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Comment by jmercouris | Hacker News Reader

I really don’t like these trends of telling people what to do. Your opinion is fine, but I find it rude to command someone to do something. “Delete this” just reeks of arrogance and faux dominance.

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>“Delete this” just reeks of arrogance and faux dominance.

It's a meme. On imageboards, Discord etc it is commonplace to post a funny image, usually of a cute character, with a gun, and the "delete this" caption. Doing an image search should show it. So instead of this feel, I think the intent is to show the comment should not be taken too seriously (so the exact opposite of your reaction).

Being overly aggressive as a form of humor doesn't translate well to text.

It's an issue of shared language -- or zoomer-talk as some would put it. But "zoomer" is itself a term that would probably require some explanation. I've also had some very bad reactions to talking about "high-level programming", with computer scientists, every time to my surprise.

There was recently a heated debate about the right to use the word "normal" in mathematical context. Aggressiveness is a relative concept...

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. HN is HN, and the vast majority of messages don't use irony or sarcasm. Humor is relatively rare. Often messages are annotated with a "/s" to indicate sarcasm. After spending a bit of time on HN, it becomes obvious how to handle sarcasm, humor, zoomer-talk, anything like that: be very obvious that you are using it. Or, as they say on the other side of the internet, "lurk 1000 years before posting".

Frankly, I don’t like the meme either. I realize it’s meant to be taken in jest, but it still has an impact on the tenor of discourse.

There’s a Jonathan Coulton song from the TV show “The Good Fight” about how memes can evolve online:

    At first it’s just a meme,
    Then it’s a joke about the meme.
    The joke is that it’s fake,
    It’s not as fake as it may seem.
    Confusion when they use one,
    And it seems like what they mean.
    And then, ta-da, a cartoon Nazi frog!

Both replies make it seem like I'm suggesting people should express themselves like that. I'm not using any of these memes, and as pointed out it's quite out of place on hn. I just wanted to clarify the misunderstanding.

"Delete this" is the almost like a motto of the current age. Whenever you don't agree with something it has to have no value and only recourse is to demand it's deletion.

People don't want wild forest of ideas they want neat cultivated gardens with very high walls.

HN should be able to use Memes, OP would have added [0], we'd laugh about it. Possibly OP could have used "Delet this" to make the words take on their alternative, more humorous, richer, meme-ish meaning.

[0]: https://keepmeme.com/files/en_posts/20200827/cdde1a7320d0827...

see also, a similar meme: delete this nephew: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/delete-this-nephew

It's advice, not a command. I wouldn't hire him having written something so disingenuous. He can pragmatically choose to accept or ignore it.

Also, it's not "my opinion". It is a incontrovertible fact that he misrepresents the content of the book.

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