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Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

Haven't you heard of Poe's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law.

Poe’s Law is vastly over-invoked. In any social setting where some amount of context can be assumed, it doesn’t apply.

And even if someone wanted to challenge me on that, I’d argue that the tiny number of people who would think “HN is a tech support site” is being said seriously aren’t worth the two seconds it takes to type “/s”.

The time it takes to type `/s` is a decent bit lower than two seconds, and yet the amount of time you've spend trying to argue that it's not worth it is vastly more.

> In any social setting where some amount of context can be assumed, it doesn’t apply.

That amount is larger than is available in most (probably all) HN comment sections.

I invoked Poe’s law sarcastically. I’m surprised you didn’t realize that, given how over-invoked it is here. I guess there’s always someone who doesn’t get the joke. /s. <—- shouldn’t be necessary, but is, obviously. /s <—- not sure if necessary here.

But this is exactly what I’m saying: if you’re sarcastic and the audience gets it, it’s good sarcasm. If you’re sarcastic and the audience doesn’t get it, it’s bad sarcasm. If you don’t have a clear enough context, just don’t be sarcastic.

There’s always someone who doesn’t get the joke. Even today, there are people who, at least at first, are fooled into thinking that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was a serious proposal.

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