You’re forgetting that text is a lot harder to “read” than when you’re saying it in person. There’s no tone, or body language to observe.

I’ll agree I miss some sarcasm here and there, but it’s getting increasingly harder to tell when people are actually joking.

There’s a handful of times where I thought I was going along with the joke but it wasn’t actually a joke. So now I just take everything at face value.

I know it’s cringe, but a /s helps out nowadays

I have been online since the days of BBs in the late '80s. Poe’s law is a real thing. I’ve seen dumber (IMO) and more extreme opinions so much, I can no longer reliably know from some short text alone if this is a thing the person really believes or they’re taking the piss. Sometimes, with enough context, it’s clear, but sometimes a single sentence or two in a response leaves me know real way of knowing (and I don’t feel like trying to read a poster’s entire posting history which may also have more sarcastic remarks in that vein cloaking their real intent/feeling).

Not meaning to imply anything to OP’s abilities, but part of the effectiveness of any communication is the delivery. Some people don’t get satire or other implied meanings even in person. Text is harder to do unless the reader is familiar with references or is in the same “mode” of humor at the time. Sometimes to make a joke or twist work online means you have to put a bit more background or setup than you would in other settings. I’ve done the same, where I just type out a phrase or quote or line as I would IRL, and then realize that it’s not that funny without a bit of context added to help it.

Note an example is the very first part I added so OP didn’t think I was saying they were bad at satire. In real conversation I might not have to say that because it’s implied we’re talking about generalities and not them. Or adding /s to a joke that could be taken serious, or other emotes to create a setting for the punchline.

I think (and this is just my opinion based on years of seeing online discussions) that people are quick to type in their thoughts and hit send without reading over and editing things for clarify. That leads to misunderstandings which fuels the typical arguments we find all because of missing nuances. Hell, I’ve even read over things, submitted a post, and then gone right back to edit because I saw something else needed.

Written communication between strangers is going to lead to a lot of missed subtlety. Without shared context it’s not always obvious when someone is joking, the Internet is full of crazies of every stripe, so even obviously extreme ideas are not definitely satire.

I’m not sure lemmy seems worse than anywhere else tbh, but it does have a larger international user base. No native English speakers, and people from different cultures, are going to lead to more breakdowns in nuance.

No, I can’t say I’ve regularly seen that as a problem, at least not any moreso than other online spaces.

Communication is a two-way street. If one person fails to understand what you’re trying to say, that may be their fault. But if nobody seems to understand what you’re trying to say, if this is happening to you regularly enough that you have to ask this kind of question, maybe you’re not being clear enough.

As others have pointed out, text cannot carry tone, facial expressions, or other nuances that can picked up on with in-person conversations. When communicating through text, it’s important to keep that in mind and work within the limitations of text in order to be clear. Communicating effectively is a skill that takes effort to improve at.

Full disclosure that I do not know you and I don’t want to accuse you of anything, but this sounds like the kind of question that has a story behind it. If you do feel like this is a frequent problem for you, I think you should try to look inward.

It’s not that people are incapable of picking up on nuance, it’s got more to do with it being reeaaally hard to convey tone through text. Like it would be hard to fully grasp all the finer points of a psychological movie if instead of watching the movie, all you had was a text version of the dialogue.

Personally I’m a fan of using an ‘/s’ marker, but inside of a spoiler tag.

Sarcasm is, like, totally for losers.

I once got blasted to hell on a Onion News post, for saying “the onion has lost a credibility lately”. An obvious reference (so i thought) to the fact that the news are stranger than fiction these days. No kidding dozens of persons got mad at me for this…We live in a world that is sorely lacking in nuance and where people based their opinions on memes.

One wonders how much of this is down to the proportion of people on here for whom English is not their first language. I know that I struggle enough to comprehend any other languages which aren’t my native one to begin with (i.e. English, in my case) so a lot of subtlety surely flies over my head in those. Can’t imagine that situation is much different for others.

Sarcasm online can be harder to pick up on, but there’s also a good chance many are on the spectrum.

You’re on the internet…

Well I’m autistic so I miss like half the shit normies try to convey. Maybe we’re not as small of a minority as I had previously thought…

I use color-blindness safe color palettes at work even though none of my coworkers are color blind and yet the idea of writing /s for a cynical or hyperbolic comment disgusts me. Eh, pobody’s nerfect ig.

I can get it when it’s missing political satire, just because there are some really stupid ideas genuinely going around; but I’ve seen a lot of missing just the most absurd jokes about fictional topics that I sometimes wonder the same thing about how they would react to a slapstick comedy.

“No no no… This is all wrong. There’s no way the coyote would just float in the air until he looked down. Totally unrealistic.”