The voting behaviour around here is … interesting.

As for the /s, that’s because of how humans communicate. Most of our context cues are subliminal, facial expression, tone of voice, body language, eye movement, etc. These account for the bulk of the actual message.

In text based communication like this, those cues are missing entirely. We use emojis and smiley face brackets to give a clue to what is going on.

Then there’s the language barrier, people come from different countries with different languages, but also different cultural ideas of what’s funny and what isn’t. You can tell when you start looking into swearing for example. The Dutch hurl contagious diseases at each other, the Italians diss each others mother, Australians use body parts.

Sarcasm is a special form of interaction, straddling truth and disbelief in some way. It’s not universally recognised in the same way since it often triggers off cultural beliefs which vary across the world.

So, to bring all that together, the simple “/s” shows the reader that sarcasm is intended in a more or less universal way. Of course that too has a cultural impact, but that’s a rabbit hole I’m not going down today.

THE /S IS ALWAYS NECESSARY

I don’t know how anyone could live through the last decade and not see how important it is to denote when you’re being sarcastic. “It ruins the joke” is preferable over it ruins society. Without the S idiots will read what you wrote and think there’s people out there who actually support their idiotic ideas

Tone indicators like /s and even smilies are great for text-based communication. It is extremely easy to misinterpret intent in text as there are no body language or auditory signals to provide context. As someone else stated already, use of tone indicators is good communication, making certain that one’s intent is clearly defined. This is especially helpful for ESL and neurodivergent people who may have increased challenges in ascertaining implicit meaning in a statement or joke.

Tone indicators like /s are vital for neurodivergent people who struggle with understanding people’s intentions, especially over text.

In addition, you probably underestimate the amount of miscommunication that happens over the internet due to strangers communicating with each other without any tone indicators at all.

People downvote reflexively here. Joke or no joke. S or no S. It’s getting a downvote.

Here you are addressing people from all over the world : they have different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives … and some of us didn’t have time to take our first coffee before reading your writings !
So, be indulgent and take this smallest of efforts to add this "/s” please. I for one will be thankful 😌

/s is a very old internet thing, not a reddit thing. It can be hard to discern jokes on the internet because we don’t know you and we can’t hear your tone.

Downvote me all you want, but for the life of me, I never understood what this meant. Even when reading your post, I’m still confused about it.

And don’t get me started on all the other “letters that succeed a slash” that I have no idea what they mean.

I’m basically f***ing stupid.