Internet culture - things like "/s"

[pythonmegapixel]

I'm aware that "/s" is commonly used to indicate that the sentence is supposed to be interpreted as sarcastic.

A friend has suggested that there are other letters other than "s" which are used in this way... I'm skeptical of this, having never seen anything other than "/s"

 

Is this the case, and which ones do you know of? Can anyone provide a list of all of the common ones?

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Personally, I find that writing "/s" defeats the purpose of being sarcastic.

[pythonmegapixel]

1 minute ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Personally, I find that writing "/s" defeats the purpose of being sarcastic.

In what way?

Just going to skip over the fact that this isn't really an answer to my question; it's an interesting discussion anyway

 

[minibois]

There is stuff like putting "jk" or "sike" at the end of your message, to signify the above has been a joke/a lie, but not sure about other instances.

Of course there are other sort of abbreviations used too. IANAL for example meaning "I am not a lawyer".

 

Single-letter phrases I can think of are people saying "F", usually used when something bad (but not too serious) happened to someone and you want to pay respects.

For example:
Speedrunner: *Fails trick in a game*
Twitch chat: F

This comes from Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, where you're at a funeral and move towards the casket when the game tells you to "Press F to pay respects".

 

Then of course there is L and W, meaning "you lost" or "you won" respectively. These aren't usually used on their own in my experience.

5 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Personally, I find that writing "/s" defeats the purpose of being sarcastic.

It does defeat the point yes, but of course without being able to convey your message verbally there is no other obvious way to show people your message was supposed to be sarcastic.

[Moonzy]

tExT mEssAgE CanT CoNveY sArCaSm

[Tan3l6]

IMHO lol - wtf

 

/jk

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

In what way?

In a way, I see sarcasm as a sort of an inside joke, that relies on the other part knowing you don't (you can't?) actually mean it.

For example: imagine someone announce a new "high end" x86 CPU with 2 cores, 3.0GHz. I could just say "that's pretty terrible by today's standards", but if I can count on you having the same understanding of the current CPU landscape as me, then I can say instead "Oh, fabulous! That's like 6GHz total, revolutionary!", counting on you to take it as a joke. I would use "/s" if I think you may take me literally and assume I don't actually know that you don't simply multiply cores by GHz, or what modern "high end" CPUs look like, but at that point then I'm being literal again.

 

3 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Just going to skip over the fact that this isn't really an answer to my question; it's an interesting discussion anyway

 

 

[Moonzy]

12 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Personally, I find that writing "/s" defeats the purpose of being sarcastic.

Yea, I sometimes forgot to put it in and have to edit my posts

 

Like, cmon, sarcasms are obvious

 

No one is THAT stupid

 

In fact, I think we need to imply that we're serious more often than we need to imply that it's a sarcasm

[akio123008]

5 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

tExT mEssAgE CanT CoNveY sArCaSm

I'm in favour of an automated forum function (next to bold, italic, underline etc.) to generate such text.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Yea, I sometimes forgot to put it in and have to edit my posts

 

Like, cmon, sarcasms are obvious

 

No one is THAT stupid

 

In fact, I think we need to imply that we're serious more often than we need to imply that it's a sarcasm

I agree in general, but there is more than being stupid to it, though. In some cases, it relies on some common information, and sometimes it's truly an inside joke (for example, if someone says "you don't need more than 4 cores", it could be perfectly serious, but if that's a forum member who is constantly arguing in favor of higher core counts then we know she's being sarcastic. But if someone says "no one needs more than 640K of RAM", then there shouldn't be a doubt).

 

29 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

A friend has suggested that there are other letters other than "s" which are used in this way... I'm skeptical of this, having never seen anything other than "/s"

 

Is this the case, and which ones do you know of? Can anyone provide a list of all of the common ones?

Back on topic: I haven't seen many used just with one letter. I had seen "/thread" when trying to present a post as the ultimate answer to a topic. Or things imported from IRC, like the use of * to write actions in third person.

*proceeds to present an example

[Teddy07]

2 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Personally, I find that writing "/s" defeats the purpose of being sarcastic.

I disagree.

It is hard to catch sometimes. It really helps to avoid misunderstandings.

[Drama Lama]

3 hours ago, Teddy07 said:

It really helps to avoid misunderstandings.

But like with a lot of things it gets overused at some point 

[pythonmegapixel]

1 minute ago, Drama Lama said:

But like with a lot of things it gets overused at some point 

IT GETS OVERUSED????????? /s

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?????? /s

[Drama Lama]

16 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

IT GETS OVERUSED????????? /s

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?????? /s

I always wondered what /s meant at some point I thought it was some among us reference

[Mooshi]

POG

[dalekphalm]

10 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Personally, I find that writing "/s" defeats the purpose of being sarcastic.

Maybe. But being the internet, people literally cannot tell if you’re being sarcastic or serious (since even if it’s a ridiculous or stupid statement... well we all know at least one person who is that dumb). 
 

Sarcasm in real life is 50% delivery. The /s is your delivery. 
 

Otherwise it’s just trolling if the poster is the only one in on it. 

[dalekphalm]

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

tExT mEssAgE CanT CoNveY sArCaSm

I mean how is that any different from /S

 

[harryk]

There are other uses of the forward slash in mostly older internet culture.

 

/thread or /t means "close thread" 

It's used as sort of a mic drop to indicate nothing more needs to be said.