To add:

Someone posted in a UK sub asking if a "Good News UK" community would be good.

I commented something like: "It'd make sense to set up and leave it empty while bloicking any submissions cos there's bugger all good news about this country"

4 DAY BAN but not just from the Good News UK community - from every other community they moderated including the Nature one which pissed me off most of all cos I fucking love British nature!

Hedgehogs are my fave animal and I've nurtered some back to health. I love tits and especially the crested tit.

Heaven forbid anyone leave a wry comment! Christ you'll get banned from fucking everything.

So no, banter is dead. Humour is dead unless it follows a brain-dead Reddit meme everyone understands.

I'm wholely in agreement, anyone who entertains the idea of "/s" can get in the fucking sea.

Java devs really have NO sense of fucking humour.

This is just a universal truth. If they had the intelligence for understanding humour, they'd not need such a verbose language.

Triggered.

The Internet as a whole lost its goddamn mind around 2016, or at the very least, lost the ability to detect sarcasm. Previous to that, you could say crazy, unhinged things, and people could look at your comment and go, "Haha, obviously this person is joking, they said a funny." We could just assume a person was being ironic or sarcastic when they were making a crazy statement. Since 2016 though, you have to finish with the /s tag, or else people will jump all over you, even if you're trying to make a point in support of their actual position. I've had plenty of comments where I'm sarcastically trying to make a point, only for someone to reply and bluntly make the argument I was trying to make through sarcasm. Or they'll accuse you of being x/y/z because people go out of their way to be offended and find the worst possible interpretation of whatever your comment is.

On the one hand, there's alot of misinformation getting flung around, alot of trollbots and state-actors trying to muck up our democracy, and it's gumming up the works, but on the other hand, some people just seem like they've lost the ability to detect sarcasm.

I think wit is hard over text. To you it's obvious you're joking, and that your joke is that this comment is ridiculous.

To others it can read as someone making a joke with little respect for the Original post.

Take the meth one for example, I can see you being downvoted for that if the original post was serious.

The UK one just sounds stupid though, but then again mods of a Lemmy instance are likely to be people that take things (like Reddit fucking their API) quite seriously. This means our population pool may be a little skewed towards the serious.

On the other hand, I've seen lots of humour here. Especially from the AI generated community with their, a'hem, themes.

This is the real answer. :(

I'll have you know I'm developing an FTL drive in Java, asshole!

No really, I agree with your sentiment. Joking around here is taken at literal face value. Makes it feel a bit stale.

Maybe you forgot the "/s"

Is that why I wasn't let into Wayland? It all makes sense now

If everywhere you go smells like shit...

I get where you're coming from, and it would be great if it was at all possible to reliably identify internet sarcasm, but at this point the waters are so muddy it's impossible to tell. I have absolutely no faith in anyone online at this point, and most of us are here in the Fediverse specifically because we're so sick of the crazies all over other social media. I can easily believe there are people that would share exactly what you typed above and mean it.

Frankly, sarcasm is already the laziest, most braindead form of humor anyway. If you can't even be bothered to at least make it clear you're joking, it's really a 'you' problem if you get misunderstood.

I think I have an idea. When you post/comment, there should be a checkmark for "are you being serious?". The default value should be chosen on a sub-per-sub basis, so all comments non-serious by default on, say, c/memes, and serious on c/news, for example. Then that information should be hidden unless you downvote or reply to a comment/post of the opposite seriousness to the default of the sub you're in (I guess there could also be an option to see the warning always or on demand).

I think I should post this properly somewhere but idk where...

I feel like lemmy was a lot funner a few months ago. Imo, the weeks between the reddit protests and the actual app ban were peak. People were so optimistic and friendly! It really felt like a better reddit. I know that the honeymoon feeling wouldn't have lasted, but I think the social dynamic here really took a turn for the worse when hexbear first federated. After a few weeks of putting up with them for the sake of giving them a chance, I finally had enough and blocked them, but I feel like their general sense of unhappiness and combativeness has spread. I'm considering laying off this place because it's getting toxic and I don't think it's good for me.

Unfortunately it's because the sheer amount of stupidity in the real world means you can never be sure if someone is being serious. Also unfortunately, when a platform has a wide enough audience there will always be people that have a vested interest in topics no matter how potentially outlandish it might seem. So they will react emotionally to things that for most people aren't that serious. That's just my take though. Also add in trolls and that tops it all off.