Which really is the cardinal sin.

That’s a great point. I think there actually are effective forms of irony and satire, but a whole irony-only forum is not one of them

large groups generally fail to understand anything more subtle than a hammer to the head

There’s a certain amount of subtlety to the posts that you get when you’re in the loop but that just look like boilerplate propaganda when you’re out of it.

Large diverse groups aren’t going to recognize the tongue-in-cheek irony, so they’ll either see it as outright cringe or low effort pasta. I don’t really see this as influencing anyone, though. Its very ForwardsFromGrandma material.

edit: i do wanna point out that this isn’t so much an issue of ‘smartness’ as “large groups generally fail to understand anything more subtle than a hammer to the head” thing (i.e. a critique of irony in mass consumer culture of which the internet is a part)

Agreed, not the best wording on my part, but in my head the list of words I could use (informed/aligned/sympathetic/etc) was just too long. Went for the simplest.

How we’re treated on the fediverse, and how we treat a lot of comms, is a good example. In both directions folks are reacting to a stereotype of the worst posters. Which, in our case, is 100% of hexbears, and in there case is only, like, 97% percent of temporarily embarassed redditors. That lingering 3% is pretty okay sometimes.

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R/The_Donald was ironic for approximately 6 hours before it became the largest trump forum on the internet 48 hours later

Because pretending to believe stupid shit is just going to make people who unironically agree with that stupid shit think they’ve found a home.

And then you being ironic doesn’t really matter when the 30 people who genuinely believe it drown out everything you have to say.

nah we should close that too. and the taylor swift one.

The AI takes are still baffling!

Kind of tiring that there’s seemingly no corner of the internet that isn’t completely irony poisoned, or willing to drop any pretense of empathy to “own” people in a debate for that matter.

we all need to understand that satire is dead. any stupid opinion you can come up with in an attempt to paint a person or political tendency as irrational or malicious or ignorant or otherwise ‘un-good’, is a genuine article of true faith for millions of people on the planet who will kill and die for that belief. the stupidest thing you could think to say is some political party or PAC’s official platform. ‘ironic’ anti-union propaganda reads IDENTICALLY to ‘unironic’ anti-union propaganda, because anti-union propaganda really is that stupid.

Yep, unfortunately we can’t have nice things. I don’t think satire has ever really been as politically effective as its proponents would pretend, and even if so, we’re well beyond the point where the benefits outweigh the costs. Is it that fun to feel superior for “getting the bit” at this point? After all, at this point, if you did “A Modest Proposal” about Gazans, there’d be sicko fucks who would probably cheer it on. In the face of the reactionary world we’re living in, I just don’t see the point of extended ironic bits. Emphasizing the cruelty of the other side in plain language (the Felix/Matt bits about how liberals would love to just throw the homeless into a meat grinder to forget about them, for instance) or Adam Johnson’s plain “how many Gazan children need to die” feels so much more effective than the layers of irony that most comedy is wrapped in. Irony still remains a tool in the arsenal, but building a whole comm around ironically posting the worst takes (and takes that are probably also most damaging to the leftist cause, since unions are a pipeline to class consciousness and praxis) just feels gross.

Maybe this is too earnestposting, but whatever. I broke up with satire around 2012 after loving it for decades (I was a Jonathan Swiftie in undergrad). The fact is, it’s not really radical. Even The Onion’s “continues to happen,” while cathartic, hasn’t changed anything in decades of posting the headline.

Also, it’s the Internet and sincerity is a weakness. Just because you’re supporting something “ironically” doesn’t mean you’re not also expressing part of your genuinely held beliefs. I’m almost willing to bet most terminally online comrades around my age have regularly expressed their actual socialist tendencies through some amount of irony, either to try and spread leftist ideas in a non-leftist space or to vibe check a community you’re not that familiar with yet or even because you yourself aren’t completely certain about what you actually believe yet. Hell, since this site is gay as fuck most of us have probably done something like that about sexuality, gender or whatever too. And right wingers do exactly the same thing about what they believe.

I’m not saying any posters here are actually trying to shit on unions or whatever, just that people should be careful about what they end up normalizing in places where they don’t know everyone personally. When you talk to someone and you’re both being ironic about something that doesn’t necessarily mean both parties have the same understanding of what the actual punchline is

I’m not ready to give satire up quite yet.

Instead we should make a mystery cult to enjoy it in secret, where we only indoctrinate people who are perceptive enough to laugh at Starship Troopers.

I feel like the taylor one is fine, we should claim her as a communist icon if only to do some counter-programming to the weird freaks who look at her as a white supremacist icon.