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>“Delete this” just reeks of arrogance and faux dominance. It's a meme. On imageboards, Discord etc it is commonplace to post a funny image, usually of a cute
by woolion 5y ago
>“Delete this” just reeks of arrogance and faux dominance.
It's a meme. On imageboards, Discord etc it is commonplace to post a funny image, usually of a cute character, with a gun, and the "delete this" caption. Doing an image search should show it. So instead of this feel, I think the intent is to show the comment should not be taken too seriously (so the exact opposite of your reaction).
- Zababa 5y agoBeing overly aggressive as a form of humor doesn't translate well to text.
- woolion 5y agoIt's an issue of shared language -- or zoomer-talk as some would put it. But "zoomer" is itself a term that would probably require some explanation. I've also had some very bad reactions to talking about "high-level programming", with computer scientists, every time to my surprise. There was recently a heated debate about the right to use the word "normal" in mathematical context. Aggressiveness is a relative concept...
- Zababa 5y agoWhen in Rome, do as the Romans do. HN is HN, and the vast majority of messages don't use irony or sarcasm. Humor is relatively rare. Often messages are annotated with a "/s" to indicate sarcasm. After spending a bit of time on HN, it becomes obvious how to handle sarcasm, humor, zoomer-talk, anything like that: be very obvious that you are using it. Or, as they say on the other side of the internet, "lurk 1000 years before posting".
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoFrankly, I don’t like the meme either. I realize it’s meant to be taken in jest, but it still has an impact on the tenor of discourse. There’s a Jonathan Coulton song from the TV show “The Good Fight” about how memes can evolve online: At first it’s just a meme, Then it’s a joke about the meme. The joke is that it’s fake, It’s not as fake as it may seem. Confusion when they use one, And it seems like what they mean. And then, ta-da, a cartoon Nazi frog!
- woolion 5y agoBoth replies make it seem like I'm suggesting people should express themselves like that. I'm not using any of these memes, and as pointed out it's quite out of place on hn. I just wanted to clarify the misunderstanding.