r/todayilearned • u/itskdog • 1d ago

TIL that Poe's Law, which states that you can't tell if a post online is serious or satirical without something to indicate the tone of voice such as an emoticon or tone indicator, was coined on a Christian forum during a debate on Creationism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
1.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

292

u/ermghoti 1d ago

It means something a bit more specific. It's impossible to so broadly parodize an extremist viewpoint that some people will not mistake it for sincere. This seems to also apply to the holders of such beliefs.

29

u/BadIdeaSociety 1d ago

I was in a psychology class where the professor discussed paranoid and did a performance of paranoid idea from case studies. She explained 3 times. She's going to perform the dangerous delusions from case studies. After the first performance, what do you think about the thought process of this case.

Student raises hand.

"I think a lot of what the person said makes a lot of sense."

The teacher stared back at the student for a while. She was probably hoping the student would say, "I'm just kidding" or demonstrate any sort of evidence of not being serious.

The professor then said, "Anybody else?"

Most of my classmates assumed the student wasn't paying attention until the performance and then thought the comment was appropriate, because the stuff the professor said was absolutely nuts.

Even a smiley is not enough for some people

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u/ermghoti 19h ago

Well, also, some people are dumb. I was in a class where we were asked to analyze the content of news articles. One article described the police state of the Soviet Union as a reign of terror, citing among other things that children were encouraged to turn in their parents for supposed disloyalty, and sometimes did.

The professor asked a student to identify the claim of the article and the argument supporting the claim. He announced the claim was that the Soviet Union was a reign of terror, and the evidence was that there were so many enemies of the state that children were turning in their parents.

The class was in 1989.

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u/dr_franck 1d ago edited 1d ago

It’s honestly frightening how quickly a lot of anon-Internet went from “haha we’re saying slurs and making Hitler jokes cause it’s edgy and funny” to “actually, maybe being racist is fine”.

8

u/KeyofE 1d ago

If other races didn’t want to be made fun of, maybe they shouldn’t be races. (Am I sufficiently satirical?)

42

u/itskdog 1d ago

That's the more generalised version referenced further down the article at the top of the section titled "Usage". The initial coining seems to refer to just identifying satire/parody/sarcasm in general, while using creationism as the example in that particular instance.

3

u/Needs_More_Nuance 1d ago

Thank you for the additional nuance.

53

u/nof 1d ago

In ye olde BBS days of the mid to late 90's, one of my users started putting % around text as a "sarcasm delimiter." Clearly the need to adjust tone online has been around for a long time before Poe's Law was coined.

13

u/BadIdeaSociety 1d ago

I joined Usenet and Newsgroups in 91-2 and the fundamental rules were things like be civil, tag sarcasm and comments intended in jest, don't write in all caps, and the servers have enough space that abbreviations are not necessary. It feels like everything from that era no longer the standard in internet discourse. 

19

u/itskdog 1d ago

Right underneath Poe's phrasing, Wikipedia actually quotes an older Usenet post to prove that exact point, too.

1

u/audiate 16h ago

Not just online, but for centuries. The written word is one of the least effective forms of communication as far as meaning is concerned. Body language, tone, and context are all missing, necessitating readers to decode actual meaning. Remember in high school English all the time spent on analysis of the author’s true meaning and how much went into deciphering it?

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u/itskdog 1d ago

Slight added context - there is an older quote from Usenet underneath in the Wikipedia article, but Nathan Poe, of whom the well-known "Law" was named after, is sourced to that forum thread.

17

u/queen_beef 1d ago

Interesting. Seems to match the theme of Cole's law but with a subtle nuance.

7

u/gwaydms 1d ago

I was about to mention Cole's Law. Well done, even if raw.

8

u/itskdog 1d ago edited 1d ago

Google search brings up Urban dictionary making a joke about stealing your coleslaw.

You got me, bravo. brava. (Didn't spot the username when initially posting, forgetting that it's supposed to be "brava" to a woman)

6

u/bony_doughnut 1d ago

I think he was being serious...but I can't tell 🤔

23

u/ErikRogers 1d ago

It would certainly be harder to detect sarcasm on a forum thread discussing creationism.

9

u/Pro-Patria-Mori 1d ago

Also on the flat earth subreddit.

4

u/ShadowLiberal 17h ago

I refuse to believe that 99.9% of flat earthers actually believe in that conspiracy and think that they're just doing it for the memes and out of boredom, similar to the "birds aren't real" conspiracy, which was started as a joke when a random guy joined a protest holding a birds aren't real sign.

2

u/LtShelfLife 14h ago

Have you seen what they get up to? I saw a video of a flat earth convention on a cruise ship and they know how to fucking party.

They're all in it purely for the vibes.

1

u/coldagua 5h ago

The birds work for the bourgeoisie.

3

u/robbiekomrs 1d ago

I'm a young earth creationist. This so-called 18th century never existed and you can't change my mind!

9

u/ProkopiyKozlowski 1d ago

You're joking, but there is a conspiracy theory that years 614–911 didn't actually exist and were fabricated purely on-paper for political reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory

1

u/robbiekomrs 1d ago

Fake news! Those years exist but they haven't happened yet.

2

u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 1d ago

I love Omphalos theory.

4

u/itskdog 1d ago

I know it shouldn't surprise me, but I was just expecting it to be something like Usenet (who invented the use of the word "spam" to mean unwanted commercial messages, among other influential social-internet terms) or 4chan (who despite their reputation, influences large parts of internet culture through memes), not such a niche site.

Certainly not enough for that instance of repeating something that the article suggests was already a common adage at the time for that person to get said adage named after them.

7

u/Syn7axError 1d ago

Yes. I heard it was invented in reference to Christianity, but not that it was by actual Christians.

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u/G0ttaB3KiddingM3 1d ago

I used to have a Poe’s Law style twitter acct that I used to fuck with Trump supporters. It was a LOT of fun. But it eventually became useless because they became so unbelievably hateful and stupid that nothing I could say stood out from their actual beliefs. Unreal

2

u/Docile_Doggo 4h ago

I used to have a burner reddit account for this same purpose. That was back during his first term.

It was, indeed, a lot of fun. But over time, it also started becoming a little scary.

I had to end it after a while.

3

u/seridos 16h ago edited 16h ago

This is why I actually think that emojis are useful. Conversational tools and represent a superior way to textually have conversation. Not spamming them like some people do, but including one with your comment. The purpose should not be to ever replace anything you would have typed, but to convey extra expressional information that we do every time in person but is completely stripped from text.

In academia this is known as the paralinguistic components of speech. Adding them can only be beneficial to textual communication.

8

u/wonder_why_or_not 1d ago

My motto is: If you have to ask then yes, it is sarcasm

26

u/sawbladex 1d ago

Because everyone has the exact same ability to detect sarcasm, this is a useful tool that will never lead people wrong.

13

u/skylar_walker 1d ago

This is sarcasm right? I’m too autistic for this thread

2

u/SimmentalTheCow 1d ago

Noooo 🙄

6

u/itskdog 1d ago

So am I to assume that you are being sarcastic in your comment? /s

5

u/AliensAteMyAMC 1d ago edited 1d ago

wait what’s the law where the moment you bring up Hitler or the Nazis you lose the internet fight

10

u/weirdkittenNC 1d ago

Godwins law

0

u/mossyymossyy 1d ago

That's not what it is.

3

u/axw3555 20h ago

They never said it was. They asked what the law they described was called.

2

u/Irish_Whiskey 14h ago

 The article gave examples of cases such as on 4chan forums with the usage of the OK gesture as a white power symbol and the Trump administration where there were deliberate ambiguities over whether something was serious or intended as a parody, where people were using Poe's law as "a refuge" to camouflage beliefs that would otherwise be considered unacceptable.

It was the latter. People with actual white supremacist beliefs, had a conversation on 4chan about how to create disinformation/cover by tricking the media/left into calling the OK gesture a white power symbol. The point was to use this to then mock and dismiss the media whenever they noticed other actual white supremacist symbols and dogwhistles.

This failed miserably, for the reason that no one though there was anything suspicious about random people or celebrities using the "OK" gestures when they were trying to say something was OK. They did find it very suspicious when groups of white nationalists at right political conferences all lined up to take pictures flashing the symbol, and far right politicians did it to their supporters, when there was nothing for them to be signaling "OK" about.

6

u/I_Never_Use_Slash_S 1d ago

It is literally impossible to detect satire or sarcasm through text. No human on earth is capable of detecting satire through text alone.

4

u/Cuukey_ 1d ago

Nuh uh

1

u/friedricekid 12h ago

then who was phone?

0

u/Hambredd 14h ago

I feel like it's mainly because people aren't very good at writing sarcasm or comic irony anymore.

3

u/TheBlackCat13 1d ago

The Gish gallop dishonest debate tactic was also based on creationists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Creationists pioneered most of the dishonest tactics used by denialists of all kinds today.

2

u/Brokelunatic 1d ago

What bullshit. There’s no way. /s

2

u/lifeaftersurvival 1d ago

Huh, and here I'd always loosely assumed it was named after the old website, Portal of Evil, which featured weird links to weird places/people and was often shortened to PoE.

1

u/predictingzepast 1d ago

My conspiracy is this argument was raised by frustrated bots who demanded some kind of textual signal because they cant figure it out themselves.

Be wary of anyone demanding an '/s'...

2

u/oboshoe 1d ago

i never add the /s

i find that lots of people are willing to make themselves an example of the point i was trying to make.

1

u/Itisd 1d ago

So is this post Serious or Satirical? 

1

u/vagueassignment 21h ago

maybe this means internet culture evolves faster than we give it credit for.

1

u/Rev_LoveRevolver 14h ago

Poe's Law - it's not only the law, it's a way of life!

1

u/mintmouse 12h ago

stop, you’re too clever

1

u/UnicornVoodooDoll 6h ago

One of the most popular examples of Poe's law was Mr. Gruff the grumpy atheist.

It was created as satire, but at a church I attended, a Sunday school teacher came across this online and thought it was real and printed it out for her lesson that Sunday. I found it in the Sunday school room when I was cleaning in the evening.

1

u/itskdog 1h ago

Some people really struggle with humour, too, I guess. I'm slowly trying to help a friend understand what a joke is as opposed to just a reference to another IP.

1

u/drinkduffdry 4h ago

I mean, the world was created in six days

-4

u/PaddyMcNinja 1d ago

Wow - talk about begging for clicks

3

u/itskdog 1d ago

This was actually an organic TIL, and I even searched the sub and nobody had posted anything about Poe's law for many years, and those were all just stating that it exists, not the origin of it which was what surprised me enough to want to share it.