The concept of communicating subtext in normal conversations is very heavily-driven by nonverbal cues given during a discussion. You don’t have to wink to let somebody know you’re clearly REALLY calling them stupid in real life, but you do have to communicate that to some degree.

When all nonverbal cues are taken away, it becomes even more difficult to communicate in subtle ways. It’s well-established that no matter how heavily you lay on satire, there’s going to be a good number of people who don’t accept that’s what you’re doing. When you make no attempt to even try to communicate a “playful jab” through popularly established means (a change in font usage or perhaps even an emoticon), you really have zero reason to expect that the person on the other end knows your conversational style well enough to credit you with any level of playfulness.

This happens even in direct interpersonal communications where there can be awkward pauses in discussions while “playful jabs” are properly communicated, especially between strangers. These errors in communication are usually quickly resolved through added context. Online, there is no additional context other than what you say.

Then you have the chronological nature of such discussions, where clearing up you were just kidding after the fact also isn’t as effective because the other person simply can’t see exactly how sorry your body, inflection, and timbre say you are for such a miscommunication. You are left simply with your words and they are stripped of any context which helps communicate whether you were truly kidding or whether now you’re just trying to cover your own ass after being outed for crossing a line.

There are certainly ways to come across after the fact with a defensible “I was only playfully jabbing” defense (which in a way is also an accusation that the other person simply didn’t understand you and that the problem lies with how they understand things rather than with how you communicated them). The easiest is to have been uproariously over-the-top so as to make it painfully obvious that you’re clearly actually calling somebody stupid, but you’re flat-out mocking such an act.

Our own Spiny Norman Bates dances over this line on a pretty regular basis and people still don’t always get where he’s coming from. Somebody who joined yesterday and left none of those ad ridiculum hints in such a “playful jab” will never and should never get that kind of leeway.

This is the way internet communication works. You don’t have to agree to this, but failing to recognize it is going to cause you consistent problems where you’ll find yourself having to back out of a lot of conversations where you’ve been misunderstood. The internet doesn’t owe it to you to know when you are and aren’t kidding and doesn’t particularly have to give a shit one way or another.

After all, it’s less insulting to somebody’s intelligence to tell them up front that you’re kidding about calling them stupid than it is to call them that and then tell them that they’re also too stupid to know when you are and aren’t being serious.

poes law explained to an invalid