[gldnspud]

Perhaps leave sarcasm out of technical blog posts, or add a footnote to indicate sarcasm?

I couldn't tell you were being sarcastic and it seems others couldn't as well. I only found out through this comment.

Text is the worst medium for sarcasm since sarcasm is often signaled by vocal inflection or body language, neither of which are present in your post.

[chrisseaton]

Baffles me that people think sarcasm is a good way to communicate on the internet. You are begging to be misunderstood, either accidentally, or maliciously.

[Veen]

It's not really sarcasm (which usually connotes contempt or mockery, which I suspect the blog writer didn't intend). It's irony, and irony has been widely used in written communication since we stopped using writing exclusively for record-keeping.

It can and does work on the internet, provided (i) the writer is prepared to accept that a subset of readers won't "get it"; they'll fail to pick up on contextual clues that signal irony and (ii) you have to be a good enough writer to include those clues so that at least your intended audience knows not to take it literally.

EDIT: To clarify, in this case, irony was a bad idea because it was badly executed. The context that would allow readers to interpret "The solution is trivial" as ironic was only available to people who were privy to the original conversation, while the blog post was intended to be read and understood by a much wider audience who lacked that context.

[TIPSIO]

It is a good way to communicate though.

[jt2190]

Yes. It’s even formally known as Poe’s Law:

> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

[gspr]

What's different about the internet when it comes to written sarcasm?

[maxerickson]

Communication isn't always the primary goal of things put on the internet.

[chilmers]

If you limit your communication online to a subset that cannot be willingly or unwillingly misunderstood, then you will say nothing at all. People's capacity to misread is infinite.

[cptskippy]

Re-read what you just wrote and break down what you said:

> Baffles me that people think sarcasm is a good way to communicate on the internet.

The subtext here is that the idea of using sarcasm on the internet should be obviously stupid to everyone, thus you're stating anyone who exercises it is stupid. That or you're clearly smarter than everyone else.

> You are begging to be misunderstood, either accidentally, or maliciously.

Thus, if you're using sarcasm you're either stupid or evil.

Was your intent to insult people?

Sarcasm and irony can be effective means of communication, the same as exaggeration. Communication is hard and people posting on the internet don't() invest much thought most of the time.

* Typo

[lhecker]

I'll try to avoid sarcasm in the future.

What I haven't understood yet is what significance "The solution is trivial" being sarcastic or not has on the article itself. I understand it's reflecting poorly on it due to what I said earlier, but is there something that makes the article harder to understand due to this? (I realize this question sounds a bit rude, but I'm genuinely curious and I don't know how else to phrase it.)

[omginternets]

Firstly, I think people are making a mountain out of a molehill. The article remains comprehensible on the whole. It’s a good article.

What is presumably meant is the following: sarcasm and irony require a lot of skill and nuance to get right, precisely because they can be understood as saying something along with its inverse. More often than not, a sarcastic written comment will divide the audience into people who understood it to say P and those who understood it to say !P. This is especially true when your audience is large, culturally diverse, and (on average) rather literal-minded.

But don’t beat yourself up too hard. It’s a good article by any measure, and even more so for someone who is not a native English speaker.

[aldebran]

I’ll be your mentor for 5 mins.

> What I haven't understood >yet is what significance "The >solution is trivial" being >sarcastic or not has on the >article itself.

If there’s no significance either way it shouldn’t be part of the blog. It adds no value and takes away from your goal of being succinct which you stated in one of your responses.

General (well meaning) advice from a stranger: 1. Always leave personal feelings out of blogs, technical and professional communication - especially the broadcast type communication. We tend to think about a small number of people but a larger number of people without context will interpret things very differently. 2. Sarcasm, irony etc need context and sometimes are also differently perceived by people from different cultural backgrounds. Your goal is to represent your and your teams efforts while helping your users. Everything else will detract from it. 3. When faced with feedback take it gracefully even if it you disagree completely or it makes you mad. You don’t need to get defensive and explain ‘your side of the story’. It almost never goes well.

Also why the hell were there such rude responses in the community post in the first place? I’ve worked at Microsoft before and I’d have roasted my team if one of them responded in that disrespectful manner - even if the community member may have trivialized work.

[listless]

I think there is a lot of overreacting here to your blog post. That’s just the final piece. What rubbed me the wrong way was how your colleague castigated this person in the issue. I know people can be rough around the edges. I know they can be blunt and sometimes rude. But I think as MSFT you have a duty to rise above that by not engaging in it.

In any event, this whole thing is blown out or proportion and doesn’t deserve 300+ comments let alone another from me.

[djur]

"The solution is trivial: [possible solution]! Well, unfortunately, [problem with solution]."

The issue here isn't so much sarcasm than that "is" should be read as "seems" here. But I don't see any other idiomatic reading that is sincerely calling the solution trivial.

[vdqtp3]

> But I don't see any other idiomatic reading that is sincerely calling the solution trivial.

Agreed - it may not be obvious on first glance, but there's no other reasonable reading.

[gertlex]

I for one caught on that the writing was analogous to, but more subtle than, "It sounds simple, you can just do blah, right?!; but actually you can't! So we had to do this complex thing to get it to work."

So yeah, as noted, sarcasm is a tricky tool in writing. While I enjoy it in technical writing often, it's definitely not as common on a company-associated blog post (for various good reasons).

My own takeway for myself is a reminder: be careful crafting snark/jokes/sarcasm. Length of the statement probably increases the chances of being misinterpreted.

[Xunjin]

Nooo... I love sarcasm ann/or irony in texts they make chuckle all the time. It actually keeps it more light and delightful to read it.