@darius Turns out that "not doing the thing that people explicitly tell you they hate" is a masterful socializing hack

@darius I think the thing I hate most about this is the person replying implying a knowing closeness despite the fact that I normally don’t know them / we are not friends

@darius
Yeah, ouch. Been there, got blocked.

@darius Among the worst things I have seen on the internet was a post by Wil Wheaton about how years and years of countless strangers telling him “Shut up, Wesley” actually hurt, and he knew how ridiculous it sounded so couldn't publicly admit to it until middle age, and guess what the bulk of the replies were, winky-face.

I don't know if I ever had the urge to reply like that but it stopped that day, at least. (And I am apologetic if I ever did engage in this.)

@darius Yeah... I feel like there *might* be rare exceptions where the joke lands, but it's very hard to assess, and the maximum payoff is way too small for the downside risk. (What I'm really saying is, I took a calculated risk on one of these recently, where I thought I was putting a little spin on it. And I think it was fine, but I still shouldn't have.)

@darius a vtuber (Rin Penrose) just ended a stream talking about chat etiquette in which a lot of chat did this

@darius You mean the replies where the emoji means "Well actually, your boundaries don't *really* apply to me."?

@darius I think you just sent all the reply guys into an infinite loop trying to work out what an ironic annoying reply to this would look like

@darius

The impulse to do this is practically a Pavlovian response for me. Fortunately, it is always immediately followed by the realization that this kind of thing is almost never funny and often really annoying.

@darius @brownpau I found Scalzi’s “the failure mode of clever is asshole” very useful and the described behavior is a top ten example. It’s not quite the platonic ideal since it’s not really very clever.

@darius I also recommend the corollary: never set up a joke you don't want someone to finish.

@darius Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.

@darius That is actually a good wisdom. On reflection, I've probably done that myself more than a few times.

@darius one of my favorite internet people, Alex Steacy, got so fed up with people doing this to him that he made a comic out of it.