Poe's law

expression

ops cultureweb dev

Without a clear marker of intent, parody of extreme views is indistinguishable from the views themselves.

Nathan Poe formulated it on a creationism forum in 2005, and the Internet promptly proved it general: absent a winking emoji, someone will take the satire straight, and someone else will mistake the sincere post for satire. It is a genuine constraint on online communication, moderation, and now on datasets scraped from the web, where irony arrives unlabeled. Every community relearns it the day their in-joke escapes containment.

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