Comment by llamageddon01 on 23/10/2021 at 14:52 UTC*

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)

View submission: The NewToReddit Encyclopaedia Redditica v2

Poe’s Law

An Eponymous Law named for a user calling himself "Nathan Poe" on a Christian forum in 2005. Basically, it claims that no matter how hard you try to be sarcastic or make a parody, some people will still think you were serious.

Poe, an agnostic, was engaging with some creationists about the origins of everything. However, the Internet has always been the Internet and there were other users who were not creationists but were instead having fun writing satirical posts on the topic. The problem was that the satire was so good it became hard to tell which posts were sincerely defending creationism and which were just trolling.

Poe then called the phenomenon “Poe’s Law”[1] stating “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly [sic] impossible[2] to parody a Creationist in such a way that *someone* won't mistake for the genuine article.”

1: https://www.christianforums.com/threads/big-contradictions-in-the-evolution-theory.1962980/page-3#post-17606580

2: https://i.redd.it/8m20poikaa291.jpg

Over time, this has been expanded to encompass any kind of extremism where parody and reality are indistinguishable from each other[3]. Poe was not the first to notice this phenomenon. In 1983, user “Jerry Schwarz” on a Usenet group[4] posted: "If you submit a satiric item without this symbol - a sideways smile, :-) - no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously."

3: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Poe%27s_Law_examples

4: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poes-law

Unfortunately, a form of “meta-trolling” has emerged where people deliberately post something offensive and when called out on it, hide behind Poe’s Law[5] claiming that their offending statement had been a joke and that the reader is just being hypersensitive, when it clearly wasn’t and the reader really isn’t.

5: https://www.wired.com/2017/06/poes-law-troll-cultures-central-rule/

*Because there is a Subreddit for everything:**

r/AteTheOnion is a glorious repository of people falling for satire, and r/poeslawinaction, now sadly defunct, also collected notable examples.

*See Also:**

AteTheOnion[6] (encyclopaedia)
r/AteTheOnion (subreddit)
Eponymous Laws[7]
Internet Adages[8]
Philosophical Razors[9]
woooosh[10] (encyclopaedia)
r/woooosh (subreddit)

Comment by llamageddon01 on 23/10/2021 at 14:52 UTC*

Poe’s Law

Replies