Your judgement of entertainment is not more important than clarity of communication.

If you want to be sure you’re clearly understood, don’t use sarcasm (it’s a massively overrated and really cheap form of humor anyway). If you want to be funny, take the risk that you’ll be misunderstood. My problem is with people who want it both ways.

> My problem is with people who want it both ways.

Why? Why would you dislike a solution which neatly solves a false dilemma?

You may subjectively believe that sarcasm is over-used (and in fact I personally agree with you), but why are you put-out that people who like it have found a way to encode the non-verbal cues of speech into text to increase fidelity in communication?

EDIT: the problem _specifically_ with sarcasm and clarity is that it appears to say the opposite of what it actually says. You say in an earlier comment that "Sometimes people make a joke that not everyone is going to get. That’s fine." - but that is in fact _not_ fine when the possible outcome is someone believing that you hold a view entirely opposed to what you actually do. I hope I don't need to paint you a picture.

> Why would you dislike a solution which neatly solves a false dilemma?

What dilemma? I’ve been diagnosed with autism/asperger syndrome since the age of six, and even I can see when people are being sarcastic without needing an explicit signal.

I dislike the “solution” because it ruins the joke. The whole point of sarcasm is to communicate a common gripe with other people without saying it out loud. If you’re not sure if the audience of your comment shares your common gripe (or if they don’t know you well enough to know what kinds of things you’d never say seriously) then that’s a bad time to use sarcasm.

It's also a lazy convention for lazy replies, the sort HN discourages. As you say, it's doing sarcasm, but badly: the writer can blurt out the first quip that comes to mind, regardless of it being related, and hides behind the prestige that sarcasm has, while often only virtue signalling.