There isn't a forum in the world without superiority, snark, self-importance, and toxicity; some of that is simply an artifact of communicating about contentious topics in the context-stripped medium of text messaging.

But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.

Depends on the sub, really. All of the subs I read have the occasional abrasive blowhard but don't tolerate shitposting.

Oh, man. My rate of trying to insert a non-obscure joke into a comment and a half-dozen commenters taking the exact words at face value and then pointing out their factual incorrectness is too damn high. I don't know if it's a symptom of, let's say, neurodiversity, or ESL, but humor on HN is almost universally punished. I don't think they are bots because once in a while I crack jokes in AI prompts (to amuse myself when exceptionally bored) and the LLMs always recognize them, even if they don't respond right away with a sensible chuckle GIF.

In my experience, those HNers actually think that they are the ones being funny when they point out your factual incorrectness or when they want to be pedantic about something.

just goes to show how different people can be. i never would have considered this but i can imagine it now

A sarcasm tag cannot mitigate that problem /s