Comment culture died for me in a different way.

I was browsing some thread and someone referenced a meme typed out as :.|:;

The comment had a few replies who recognized the meme. I had no idea what it meant so I asked Claude

Well the AI knew what it was! It was the “loss” meme but the explanation it gave made no sense.

Turns out the meme needs a strike through tag. This turns :.|:; into a four-panel diagram of a web comic.

That’s when I realize that whatever trained Claude stripped out the formatting, and thus the entire meaning of the meme. And the comment I originally saw was a repost bot that also failed to retain the formatting when it reposted it.

And the replies that understood the reference were all reposted by bots.

So who even knows if we CAN make relationships on the internet anymore?

I can’t trust that any comment is actual human expression any more. Or is it just bullshit stripped of any context or meaning

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anyfoo 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know the exact situation obviously, but isn't it possible that the poster simply wasn't able (or didn't know how) to add the strikethrough, but had the expectation that anyone who knows about this form knows, and the replying commenters were indeed people who did instantly recognize that jumble of characters, and acknowledged it?

Like, I didn't know about that form of the loss meme, but now that I know it's loss if you add strikethrough, I'm pretty sure I'd recognize it even without the strikethrough.

	▲	abhaynayar 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yea, I was able to tell what it was without the strike-through. It's not necessary. In fact, it's one of those memes where the meme itself is about recognizing it in super obscure formats so that's where my mind and most peoples' minds who are familiar with it would go to. I HIGHLY doubt it's a bot thing.

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squigz 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What strikethrough? I immediately recognized it in your 2nd line as Loss. This is a culture thing, not an AI thing.

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mingus88 4 days ago | parent [-]

Claude tried to explain the meme but without the horizontal bar, it was not 4-panel. It contradicted itself explaining the dots. It makes no sense:

• : (one person standing) • :| (two people, one standing, one lying down) • :| (two people standing) • ; (one person standing, one lying down)

So I had to look up the meme, saw that the entire representation relies on a strike through. That’s how you get one person in 1 panel. That’s how you get four panels at all.

Sure, if you have seen the meme without formatting, you would recognize it. You probably have seen bots reposting without the right formatting it just like I did.

Or you didn’t. Who can say for sure? That’s my entire point. Comment sections are dead

	▲	squigz 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think you're being overdramatic. Googling "loss meme text" brings up a Tumblr post with this exact text - admittedly when you visit the page itself, you get the strikethrough, but if I wanted to share this meme and saw only the text in the Google results, I would share that confident that other people who know the meme would get it. I suspect other people would too. Why are you getting hung up on Claude's response? How is this an issue with comment culture and not the LLM?
	▲	jjani 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I didn't even remember whether it had a strikethrough or not but recognized it. It's nothing to do with bots, it's simple human pattern recognition. That rough sequence of characters is really only used in comments for that meme. Plus that it would've been placed in a certain context, making it even easier to recognize, which your comment didn't even have but it was still recognizable.
	▲	anyfoo 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's true that nobody can say for sure, but bots reposting the loss meme somehow strikes me less likely as some people reposting the loss meme. And an entirely ASCII-representation (ignoring the strikethrough) is extremely easy to post, so could make this a relatively common off-shoot of the meme that many would recognize, strikethrough or not. Why do you think they were all bots?

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ElectroNomad 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s wild how a single missing tag can collapse the whole meaning. It really underscores how fragile context is in this digital realm. Makes you wonder if we’ve lost our ability for an authentic connection… or just spearheading into an echo chamber where you never know if it’s a human or a bot…

	▲	anyfoo 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, "the loss meme as minimalistic ASCII art ad absurdum" is a pretty extreme form. It's basically tailor-made to be below the threshold of recognition, while still evoking familiarity once you know what it is. It's almost certainly the answer to a self-imposed challenge of how one could make the meme with the absolute minimum of ASCII-only characters. I'm not sure anyone would recognize this as the loss meme to begin with, unless they got context-hints like "this is a popular meme", strikethrough or not. So, yes, that context is extremely fragile here, but that's because this was made to be barely viable in the first place, not because that's a general quality of any content in the digital realm... That's not to go against your wider point (to which I have no opinion either way), I'm just not sure this is significant for that.

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mercenario 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So do you think it is completely normal to recognize :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ as a meme, but then it is completely unreasonable to recognize just :.|:; and it should definitely be AI bots? Really?

To convert the comic to :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶ is a very very distance, to remove the strikethrough is nothing.