Snark took off around the same time the web did because it solves a specific problem of the attention economy: how do you signal intelligence, distance, and in-group membership in as few characters as possible. Earnestness is expensive, it takes context and charity, but a snarky aside is cheap and instantly legible to your tribe. Once media, then social media, got rewarded for engagement over accuracy, snark became a kind of default compression algorithm for opinion: less argument, more vibe. The irony is that the word itself has this long, meandering, almost quaint history, while its modern use is basically an optimization for ad-driven feeds and quote-tweet culture. We didn’t just get more “snarky” because we got more cynical, we got more snarky because the systems that surface speech pay better for sharp edges than for careful thought.

"Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.

The practice of cynicism is smarm."

From Tom Scocca's "On Smarm" essay, 2013

https://www.gawkerarchives.com/on-smarm-1476594977