<i>Flippancy works best for people who already agree with you in principle.</i><p>And this is why snark "works" -- people only care about socializing, not learning or persuading. Snark "works" by reinforcing commonality, stigmatizing difference, and turning disagreement into rivalry. Snark "works" if you're interested in the distinction between "people like me" and "people unlike me" rather than the distinction between your ideas and someone else's ideas. It doesn't work at all if you want to communicate constructively with people who have fundamentally different or alien ideas.<p>EDIT: I guess I didn't say anything very different from him, but I thought he glossed over the negative aspects pretty quickly. He characterizes snark as an ugly way of bullying people close to you, he says it is "quite possibly a really bad thing and a really bad habit," but he's clearly looking forward to using it. Creepy.
<i>"They convince socially, not rhetorically."</i> is an interesting take on the well-known idea of peer-group pressure. Humans have a need to belong, and we'll do it using whatever means are available. It's not just reddit memes, but also even the kind of language scientists use (so their "dominant paradigms" are partly social paradigms). When you laugh at a clever xkcd comic, it's partly a social laugh.<p>I hadn't thought of it in terms of <i>convincing</i> people - of having arguments and assumptions accepted, often without any opposition, because the conscious barriers are circumvented. Advertising uses this (especially sports-star endorsement). It's not just a sense of "getting it" and belonging/being accepted - it's also values and beliefs being changed.<p>Incidentally, peer pressure was experimentally confirmed in the famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments</a><p><i>EDIT</i> the problem with sacrificing objectivity for a sense of belonging is that you don't see things quite as they are, so you have less ability to make a difference. You can't hack "magic" (there's my in-group reference). But in any group, people will try to conform unconsciously - the stubbornness of Establishment scientists (putatively truth-seekers) is a well-known trope; even here, HackerNews has some cult-like qualities (the "pg cult").<p>The problem of going the other way is that you sacrifice a sense of belonging for the sake of objectivity - an inhumanly cold choice. And you can't do it fully, anyway.
When i'm new to a group, I like creating my own snark comments instead of acting like I get theirs. Then I can hijack the assumptions others have and make them my own.<p>Besides if you don't use direct references you have to rely on assumptions. Which makes us all speak babble.