On mocking

It's interesting that you mention that sort of teasing-as-bonding. It takes a tremendous amount of trust and ease, or unspoken intracultural knowledge, to assume that someone else's mockery means "I like you, stick around." It's hard enough to get that message across *in person*; across timezones and cultures, and stripped down to Unicode, it's roulette.

I believe it was John Scalzi who said "the failure mode of clever is asshole." I remember that every time I write something subtly humorous in a wikitech-l email, remember that my developers' list has people from dozens of countries who mostly speak English as a second language, and either take out the joke or replace it with something more obvious and mark it with a ;-). I can make people laugh when I see them in person. I won't sacrifice some unknown contributor's morale for the sake of fulfilling a passing impulse to jest.