I'll make this short:

One of the major hurdles in ML/NLP (machine learning & natural language processing) is the detection of semantic patterns like humor and sarcasm.

What if the use of "\s", a convention only almost exclusively seen on Reddit, was deliberately promulgated to subvert Reddit users into unwittingly producing a massive training set of sentences tagged for sarcasm.

The set of all comments with \s is a potentially incredible useful dataset. It would also be much more indicative of actual current language trends, and provides a relatively unbiased sample of the target audiences for products built with models trained on it.

This is pure conjecture, but if I wanted to try to build some sort of model for sarcasm, this is the first one I'd think to try to scrape.

Edit: \s

Edit: /s