A year ago I made a sarcastic comment which most people understood as such, except one other commenter. I took the opportunity to make the most heavy handed sarcastic response I could where I said democrats should vote for SpongeBob and we should all be more like him because he's a hard worker.

Apparently that was the comment that needed the /s.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that when there's so much toxicity in a network that people need the /s, the network isn't capable of handling sarcasm anymore. At that point hate has won.