I feel like you’re missing an important piece of context. The “nobody reads the article” joke works (when it works) because it’s both a known common behavior and one that creates incredibly obvious problems and makes people look silly. Apologies that it was your turn to take that L last week, I guess?

A fair chunk of this also comes down to community norms. On awful.systems it’s not really an expectation that the top level post includes a summary instead of just some choice quotes or a reaction, because the expectation is that the thing being shared is worth reading in full so of course you’re going to do that if you have time. Hell a lot of our members are sometimes sharing either their own longer-form work or that of people they know personally and it’d be rude to act like following the link and reading the thing isn’t worth doing. I’m not arrogant enough to say I always read the link before commenting, but unless I’m making a bad pun off of another comment or otherwise shitposting I usually do, and it’s kind of baffling to have someone actively defend doing otherwise.

And yes, when someone uses the phrase “my dude” you can assume they’re at least 65% taking the piss.