Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

> Would the author ever write about a man like this?

I think so. It's perfectly in the style of these crappy mass-produced long read articles, padded with every possible cliché and useless piece of information to sound like exciting stories. I'm sick of skimming through tons of padding text to extract the smallest nuggets of valuable information.

View on HN

It's what happens when editors and publishers see the success of long-form journalism, but don't understand that the 'scenery' language is just there to really flavor a driving story.

So we get a 5 sentence story that gets turned into this mess.

There may be around 5 to 6 lines of interesting information in that article. Way too much crud!

I wish there was a service where you'd send a url of an article such as this one and it'd spit out a summary with only the relevant data and without all the surrounding cruft. Something like a tl;dr for this type of articles.

It's called an abstract, and it's a thing for scientific papers. If you want literally none of the human side of a story or discovery, research papers are a great solution and don't need to be recompiled from longform journalism.

If you want concise descriptions of science, read the papers or abstracts. Complaining about journalistic style will literally get you nowhere.

Edit: yes, please flag me because I upset you by providing helpful information. That's definitely not an abuse of power.

This is not just "journalistic style". It is a specific journalistic style of many possible ones; and I find it annoying in its repetitiveness. It might be fun to read an article like this the first or second time; by the third one you start to discern the pattern, and starts to realize that all the stuffing with pointless details and the rambling exposition are always the same. A writer can entertain his/ her readers with insightful remarks, wittiness, or great descriptive passages- but very little if none of these are to be found here: these articles show no particular talent, or focus, they all follow a very obvious scheme and sound as if they were all written by the same dull person. Come on, journalism can be much better than this.

I don't like it either.

Yet, we not liking it won't change anything. In general, the public like this stile, so journalists will write this way.

You are better searching for media that fits your stile better.

Do you mean that I shouldn't express or voice my dislike for things I don't like?

I'm just saying that it's useless, and you'll gain more by actually changing your habits than trying to change society.

But if you think it's a hill worth taking, go ahead. You won't succeed, but if all you want is to try, you'll get to try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com