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Comment by clon | Hacker News Reader

I cannot stand those long form articles. The headline picked my interest, the lead text is intriguing but the first paragraph that starts to describe a bright, warm morning or the attire or the facial features of a "lead character" immediately takes the wind out of my sails. How can anyone place so little value on their time as to be able afford to consume material that is so sparse in information?

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Indeed. I do not want to know about the "cold morning when the researcher walked into the lab..." Like Linus Torvalds say "Just show me the damn code!", these magazine articles love to beat around the bush than lay out the key story points right away.

So I skipped directly to the figures and section of the story that talks about changes in ROS levels in gut.

I thought maybe you were being overly critical and the writing wouldn't be so bad... then I read halfway through this sentence:

On a cold morning this winter, Rogulja leaned over a tablet in her office, her close-cropped dark hair framing a face of elfin intensity...

Poe's law strikes again.

Huh?

I could honestly not tell whether that quote was written satirically or actually in the article without looking.

> framing a face of elfin intensity

Oof. Now there's a phrase that belongs in a Lyttle Lytton entry.

So glad I caught this comment before I gave that article a chance to make me wretch.

What? You don't want to see the author literarily jerk themselves off?

This is how writers write when they're writing to show of their craft. Of course us uncultured laymen are not going to appreciate it the same way that someone who just wants to build a shelf to put their crap on is not going to appreciate a 45min YouTube video where somebody looking to show off fine woodworking spends an entire weekend building a shelf and someone who wants to just make an omelette is not going to enjoy a video where a master chef freezes frame every 10sec to narrate about the technique needed to wiggle it just right in order to make butter to brown the image of the Mona Lisa into the thing.

Whether "performing one's craft in a manner that showcases the capabilities of one's craft" is appropriate for the context is a matter of opinion.

This isn't showing off their craft, this is like John Hancock's flourish. You can write well and short.

At least there is value in the other examples, and you can quickly tell how the video's going to play out. I sometimes need to pre-skim the whole text just to feel the signal to noise ratio.

When will journos dawn on that we don't care about their morning bagels?

You’re complaining about two sentences in a 3000 word article. Read on. It’s raw information from there. You are also allowed to skip the pictures.

The problem is, this way we would spend 72 hours a day on all these 3k word articles for getting one page worth of chitchat material.

I bet that tl;dr extension that would allow to jump directly to highlights (or mark them) would be pretty popular. If anyone knows one, please share.

Something like that could work like existing models that generate abstracts for research papers. I don't know if these techniques have gone mainstream yet, but my understanding is that they are under active development. If you can generate one or two paragraphs that summarize the findings of a paper, it's not much of a stretch to imagine an application that generates pop-sci articles of the desired length.

Indeed it's a really common trope. More hook to the core subject is needed before waffle can be tolerated. I imagine some popular course on writing had much to answer for.

I suspect this works better in print when you sit down with a cup of tea and a copy of the New Yorker

Luckily there was a link to the Cell paper early on. I skipped directly there [0] and there was a wonderful short abstract with key points as well as a graphical abstract that succinctly summarized the findings.

[0] https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30555-9.pdf?_ret...

That graphical abstract is brilliant. All I needed to know in seconds.

There is exactly one paragraph of it. It takes approximately 10 seconds and is easy to skip. Seriously.

The paper the article is about [0] has a 3 sentence 32 word introduction. Those 32 words tell describe the mechanism they found, and give you a feeling for how likely it is to apply to humans. 3000 words is a big jump. The first paragraph is 94 words long.

The article has more than that of course - it's a leisurely introduction to the people behind the discovery and the effort they put it. Nothing wrong with that, it's a worthy story in its own right. But when you click on the headline "Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?" so discover the 32 words answer to the question in the headline is buried in a 3000 word human interest story, you may feel a little cheated.

[0] https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30555-9.pdf

There's one paragraph of that. Then a paragraph talking about the lab being in an apartment building, so that there are bedrooms nearby. Then a paragraph grad students describing their work as "thrilling" to the point of not wanting to graduate. (As an ex-grad student, I have to say "Really?")

If that bothered you, you haven’t looked up food recipes.

Yes, that would be me. I like long form articles, I don’t consider them as part of any pressure or deliverable. I have managed my life by living in a humane environment so as to enjoy rather than be frustrated in small everyday time consuming activities. Of course I would understand if someone would prefer if I simply said “Yes” and I would consider a time waste to fuss about it.

This complaint pops up over and over again on HN. A lot of people like writing that "paints a picture", or like fancy GUIs, or want a website with a bunch of bells and whistles, or small talk without much real information. HN, in general, skews against all of these things (and so do I) but it's not a representative sample of what people in general want.

Look it's a magazine with long form read intended for people who like such things. You can always skip it and read the abstract of the paper it references :-)

Fanfiction Journalism.

If you want to tell a story please just write a book, I don't need your clickbait wrapped up in a quaint little story.

What's most painful about it is you can feel the writer's desire for a different job.

I came here to express the same sentiment, expecting to be an outlier. The overwhelming response is my perspective. I'm glad it's not just me who wonders "who writes this sh*t".

"in their own tubes live other sleepless flies, animated with the calm persistence of those consigned to eternal day." - This hurts my head. This author does not understand communication.

I found tremendous amount of valuable information when I do intensive reading on a long form article, such as historical context, locations of cities and places, and other info that's only loosely related to the topic at home.

Like I now know that spaced repetition systems that people uses for studying was a product of Soviet era research by a Polish academic.

Though whether it's a warm morning or not is kinda useless to me.

I thought it was only me but i bored after the first paragraph and tried skimming through the article but it was too boring.

most content writers and journalist i know get paid for the amount of content they write. that fluff paragraph that you hate so much added almost 100 word and over 500 characters to article. if you are required to write an article with a minimum length of 2000 words, you just knocked off 5% of your requirement.

The reason that the article is written this way is that most human beings enjoy stories about people and events. I assume the reason you don't understand that is you are in this way different from most human beings but are not clearly aware of it.

I’ve let my New Yorker subscription lapse. The writing is great and sometimes, perhaps on a long leisurely train ride across Canada, it might be nice to read these “long form” articles. I was finally just subscribing for the cartoons.

This article was particularly frustrating, because it inspires but never answers an incredibly obvious question: does antioxidant treatment help prevent the effects of sleep deprivation in rats, or only in fruit flies? Surely that would have been the next thing on the researchers' list of things to try.

They may have addressed this, and I just missed it. But in general I agree that this isn't the best format for describing this type of research to nonspecialist readers. I don't mind a slight dose of human-interest fluff, but the facts should come first.

(I take it from the patented HN instant downvote that the article did, in fact, answer my question, and I just missed it.)

Looking at the 'Graphical Abstract' in the excellent link [1] that seesawtron posted, I don't think you did miss anything.

[1] https://bit.ly/3cy0C9u

Can someone explain how the downvote system works? I guess every user is not allowed to downvote but some users can? Thanks for your insights in advance.

It’s been a while since I was a new member here, but AFAIR, you need to accumulate a bit of karma so you can downvote. This prevents fresh accounts from downvoting.

I think it's 500 karma, but I'm not sure because I've been here 2 years and still don't have access.

I'm at around 1000 and have it. I suspect it might be a little above 500?

EDIT: dang answers directly (500 or 501): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8381148 (2014)

I try to save downvotes for posts that are actively abusive or hurt the discussion (by being abusive). Not just for stuff I don't like or I find 'low effort' (although I understand why others might have different standards). I also try to be generous with upvotes for everyone who participates with me in good faith.

I have a feeling my comment is being downvoted by people who didn't read the article. In retrospect, I can see where someone might think I'm advocating a quack antioxidant treatment for sleep disorders, or "just asking questions here," or something else besides asking a specific, valid question about the studies.

Oh, well.

Yeah people seem extra jumpy these days especially concerning medical articles. I generally just expect it ahead of time and shrug when it happens.

I tend to lurk and enjoy reading things here. I've been here almost 5 years and have less than 200 karma. That being said, I give out upvotes like candy.

It's greater than 500 karma. I made it to 500, no down arrow. Got up to 502, and the 'down' arrow appeared. Then a comment of mine was downvoted, bringing my karma down to 499, and the button went away again. Got it back a day or two later.

The other thing is that you don't seem to be able to downvote comments which are a direct reply to your own comment (although you can up-vote them). You can downvote replies-of-replies though.

You’re never able to downvote direct responses to your posts. Prevents retaliation for disagreeing.

> Prevents retaliation for disagreeing.

Or it just incentivizes them to click on your profile, click through to comments and down-vote everything not in direct reply.

Arguably that's a higher bar of caring but once that bar is exceeded it's far more damaging to civil discourse because then you've got factually correct technical comments down-voted into oblivion because that person happened to also commit WrongThink(TM) in the comments on an unrelated contentious subject.

You could also argue that it's an incentive to wait a day before taking a minority opinion on a divisive subject but I'm not sure that's something we want to be incentivizing.

I don’t think it incentives the behavior you’re describing. People that get this offended about a post on HN will try so, even if they can downvote the direct response. Not being able to downvote a direct response stops the first impulse, which is sufficient to deter many, if not all people.

> Not being able to downvote a direct response stops the first impulse, which is sufficient to deter many, if not all people.

I think probably the most important thing is that it clearly communicates what the expected behavior is. I don't think it's immediately obvious that downvoting a response to you is would be considered impolite. (After all, people down-vote things because they happen to disagree all the time; what's the difference if it's in response to something you wrote or in response to something someone else wrote?) But if it's clear that's the social norm, I think most people would just go along with it.

Adding an extra few seconds to retaliation probably does have an effect, but only on people who would consider breaking the social norm anyway.

You have to earn 500 (or maybe 501) karma before you can downvote, and you're not allowed to downvote replies to you. The idea is, a person has to become a member of the community before they can just come in and downvote whatever they don't like, and you can't downvote someone for disagreeing with your point.

As far as I know, those are the main hard rules of downvoting.

I too was hanging on throughout the end for that experiment result, but it never came.

Next month's issue will feature a long-form article on why suffocation by a police officer kills.

Exactly my perception. Was looking desperately for an abstract, a TL;DR version, the key takeaways.

Lol exactly. So I come to the comments in hopes of the tl;dr, which is usually just a sentence.

So true. Details that are so utterly irrelevant and gratuitous that it verges on being an (unintentional) parody of the style:

'On a cold morning this winter, Rogulja leaned over a tablet in her office, her close-cropped dark hair framing a face of elfin intensity'

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