I actually can't imagine any kind of reading medium that's worse. There's chunks of text interlaced with a bunch of visual noise, random images, links to separate threads which are huge images and bigger than the surrounding text.
Please just stop.
90% of links, have some kind of: "doesn't work on my mobile... format sucks, i don't like the colors, etc... etc.." comment.
It is pure infantile/juvenile bikesheding and distracting from the point of the conversation/link that has nothing to do with formatting.
I worded it more concretely: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances [etc]" I find that giving concrete examples and inviting the mind to generalize them works better than giving an abstract rule and inviting the mind to instantiate it. I learned this trick from spreadsheet development.
I was about to complain bitterly that the guidelines are now too long and there isn't a single one that can be taken out...but then I saw one that could be taken out, and I took it out. That was "Please submit the canonical URL. Avoid link shorteners." It's covered by "Please submit the original source." We added it a few years ago to try to convey that link shorteners are banned on HN, but it can be pushed out of the constitution and down into case law. It's the ones that aren't derivable from other guidelines that are hard to remove.
The list still feels too long to me. The longer it gets, the less people will take in, and I really want to avoid the mistake of accruing a big list of rules over time. They've grown like tree rings (and about as slowly) as we've learned about what feedback helps regulate the system. But the longer the list becomes, the more it starts to feel like a bureaucratic artifact rather than, let's say, a philosophical one, and that is out of sync with the intended spirit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That comment has sparked a larger subthread specifically about Twitter as a medium, rather than the content of the post. This specific subthread is so popular, it's near the top of the page every time I refresh this post. So we could say it stifles discussion, also because people are prone to voting up a comment like that despite the fact that it's not really relevant to the post.
I know there's a user called foone that has gotten posted to HN enough times that they explained why they use twitter to make posts instead of writing a blog (they have adhd, and they find it easier to write on twitter). Which is reasonable since there's an empathical justification. And I've read other twitter threads in the past, which were fine.
Usually, people just write out a paragraph but broken over multiple tweets. This is the first time that I've seen someone try and link other videos/posts/images which is somehow so much worse.
The key text is: @threadreaderapp unroll
If you reply to a Tweet thread with that, it'll unroll it and create a link like that.
I recently read HG Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau; the protagonist describes one of Moreau’s creatures, who specialized in Big Think: big-worded, incoherent rambling intended to confuse and impress in equal parts. The argot of Twitter, in other words.