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Comment by smabie | Hacker News Reader

It lowers the latency of the communication and also makes the text easier to read. Before you've finished typing it all out, your co-worker has already started processing and thinking about the question.

This is superior than just sending one big block of text.

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I would much rather have the wall of text. Whenever I get to the message, I can process it without asking a million of follow up questions.

Why would you need a follow up question more for a bunch of lines of text vs a block of text? We're talking about putting a bunch of new lines (i.e sending many messages) vs sending just one large one. They can contain the exact same information.

Why do many comments in response to my initial question default to the alternative being gigantic blobs of text and not advocating for merely brief and concise but informative communication styles?

Is it no less valid than the rapid fire messaging on the one extreme and large paragraphs of words on the other?

For me this depends on the context:

1. On the first message of a conversation I prefer a wall of text, because that lets me read all of the details really quickly.

2. If the conversation is likely to be short I prefer the one message after another since my attention is already on the chat, and I might as well be reading what they're typing rather than watching the "x is typing..." indicator.

3. If the conversation is going to be long I much prefer a call, I don't have the time to wait for someone to type all day. Context switches are expensive so I don't like reading occasional long messages while I'm trying to work.

For an initial message (no hello) this is great. But when we are already chatting and my attention is on the window, I prefer shorter messages.

That's where email/mailing lists shine.

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