What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.
Fyi, it's not a fad. It's what's called a "human interest" angle and some publications (like this rrj.ca website of this thread) have that editorial allowance for personal storytelling. (I made a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673)
More examples of that include "The New Yorker", "Harper's" and other literary style magazines.
The opposite examples of "just the facts" type of publishers would be "lwn.net" for Linux tech articles or The Economist magazine for business stories. You won't find articles beginning with personal things like, "When I was a little boy, my father took me to discover ice...blah blah blah...."
The problem is that HN is an aggregation site that gets the [human interest] articles when some readers don't want it and we have no convention for tagging them to avoid annoying that subset of the audience.
This particular investigative journalist is over-preparing for interacting with sources. That is a literary device to color his avoidance of the services named in the headline.
This particular cliche has grandkids by now.
Overpacking a story with junk (how ironic!) makes it harder to spread the important ideas of the article, which hurts the author's goal.
Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority?
To me, these articles look like those SEO recipe sites that are stuffed with random content because Google won't rank them as well if they just provided what the user is looking for.
This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
I get the impression that there are multiple things at work: some people really like those side-stories, and they're very easy to write. You'd have a much, much harder time filling a newspaper with facts, which makes it much more expensive.
But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
Depending on who you are, those details could be important. If chemical X is known to be harmful, it opens up details into how Suzy and Michael got exposed and who exposed them. Is this a local problem or a national one? Are there alternative explanations for the bad things that have nothing to do with chemical X? The human interest details, meanwhile, clue you into socioeconomic and demographic factors which may be at play. (But also may not.)
These sorts of stories are surfacing anecdotes. Hopefully fact-checked anecdotes. But not peer-reviewed papers, either. (All that said, I personally prefer publications that tend towards terseness.)
That's a very specific story then, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about "eating poison is not good for humans". Suzy and Michael are humans, therefore eating poison is not good for them, but they could be replaced with any other human: they specifically don't add anything to the story. They're an emotional connection for the reader at best and a filler at worst.
Perhaps if someone wrote a blog in nested-comment style I would read it.
Fun though experiment: could Harry Potter be rewritten in comment style?
I found it's very liberating to consciously decide "this isn't intended for me" and focus my attention elsewhere. Still, it's very easy to lower my guard and fall into the mindless consumer trap again. But it's an indulgence, and I try to limit my intake.
I loved my grandmother, we’ve spent such a great time together as we used to do our daily walks in the green park in front of our house and we watched all those dogs running around and birds chirping, while enjoying our ice-cream that we had acquired from the shop around the corner.
Then I wake up, and I go on Hacker News to read about all those interesting and innovative things that happen around me all the time, while my little dog wags his tail and watches me as I click every link on the front page.
Thank you for reading this.
I try to add as much “human” as possible into my writing and tech interaction.
I feel that we have allowed technology to leech our humanity, and the consequences have been devastating.
When we have people running multi-billion-node datasets, that have no empathy for the essential “humanity” of each node, we can have Jurassic-scale disasters.