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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

I know many like this sort of article, but I lost interest at "Henry Adams, one of the most important thinkers in the 19th century", because it promises that the article will blather on with philosophical arguments for a long time before actually revealing its point (and thus before showing whether it is worth to spend any time on it).

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Ok, but please don't post off-topic, shallow complaints to HN. They get upvoted to the top of the thread (it's basically a community bug) and then choke out interesting discussion.

I've marked this one offtopic now, which puts it lower on the page.

Similarly, I lost interest when I clicked a link to another of the author's posts talking about the FTC declining to sue Google in 2012 and it treated the claims of Yelp as gospel for proof of Google's anticompetitive behaviour.

Yelp like to paint Google as the bogeyman because it distracts from the fact that Yelp hasn't changed in a decade and the product, well, sucks.

The core claim here seems to be that Google is giving itself preferential pricing on impressions. Maybe that's.true? It's not clear to me what the effect of that is. I would've liked more detail about that and less grandstanding on the evils of Google, honestly.

It was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to the point.

I only know this because after reading the meat of the article and seeing your comment I went back to check.

I had noticed the waffle the first time around because I'd skim read until I got to the relevant part.

> t was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to the point.

Too much.

Not if you can skim read.

Except.. it didn't blather on at all, and got right to the point.

I think this heuristic is good, but specifically for identifying bad writing. You, me, and almost everyone here wants a straightforward account of what happened. The opening sentence is tone-deaf to what the readers want to learn.

Also, the phrase "one of the most" is almost always indicative of poor writing, even if it is far better than using a superlative.

It was a single paragraph of historical context, I don't think that's uncalled for.

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