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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

The writing style of this article really drives me nuts. Let me tell you why.

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I talked to some people. Some of them wanted to. Others didn't. Some were anonymous. Some weren't. Let's get to the bottom of this topic.

"It's really a lot of problems all at once." said one person I talked to. What they say next will shock you.

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This article drags on so long I almost forgot what I was reading about. Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next.

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And the headline states

  (And Three Ways To Fix It)

Which it does not deliver any fixes for the listener.

The only real fix is to use a dynamic compression algorithm. Most AVRs (home theater receivers) have this, and I now always use the chrome plugin AudioChannel for playback to devices that do not have that feature.

I hate long articles - because ADHD - but I read this whole thing. I thought it was incredibly well-researched and well-written and fully identified a problem that has been grumbled about continuously but not fully developed before.

1. you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin.

2. the fact that you consider this a long article says a lot more about you than the article or the author. I read the whole thing (with ublock origin active) and I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context.

> you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin.

Ah yes, victim blame.

> the fact that you consider this a long article

I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content. Not that the article itself was long.

> I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context.

Good for you. We had different experiences, then.

I'm not victim blaming you. Anyone who reads HN understands that a huge chunk of the contemporary web provides a fucked up experience for readers and viewers because of ad placement. I consider that complaining about any particular instance of ads doing that is essentially redundant at this point. The web is screwed up by ads, use an ad blocker or complain about online ads in general, not any particular article.

> I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content.

There are 6 paragraphs of introduction before jumping right into the Nolan case. With default font sizing, it's a bit less than 1 page of content in my web browser. How is that "drags on so long before it gets to the actual content"?

I tried to restrict my remarks to the article in question. You closed with the sweeping generalization "Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next."

You and I seem to have different opinions on "dragging on". A full page of introductory fluff before getting to content, to me, is ridiculously long winded, needless bloat in an article.

it's long! 5,440 words 31,008 characters (~20 minutes to read)

And there are no charts. The proposition is simple. (Dialogue got worse.) What's the metric. How it has gotten worse. Where's the data.

Okay, maybe it's not that kind of article, but it's full of fluff. (At least compared to what I expect clicking on a HN link that has an interesting title.)

Ironic how it is lost on the author of the article, that he himself, makes it difficult to understand such a poorly structured and click-bait ridden article.

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