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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

This is now the second or third author i’ve found this year who uses the royal we.

Am i missing something? Are we in Cryptonomicon-style Relatively Independent Sub-Totality mode non-ironically now?

There are other usages of we for an individual. I think the writer is trying to use what is called the editorial we, not the royal we.

I will say it's use in that article is rather jarring however.

edit: Looking it up, it appear this has a fancy name, encompassing the royal we, the editorial we, and more: Nosism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism

I just assumed that the author shared the laptop with their partner.

Interestingly, the past blog posts use singular "I" up until the middle of the post "A Story of Microsuites, and Atrophy" from 21st of September, 2021: it starts with "Let me give you a view", but ends with "We lived there for three long years".

But diagnosing over the Internet, while a fun pass time for the diagnoser (diagnostician?), is very unreliable.

I figured maybe the author used they/them as their pronouns. But the main page has some testimonials referring to “she”. So idk what’s up with the royal “we”.

Sometimes in science, people use the collective “we” in their writing. But like you say, the OP is using royal “we”, so I don’t think scientific writing is the reason either.

Assuming they're non native it could be a butchered idiom from scientific writing.

I'm not a native speaker, but AFAIK if you use "they" to avoid specifying a gender, it's "singular they" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they), so using the first person plural still doesn't really make sense...

First person pronouns aren't gendered, so even if this were a they/them using person, the darren.rogers@cybereason.com' doesn't make sense. What it did do was distract form the blog post, to the point that I stopped reading it.

I just kept picturing someone creepily talking to their hairless cat while saying 'we'

Their next blog post talks about being banned from Twitter because they put in a birthdate that made them under 13, so I'm guessing at some point they decided that they were reborn as some sort of collective (Twitter profile says "hardware witches | server maids"). Thus, "we" instead of "I".

It's Hacker News. This kind of stuff is pretty normal here.

no it is not

It is. You have to understand that the way you see yourself is not necessarily the way other people see themselves. For centuries people hid this from society, but now people are open about it and it turns out that it's pretty OK.

doesn't make it normal

I don't know but I've stopped reading the article after 5 paragraphs because of this (and also some other reasons...)

What were the other reasons?

I stopped reading because there was no background to anything. I landed there because I saw it on HN, but I had no idea what was going on. After a few paragraphs, I lost interest.

Uh, they started to use an old laptop (presumably that they just had lying around) because they wanted to spend time on their phones less, and here's how it worked out. To be honest that's a fairly common story structure here on HN (with precise details different, of course), what more background do you want or need?

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’d appreciate something along the lines of who they are and why the reader should invest their time to read on.

The article had no structure. I had no idea about the context in general and the wording was so weird, I just couldn't follow it properly.

Ugh. All the way through I was imaging that Siamese twins wrote this piece or something.

Or maybe somebody with a split personality.

Notoriously, Margaret Thatcher used the royal/singular we once ("we have become a grandmother"), so it's not reserved strictly for monarchs.

It's at least less jarring than illeism, where one refers to oneself in the third person, I suppose...

funny, I had a different theory: A concerned tech savvy parent, trying to save its children and spouse from the hazardous impact when using touch screens.

> So this thing’s main job is to help us stay off our phone, since touch screens are the hardest on the health of our hands.

So lets heal this small children hands with this small keyboard :-)

It sounds like a genius solution to shut up people who loudly refuse to use “they” for “oh, purely grammatical reasons, of course”

“One” is a fairly formal voice, but certainly an option with a long precedent.

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