I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. It’s hard to follow and feels disjointed, and fights against an authors motivation to go into detail or explore nuance
B) In this specific case, the author has written a lot of blog posts about this domain (though not this specific subject), and those have been on HN frontpage occasionally. So whatever reason they had to use Mastodon for this writing, it at least wasn't coming from ignorance or a lack of a platform.
In my opinion at least.
The guideline is not that the form is not annoying - some people, like you, will find it annoying not matter what. It's that the complaints about it are boring, repetitive and corrosive to the forum just as any boring and repetitive thing is. That's very much a slam dunk of truth.
multimillenial standard interface for connected text
This is pretty ahistorical.
I'm not arguing that the guideline can be breached when some people find it annoying. That would be silly.
I'm arguing that posting articles as trains of social media posts may not be tangential nor merely a matter of formatting. If that's the case (I agree it's 'arguable'), then complaining about them isn't in breach of the guidelines.
> This is pretty ahistorical.
Claiming that posting multiple social media objects is a mere 'formatting' alteration to our legacy of textual culture is pretty ahistorical.
It is, the guideline was written specifically to address the repetitive twitter complaints - you can find this explanation in the mod commentary. Also, pretty much anything repetitive runs counter to the rubric of the forum and this complaint is very, very repetitive.
our legacy of textual culture
Our 'legacy of textual culture' contains a huge variety of formats and representations. The notion that some single one is a representative standard, let alone has lasted for millennia is not an accurate one.
If the guidelines are unclear, and arbitrarily rule non-articles in as articles, then they must be rewritten to make the fiat clear.
> Our 'legacy of textual culture' contains a huge variety of formats and representations. The notion that some single one is a representative standard, let alone has lasted for millennia is not an accurate one.
Irrelevant, as no-one made that claim. Your unevidenced insistence on your personal take on a novel tech as inarguably part of a historical tradition is just quiet shouting. I disagree, but agree it's arguable. You think it's not arguable, because it's obvious to you, and you believe what's obvious to you should be enforced.
Hence the clarification. Hopefully it's clear now.
no-one made that claim.
You made the claim - "the multimillenial standard interface for connected text". There's no such standard.
Nope. Just that you personally rule something as tangential that I claim is not. Your personal preferences aren't present in the guidelines (I've read them). If you wish them to be so, please rewrite the guidelines.
> You made the claim
I did not. I claimed that there is such a thing as textual articles, ie. an existential claim. I didn't claim that all text, or all articles, or all textual articles, share a single format. They exist, and claiming that something entirely different (a chain of social media objects) falls under the same head is false. Claiming that two different categories of things are, in fact, different, is not 'tangential', or related only to 'formatting'.
Oh I see the problem. No, I'm not personally claiming this, I'm trying to explain the context and motivation of the site guidelines. Here are some relevant comments from the site moderator:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838162
and in endless glory:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The guideline is there because of the repetitive twitter complaints, I'm not making this up as a fun messageboard hypothetical. Complaining about tweets being on twitter is a well-established off-topic topic.
please rewrite the guidelines
That is impractical for a number of reasons (i.e. the guidelines can't be exhaustive and also aren't, by design) which, coincidentally is also a subject of much moderator commentary. Happy to dig it up for you if interested.
I did not.
I mean, you talked about this millennial-something standard but there's obviously no such a standard. That's all. I'm happy to accept it as a rhetorical flourish and move on.
> The guideline is there because of the repetitive twitter complaints, I'm not making this > up as a fun messageboard hypothetical. Complaining about tweets being on twitter is a > well-established off-topic topic.
This is very obviously untrue. Almost every single thread in HN is littered with repetitive comments. Try posting anything about Linux, note-taking. Dare mention an Electron app, and if it's installed with an install.sh, then .. instant death. You'll be buried under an avalanche of near exact copies of comments that have been posted tens of thousands of times on HN.
This is manifest bad faith on the part of the mods in general or pvg in particular: an individual dislike on their part of this particular repetitive complaint, which prompted a vague guideline with plausible deniability in mind.
These aren't the kind of judiciously-applied guidelines I could willingly sign up to. Unfortunately we're not permitted to delete accounts here, so I'll remove my email address, log out, and stay out of the comments.
I'm a regular user here, I don't permit or not permit things. Click on the timestamp of a comment next time to reply to it if the reply button is hidden.
This is very obviously untrue
I mean, complaining about things being on twitter is offtopic on HN which I've gone to exhaustive and exhausting lengths to explain. You can't just declare it untrue, that would be, as you say, a personal preference of yours rather than the reality.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's worth knowing that HN is a common law system, not a civil law one: there's the guidelines page, and then there's a long history of moderator interpretations and addenda, and to grok the totality of our rules, you need both. Think of the guidelines like the Constitution, and Dan as the Supreme Court.
Edit
This comment was originally snottier and stated that someone had already posted the mod comment link, but, nope, I was just wrong about that, and I do apologize. Chagrin is a powerful decongestant and so I'll be less snotty in the future.
You weren't, it just that this thread got a little out of whack with the self-reply-because-reply-link-was-hidden thing.
With blogs it is hard to respond to just part of it - and it is hard to respond in most blog comment systems. Twitter solves both of those problems.
I'm not sure if this outweighs the different reading experience, but that ability makes for something which is fundamentally different, rather than being a strictly worse version of a blog.
Agree, it's interactive. It's built to involve you and the audience in a very democratically equal way. Everything is a conversation instead of a soliloquy (blog).
HN also offers the same conversational interaction (with much better moderation). It's what pulls us in. It's interesting to see that every comment on HN, for example, is also an original, stand-alone post where you too become an author on this system : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34252904 : it's very balanced for all participants.
It's hard not to get pulled in by this conversational aspect on Twitter (and similar) when you have (1) a voice and (2) it's generally built to be equal within the system (if we gloss over some issues created by the number of followers that give some users a much greater voice). There's a sense of ownership that comes with this.
(I had assumed the latter, but maybe not?)
(For example, notorious thread-poster Foone elaborates on their process/why threads work for them here: https://foone.tumblr.com/post/700185724820078592/one-of-my-f...)
I say this as someone with a custom blog written in custom HTML/CSS/JS.
If it makes you feel better a lot of people are creating substacks, with no intent to monetize, to act as their blog.
Ultimately, it's because that's where the readers that they care about are.
And sure, they could post a link in a tweet. But I suspect that results in much less engagement than a tweet storm.
Don't get me wrong - I hate it too. But don't hate the player, hate the game.
I get that some people dont want to have this experience. But this here is using the medium as intended. It fits in the scene & participates actively with others, in a way that going-off-and-doing-your-own-isolated-thing (then linking to it) doesnt.
It'd be so nice if we didnt have to keep having this debate every single time. There's advantages to both. Recognizing & accepting that different things can be happening in the world & that you should maybe have a little flexibility about it seems like the mature response I'd hope for.
I dont think it applies nearly as much to this grass-roots, open-source, distributed, protocols & standards based form. People want a way to talk, converse, connect. Sure there's ways to do it badly, for bad cause, with bad incentive, but this is & most activity on ActivityPub reads as dielectic. As an exploration & search for truth, a desire to understand ourselves, each otger, and the worlds about us better.
For sure, we can use communication & connectivity poorly. Are unwilling to imagine though that connection can be a force for good? ActivityPub here is a very very early attempt to create standards where we can explore & innovate, and hopefully some of those fronts indeed show promise of good, for raising up & improving... not just amplifying the rash, the base, the overly emotional, the manipulators.
At some point we have to be willing to get beyond the long long long scapegoating & demonizing we've done. We have had very convenient targets to hang the blame on. Maybe less is the only answer, the only possibly, & hope of ever being better is foolish & mistaken, but I hope we can at least entertain that as a question, a possibility, & not act with- ahem- rash emotional fear-based certainty. This seems like a new path where we can be involved enough, have the decisions available, to start pioneering im the addition of responsibility & moderation to our social systems. That possibility excites me, and I hope we can agree is worth trying.
Are there other avenues for hope you see? What else might possibly be worthy?
Welll...
> (all the arguments are other features that may be missing in blogs, not arguments against having a cohesive post that doesn't spread across multiple messages)
Ok that's a pretty big category of exclusions. I can maybe picture a blog which is actually a number of subresources with distinct urls in it, where as we go down the page the url keeps updating itself. I can maybe imagine commenting per section. I can maybe imagine ActivityPub readers that can show the top resource & let folks expand the remainder if interested. I can recreate a better more featureful more complex medium, if I drastically rebuild what a page is/how it works.
There's a dozen structural advantages to using the web like a hyper-medium, not just a long scroll of paper. Yes we can try to import those features onto the virtual long-scroll-of-paper. But why? Many people like this hyper-medium. Im sorry but I think the pro-blog people need to fix their own problems & build better clients. Assimilate yourself & stop being petulant, acknowledge the superior medium that is more capable, and for god sake, start building some clients that hide all the stuff that you find so so bothersome to yourselves so you can please be less miserable people.
Not saying you're wrong, but... if it was a blog wouldn't that "native app" be a browser?
>> Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach
I think this is a big part of it; it's not about connecting with a few deeply, but many shallow connections. I'd argue that these authors care more about the sharing than the communication aspects TBH.
But they come across the content scrolling through a social feed. They'd need to click a link, that opens a new tab (with goodness knows how many ads), to read the content.
Tweet chains have a rhythm, no ads (with a decent client) and no filler.
Blogs (and worse: podcasts or videos) are full of fluff and filler, and often packed with ads.