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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

This type of comment might be a reason why people hate when their posts end up on HN. Keep in mind everything isn't written for HN audience or to optimize skim-reading time. In a personal post like this I feel like it's perfectly ok to not include a summary and to start with your backstory to give perspective.

Yeah, it looks like a personal blog post. Feedback is fine but we have to remember that this feedback has likely not been asked for, and we are not entitled to anything. If you don't like the author's writing style, just move on, other people might like the very thing you don't, so…

(as someone who has been meaning to write a blog forever - I will definitely like some feedback if it ever actually happens because I will want to improve and please my readers, but I'll probably take ironical feedback somewhat badly. I'll be free to ignore such feedback or silently take what's good in then, but I will appreciate if someone takes some care when sending feedback. Specifically here, "Would it really have hurt to" can easily be phrased as "I would have appreciated")

I am entitled to give my feedback to anybody I think. Feedback is not meant as asking somebody to change, it's there to tell how you felt. If the addressed person agrees/disagrees doesn't matter. I believe the world gets better if everybody is allowed to voice their opinion

Yep, I said feedback is most likely fine. I said it. I also believe in feedback for a better world (when I said you aren't entitled to anything, that was sloppy phrasing for 'the blog author owes you nothing').

But the way you give feedback matters, and you are not entitled to be a jerk when giving feedback. Now, I don't believe OP wanted to be a jerk. I think vanishingly few people actually want to be mean. But I think the world is better off if people take their recipients' feelings in account, because it's nicer.

Another perspective: if giving feedback is indeed your intent, surely you care about the recipient and how your message is received (otherwise you would not bother). Your feedback will likely be more effective if well received, so you definitely want it to be well received. So you definitely want to avoid hurting people's feeling as much as possible (of course, sometimes useful feedback will inevitably hurt, but anything beyond this is harmful to your goal).

Whether your recipient agrees is an orthogonal concept indeed. I'm totally fine with respectful feedback given to me with which I disagree. It's okay to be wrong. (:-D)

> I am entitled to give my feedback to anybody I think.

Yes, of course! And others are entitled to ignore your feedback, downvote your comment, or say it to your face that your feedback is unwelcome, or flag your comment as they see fit.

absolutely. And they did. But I don't understand why they chose to do so

Feedback is best given when asked.

why?

True, but then at least give a meaningful title.

Intentionally cryptic titles can be a good artistic choice to make people curious - but then add a summary or be kind enough to solve the riddle in the first few paragraphs.

Same with stream-of-consciousness blog posts or articles that start with some barely related story before they get to the point - but then add an informative title.

It's just that if both the title and the post refuse to tell what the article is even about, I feel like someone is purposely trying to be obscure.

I think HN, the site, also deserves some criticism here: It actively discourages people from adding any kind of context or explanation why they wanted to post a link here, so you end up with a list of just titles with no context and have to guess what the article will be about.

But if the poster isn't allowed to add context and the author doesn't want to, where are you supposed to get context from?

It's not an article, it's a blog post. Expectations should be vastly different for the two.

Ah come on, it's good writing. Sets the scene!

It's not that important for the story, yeah. Provides some background tho.

My point isn't really about the first sentence as such. It's that we have no idea what the article is going to be about. That's true even several paragraphs in (at which point they're entertaining the idea of a job but the article could still really be about anything).

It's a blog post, not an article. Not every piece of personal expression needs to be structured to spec and optimized for SEO.

I think it's refreshing at this point, really. A little clumsy, not written according to "Use This One Trick To Get To Frontpage" rules, just what someone cares about in the order they wanted to tell it.

Oh, yeah, I see your point now. Agreed, it could be a bit clearer in the beginning, although as others pointed out it's a personal blog and probably wasn't even intended for such a wide audience. (Maybe it's even more like a personal diary rather than some public thing?)

It’s a personal blog entry that’s tagged with #google and #work. It doesn’t transmit as freely to HN as it does if you enter from the front page or their blog, but unless it was the author who posted it here then I think it’s hard to fault them for the article not being clear enough.

bro just skip to the end LOL

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