Comment by crmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crmd | Hacker News Reader

The author's intentionally verbose/non-linear storytelling technique, for example the two paragraph detour that describes his ladder and the ladder company's bankruptcy, and the 19 paragraph deep dive on garage door repair business marketing, makes it very hard for my brain to absorb the core information I was looking for (the procedure to replace the springs).

I know I'm kind of missing the point/creative intent of this essay, and I appreciate the non-linear full-of-detours style in other genres. For example I'm a huge fan of Norm MacDonald whose long, impossible-to-follow stories would often drive unaware audiences and talkshow hosts crazy. But for technical things I personally find the style super annoying and feeling like the author is trying to flex on how much engineering, business, and trivia knowledge he has in many adjacent topics.

I actually get anxiety thinking about getting trapped at a bar or party interacting with somebody who talks like this :-)

Curious how other readers feel about this, especially those who have the exact opposite reaction!

This is basically what the "early Internet" looked like that people often write paeans to. Lots of pages written by people very dedicated to a weirdly specific thing while also peppering it with nonsequiturs and their crazy theory about who runs the "real" government. It was fine, but hardly the glorious wonderland often portrayed. (Not that the current Internet is without its flaws, but if I want to learn something from someone it is a million times easier today than it was in the late-90's and early-00's.

Yeah, that's a good point and it makes me wonder if the modern web has shrunk my attention span.

I used to often meet this exact type of engineer early in my career as an enterprise data storage consultant in the 90s and early 2000s. I would say the most common "character" I would run into at a customer site was "UNIX libertarian hippie guy" who would love to weave politics, especially about privacy, freedom of speech, government overreach, new world order, esoteric obsessive hobbies, etc into technical discussions.

I feel like the typical tech worker today either has very different socio-political views, or keeps their politics out of our workplace interactions.

> It was fine, but hardly the glorious wonderland often portrayed.

Probably down to personal taste, but I would happily take a thousand of these websites with strange, esoteric folk sharing knowledge in unconventional ways than another subreddit that's 70% non-sequiturs by volume, or a Stack Exchange thread that's just the same quesiton asked 400 times in broken english.

Youtube has the esoteric folk people and I love it. Not big digressors, just really diverse and into their thing.

Modern day recipe and gardening websites sound like your description of the "early internet".

The difference is that the extraneous junk is in one long block on modern websites, whereas it previously would've been freely mixed throughout the actual content in the old web.

At first I find it difficult to concentrate, but then I started really enjoying the article, and in way I think it is much better than current low-content-big-font websites. But yes, I was raised with this kind of content, so it seems that when I started enjoying was because I synced with a style that I already knew.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com