It's not the "Instagram disease", the page is completely unstyled and unsuited for reading. Even after using Firefox's Reader mode, the paragraphs are too dense. Some people are great writers but could benefit from a designer or editor.
If you want to argue about other aspects of his writing style, fine. But those are normal-sized paragraphs. Scrolling through in reader mode, I saw maybe a couple paragraphs that stuck out as "too long to be a paragraph," and even those are only ~5 sentences (so maybe some of his sentences are too long?)
Social media has people thinking a paragraph can only be two sentences. At a certain point, you're basically just putting a line break after every sentence.
That is a straw man and extremification. Paragraphs can be longer than two sentences. Formatting is important, however, and some of Luu's paragraphs are hard to parse. You may not notice this, or you just power through it, but if you study enough design and user experience principles then you start to feel when interacting with a medium takes more energy from you than it should.
Better paragraph formatting makes you a better writer. You get better at slicing your communication into individual ideas, serving them one at a time at the reader's own pace. Your thoughts become less coupled, more clear and compact, and flow better from one to the next.
It's also just important to consider that the reader needs anchor points to avoid fatigue, and we can achieve that with minimal styling and well-formatted text.
Luu does not consider that his blog post is not read in isolation. It is part of a stack of information that a reader may consume each day, each communication inefficiency slowly adding up until the reader experiences significant cognitive drain and measurable fatigue. I also had to resize my window to discover the best width for me. I settled on the width of my cell phone, about the only platform this blog post looks readable on natively. And then, I had to resize it back my normal width to interact with hacker news and every other website on the internet. All of that adds friction and fatigue to the consumption process.
I barely engage with any social media at all. I don't have Facebook, I don't post on Instagram, Twitter, or anything else. I stick to intimate online conversations and places like hacker news where there is real, meaningful, longform discussion. Your assumption about the nature of my critique is off-base and frankly unnecessary.
... and you end up with your average self improvement book.
"If you study enough design and user experience principles then you start to feel" is not quantified enough, imo. Your initial critique was that the paragraphs were "too dense," but we've established it's not necessarily that they're too long. Perhaps if you'd give an example of how you'd fix some of the paragraphs, I'd understand your concern better.
I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself). Looking at the original page in non-Reader mode, it seems like adding graphics every few paragraphs so it's not a literal wall of text would increase readability, as an alternative to making the paragraphs themselves less "dense." I'm not sure what supporting graphics would be on-topic, though, aside from maybe screenshots of some of the cited sources.
I mentioned that I barely engage with the majority of the space, that doesn't have any bearing on the classification of hacker news. Though it also clearly shows the limits of "social media" as a useful descriptor.
> I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself)
I was referring to basic text formatting regarding line-breaks, and was not insinuating that you made any defense against formatting in general, I apologize if that was unclear.
You're probably right about graphics, though I understand not all writers want to deal with graphical elements. Sensible line breaks still go a long way.
I am a huge proponent of minimalism. But minimalism doesn't mean doing nothing. It means doing a lot with a little.
It really just depends what you are used to reading
You can’t read a long paragraph in reader mode?
Just because it's the default doesn't mean it's suitable for reading and it was never thought of being that.
Then there's the separate issue of overlong paragraphs, which is simply a sign of poor writing (again making the text less accessible), unless you're trying to argue that the use of fewer <p> tags makes the page faster to load and render?
Now, I do wish that browsers had saner default styles, so one wouldn't need even that single line of CSS, but that's not the world we live in, and for whatever backwards-compatibility reason we're stuck with how things were in 1995.
I don’t understand though. Times new Roman and clones of it are very readable fonts. It just doesn’t look like short form marketing material.
I have this 16:9 screen. I'd like to use all of it, thanks.
(I'd suggest more than 50 but not a whole lot more, not nearly enough to fill a normal size screen.)
Absolutism on either side of this debate is purely ideological and does little to serve the user the best possible experience.
Instead, I will focus on more objectively measurable aspects such as flexibility and ergonomics. You may be getting the most flexible reading experience, but you are getting the most ergonomic reading experience. You also have to put in up-front work to get a better experience, or rely on tools like Reader mode.
If that's what you prefer, that's fine. If you weren't aware, in most browsers you can access the menu bar and navigate to "View -> Page Style", and set it to "No Style".
Then you're free to add whatever styles you'd like on top. Meanwhile, the casual, less technical, non-designer user can still engage with the content in an accessible and easily parseable manner.