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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

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You have a link to your blog in your profile, I don’t understand anything the top post is talking about and you’ve given little/no context. I can guess it’s hardware benchmarking related and I know I’m not particularly interested in that and I can opt to bounce away. And I did. I’m not asking you to go write a better intro to ease me into something I’m not interested in.

I had never used ffmpeg kit but it linked to their GitHub in the first sentence and I could quick grasp what it was from a ton of context clues. I had played with ffmpeg about 20 years ago. So kinda had some idea it was related to video, if I didn’t know that already, the “mpeg” part is a giveaway. But really I’m not interested in codecs or whatever, I am interested in the business/legal parts of software and that’s what they wrote about and got into it quickly which i appreciated.

Anyways, you seem to have an unpopular opinion that you don’t even practice yourself is my main criticism here.

Touché, I will improve it now.

Edit: Updated version - https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-sp...

Alternately, if you're reading an article about something and realize it assumes familiarity that you don't have, stop reading it or follow your curiosity.

The person who wrote the article did so for the audience of people that follow them, who would already be familiar with FFmpegkit: there would be no point to describing it because the name would be de facto known. Because the web is open, they don't have control over whose eyes stumble upon it and didn't submit it here. But the link got modest traction here nonetheless because enough people are already familiar or at least curious. It's a very organic process and neither the writer, the submitter, nor yourself are under any particular obligations.

I'm not sure if I'm interested in ffmpegkit or not (because it wasn't described), but I am interested in the dynamics of open source communities, so stopping reading the article would miss the point for me.

Plus I guess as a writer you want people to read your stuff. Obviously if you don't, then don't follow all the usual rules of good journalism like the inverted pyramid, which is what I'm describing here.

This wasn't journalism; it was an address written for a personally invested audience. And even most journalism, as most writing, is written with mind with to some specific vision of its audience.

That you happened to come across it is just a coincidence. What you choose to do with it is up to you, and as someone who wasn't already aware of FFmpegKit and therefore not among the addressees, presumably of no particular bearing to the author.

They are writing the article for a specific audience: ffmpegkit users. All tech articles assume some prior technical knowledge.

And yet it was posted here and many people who know nothing of the project will read it. Writing a sentence saying what the thing is takes a few words.

I see that more of a downside of HN's policy of essentially demanding that articles are posted without any context or explanation.

It's not the job of the author to provide context for an audience they didn't even write for - but it would be HN's job to provide context for its own audience.

And clicking on a link to GitHub takes no time at all. Is there anything wrong with that approach? Furthermore, I feel that you shouldn't blame the author for omissions if their post is shared outside of the intended audience.

I suspect there was a human who posted a link to the OP's post here on HN. It is -that- human who was being asked to provide context since they should have know that by posting a link to HN, they are posting a link to a community that may be different from the OP's original audience.

i.e.- this was not a rerquest or taner saner to provide context, but a request for @ericdiao to provide context.

Except HN explicitly discourages this: You can intentionally submit either a text post or a link, but not both. For links, you could theoretically edit the title, but there too, the guidelines state that you should just use the original title from the article if possible.

Yes, it's a shame that HN doesn't include a short 1- or 2-sentence summary of each article (on the front page).

Exactly. I also think it would be interesting to know why someone decided to submit an article, so they could write their reasoning in there too.

We could make every reader do the extra work, or the author could write a few words once.

It seems you are suggesting they would do it every time they post though

Well, yeah, you can go bug the authors of stories like this that someone (not the author!) at HN decides to post a link to that they need to change how they write for the benefit of an audience they aren't actively seeking, but I doubt that will do much good.

But its especially silly to post on HN that authors need to change how they are writing in a thread on an article that wasn't posted here by the author, and where there is no indication that the author is a member of the community.

He could title that section Why #3.

> And yet it was posted here

Not by the author, so I don't see how that impacts how it should be written; and HN users are free to ignore things that don't interest them, or to spend a few minutes with a search engine learning context for things that seem like they might, but which are unfamiliar (and are generally competent to both of those things as appropriate.)

Had to check GitHub

"FFmpegKit is a collection of tools to use FFmpeg in Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, tvOS, Flutter and React Native applications."

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