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Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires…

Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.

Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?

The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.

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Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.

Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.

Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.

A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.

Consider the following excerpt of the post:

  The thick life doesn't scale.

  That's the whole point.

  So: bake bread.

There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.

There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.

PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).

Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)

No, I want to read it (or not) the way the writer intended.

Heck just skip the website and ask the AI to make some text for you to read

In what way were the sentences content heavy? It's quite repetitive, and often the meaning of a section of it will be split into individual fragments.

I get it.

One sentence pragraphs feel punchy.

It feels like you're writing copy for an Apple ad.

..but it only works when it's in another medium, in a shorter format. In this form, it's just exhausting.

The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.

Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."

ok, but there's nothing there. The point of this piece is empty calories.

I thought the point was about baking bread?

I've never baked a loaf of bread.

I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.

Baking has always been someone else's problem.

But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.

(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)

I started baking bread because I had a bag of plain flour (i.e. not bread flour, only 9% protein) sitting in the cupboard and approaching its sell-by date. So I made 'ships biscuits', and one thing led to another.

So a bag of what in the UK is called 'strong white flour' (i.e. protein around 12%, I think it is 'all purpose' in US) and a sachet of instant yeast and some salt. Followed the instructions on the bread bag and it worked sort of, a bit solid but edible and it toasted nice.

Then you just iterate. Lots of stuff out on the Web. I use supermarket flour and the dried active yeast and the ingredients are 10x cheaper than even a basic bought loaf. And mixing and baking is fun. Sourdough is OK but you then have a pet to look after...

I noticed last night that I have two bags of "all-purpose" flour taking up space.

Perhaps the time has come.

> Reflect on the structure of your own comment

Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?

> "my attention span is shot"

Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.

Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.

It's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany.

You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about.

Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but not this:

> then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.

Ideas don't have to be infallible to be worth writing about. It's a slippery slope to not writing at all.

"inkling of truth" != "infallible"

#strawmanning

Robin Sloan has called this “ventilated prose”, a phrase I love. (I seem to recall “aerated prose” having also been deployed)

See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/

Rarified prose…

This type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web.

An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style.

The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.

News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.

I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.

Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.

Interspersed single sentence and denser paragraphs, seem to get the most bang out of both.

My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)

I think it makes sense to write like this if you're intended audience is already used to consuming "thin" desire media.

I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.

But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.

Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.

Hah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.

Also the ideas are just reframing the old maxim of "its not the destination, its the journey".

It is that but more than that. There are companies trying to profit by selling instant gratificaton.

i have meaner names, but lets just call it nod along content

>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.

From the about page:

>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.

So maybe you're right.

I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.

When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".

Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.

I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.

Maybe it will be Max Headroom's blipverts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk

It sounds like a Ted Talk with unnecessarily long poses to let sentences sink in. For some reason I just can't digest this sort of writing.

Yeah, this feels very much like one of those sites with random quotes that seem deep but aren't, like wisdom.spark.pink.

It's basically the sort of rot writing that proliferates on linkedin

I disagree. I feel there is a genuine insight at the core of it.

Yeah me too. Lately LI is like:

CMSs are done!

Let that sink in!

Some dude trew away his CMS and vibe coded some markdown based static stuff that does the same.

No harddrive was wiped this particular time.

The world is different now, reply in comments if you agree. Reply “airhead” for my 3 slides which are even more insightful than this post.

I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.

>wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.

Pretty sure the first rule of writing on the internet is ignore the comments section

There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.

A genuine insight turned into a cartoon self-help scam-artist LinkedIn inspirational quote cliche version of itself...

Is the message deep and important or was the article attempting to manipulate you into thinking it is?

Your need to quip about the article's presentation instead of its meaning is a thin desire.

Presentation and context are important to understand the meaning of a text.

I've seen this author's work elsewhere like Substack/Threads.

Good article, good writer.

But this whole post reminds me of a series of 1 or 2-line tweets. And I think that's the point. It's almost written as a series of scheduled posts that dribble out once a day for the next X days. Write once, re-purpose many times.

I quite like that this is a more unique writing style and in fact would encourage people to write "unusually".

I immediately stopped reading after I saw the format. Absolutely hate this linkedin style 'everything is deep' posting. It's crap

In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.

More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.

So that the people with the most rotted brains -- those caught fully in the thick of thin things! -- stand a chance of reading it.

Source: I talk to zoomers. (Some of them couldn't make it through an article of this length...)

Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.

Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.

If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.

It's like some kind of meta writing, the writing style is proving what it's talking about.

That's not always the intention behind that style of writing.

Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.

It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.

Still.... the message has value.

Not really.

It matches the way she speaks in the videos.

I don't mind that.

It's a vibe.

Sure, but can you at least appreciate the underlying meaning (soul) of the text?

It's almost like anti-poetry.

"Thin Paragraphs"

Possibly AI-generated?

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