Comment by ritlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ritlo | Hacker News Reader

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One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that.

The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium.

This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.

I totally agree with this. I would add that it's well beyond the discussion boards. It's probably most clear there and it's well possible we learned it there and then took it into our social interactions everywhere, but the majority of my irl interactions—except with my closest friends—are sorta like this. Sometimes I think its ADHD, other times I think it could be any number of things, but I think to say anything that isn't dead simple (or in dead agreement with the other person), you need a few sentences. Often, you need to hear the third sentence before the first will make sense. But if you get distracted by the first one or can't suspend your disagreement enough to get to the third you will think the person is mistaken. You'll think that about both their first point and the larger one, which you didn't really hear or even get to but thought you did. So the speaker does the hedging each sentence in hopes of getting to the third (or whatever) sentence.

To add to this: another sign of posting on online boards is starting your comments with "I agree" because otherwise the other person might default to assuming you are disagreeing (as is the norm for replies), leading to a comment chain of people violently agreeing with each other without realizing it

>too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers.

yeah but if the OP doesn't do that and you confront their argument they can retreat into definitions and ambiguity without addressing your rebuttal. i think its good manners to be hyper-specific particularly on HN where there tend to be a lot of martian brained people who need it to engage with you. the fuzziness just won't do.

This is all communication no?

If people do not share the same context, then they will come up with different interpretations of the same content.

In communities with more homogenous understanding of the context, people are able to get into the details more effectively.

Those communities tend to also be impervious to outsiders, or newbies, because the use of terms/jargon that speeds up conversation abound.

No, this goes beyond that. A well-written article or book doesn’t need to be padded with junk to cater to bad readers, or to preempt trolls, because they can’t scrawl all over it such that it disrupts others’ experience. You have to go to e.g. the Amazon reviews to find people complaining that an author didn’t address something that they very definitely did, or claimed something they certainly did not, that stuff doesn’t show up on the page in footnotes or turn into flame wars on the page where everyone sees it.

Despite being a different kind of writing, there are some interesting parallels with the article in what you wrote here

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