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Comment by nubg | Hacker News Reader

> The young girl tugged on her mother’s hand as they pressed through the doors of the hospital in Shanghai. She was 6 years old, bouncing along in a pink jacket and blue pants decorated with cartoon bears. Behind them, her father rolled a large suitcase with everything the child needed for the weeklong stay: stuffed animals, Play-Doh, an iPad loaded with episodes of Peppa Pig.

What's this style of "journalism" (time-wasting) called and how can we exterminate it?

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It’s called long form feature writing. Many, many people enjoy it and do not want it exterminated. It’s a way to humanize and add emotion to complex topics. If you want, many outlets have bland straightforward bullet point articles. Try Axios.

Reading articles posted on HN is optional as are most things on the internet. If you don’t like the style in the first paragraph, stop reading. Getting fewer eyeballs on an article is typically a way to “exterminate” a style. Be aware, the articles that make the biggest waves tend to be long form feature writing. Given their influence and popularity you might find your extermination efforts to be quixotic.

But it's hallucinated slop? (by a human)

Is this literally true "bouncing along in a pink jacket and blue pants decorated with cartoon bears"?

or just what the author thought the scene could have looked like?

Not having witnessed it personally does not make it hallucinated slop. Journalists very often write about things they were told happened, and are believable. Most likely the parents told the writer, or showed them a picture.

On top of that Science is a reputable publication. They have fact checkers on staff. For a sensitive article like this it would have been independently gone over with a fine tooth comb. The fact checker will have seen a photo, or spoken directly with the family. This is all standard stuff in high level journalism like this.

There are journalism 101 courses you can audit to learn more about features, fact checking and how all this works. It seems like it would go a long way in improving your knowledge. Things like accusing journalists of fabricating things is a VERY serious accusation in that world. The writer is not going to make up the lede in a Science article on something that could be easily refuted by the parents and ruin their entire career.

It’s ok to not like feature writing or be ignorant of its existence and how it gets made. Calling for extermination and characterizing it as hallucinated slop with no evidence out of that ignorance is strangely aggressive.

It's human-interest style writing. Western, particularly North American, audiences strongly prefer this kind of scene-setting prose prior to information exchange. I am also not particularly a fan of it. In the past, you had to endure it. Nowadays, you can select for your own degree of expertise and terseness by feeding the prose into an LLM and prompting it appropriately. Therefore, complaints of this sort of writer-audience mismatch are no longer of use. Use the tools available to you to solve your problems.

I used Opus 4.8 to avoid Fable guardrail hair-trigger, but you can use ChatGPT as well.

Treat those proses as warnings. They mean the writers have decided to guide your emotions in certain direction instead of portraying what happened in a neutral tone.

They're writing about a child that died, I don't think they hav any other motive other than the reader to feel sadness or outrage and given it is a dead child, they should not.

Is writing in neutral tone describing situation in cold facts without evoking situation that generate emotions in the reader ?

I looked up what neutral tone is, and it seems to be more about how you write than what you write. https://pressbooks.ccconline.org/medianewsandreporting/chapt...

This feels weird to me. It's like a newspaper describing a mass-killing without interviewing survivors because they would have emotions.

And also, neutrality is a myth, especially in news reporting. What you can do is using unloaded language and be balanced between parties.But being neutral doesn't mean you don't have values. Preferring live over death, and justice/honesty over injustice/cruelty.

Did you describe what happened in a neutral tone?

I’ve written articles in this style. The goal is to be evocative of the story. Simple factual accounts carry less weight than the reader being present in the situation. To remain truthful and accurate you describe factually; it is not counter to that to also describe in a way that situates, evokes, humanizes something that is about the experience.

This is about two uncertain, trusting parents taking their young daughter for treatment. It is in every way one of the most frightening human experiences. In that light, this is a light, gentle touch by the author trying to communicate to you the reader the humanity behind the facts.

Indeed. Whilst not the same situation, one of the things I realized while developing a filtering system for various websites was to be thankful for obnoxious mannerisms and phrases. You want people to keep using filtered phrases and such because said users are usually not worth the time anyway, even if they stopped using them.

All your comments boil down to: Why are people people and not machines?

This is good quality journalism; human-interest details like this are important.

Velcro, I guess.

Yeah, this is insufferable. The title was interesting enough to click, but I don't know what to make of the audience that actually perceives this as a good source of information.

This kind of thing is pretty standard, and you accordingly come across as rather boorish.

But it is generally referred to as "creative non-fiction", and I agree it can often be overdone.

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