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Comment by AshleyGrant | Hacker News Reader

No. It isn't. With acronyms, there's often plenty of potential things it can stand for, and if the person doesn't know enough to know which one is the correct acronym, Googling it isn't going to help them.

As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK."

The NWS knows this and automatically links to their glossary for both acronyms as well as jargon in their discussions. <-- See what I did there? What does NWS mean in this context? If only I had provided a link that would help you know. I very easily could have. I just didn't.

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>As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK."

it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing.

if you're reading this stuff, and you can't figure out what kind of RAG that the search engine mentioned is being talked about through context clues, or you aren't clever enough to feed context into the search like 'hackers , computers, rag' as a query -- there is a very high probability that the person will have absolutely nothing constructive to add to the conversation that is about the topics they haven't even yet conceptualized or are aware of.

in that case that slight barrier to entry for the conversation will serve as a tool to produce less work for the moderators and derail less threads into uselessness.

(much like this stupid divergence.)

> it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing.

No. Lowering the barrier of entry to those who are trying, in earnest, to learn about a new topic, to broaden their base of knowledge is NEVER a bad thing. None of us were born with the knowledge to read this (or similar) article. Trying to kick the ladder down after you have climbed it is terrible behavior and absolutely must be discouraged and stopped at all costs.

> much like this stupid divergence

The only thing stupid in this conversation is the insistence that folks who might know less than the author of the linked article or the poster do not deserve to have access to the information.

blah blah blah justifications for gatekeeping.

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