If you want to argue about other aspects of his writing style, fine. But those are normal-sized paragraphs. Scrolling through in reader mode, I saw maybe a couple paragraphs that stuck out as "too long to be a paragraph," and even those are only ~5 sentences (so maybe some of his sentences are too long?)

Social media has people thinking a paragraph can only be two sentences. At a certain point, you're basically just putting a line break after every sentence.

That is a straw man and extremification. Paragraphs can be longer than two sentences. Formatting is important, however, and some of Luu's paragraphs are hard to parse. You may not notice this, or you just power through it, but if you study enough design and user experience principles then you start to feel when interacting with a medium takes more energy from you than it should.

Better paragraph formatting makes you a better writer. You get better at slicing your communication into individual ideas, serving them one at a time at the reader's own pace. Your thoughts become less coupled, more clear and compact, and flow better from one to the next.

It's also just important to consider that the reader needs anchor points to avoid fatigue, and we can achieve that with minimal styling and well-formatted text.

Luu does not consider that his blog post is not read in isolation. It is part of a stack of information that a reader may consume each day, each communication inefficiency slowly adding up until the reader experiences significant cognitive drain and measurable fatigue. I also had to resize my window to discover the best width for me. I settled on the width of my cell phone, about the only platform this blog post looks readable on natively. And then, I had to resize it back my normal width to interact with hacker news and every other website on the internet. All of that adds friction and fatigue to the consumption process.

I barely engage with any social media at all. I don't have Facebook, I don't post on Instagram, Twitter, or anything else. I stick to intimate online conversations and places like hacker news where there is real, meaningful, longform discussion. Your assumption about the nature of my critique is off-base and frankly unnecessary.

"If you study enough design and user experience principles then you start to feel" is not quantified enough, imo. Your initial critique was that the paragraphs were "too dense," but we've established it's not necessarily that they're too long. Perhaps if you'd give an example of how you'd fix some of the paragraphs, I'd understand your concern better.

I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself). Looking at the original page in non-Reader mode, it seems like adding graphics every few paragraphs so it's not a literal wall of text would increase readability, as an alternative to making the paragraphs themselves less "dense." I'm not sure what supporting graphics would be on-topic, though, aside from maybe screenshots of some of the cited sources.

I mentioned that I barely engage with the majority of the space, that doesn't have any bearing on the classification of hacker news. Though it also clearly shows the limits of "social media" as a useful descriptor.

> I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself)

I was referring to basic text formatting regarding line-breaks, and was not insinuating that you made any defense against formatting in general, I apologize if that was unclear.

You're probably right about graphics, though I understand not all writers want to deal with graphical elements. Sensible line breaks still go a long way.

... and you end up with your average self improvement book.

I am a huge proponent of minimalism. But minimalism doesn't mean doing nothing. It means doing a lot with a little.

It really just depends what you are used to reading

Just because it's the default doesn't mean it's suitable for reading and it was never thought of being that.

Then there's the separate issue of overlong paragraphs, which is simply a sign of poor writing (again making the text less accessible), unless you're trying to argue that the use of fewer <p> tags makes the page faster to load and render?

Now, I do wish that browsers had saner default styles, so one wouldn't need even that single line of CSS, but that's not the world we live in, and for whatever backwards-compatibility reason we're stuck with how things were in 1995.

I have this 16:9 screen. I'd like to use all of it, thanks.

(I'd suggest more than 50 but not a whole lot more, not nearly enough to fill a normal size screen.)

I don’t understand though. Times new Roman and clones of it are very readable fonts. It just doesn’t look like short form marketing material.

Absolutism on either side of this debate is purely ideological and does little to serve the user the best possible experience.

Instead, I will focus on more objectively measurable aspects such as flexibility and ergonomics. You may be getting the most flexible reading experience, but you are getting the most ergonomic reading experience. You also have to put in up-front work to get a better experience, or rely on tools like Reader mode.

If that's what you prefer, that's fine. If you weren't aware, in most browsers you can access the menu bar and navigate to "View -> Page Style", and set it to "No Style".

Then you're free to add whatever styles you'd like on top. Meanwhile, the casual, less technical, non-designer user can still engage with the content in an accessible and easily parseable manner.

What is "good" communication depends on the social context of the communication, the audience, etc. A novel probably shouldn't be written in the same style as a project status update document. IMO one of the downsides of people in our modern education system being drilled on the "one true way" of communicating for a small handful of contexts (position paper essays, tactical business memos) is that they begin to think that is the only way to communicate ever in any context to any audience and forget that different people have different tastes and in a lot of contexts catering to your audience's taste is what matters.

I'm sure you'd say it's a distinction without a difference but clearly it resonates with someone and those people are able to summarize his ideas or reframe them for a broader audience.

I think his style is quite particular (I think I would compare it to patio11 a little bit?), and I understand it not being everyone's cup of tea; but one thing I don't think I would ever say it feels unedited.

To me, it feels _very_ edited — yes, there are occasional sentences with five sub-clauses in them, but they all feel very _deliberate_, and serve a particular stylistic goal.

I find them quite different, patio11 is good about introducing a topic and easing you into, even if it's something you might not be initially interested in. Luu's writing isn't inviting at all. I'm sure it appeals to folks already familiar with his work, but there is nothing to draw in a new or not particularly interested reader.

> Yossi's post about how an unusually unreasonable person can have outsized impact in a dimension they value at their firm also applies to impact outside of a firm. Kyle Kingsbury, mentioned above, is an example of this. At the rates that I've heard Jepsen is charging now, Kyle can bring in what a senior developer at BigCo does (actually senior, not someone with the title "senior"), but that was after years of working long hours at below market rates on an uncertain endeavour, refuting FUD from his critics (if you read the replies to the linked posts or, worse yet, the actual tickets where he's involved in discussions with developers, the replies to Kyle were a constant stream of nonsense for many years, including people working for vendors feeling like he has it out for them in particular, casting aspersions on his character, and generally trashing him). I have a deep respect for people who are willing to push on issues like this despite the system being aligned against them but, my respect notwithstanding, basically no one is going to do that. A system that requires someone like Kyle to take a stand before successful firms will put effort into correctness instead of correctness marketing is going to produce a lot of products that are good at marketing correctness without really having decent correctness properties (such as the data sync product mentioned in this post, whose website repeatedly mentions how reliable and safe the syncing product is despite having a design that is fundamentally broken).

I'm sorry, this is too much for me. I don't understand what this paragraph is about. Too many abstract nouns; "correctness" lost its meaning for me. If this is a parody or a joke, then it flew way over my head. Was it supposed to recreate "a constant stream of nonsense"? If so, it missed the mark.

It's like Infinite Jest set in Silicon Valley.

Giant paragraphs (hard for the eyes to keep focus).

Sparse amount of headers (contributes to the flow and easier to scan, to see if it's something I'm interested in).

It's not even that, Dan's design decisions for the page make it actively annoying to read and that's before you even consider the writing decisions he's made. Presumably he's writing for an existing audience and feels no need to ease you into the material, but that's a huge turn off for folks coming from sites like this that aren't already primed to read it.

Writers could try to split up their work to better appeal to an audience that does quick scans, then reads where it matters.

This article may be great, but there’s not even any section headings, so I’m not able to gauge my own interest.

In our era where there is so much content to consume and where so much of it is just hot garbage or advertising, I don’t want to spend time deeply reading everything in hopes that I care about it.

I need to be able to asses that at a glance, then dive in if I deem it meaningful enough.

Writers should probably change their style to accommodate their audience (if they care about really wide reach)

I’d like to read deeply about something interesting, but with so much LLM slop around, I’m much less willing to dive right into a long article.

That was one of the original visions behind hypertext - that it would not only link documents together, but provide a way to summarize the content at varying levels of detail, allowing up-down traversal rather than just lateral links. MIP mapping for text, basically.

We're starting to see a bit of a revival of that idea, where language models generate summaries at the paragraph level that readers can either browse quickly or use as a jumping-off point into the underlying original content. This page seems like a good application for that.

Well, I'd say part of the problem is you think of yourself as a content consumer. How things are called can be important.

You consumed my content (my comment) and are now creating your own.

What you spend your attention on is much more important now than even 10 years ago.

Unless, of course, you're commenting here in order to create "engagement" for monetary gain. But it does look to me like you're trying to have a conversation, which is an entirely different animal.

We are both creating content which hacker news serves up to people who read comments. We’re not the only ones this conversation is seen by.

Hacker news is, among other things, a platform for YC to find talent and advertise its startups. People come here both for the posts and comments.

The content we create and post here have clear commercial purpose even though we as the creators don’t necessarily benefit or care.

Welcome to the internet.

I'm talking about our personal motivation, regardless of platform. And I'm trying to say that when the motivation is to 'create content' the result is worthless, and I think you're doing yourself a disservice accepting that.

I may not be writing this comment to create content (I’m actually really enjoying this discussion.)

But that doesn’t change that I am creating content for the HN platform.