Comment by loceng
4 years ago
We're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?
4 years ago
We're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?
When I go to bed, I think about how I’m going to wake up next morning and have a hot cup of coffee, a marvelous breakfast and brush my teeth before sitting in the comfy armchair that I have next to the couch in my medium-sized living room. Then, when I wake up, I do all those things that I have in mind that I went to bed with, that I dreamed about while sleeping in my large wooden bed that I inherited from my grandmother who is not with us anymore.
I loved my grandmother, we’ve spent such a great time together as we used to do our daily walks in the green park in front of our house and we watched all those dogs running around and birds chirping, while enjoying our ice-cream that we had acquired from the shop around the corner.
Then I wake up, and I go on Hacker News to read about all those interesting and innovative things that happen around me all the time, while my little dog wags his tail and watches me as I click every link on the front page.
Thank you for reading this.
But... you forgot to share your grandmother's recipe for making lemonade!
Thanks for writing it, whether in no, half or full jest - I appreciated it.
I concur.
I try to add as much “human” as possible into my writing and tech interaction.
I feel that we have allowed technology to leech our humanity, and the consequences have been devastating.
When we have people running multi-billion-node datasets, that have no empathy for the essential “humanity” of each node, we can have Jurassic-scale disasters.
Go on..
Communication is about co: sharing information that is wanted to be sent and wanted to be received. Readers aren't meant to be a captive audience for shaggy dog tales. The article is on the review of Journalism website, not a storytelling website.
Overpacking a story with junk (how ironic!) makes it harder to spread the important ideas of the article, which hurts the author's goal.
Different people like different things. Rather than assuming the author, the editor, and various other reviewers are all idiots, perhaps consider that you are not representative of their typical audience.
That's a good point. I feel like there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories. I don't know whether they'd read the article if it didn't come with a somewhat relatable story.
Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority?
To me, these articles look like those SEO recipe sites that are stuffed with random content because Google won't rank them as well if they just provided what the user is looking for.
4 replies →
Indeed. To me, it's the age-old form vs function dichotomy. I have resigned myself long ago to the fact that most people choose form over function every time.
I found it's very liberating to consciously decide "this isn't intended for me" and focus my attention elsewhere. Still, it's very easy to lower my guard and fall into the mindless consumer trap again. But it's an indulgence, and I try to limit my intake.
Valid point! Oddly enough, I'd rather read a bunch of comments _about_ the alleged article than actually _read the article_.
Perhaps if someone wrote a blog in nested-comment style I would read it.
Fun though experiment: could Harry Potter be rewritten in comment style?
Oh, you know the author's goal? Likewise, if it was published on the site - arguably the curators read the article and approved it - but because it doesn't fit your own expectations of the only kind of content you want there, then it's inappropriate? That sounds like gatekeeping and perhaps perfectionism.