There is if your goal is to attract a wider audience. Call me old fashioned, but if you can't even be bothered to capitalize the first letter of each sentence in your publication, I'm probably not going to read it.
Not everybody is trying to attract a wider audience. Some people just want to say what's on their mind without worrying about that stuff. That's one of the beautiful things about personal websites. They're personal.
It's perfectly fine if the style puts you off. You're not wrong for having your own tastes. You're just not the audience for that particular site. Nobody can please everybody.
It's my right to greet guests to my house by singing Don't Stop Believing by Journey flat and terribly off-key. If they complain, I'll tell them it's not that I'm a bad singer, they just aren't my target audience!
This is precisely correct. There's nothing wrong with doing that, and there's nothing wrong with some people deciding they don't want to visit as a result.
> if you can't even be bothered to capitalize the first letter of each sentence in your publication
I suspect this is actually more interesting than base sloppiness.
My first experience with instant messaging was on ICQ (and IRC a year or two later once my Internet usage wasn’t being billed by the minute), and to this day I don’t capitalize or end single-sentence replies with a period in IM situations. The no-period thing is mostly universal—I believe I’ve seen an article in a linguistics journal about how a final period “feels aggressive”—, but I’ve noticed people who learned on smartphones using keyboards with automatic capitalization do, which just looks unnatural to me.
So if someone writes a blog post not as an article, but as a monologue in this kind of conversational style, I can see how they could come to not capitalize and use newlines as sentence breaks. I believe that style is (was?) somewhat popular on Tumblr? I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t more popular on Twitter before the 140-character was lifted.
I’ve heard that communication over IM is actually linguistically interesting (the whole thing, of course, not the punctuation)—in most ways it works like a spoken (or signed) conversation, except it’s expressed in writing. So it’s not entirely unexpected that it can develop conventions that are unlike that of the normal written word. And despite the thousands of years people have been using writing, there isn’t really precedent for this kind of thing before computers.
(I’m also not convinced anything good comes out of trying to attract a generically wider audience.)
You shouldn't take any single posting here as indicative of all the postings here. HN posts plenty of stuff that isn't to my taste at all. I just ignore those things and pay attention to the stuff that is to my taste.
Maybe I’m an old, but this thing called a “blog” was very popular a long time ago, where people would have their own slice of internet to write whatever they wanted.
Yeah, apparently it no longer works that way. You can ramble on social media, but if you publish it on your own site it needs to be worth publishing in a national newspaper or a peer-reviewed journal.
To me, laid off twice in 18 months, currently three months unemployed, engaging daily with the Sisyphean madness that is finding a tech job in 2024, the author's darkly humorous, off-the-cuff style resonated deeply.
Given the attention it's getting here, I can only presume I'm not alone.
I dunno dude, I think it's just called blogging. Sometimes people like showing more personality and opinion than you get in other blogs that do super serious technical writing or thinly veiled product advertisement.
Sometimes they're right about clarity but I read TFA and it seems fine? The writing seems very clear to me, maybe you have to be a boomer to find it difficult?
It’s because they are writing for the masses. What happened to professional writing? This:
“When The Wealth of Nations was first published in March 1776 David Hume wrote to his old friend in terms of the greatest praise, while qualifying his hopes by remarking that ‘the reading of it necessarily requires so much attention, and the public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very popular’. (Corr., letter 150.) Strahan, Smith’s publisher, wrote very much in the same vein when commenting that the sales of the book had been much more ‘than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers) to peruse to any purpose’. (Corr., p. 193 n.)”
Excerpt From
The Wealth of Nations Books I-III
Adam Smith
Are people on HN wiser than the general populace? If they are, I imagine the wisest of them must be lurkers.
> It comes across as if it was written by a disgruntled 15 year old.
Appropriately enough, this style of blogging is at least fifteen years old if not older. It's not all that different from the format of Joel Spolsky's blog.
This is a personal pet peeve of mine as well. In written text i see online and in direct communication, punctuation is absent, words are misspelled, ideas are incoherent.
It is frustrating to read because it is unclear. Even more frustrating is the over-reliance on memes and inside jokes.
