It's not the "Instagram disease", the page is completely unstyled and unsuited for reading. Even after using Firefox's Reader mode, the paragraphs are too dense. Some people are great writers but could benefit from a designer or editor.
> Even after using Firefox's Reader mode, the paragraphs are too dense.
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.
> Social media has people thinking a paragraph can only be two sentences.
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.
Hacker News is a form of social media, regardless of whether you consider it "real, meaningful, longform discussion" as compared to other platforms.
"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.
> Hacker News is a form of social media, regardless of whether you consider it "real, meaningful, longform discussion" as compared to other platforms.
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.
> 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.
... and you end up with your average self improvement book.
Decades of user interface research and design disagree with you. A handful of inline CSS rules would immediately make the content far more accessible and scannable across multiple platforms.
I am a huge proponent of minimalism. But minimalism doesn't mean doing nothing. It means doing a lot with a little.
Because it is a smaller download, is faster to render, easier for accessibility tools, and is more likely to work in readers and browsers of all kinds.
Yeah, a single `body { max-width: 50em }` is not going to change any of that, and actually makes it more accessible to a wider audience. The entire point of typography and formatting is to make text more accessible. Lack of layout is the antithesis of 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.
If you defend the styling by saying it's efficient, and they say you can have efficient style so that's not a good reason, they are not agreeing with your main idea.
I am user who thinks I’m getting a better experience, so I think his main point is right - you are expressing your preference with the voice of the general user, and moderation.
"Better" is subjective and debating such a vague generality will get us nowhere.
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.
