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Comment by mjb | Hacker News Reader

I agree with all of that. The defensiveness that comes with writing for HN (and Twitter) makes me a worse writer too. It's not just about being careful and precise, but about being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading.

Perhaps more unfortunately, I find that writing for academic conferences and journals makes me a worse writer too. It's different, but having to laser focus on 'selling' the paper throughout the paper makes it hard to communicate. Many of my favorite CS papers could never be published in a 'good' journal or conference today. Good research writing is really hard, but it seems like the publication process makes it harder, not easier.

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> being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading.

Had my eyes opened recently by just how wild people can get with their inferences. Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X.

> Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X.

And then they either ignore you or call you a liar, because the only reason they bothered to comment was to post their manifesto against y anyway.

At least a bad faith signal makes it easy to bail from the discussion. Seemingly-honest, good faith confusion is somehow worse due to the obligation to clarify.

It's difficult, 1000 people can see what you wrote and it just takes one to misunderstand or jump to conclusions. That will motivate someone to respond (to feel self-righteous or helpful) more than someone agreeing with what you say. To me it's just the physics of a message board and you have to accept that reality while not taking it all too seriously.

For every comment I’ve written here and clicked reply, I’ve written 10x more and just closed the tab. But that’s okay. Usually someone makes my point better than I ever could anyway.

Makes me feel a little better seeing someone with my same thought process. I don't know why. But I do the same thing, and think the same thing.

I love the HN crowd for the intelligent discourse. It reminds me of reddit in its heyday. But goddamn, I've never met a crowd as critical and prone to buzzkill. Everyone's so damn serious here.

I find the culture (very generally speaking) to be an odd mix of intelligence, knowledgeability, humorlessness, and immaturity.

I’m in the middle of writing a series of security articles on my blog and a couple of people have told me that some of them are too long.

They are long because I was trying to be thorough, but more so I was trying to make sure I pre-addressed all of the arguments I knew would come (particularly in my enterprise DMARC deployment article).

I realize that what the author talks about here is part of why I do that.

I recommend posting the articles as you intended to. You’ll never make everyone happy anyway.

Very much so. Write first for yourself. Write to your own standard of quality. A borrowed standard is one never fully understood, nor knowingly achieved.

I definitely did that. Just in reading this guy I realize I'm trying to logical address arguments I know will come.

Don't know that it's actually due to HN feedback or just knowing how internet discussions tend to go.

Imo, as long as you organize your writing elegantly, it doesn't matter how long the final product is.

As a reader, I really appreciate the table of contents.

Maybe what your friends meant was that your piece was too long without a table of contents, from which they could jump to a place for reference, or skip it because they were already familiar with the material.

That's possible. Here's the Enterprise DMARC if you're interested.

I probably should add a TOC. I don't largely because it's setup to flow and I don't really want people to skip to a specific section.

https://www.brightball.com/articles/enterprise-challenges-wi...

> It’s not just about being careful and precise, but about being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading.

That’s a shame because one of HN’s explicit guidelines [1] is to respond to the “strongest possible interpretation of what someone says”.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It wouldn't need to be a guideline if it was already common behavior.

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