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Comment by ugh123 | Hacker News Reader

Bare with me here:

Why is it that articles need to start with lines like

> "The winter morning was cloaked in thick fog..."

and postpone the actual information pertaining to the title? Instead, we have to sift through irrelevant story-like content to get to the meat of the information and facts.

Will one promise of tools like ChatGPT and their successors be to summarize-away this fluff?

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It's a travelogue, not a Wikipedia article. People read it for the fluff and prose.

> Bare with me here:

Most people would pay money to ensure I don't.

> Instead, we have to sift through irrelevant story-like content to get to the meat of the information and facts.

Because journalists are frustrated novelists, and editors think the "human interest" angle sells.

> editors think the "human interest" angle sells.

does it not?

When "human interest" means "keep scrolling to find the content while you look over our ads" then that angle gets less and less meaningful.

I found it ironic that OP started complaining about the author’s writing style by urging us to bare it all!

I had the same reaction. I read the first line of the article and instantly knew I didn’t have the patience to find the content implied by the title. There have been discussions here about this problem for recipe sites especially. What I wonder is whether the majority of their readers (non HN people) also feel annoyed by this.

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