Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

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> The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable.

What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs.

There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads.

That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.

> We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.

What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator.

Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites.

Here is a good discussion of the topic at large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

I'm sure you do call it that. How many people listen to you when you do?

A one-sentence summary has grabbed people better than pages and pages for as long as people have been people, and that's not going to change because you want it to.

Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

So - it as a matter of fact has changed and that you think that this is okay (as I'm sure many people do) is obviously telling of something.

But hey, maybe you'd prefer the 2020 election-debate winner be decided by who can keep a reddit-pun thread going longer.

I would thank you, my supercilious friend, to not fucking put words in my mouth, okay? What I am asserting is that it has not, "as a matter of fact", changed. You can point at Presidential elections as oh, hurr, shallow, and I'll even agree with you. And then I will point at Obama's convention speech in '04 or even Bill Clinton's in '12 as modern examples of long-form rhetoric. Because that stuff happens today, too. And people watched, and listened, and talked about those, too (but they had the temerity to talk about it on Twitter, so I'm sure it didn't count).

Lincoln-Douglas looms large in the retrospective eye because it was important (and was at the confluence of a number of factors, not the least of which that it was a geographically diverse set of venues but mass communication was still the newspaper and the telegraph). Perhaps it is worth reflecting that modern presidental elections may not be so important--I mean, the gap between a right-wing and a center-right party is, on balance, very small--and the level of discourse may reflect it. Consider also the consular elections of the Roman republic during times when very little of importance was happening. They're venal, they're often populist, they're regularly pandering and stupid. They look like--well--today's. Because nothing is as stupid as fights when there's nothing of meaning to gain.

I mean, shit, dude. You know what came most of a century before the Lincoln-Douglas debates? A little speech by a dude in a church in Richmond. It's about fourteen paragraphs long. I've read it. But there's one sentence from it that you actually know: "give me liberty or give me death." Patrick Henry laid the groundwork for that sentence. It's a good speech, if you care about that sort of thing. But nobody was reading it then (it wasn't published for forty years, and nobody's actually sure how much of it is the original speech). That sentence is what caught, because it is distilled sentiment and meaning and requires no attention span at all.

You are arguing against history as well as the tide, to heroify dead people and pretend they were other than how they were. I don't understand why.

People that are arguing to treat popularity as the primary metric by which to gauge quality and importance of content are doing two things:

a) being dishonest

b) performing an active disservice for the human-race.

To address point a: Take Gawker - it's popular, ok, maybe Gawker is just as good as a well-written article, I'm sure there are at least a few people that would argue that; but eventually that argument reaches a dead-end - you might never want to read an academic paper, but you're probably damn glad someone wrote it if only for the scientific advances which provide for your material comfort. You might prefer to watch a sitcom, to reading about economic policy, but you probably would prefer the president should do the later.

That is no matter how people may argue (e.g. Why is a Video Game any less a work of art than Shakespeare play) the kind of absolutist-populist position, they will eventually back-pedal on that argument when you run it out to its furthest point, I mean hell Hitler was resoundingly popular, and so was slavery in the South.

Since it's on topic consider RMS - he's rather a secular nut now -- and that's after NSA/Snowden revelations -- 20 years ago he must have appeared as a complete crackhead (the new printer at MIT was closed-source and I decided I could no longer participate in that [not-verbatim]) to 99.9% people and significantly less-popular than idk: Tele-Evangelists, who probably have much more compelling presentation and better websites and public image.

The active disservice part is where people that don't want to be educated, and don't want to read, and would rather watch a sitcom (there is nothing wrong with these in an of themselves) argue and promote their intellectual laziness and ignorance as important values, and accuse those who disagree of being out-dated, elitist, or whatever other such bullshit.

> People that are arguing to treat popularity as the primary metric by which to gauge quality and importance of content are doing two things

I am done with your disingenuity, but for the readers I'll clarify to make it unmistakable: while you can keep on being you all you want, it will not change that to have people listen to you, you must approach them with something they want to consume. You must understand people, and to actually deign to do that instead of to try to lord over them with imagined superiority is not pandering but communicating.

John Oliver understands this. Stallman doesn't. That's why Oliver did in a week what the second guy couldn't do in thirty years. So you can keep arguing and keep sneering. I'm pointing at the elephant and saying it's an elephant. It won't stop being an elephant because you don't like elephants.

> John Oliver understands this. Stallman doesn't. That's why Oliver did in a week what the second guy couldn't do in thirty years. So you can keep arguing and keep sneering.

Yes, Stallman really hasn't done anything. GNU, GCC, GPL and Free-software are really worthless contributions compared to comedy routines, we should all quit working on things that we care about just because you and Joe say we aren't ever going to be popular or important.

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