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I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires… Every sentence is separated into its own paragr
by ianstormtaylor 9mo ago
I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires…
Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.
Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?
The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
- viraptor 9mo agoIt matches the way she speaks in the videos. I don't mind that. It's a vibe.
- micromacrofoot 9mo agoIt's basically the sort of rot writing that proliferates on linkedin
- throwaway_2494 9mo agoI disagree. I feel there is a genuine insight at the core of it.
- teekert 9mo agoYeah me too. Lately LI is like: CMSs are done! Let that sink in! Some dude trew away his CMS and vibe coded some markdown based static stuff that does the same. No harddrive was wiped this particular time. The world is different now, reply in comments if you agree. Reply “airhead” for my 3 slides which are even more insightful than this post.
- PaulHoule 9mo agoI think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
- tayo42 9mo ago>wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result. Pretty sure the first rule of writing on the internet is ignore the comments section
- PaulHoule 9mo agoThere’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
- coldtea 9mo agoA genuine insight turned into a cartoon self-help scam-artist LinkedIn inspirational quote cliche version of itself...
- memonkey 9mo agoDidn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
- godelski 9mo agoSame. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message. If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
- luxuryballs 9mo agoI really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoWhen I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news". Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok. I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet. Maybe it will be Max Headroom's blipverts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
- peanut-walrus 9mo agoIs the message deep and important or was the article attempting to manipulate you into thinking it is?
- wagwang 9mo agoAlso the ideas are just reframing the old maxim of "its not the destination, its the journey".
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo agoIt is that but more than that. There are companies trying to profit by selling instant gratificaton.
- wagwang 9mo agoi have meaner names, but lets just call it nod along content
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- levocardia 9mo agoSame reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
- OGEnthusiast 9mo agoPossibly AI-generated?
- nicbou 9mo agoIt sounds like a Ted Talk with unnecessarily long poses to let sentences sink in. For some reason I just can't digest this sort of writing.
- xiaomai 9mo agoI think it makes sense to write like this if you're intended audience is already used to consuming "thin" desire media.
- ianstormtaylor 9mo agoI agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot. But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message. Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
- bee_rider 9mo agoHah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.
- fallinditch 9mo agoThis type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web. An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style. The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.
- nostrademons 9mo agoNews is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition. I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves. Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
- Nevermark 9mo agoInterspersed single sentence and denser paragraphs, seem to get the most bang out of both. My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)
- aeve890 9mo ago>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires. From the about page: >Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access. So maybe you're right.
- tobyjsullivan 9mo agoReading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read. Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic. Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
- ablob 9mo agoA paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter. Consider the following excerpt of the post: The thick life doesn't scale. That's the whole point. So: bake bread. There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise. There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author. PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
- datastoat 9mo agoWouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
- eCa 9mo agoNo, I want to read it (or not) the way the writer intended.
- wlesieutre 9mo agoHeck just skip the website and ask the AI to make some text for you to read
- lionkor 9mo agoYeah, this feels very much like one of those sites with random quotes that seem deep but aren't, like wisdom.spark.pink.
- neuralkoi 9mo agoIt's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany. You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about. Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
- ghostie_plz 9mo agoI agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but not this: > then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about. Ideas don't have to be infallible to be worth writing about. It's a slippery slope to not writing at all.
- tessierashpool9 9mo ago"inkling of truth" != "infallible" #strawmanning
- velcrovan 9mo agoRobin Sloan has called this “ventilated prose”, a phrase I love. (I seem to recall “aerated prose” having also been deployed) See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/ https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoRarified prose…
- oggadog 9mo agoI immediately stopped reading after I saw the format. Absolutely hate this linkedin style 'everything is deep' posting. It's crap
- chairmansteve 9mo agoStill.... the message has value.
- mplewis 9mo agoNot really.
- Voklen 9mo agoI quite like that this is a more unique writing style and in fact would encourage people to write "unusually".
- reincarnate0x14 9mo agoIt's almost like anti-poetry.
- testermelon 9mo agoIn my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst. More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
- poemxo 9mo agoYour need to quip about the article's presentation instead of its meaning is a thin desire.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- peanut-walrus 9mo agoPresentation and context are important to understand the meaning of a text.
- Kholin 9mo agoIt's like some kind of meta writing, the writing style is proving what it's talking about.
- dynamite-ready 9mo agoThat's not always the intention behind that style of writing. Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them. It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.
- HPsquared 9mo ago"Thin Paragraphs"
- megamix 9mo agoSure, but can you at least appreciate the underlying meaning (soul) of the text?
- andai 9mo agoSo that the people with the most rotted brains -- those caught fully in the thick of thin things! -- stand a chance of reading it. Source: I talk to zoomers. (Some of them couldn't make it through an article of this length...)
- grvdrm 9mo agoI've seen this author's work elsewhere like Substack/Threads. Good article, good writer. But this whole post reminds me of a series of 1 or 2-line tweets. And I think that's the point. It's almost written as a series of scheduled posts that dribble out once a day for the next X days. Write once, re-purpose many times.