> If they’re triggered and writing angrily, they care.
They may care about the subject matter of the blog post, but they don't care about the blog post, which is just an excuse for them to rant about the subject matter.
> Reasons that can be eliminated by adapting the structure of the content to a modern audience.
> they don't care about the blog post, which is just an excuse for them to rant about the subject matter
This kind of framing/sweeping generalization doesn’t make sense to me. There will always be people who will rant for the sake of ranting, but this isn’t universal, nor should it be the base assumption about a reader/commentor.
> c/modern/lazy
This carries the problematic generalization further. The modern media environment has drastically impacted people’s attention span.
There are plenty of critical things to be said about the effects of this trend, but painting this as just a matter of laziness misses the bigger picture.
Especially important if you want to create content that encourages people to cultivate attention and stop consuming attention-destroying content.
Writing for a “modern” audience isn’t about catering to lazy people, but recognizing what people are up against in an information landscape that increasingly churns out bad information, making it necessary as a reader to assess the content quickly enough to know if it’s time to move on, because there isn’t enough time or attention in a day to give every post a full read.
I’m not saying lazy readers don’t exist, but that’s not why I think it’s useful to think about content structure.
My comment "In other words... nobody cares about your blog. ;-)" was intended to be joke, with the wink emoticon, riffing on the title of the blog post. It wasn't intended as a serious sweeping generalization.
Nonetheless, many good jokes have a grain of truth. Such commenters who rant for the sake of ranting obviously do exist, as you admit, and they are pervasive.
> making it necessary as a reader to assess the content quickly enough to know if it’s time to move on, because there isn’t enough time or attention in a day to give every post a full read.
It's interesting that you said "move on" rather than "comment", which is precisely the distinction I discussed in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746673 Moving on is fine. The problem is staying and commenting without reading carefully.
I also don’t fully accept the premise that not reading is why people are commenting critically.
Personally, I read the whole thing, kinda scratched my head about the framing of it all, and came here to find what apparently seemed like agreement with my reaction.
It became more clear what the author was going for when he clarified, and in that light, the post makes more sense.
But I think someone lacking that context or familiarity with the author’s style and taking the content a bit too literally at first (like me) is another source of the critical commentary.
Things got a bit off track when this became a thread about people refusing to read, or lacking comprehension. From my perspective there are two ways to read it, and I think this pretty much guarantees some confusion.
You don't understand how people rather want to read some short comments and share their thoughts than to spend a lot more time reading a long blogpost?
Yes, blogpost we discuss here isn’t even that long. For any meaningful discussion there is context required. Writing out thoughts without context might be funny or might be silly but that is disrespectful to everyone.
In other words... nobody cares about your blog. ;-)