4 ms·

What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts

What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?

andai 10y ago
I enjoy reading words which indicate the person who wrote them is not entirely dead inside. It provides, i feel, for a Mor Better Reading Experience™
- falsedan 10y ago
  I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it. It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.
    - falsedan 10y ago
      Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"? That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely). Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0] [0]: http://danluu.com/wat/ http://danluu.com/wat/
      - falsedan 10y ago
        *Things (whoops)
  - usrusr 10y ago
    Is it a reference? If it is I did not get it, but I also did not miss it at all because I felt that it was quite clearly established as a shorthand for "improvements in the state of the art of writing software in general and specifically browsers, accumulated over the past two decades, which I don't want to describe here in detail, trust me that they exist or not, your choice" on first use. That shorthand was a considerable reading speedup for me, reference or not (if it is a reference, depending on what it references it might make reading slower for those who do get it - maybe I was just lucky?).
jgrahamc 10y ago
I think it shows who the author had in mind while writing the piece. If you use memes etc. then you are writing for an 'in crowd' that understands the same cultural references as you. That's OK, but you should be clearly aware of it. The one thing I would have appreciated from the post is for the author to have written about the "Mor Better Ideas" that make Servo better than Gecko. To me that particular phrase in this particular post is a little out of place and lowers the tone slightly. I expect that to others it will be seen as fun/human and indicating that the post isn't written by a corporate drone. YMMV
hoorayimhelping 10y ago
It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. Is this the tone of the whole project? I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that. I get the reason for doing it, and I like that the internet isn't full of drab corporate-speak all the time, but this piece just missed the mark I think. The title doesn't really communicate the intent well and instead feels like its trying to be a little clever for the sake of being clever. It's really a two or three sentence press release that got fluffed up with some non-corporate language.
- falsedan 10y ago
  I think a lot of engineers may be hesitant about appearing boring in prose, because they haven't had a lot of experience/training in writing. Also, they not be confident that external people will be interested in the project. They try to build/maintain interesting by sprinkling it with these asides, forced references, and analogies (aping the style of other popular writers/entertainers who unfortunately aren't presenting technical information in a professional environment). They're probably aware of the drab corporate-speak & aggressively alter their style away from it avoid being mistaking for it. Writing clear, expressive prose is hard! Plus, it's not taught as part of software engineering & it's not required to be a great engineer.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. The world in general, and personal blogs in particular, doesn't exist to serve people who are "busy". And being flippant on one's blog has nothing to do with being "unprofessional". In fact, the blog where TFA is from is not a business or professional endeavor to begin with. So "professionalism" (however some provincial people conceive it) is not a requirement for it. Not to mention that billions are made in fully professional endeavors that actually include such references and humor (from Google's easter eggs to funny messages in update notes in various apps, etc).
- bzbarsky 10y ago
k2enemy 10y ago
I've been annoyed by the capitalization and (TM) thing since I first started seeing it on slashdot (maybe it was fish and chips then) in the late 90s. But live and let live. At least we've dropped the micro$oft thing.
mnarayan01 10y ago
Contrast "this should be done better" against "this should be done Mor Better". The intention, I think, is to be less abrasive and "something else". Really I'm not even sure how to describe it, which I think is actually why people use such formulations; it does add at least some connotative meaning which is hard to express explicitly. Basically, I do find it "additive", but it's obviously only feasible in very informal contexts and the percentage of the audience for whom it is not additive (and possibly quite jarring) might be quite high.
usrusr 10y ago
It's a bit like sarcasm, even if less grumpy. But unlike conventional sarcasm, which is both best (as in enjoyable to the type of person who enjoys sarcasm) and worst (as in completely defeating communication for those who don't) when it is borderline unrecognizable, these "internetisms" don't need to play hide and seek to be good at what they are. In the servo post, extra capitalization and an ironic "™" is used for tagging, but if one ever felt the need to further reduce subtlety, any amount of emojis or "funny" typography could be added without diminishing any quality it might have (or exacerbating lack of quality, depending on where you stand). What I try to establish: amongst colloquial witticisms, this pattern is probably one of the most harmless ones. Do I personally like it? I sure would not say that I love it, but I do enjoy reading texts that are less impersonal than a press release. Patterns like this can help identifying them, so I tend to be happy when I see them. What I hate, and I feel tempted to claim that all of humanity is with me in this, is when these patterns are used to engineer press release type communication into appearing like something different.

andai 10y ago

I enjoy reading words which indicate the person who wrote them is not entirely dead inside. It provides, i feel, for a Mor Better Reading Experience™

falsedan 10y ago
I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it. It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.
  - falsedan 10y ago
    Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"? That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely). Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0] [0]: http://danluu.com/wat/ http://danluu.com/wat/
    - falsedan 10y ago
      *Things (whoops)
- usrusr 10y ago
  Is it a reference? If it is I did not get it, but I also did not miss it at all because I felt that it was quite clearly established as a shorthand for "improvements in the state of the art of writing software in general and specifically browsers, accumulated over the past two decades, which I don't want to describe here in detail, trust me that they exist or not, your choice" on first use. That shorthand was a considerable reading speedup for me, reference or not (if it is a reference, depending on what it references it might make reading slower for those who do get it - maybe I was just lucky?).

jgrahamc 10y ago

I think it shows who the author had in mind while writing the piece. If you use memes etc. then you are writing for an 'in crowd' that understands the same cultural references as you. That's OK, but you should be clearly aware of it. The one thing I would have appreciated from the post is for the author to have written about the "Mor Better Ideas" that make Servo better than Gecko. To me that particular phrase in this particular post is a little out of place and lowers the tone slightly. I expect that to others it will be seen as fun/human and indicating that the post isn't written by a corporate drone. YMMV

hoorayimhelping 10y ago

It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. Is this the tone of the whole project? I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that. I get the reason for doing it, and I like that the internet isn't full of drab corporate-speak all the time, but this piece just missed the mark I think. The title doesn't really communicate the intent well and instead feels like its trying to be a little clever for the sake of being clever. It's really a two or three sentence press release that got fluffed up with some non-corporate language.

falsedan 10y ago
I think a lot of engineers may be hesitant about appearing boring in prose, because they haven't had a lot of experience/training in writing. Also, they not be confident that external people will be interested in the project. They try to build/maintain interesting by sprinkling it with these asides, forced references, and analogies (aping the style of other popular writers/entertainers who unfortunately aren't presenting technical information in a professional environment). They're probably aware of the drab corporate-speak & aggressively alter their style away from it avoid being mistaking for it. Writing clear, expressive prose is hard! Plus, it's not taught as part of software engineering & it's not required to be a great engineer.
coldtea 10y ago
>It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. The world in general, and personal blogs in particular, doesn't exist to serve people who are "busy". And being flippant on one's blog has nothing to do with being "unprofessional". In fact, the blog where TFA is from is not a business or professional endeavor to begin with. So "professionalism" (however some provincial people conceive it) is not a requirement for it. Not to mention that billions are made in fully professional endeavors that actually include such references and humor (from Google's easter eggs to funny messages in update notes in various apps, etc).
bzbarsky 10y ago

k2enemy 10y ago

I've been annoyed by the capitalization and (TM) thing since I first started seeing it on slashdot (maybe it was fish and chips then) in the late 90s. But live and let live. At least we've dropped the micro$oft thing.

mnarayan01 10y ago

Contrast "this should be done better" against "this should be done Mor Better". The intention, I think, is to be less abrasive and "something else". Really I'm not even sure how to describe it, which I think is actually why people use such formulations; it does add at least some connotative meaning which is hard to express explicitly. Basically, I do find it "additive", but it's obviously only feasible in very informal contexts and the percentage of the audience for whom it is not additive (and possibly quite jarring) might be quite high.

usrusr 10y ago

It's a bit like sarcasm, even if less grumpy. But unlike conventional sarcasm, which is both best (as in enjoyable to the type of person who enjoys sarcasm) and worst (as in completely defeating communication for those who don't) when it is borderline unrecognizable, these "internetisms" don't need to play hide and seek to be good at what they are. In the servo post, extra capitalization and an ironic "™" is used for tagging, but if one ever felt the need to further reduce subtlety, any amount of emojis or "funny" typography could be added without diminishing any quality it might have (or exacerbating lack of quality, depending on where you stand). What I try to establish: amongst colloquial witticisms, this pattern is probably one of the most harmless ones. Do I personally like it? I sure would not say that I love it, but I do enjoy reading texts that are less impersonal than a press release. Patterns like this can help identifying them, so I tend to be happy when I see them. What I hate, and I feel tempted to claim that all of humanity is with me in this, is when these patterns are used to engineer press release type communication into appearing like something different.