Academic abstracts are very similar but evolved to serve a slightly different purpose. Papers take time to read and there are a lot of them coming out all the t

Academic abstracts are very similar but evolved to serve a slightly different purpose. Papers take time to read and there are a lot of them coming out all the time, so researchers need to know if a paper has something they're interested in it before investing the time to read it. I've grown accustomed to this consideration from people who want my eyeballs to read their words. If you send me messages, etc. similar to what this article uses as "before BLUF" examples, it's very likely going to piss me off. There are a decent number of long-form articles posted on Hacker News that don't follow this standard and don't have a last paragraph (or two, or three...) that's any more helpful. They typically have an intriguing click-bait title that fails to fully parse and I wind up clicking on them just to figure out what they're about. I read three or four paragraphs in and it becomes clear the article is going to do a painfully slow reveal of it's point, if it even has one. So, I scroll alllll the way down to the bottom, noting that it will take a good twenty minutes to read that far, and find the last few paragraphs to be utterly unhelpful ramblings rather than a summary or conclusion. Giving up, I read the comments here and it is frequently the case that a lot of people are just commenting on the title without having figured out what heck the article is about either. I find this absolutely infuriating. I apologize for venting.