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> You'd have better success if you showed some respect for your readers by capitalizing and writing your posts in a normal style. Starting off with "lol" and an

• iuguy 16y ago
  > That is the biggest pile of bs I have ever read. And they say civility's dropped on HN.
  • geoffw8 16y ago
    someones not allowed to say bs?
    • steveklabnik 16y ago
      That's bullshit.
• gnaritas 16y ago
  > What you've done is no different to this scenario - your at school, your one of the popular guys But this is exactly the kind of thing he's referring to, sloppy writing and sloppy grammar generally mean sloppy thinking. If you're going to take the time to write something, you must want it to be read; have respect for your reader and use proper capitalization, punctuation, and correct contractions. There are a lot of people who won't even read what you have to say if the writing is lazy and disrespectful to the reader.
  • geoffw8 16y ago
    Not that I do, but what if I said I had learning difficulties? Or never went to school. Your saying I'm not allowed to contribute?
    • gnaritas 16y ago
      Nowhere did I say or imply that, I simply said there are quite a few people who won't read sloppy writing; that's a simple statement of fact. If you want to be read by the widest audience, then consider the reader rather than what's easiest for you.
  • mkr-hn 16y ago
    I think words like "proper" are what throw a lot of people. It brings up images of a grumpy English teacher. But natural language is like a programming language. If you start tossing brackets and semicolons all over the place, it won't compile, and it won't make much sense. Things like grammar and spelling are the syntax of natural language, and failing to make sure you're close to the norm is a good way to throw an exception. Not as concise as "proper" or "correct," but less likely to start an argument.
    • jarek 16y ago
      The root comment compiled perfectly. The grammar was understandable and the logic reasonably sound. The only deviations from the gold standard of natural English are: 1) "lol"; 2) ";]"; 3) lack of capitalization on some words. That is much closer to whitespace conventions than tossing brackets and semicolons all over the place.
• InclinedPlane 16y ago
  It's "you're guilty", not "your guilty". >_> Seriously though, calm down. Both your post and the post you're referring to have plenty of upvotes, which is a strong indication that they are not unwelcome contributions to HN. Personally I think it's important to maintain civility, writing quality, and professionalism in an online discussion, and I'm glad that HN values that. It's a lubricant that enables more productive, more rational, more open discussion without getting distracted by juvenile things like distracting humor and emotionally charged debate (as when someone lumps an entire group of people together, makes generalizations about them, and compares them to racists). HN is still one of the few places on the intertrontubes where it's possible to have a mature, rational discussion. If you find someplace better, by all means let everyone know.
  • geoffw8 16y ago
    I agree with all of your points, except one - when I'm doing something of leisure, i.e. commenting on hacker news, I actually don't think about my grammar or spelling and nor will I begin to. As far as I'm concerned, people pulling people up on their spelling and grammar is a step to far. Edit: Spelling and grammer excellence isn't in the guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • mcantor 16y ago
      I don't think anybody at Hacker News really begrudges your leisurely writing practices. However, it seems like you feel entitled to have your opinions treated equally despite the fact that you are presenting them differently. This is probably why many of your comments are getting downvoted. I am sure that you and posters such as frevd are cool, intelligent dudes; but most members of the HN community value conventional writing style. It's not in the guidelines because it is something that comes from the members of the community themselves. By intentionally eschewing the rules of writing, you are signalling to the community that you are not willing to "meet them in the middle", so to speak. If the majority of HN posters did not care about writing style, this situation would be reversed. But, c'est la vie.
• SamReidHughes 16y ago
  > Just because he starts his posts with a lol, and a smiley mean NOTHING. Actually it means a lot. When you read, your neurons get tingled. How this happens is affected by writing style. Not everybody has the time or energy to be a hyperrationalist information absorber that processes data into the same thing irrespective of the order and manner it arrives. edit: I think you've misinterpreted my post if you think I said anything about whether his writing style is bad -- I've just said that it causes people to react a certain way. (Though, if you want me to declare which side I'm on on that matter of whether it's objectively bad, it's the opposite of yours.)
  • geoffw8 16y ago
    You've missed your own point. By NOTHING, I meant that it "has absolutely no connection to how much respect [he] give[s] readers, and how much [he] think[s] about [his] responses." He just might not be so hot on English, it doesn't mean he hasn't considered what he's going to say.
    • deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  • kraggp 16y ago
    The pseudo-intellectualism that permeates this board is a little appalling. I can certainly assure you that C-level executives across Silicon Valley backed by the strongest VCs and beyond write in a much less formal manner than most people on HN. Nothing wrong with that.
    • mcantor 16y ago
      Context is very important, though. I don't think anyone is claiming that there is a correlation between intelligence and writing ability; only that within the context of HN comments from the majority of posters, style is important.
    • mryall 16y ago
      Writing in clear understandable language and suggesting others do the same isn't "pseudo-intellectualism". It's just common sense. If you want your thoughts to be understood and respected, choose appropriate language to express them. What people use in frequent communication with their friends or colleagues is likely to be different to that used on a public message board which brings together people from many different backgrounds for discussion of "deeply interesting" topics.
• YuriNiyazov 16y ago
  "The barrier to entry of participating on HN is not how you word, or begin your point - but the value you add." The original impetus behind HN was that it is a place where people can have civil discourse online. Proper grammar and spelling when writing are a part of that - it is the equivalent of not drooling from your mouth when speaking.
  • geoffw8 16y ago
    > it is the equivalent of not drooling from your mouth when speaking. No, it is not. Not everyone is hot on their written english. I'm sure if this was a fundamental of the HN community, the HN team would have referred to it in the guidelines - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I'll repeat what I said above, its about the value in what you say, not how you word/spell it.
• JesseAldridge 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) Attention is a scarce resource. Acting like a fool is correlated with actually being a fool. People are less likely to take a comment seriously when a cursory examination suggests that it's a waste of space. Maybe that's not the way it should be, but that's the way it is.
  • kraggp 16y ago
    Are you serious? Have you worked in a board room at a Fortune 500 company? Most CEOs and executives don't have time to compose grammatically-error-free responses. Do you know how Steve Jobs writes? Now multiply that across 500 organizations of the biggest corporations in America and the shoddy writing will certainly shock you if you think "people are less likely to take a comment seriously" because their sentences aren't grammatically-correct. Calling someone a fool because they write differently from you is absurd. Ad hominem attacks don't belong on HN.
    • JesseAldridge 16y ago
      Being CEO of a Fortune 500 is such a strong signal of competence that you don't need any others. Ad hominem is useful in the real world because one's credibility impacts the probability that what they say is accurate.
      • IsaacL 16y ago
        I agree. It might sometimes be a status thing, as in, "I'm so important that I don't need to spellcheck my emails to you."
    • muhfuhkuh 16y ago
      "Most CEOs and executives don't have time to compose grammatically-error-free responses." I've been at 3 F500 companies in my 20 years of work, and where those F500 have even changed CEOs once or twice. The only time a CEO has ever sent anything grammatically or syntactically incorrect is when he's paging IT from his cellphone to fix something on the Executive floor. Everything else is carefully crafted and presented, especially internal memoranda. Being a CEO is more than just promoting synergy like a boss; communication (including and especially writing) is almost everything else.
• dustingetz 16y ago
  conversational tone signals that he just wrote a one-off sentence. more formal tone signals that his thoughts were revised and thought through.
• csomar 16y ago
  Yes, the value you add. But there are semantics for this addition. Consider yourself contributing to an Open Source software. There are semantics and rules used by the contributors, this makes reading old code easier and possible. The same is for HN, the community has rules for posting, even though they are not mentioned in the guide lines. It would be better to follow them. Just an example, in some communities, bad words are considered to be normal. Would you be happy if someone throw a word like that at you? After all it's his culture, no? But this is not the HN culture. We value difference and we want to know your point of view, but there are simple rules for communication. That's it.
• Confusion 16y ago
  I've met plenty of very, very wealthy and successful individuals to know that how you type has absolutely no connection to how much respect you give readers, and how much they think about their responses. I've read enough on the internet to know that how people type is strongly correlated to their respect for their readers, whether they take long enough to think about their response and, above all, their clarity of thought. In other words: your personal experience and opinion isn't relevant or convincing, because others have other priors. The barrier to entry of participating on HN is not how you word, or begin your point - but the value you add. The value you add is very much in how you choose your words. Every single one of our most interesting contributors could make any comment vicious and denigrating without losing a bit of the valuable content. That would seriously diminish the value of their posts. You cannot clearly separate presentation and contents. The presentation always influences how the contents are perceived and rated. You could be the smartest guy in the world: if you type without using caps, nobody is going to realize, because your text gets harder to read and understand. You can probably think of many more examples yourself, where presentation detracts from content.
• stcredzero 16y ago
  That is the biggest pile of bs I have ever read. Just because he starts his posts with a lol, and a smiley mean NOTHING. It angers and disgusts me to think that 17 other people happen to agree with you. The whole structure of the original comment looks like a troll to me. (Get a rise out of us stick-in-the-mud HN with lol.) However, your reaction seems to be better designed to incense anger than to point out structural problems in the discussion or overlooked value in the original comment.