Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are the same folks who view human interaction as a “problem to be solved”. They’re the outliers in society who make the rest of our lives easier. But they have gained way too much power in this world and are intent on dooming us all to their cold, dark, inhuman world.
I am not anti story. I am in fact, a fiction writer. I live for stories. But there's a time and a place. And I think pigeonholing everyone who opines "tldr" as some sort of robotic fascist who wants all human discourse in binary or whatever is reductionist and moronic. I'm not burning books, I just thought an article should get to the bloody point
> Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are the same folks who view human interaction as a “problem to be solved”.
Yes. But your next statement is nonsense.
> They’re the outliers in society who make the rest of our lives easier.
Nothing about Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg made our lives easier. All they've done is made the social contract worse, making our lives harder, not easier. They've given lucrative jobs to a few, but all their market offerings gave the world is distraction and misery, in the case of Facebook, and flashy status symbols to chase, in the case of Tesla. They crowded out the market for competitors, so people can't have truly useful solutions to the problems Zuck and Musk claimed to solve.
Ask yourself why Chinese electric cars would be banned from the US market and you're getting there. Musk bought a social network with the explicit aim of making it worse, and more than succeeded.
We're not sitting around a campfire shining flashlights into our faces. We're reading an article supposedly about an unsung genius named Peter Putnam. Such an article should open with who he was and what he did that was so important yet unsung, and THEN delve into story details, not bury the important bit behind mountains of "It was a dark and stormy night" type filler.
Can you please not cross into personal attack or general nastiness, even when an article is bad or you feel it is? We're trying for something else on this site.
So if I dressed my insults up in purple prose like the comment I was responding to, or the parent of that comment, did -- would that be "the kind of discussion we try to foster here on HN"?
A million years ago around a campfire, I watched grandpa try to tell my child his favorite story. It wasn't going smoothly as he would like. I lovingly watched him persist. At some point he sighed and met my sympathetic gaze. It was time to kick embers and turn in.
Maybe it’s the pacing of the article that’s off. Feels like it’s wasting one’s time with self-indulgent prose.
The short story in your comment, OTOH, is very much better. I can see the scene, my mind has filled in some details, and it took only a couple seconds to read.
I think pacing is more aptly the issue than narrative. Perhaps even more specifically, the load-bearing first couple sentences dive right into establishing a complex setting before any other context is established. Even as I may enjoy narrative, I rarely enjoy effortful fumbling around in the dark unless it's with Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov.
