[antisemiotic]

This doesn't change the fact that irrelevant pictures (like memes and cheap popcultural references) belong neither in references nor blogposts, they're just a waste of time and bandwidth.

Tone is a different matter, tutorials sure can be more lighthearted. But I'd still take a dry tutorial instead of forced, stillborn humor any day. (I'm not sure if the latter kind is all that common in the wild, could be an illusion of frequency on my part).

[braythwayt]

As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions.

It’s a perfectly valid choice to write essays that are hyper-focused on just teaching the facts as efficiently as possible, but that isn’t some kind of universal rule that must be applied to all essays.

I personally don’t care for the popular “American Folksy” style of essay that is heavy on the author’s journey to learn the thing it purports to teach, but I wouldn’t dictate that nobody should write in that style.

There are no gatekeepers to writing words, just as there are no gatekeepers to writing code. That has its benefits, aand its hazards.

[saurik]

This seems orthogonal to the complaint: the person you are responding to is assuming you aren't just doing this because you think it is a worthy art form for your audience of people who enjoy it, but that you are attempting to write something that provides strong value to the reader. You are welcome to write whatever you want, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is helping. If you want a music analogy, you are welcome to make a movie score that has loud and clear lyrics while actors are talking... but I would still say to you that lyrics "have no place" in a movie score during a dialog scene--the audience is trying (and now failing) to hear the dialogue--even if there are some people who seem to enjoy that. So: you are welcome to write those tutorials in that style if you personally must--no one is saying they should be banned and censored and deleted from the web--and also you really should know that you are actively making a decision to be less useful.

[braythwayt]

"Useful" is very much context-dependent. A post that does not catch the reader's attention is not useful. If you write in a style that is indistinguishable from a thousand other authors writing about the same topic, your writing is equally useless.

It is a mistake to think that an "audience" is one uniform set of people with identical needs, tastes, and interests. And therefore it is a mistake to suggest that there is something inherently "less useful" about one style of writing over another.

Less useful for whom? Under what circumstances?

I agree 100% that if you define your audience as "person trying to solve a problem and googling for help," my writing is terribly useless.

But I don't write for that person under those circumstances, and I assure you that the pictures in my blog posts do not bleed over to obscure any of the text.

I personally think that analogy doesn't really fit. A different take might be to consider Raymond Smullyan writing about combinatory logic.

If you just want to solve a homework problem, reading "To Mock a Mockingbird" is going to be an exercise in frustration. What's all this faffing about with birds and forests? Or locks and vaults?

Nevertheless, a great many people have found the book both useful and entertaining, which is a kind of useful in its own right. Smullyan also knew that there were other ways to write, and he wrote textbooks that eschewed the metaphors and entertainment while focusing on the utility.

---

I am not fooling myself that my writing is helping some people, some of the time. I know that it does, and I have the data to prove it. But, I am also not fooling myself that what I write is the best thing for all people under all circumstances.

I regularly endorse buying books like Eloquent JavaScript or You Don't Know JavaScript precisely because they are written in a manner that is useful in a different way than my own writing is useful.

But getting back to the subject of the post... I think that ultimately, search should be sure to highlight StackOverflow and MDN results or similar. Reference works designed to answer questions simply and directly are what you need when you're in the middle of a problem.

Blog posts serve a different purpose, such as motivating you to want to solve the problem in the first place.

[antisemiotic]

>As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions.

Of course, just like anyone's free to say "it's a generic 4:4 I–V–vi–IV pop song, nothing to write home about" or "it's yet another ISO standard blogpost, don't bother clicking through the popup". Though I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden blogpost would be a sea-shanty with changing time signatures and atonal riffs with a rabid scene kid at the vocals - kind of bizzare, kind of crass, fully useless for pulling a rope on a galleon.

>It’s a perfectly valid choice to write essays that are hyper-focused on just teaching the facts as efficiently as possible, but that isn’t some kind of universal rule that must be applied to all essays.

I wasn't arguing that every blogpost should be hyper-focused, just that it would be kind of nice if more people took the route of "uncreative but solid" rather than "trying to create an illusion of creativity with randomness".

[javajosh]

> "trying to create an illusion of creativity with randomness"

I doubt that's why authors use this technique, though. I think it's part humble-brag ("hey I'm so smart I don't take complexity seriously!") and part an expression of nervousness ("it's scary to write things and publish on the internet, because haters"). A less serious style also allows you to take criticism more easily, perhaps.

That's an explanation, not an excuse! I like dense, solid prose more.

[antisemiotic]

Hmm you're right, on a related note patching holes in my understanding of a topic with "distance" and sarcasm is something I'm personally guilty of. I'm grateful of HN for being much less conductive for that style than, say, Reddit.

[braythwayt]

I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden blogpost would be a sea-shanty with changing time signatures and atonal riffs with a rabid scene kid at the vocals - kind of bizzare, kind of crass, fully useless for pulling a rope on a galleon.

To my great delight, this phrase illustrates the value of writing with feeling and metaphor. It captures my imagination and motivates me to think about your argument carefully.

[antisemiotic]

I've never argued that metaphors make for worse technical writing. It's just that you've started the discussion defending putting random pics into a blog post, and now you're trying to paint opposition to these as an opposition to creative technical writing (vide the sibling post about Raymond Smullyan). I think we might be in a violent agreement here, actually.

[braythwayt]

+1

[vikramkr]

Why don't they belong in blog posts? They belong anywhere the author had made the creative decision to include them, and if you don't like it, that's fine, but if the author wants to use their time and bandwidth in the article to post irrelevant memes then that's their call. To you it might be a waste of time, but in general people can and should do whatever they want.