[KKPMW]

I don't know about everyone but for me there is this weird effect style has on how serious I think the text is.

When I read something written in the style of a medium post I sub-consciously think of the material as being shallow. While reading this type of LaTeX style I would start taking it more seriously. But the texts with most serious look to me are non-formatted pages, like the ones on danluu.com or even plain text posts like this one: http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/bocode/t/transint.html

[jraph]

Me too. Your comment perfectly nails it. I'd guess with a wet finger that it is learned: our brains probably look for clues to quickly assess the quality / trustworthiness of a document. This is why style is pretty important: it certainly affects a lot many people's perceptions.

By the way, this is also why I used serious words like "brain" and "assess" and avoided typos: to make my comment look trustworthy. I had to put a front warning in terms of "wet finger" to lower that a bit though. The Hacker News style and context already make it feel far too scientific already.

For texts like in your link, I automatically expect they are written in the 90s by some very clever person and when I find some that are from the 2000s or later, I think "wow, this is actually new!".

What would be your impression with such a text written in Comic Sans? I would probably be completely lost I think.