[throwaway03857]

Since I develop addons for blender my readmes contain gifs, video embeds and all the things you undoubtedly hate because that's the most efficient way to communicate what the tools actually do and how to use them. Not everyone develops command line tools.

[pwdisswordfish0]

READMEs and markdown in general are supposed to be as legible in plain text form as it is when rendered. But that's something the kinds of people who hang out on GitHub don't seem to give two shits about. Any time a project hosted on GitHub is cloned, chances are high that if you try to open the README, it's going to be filled with line noise that effectively means you must use the rendered view. It's no wonder things like building native support for markdown rendering into apps like VSCode are so desirable. Project authors are treating it like an intermediate form that no one is really ever supposed to look at unless they're going into the markdown to add/fix/change something just before submitting a pull request.

[eyelidlessness]

Yes. And that’s not because people are abusing README.md, but because abusing README.md is the only way for most projects to improve most first impressions for their project.

[pwdisswordfish0]

First of all, even if that were true, it wouldn't matter. If a project author is participating in the culture that involves the compulsion "to improve most first impressions for their project", that's just the toxic culture associated with traditional social media projected into a different venue, except it has a facade of respectability that keeps people from calling it out in the way people call out Instagram bullshit.

Secondly, it's not true. Don't care about the deleterious effects that comes from overvaluing social media impressions? Want to take part in that messed up, Black Mirror-esque world anyway? Take all that junk you're shoving into the README and put it on a real landing page. No one is forcing anyone to link people to the GitHub repo for first impressions.

[eyelidlessness]

Wow. A little flourish on a GH repo front page (which is also a README, because it’s been both for years) is Black Mirror-esque?

[pwdisswordfish0]

One-liner strawmanning isn't hard.

EDIT:

> which is also a README, because it’s been both for years

What is this even supposed to be a response to?

[eyelidlessness]

This isn’t worth my time except to say so.