Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amelius 2008 days ago
What is wrong with "content"? It's the opposite of "without content".
3 comments

Stallman expanded on this somewhere else. The argument was that it uniformizes, degrades the work and focuses on just the mere aspect that it can fill up some container. Like the contents of standard cargo ship containers. Video, podcast, article, whatever it is, the important part is that we can serve ads alongside it and we can market it and we have all these "interfaces" that have nothing to do with the ideas conveyed or the artistic effects or intents etc.
It's the epitome of wooden language.

Your example is very good for proving my point; the expression "without content" talks about what? about the content? So you would say "content without content" to speak about a text that does not have substantial content?

> It's the epitome of wooden language

Exactly. See the comment elsewhere about Orwell's 1984. In which Newspeak [0] is "a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak