[yan]

Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification?

It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent.

The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on removes depth.

Also, comparing Reginald to Mike Daisy non-ironically is very disingenuous. Mike went on national news outlets to pitch his show and highlighted it as fact rather than performance. He was warned that performing on TAL will lead to its scrutiny as a journalistic report and he still went ahead, knowingly misleading the public.

[raganwald]

Not in the minority, but here’s the thing. As long as this was primarily in our community, I was comfortable with a wee bit of ambiguity. Hackers and others are perfectly capable of doing a little fact-checking such as looking at my online resume or noticing that I write a lot of stuff like this.

Perhaps one in a hundred or even thousand people reading it might have thought it was real.

But once it escaped our cozy little echo-chamber, it went to a place where many people thought it was real. They aren’t part of a culture that expects parables and satire. They have no familiarity with my existing blow-hardiness on the subject of hiring programmers or privacy. It’s not as reasonable for me to expect that J. Random Facebookfriend will read it and assume it’s a parable.

So, it seemed like the right thing to do to issue a clarification.

tl;dr: An item on the front page of HN doesn’t need a clarification, an item on the front page of Reddit does.

[saurik]

In my experience, it has not been possible to predict the audience of such things ahead of time: in fact, it is the things where the most audience-specific assumptions are made that end up (I believe due to those specific assumptions) ending up in the most surprising and irritating of places.

[freshhawk]

I thought it didn't need clarification but judging by the comments on HN it certainly did.

We can all bitch about whether or not people should have gotten it, and I don't think very highly of the reading comprehension skills of the people that didn't, but they didn't. The author didn't communicate his point in a way that translated to his audience. That's the entire purpose of his public, rather than private, blog. So it needed clarification.

[notatoad]

regardless of who it was aimed at, it ended up on the front page of reddit. and we all know how reddit is about believing stuff, and then how they react when they find out they've been 'lied' to.

i'm sure at least a few people have threatened to kill raganwald's cats by now.

[raganwald]

Strangely, the amount of anger people feel when their beliefs are revealed to be false is proportional to the leap of faith they had to make to believe them in the first place.

Think of that leap of faith as being personal investment.

[freshhawk]

Did you read the comments here? Because the HN comment thread was full of people that thought it was a real letter.

There are plenty of good reasons to take shots at reddit. This one is stupid.

[astrodust]

I had to double-check that the place he was working hadn't degenerated into some sweat-shop with, shudder, an HR department. It was kind of obvious, yet not completely apparent.

[mikeash]

I totally agree. Some people understood it, who cares? Their lives were not negatively affected by that in any way. Let them misunderstand. The letter would have been much less compelling with a disclaimer on it.