[mindslight]

Funny, because I'd say that jargon is a facilitator of communication between knowledgeable people. It can always be looked up by those with the interest but not the knowledge. I end up doing this all the time, and appreciating reading dumps of domain knowledge and perspective. Meanwhile, writing everything for a lowest common denominator audience creates real barriers to communication - both destroying communications bandwidth, and also encouraging experts to retreat to less visible forums.

[scrozier]

It would take the author a few seconds to type "remotely operated vehicle" (or whatever it stands for), and therefore save hours of time for people who need to look it up. Not to mention...I almost skipped the article because I didn't know what ROV stood for. Lost audience.

Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?

As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.

The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)

I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.

[mindslight]

Jargon generally takes on its own meaning and context beyond a naive reading. "ROV" customarily refers to an underwater remotely operated vehicle, not merely any "remotely operated vehicle" (contrast with flying "drones" or contemporary cars with cell modems). I'm nowhere near an expert or even frequent user of the term, that's just from my casual recollection and a quick search seems to back it up.

The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.

And yes, effective communication within "like-minded cliques" is exactly what is facilitated by jargon. Personally I'd rather read concise technical descriptions from such direct communications (doing the work to learn what I don't know from context or external sources), rather than having to skim through watered-down general-audience "edutainment" articles and read between the lines to figure out the specific touchstones being referenced by canned general phrases.

[Attrecomet]

>The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.

This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.

[mindslight]

I don't get this pigeonholing of the concern as being only about "water hobbyists" or "underwater professionals". It's literally just a type of machine you will become aware of some time during the course of reading about engineering or subsea operations. As I said, I'm not even fully sure it just applies to underwater vehicles yet I have bumped into the term/concept more than several times already in my life. If you're new and this is your first time encountering it, appreciate the learning opportunity. I bet you'll see the term a lot more now due to Baader-Meinhof.

[krisoft]

> This isn't a water hobbyists forum

And the article was not written to this forum?

> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested

This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.

> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much

Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.

[mcculley]

HTML has a handy tag for abbreviations and a way to link to definitions. It is a shame that so few bother to use it.