alt Hacker News> The young girl tugged on her mother’s hand as they pressed through the doors of the hospital in Shanghai. She was 6 years old, bouncing along in a pink jacket and blue pants decorated with cartoon bears. Behind them, her father rolled a large suitcase with everything the child needed for the weeklong stay: stuffed animals, Play-Doh, an iPad loaded with episodes of Peppa Pig.
What's this style of "journalism" (time-wasting) called and how can we exterminate it?
Replies
It's human-interest style writing. Western, particularly North American, audiences strongly prefer this kind of scene-setting prose prior to information exchange. I am also not particularly a fan of it. In the past, you had to endure it. Nowadays, you can select for your own degree of expertise and terseness by feeding the prose into an LLM and prompting it appropriately. Therefore, complaints of this sort of writer-audience mismatch are no longer of use. Use the tools available to you to solve your problems.
I used Opus 4.8 to avoid Fable guardrail hair-trigger, but you can use ChatGPT as well.
Treat those proses as warnings. They mean the writers have decided to guide your emotions in certain direction instead of portraying what happened in a neutral tone.
This is good quality journalism; human-interest details like this are important.
All your comments boil down to: Why are people people and not machines?
Velcro, I guess.
Yeah, this is insufferable. The title was interesting enough to click, but I don't know what to make of the audience that actually perceives this as a good source of information.
This kind of thing is pretty standard, and you accordingly come across as rather boorish.
But it is generally referred to as "creative non-fiction", and I agree it can often be overdone.
It’s called long form feature writing. Many, many people enjoy it and do not want it exterminated. It’s a way to humanize and add emotion to complex topics. If you want, many outlets have bland straightforward bullet point articles. Try Axios.
Reading articles posted on HN is optional as are most things on the internet. If you don’t like the style in the first paragraph, stop reading. Getting fewer eyeballs on an article is typically a way to “exterminate” a style. Be aware, the articles that make the biggest waves tend to be long form feature writing. Given their influence and popularity you might find your extermination efforts to be quixotic.