alt Hacker NewsNo. It isn't. With acronyms, there's often plenty of potential things it can stand for, and if the person doesn't know enough to know which one is the correct acronym, Googling it isn't going to help them.
As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK."
The NWS knows this and automatically links to their glossary for both acronyms as well as jargon in their discussions. <-- See what I did there? What does NWS mean in this context? If only I had provided a link that would help you know. I very easily could have. I just didn't.
>As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK."
it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing.
if you're reading this stuff, and you can't figure out what kind of RAG that the search engine mentioned is being talked about through context clues, or you aren't clever enough to feed context into the search like 'hackers , computers, rag' as a query -- there is a very high probability that the person will have absolutely nothing constructive to add to the conversation that is about the topics they haven't even yet conceptualized or are aware of.
in that case that slight barrier to entry for the conversation will serve as a tool to produce less work for the moderators and derail less threads into uselessness.
(much like this stupid divergence.)