Some of us enjoy reading and writing like this. Writing especially in non-expository formats is more than just communicating the thesis of an article. Background and personal touch are often entertaining.
Take your comment for example. Your comment's thesis is the last sentence "Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9", but delaying that to the end yields a different effect for the reader than if you began with the thesis and then supplied examples.
I understand your viewpoint completely, I used to enjoy these articles too. Thousands of words on a single topic, no problem.
But time went on and I got tired of it. I discovered time is not infinite even when I have about sixty years ahead of me. I don't read mainstream news because knowing about the latest terror attack (or even positive news, like the latest rare animal being born in a zoo) doesn't help me in any way. Most of the time it just makes me feel bad for or angry about something that I can do nothing about nor affects me in any way.
I still read fiction as a past time activity and as I said, I used to enjoy these articles too, so I understand your point. It's just not the format I like to read for news.
(As for my own comment, burying the main thing, in my defense: it has structure that you can skip past very easily until the last sentence. But again, I see your point.)
This isn't a news article. It's the electronic equivalent of some person's diary. If you want something more formal, you'll probably be better served by skimming arXiv or subscribing to Nature.
>Some of us enjoy reading and writing like this. [...] Background and personal touch are often entertaining.
Here's my guess on why the article's slow build up irrated many readers: It was the apocalyptic armageddon title and then the first sentence the reader sees is, "I finished high school in 1995."
If the title is bombastic or provocative, your readers are going to want the Inverted Pyramid[1].
Had the author titled it something more toned down like, "Coming to grips with LHC's lack of new particle discoveries" ... the immediate juxtaposition of "I finished high school in 1995" wouldn't have been such a letdown. The phrase "coming to grips" sets up the reader to sit back and relax for a "timeline".
Put another way, if the writer puts a promising title but buries the reader with personal details, it is often seen as a self-indulgent style of writing that does not respect the readers' time.
This is not analogous. If parent had begun the comment with a personal history of experience in reading verbose articles with clickbait-y headlines that then meander to the actual meat of the bait, then it'd be similar.
The parent comment is instead succinctly presenting evidence /observations which build to a conclusion. Not the same thing.
I've been on vacation for a while (can't escape HN) and this discussion strikes me as uptight, granular, and overall a waste of time. Read the article however you want and get on with life.
That's fine, but just sell what you're peddling and put your thesis at the top. A thesis including plenty of personal touch is just fine.
If you're going to have a title like 'LHC nightmare scenario" tell me precisely what it is -- briefly -- in the first paragraph and then introduce me to the fact that we're going to follow your maturing into a physicist and how that went along with the development and end with a good bang of expanding on that nightmare scenario.
Don't lure me in with a grabby title and then ignore it until the end. Make an interesting title, sell the title and the rest of the article in the first paragraph, and then get to the content.
I enjoy reading about the lives of scientists, just let me know that that's what I'll be reading.
Except lucb1e's critique was actually entertaining, because I stopped reading the post myself because it was just so much fluff. All that high school college la-di-da stuff.
Take your comment for example. Your comment's thesis is the last sentence "Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9", but delaying that to the end yields a different effect for the reader than if you began with the thesis and then supplied examples.