My IoB post has attracted the most ever comments along the lines of "why is this so long, tldr <favorite compression>". It's interesting. Kinda fascinating. We've been in tldr/compression mode so long, we've forgotten that elaboration has its own motivating logic and demand.
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This post is in the old refactored-perceptions style rather than the new constructions-in-magical-thinking style. The modus operandi *is* to elaborate along a new vector after compressing along an old one.
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An episode of Rick and Morty (froopyland) plays this tension for laughs, where Rick and Beth figure out what's happened in a telegraphic 10 second exchange, but the other characters in the situation *still* lay it all out in detail
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For a decade+ I've been writing things smart people have been complaining is "too long" and that I should shorten to broaden appeal. The compression fetishists genuinely don't get that there's a type of reader out there who likes a sort of tapestry of implications rolled out
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The elaboration *is* the game. Just like every Hallmark Christmas romance movie has the same tweet-length plot, but an entire business exists based on people watching hours of the stuff
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The thing is, working out the entailment space of an obvious-seeming insight is a kind of grunt work most people don't want to do for themselves. But it still needs to be done to understand why it's important. That's why people like me who actually enjoy doing it have audiences
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I'm reminded by that joke about what UX designers would do to a video game if they applied UX design principles. They'd replace the entire game with a big red button. If you press it, it pops a message saying "you win".
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The fact that I enjoy doing this, see value in it, and enjoy the conversations that follow, is one reason I'm not truly a subcultural person, and am more normie than a lot of sophisticated, subcultural people who read me (with impatience and frustration).
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These readers tend to not just be already where I am, they are often a few clicks of edge-insight ahead of me. I'm typically bringing up the rear of an idea, and trying to drag in people who haven't even been in the conversation so far. It's almost a scaling model.
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For a Very Online person who's 6 months ahead of me, I'm belaboring the obvious in tediously overwrought form. For the reader a year behind me, I'm giving them a shortcut to leap 19 months ahead in the zeitgeist, leapfrogging the subculturalists
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This is why subcultural scenes often seem like they're weirdly caught in a time warp. It is possible to wrangle the discourse around them, via leapfrog mechanisms that teleport a crowd past them via longform wormhole. I think I mixed 6 metaphors in 1 tweet here.
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This is a game that many people who've tried to take writing cues from me don't get. They think 5000 words is about getting 1 year ahead of the subcultural edge. No. You'll never, as an individual writer, manage that effectively. 5000 words = 10x more people drawn in to "now++"
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When I *actually* want to leave the subcultural edge behind and foray out past the frontier on my own, I use a very, very different writing style that is basically incomprehensible to people who don't follow me long term (that's basically what I'm trying to codify as blogchains)
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