It does get repetitive too often. - Edit 1
Before modification by Joel at 31/08/2012 05:10:14 AM
I respect that criticism, but implications long=bad prompt rants on people wanting complexity and nuance dumbed down to soundbites. Coming from people smart enough to know better it is especially annoying. If a post demands too much time someone wants to invest elsewhere, fine, but taking that time out from Tolstoy or Gibbon to say a few hundred characters is just inherently too long to read is ridiculous.
Maybe it's fairer to say that it's too long to read for what they feel they'd get out of it. I think that's an important distinction. There are some people who are what you're complaining about, no doubt about it, but there are also people who feel that the opinion of a relatively random person on the Internet is only worth so much of their time and effort. Doubly so when it comes to a point-by-point debate of that opinion.
It is also fair to say that reading text on a monitor is harder on the eyes than reading text on a page, though how much that contributes to the Internet's relative brevity I can't guess.
TL;DR summary: shit be exhausting, yo.
I was with you till the last part, but "exhausting" is just not applicable to a few hundred words confronting someone who regularly reads a few hundred pages per day. If, to borrow one of Jordans favorite phrases, someone feels the candle not worth the wick, that is reasonable. It is the suggestion thick tomes are well within their capacity but my posts too verbose for them to process that bothers me, particularly when they know the issue is too complex for an *NM* to adequately address.
I think we're looking at not how large of a "tome," but how many times one is willing to read the same page. And/or how much effort to spend deciphering oddball tangents, metaphors, etc.
When people gloss over or flat out ignore things though I feel like they either missed them in the text wall or are trying to obscure them from others, so I end up reiterating them to make sure EVERYONE noticed. I do try to minimize tangents, but it is a holistic world and so many things are interconnected it is not always easy (e.g. Romney invoking Neil Armstrong tonight leads straight into my lengthy "Reaganomics is the reason we have done NOTHING but regress since the moon landing" rant, even though it began with the Energy Crises and Nixon ending the gold standard.) The metaphors, well, I try really hard to find apt ones, and sometimes the best parallels come from unconventional places.
I do take your point though; the preceding was more explanation than excuse. I guess it is a bit late for me to avoid threadjacking (sorry. ' />)