Hacker News is a form of social media, regardless of whether you consider it "real, meaningful, longform discussion" as compared to other platforms.
"If you study enough design and user experience principles then you start to feel" is not quantified enough, imo. Your initial critique was that the paragraphs were "too dense," but we've established it's not necessarily that they're too long. Perhaps if you'd give an example of how you'd fix some of the paragraphs, I'd understand your concern better.
I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself). Looking at the original page in non-Reader mode, it seems like adding graphics every few paragraphs so it's not a literal wall of text would increase readability, as an alternative to making the paragraphs themselves less "dense." I'm not sure what supporting graphics would be on-topic, though, aside from maybe screenshots of some of the cited sources.
> Hacker News is a form of social media, regardless of whether you consider it "real, meaningful, longform discussion" as compared to other platforms.
I mentioned that I barely engage with the majority of the space, that doesn't have any bearing on the classification of hacker news. Though it also clearly shows the limits of "social media" as a useful descriptor.
> I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself)
I was referring to basic text formatting regarding line-breaks, and was not insinuating that you made any defense against formatting in general, I apologize if that was unclear.
You're probably right about graphics, though I understand not all writers want to deal with graphical elements. Sensible line breaks still go a long way.
"If you study enough design and user experience principles then you start to feel" is not quantified enough, imo. Your initial critique was that the paragraphs were "too dense," but we've established it's not necessarily that they're too long. Perhaps if you'd give an example of how you'd fix some of the paragraphs, I'd understand your concern better.
I was not defending the formatting of the page at all (that's a strawman itself). Looking at the original page in non-Reader mode, it seems like adding graphics every few paragraphs so it's not a literal wall of text would increase readability, as an alternative to making the paragraphs themselves less "dense." I'm not sure what supporting graphics would be on-topic, though, aside from maybe screenshots of some of the cited sources.