It's called long form journalism and it's been a thing for a while; you should avoid Hunter S. Thompson if it's something you hate.

People poorly imitating Thompson is what do avoid.

It's called "gonzo" and most writers are bad at it, but it fills pages.

This is not long form journalism or HST's Gonzo style; it's Striptease.

I think I realize what it is now. It's this sites refusal to allow meaningful links. So we get crap like, "Faced with change, an all-female indie dev team evolves to a higher form" . This is a completely meaningless title for a link but I click on it anyway, find a wall of text, try reading a bit to see what it is about and...nothing.

It's not that I have a short attention span. I have multiple options and delving into an unknown article which has the only merit of being linked from hn just isn't good enough if they don't want me to know what it's about either.

At least if I have an idea what they're aiming for I can read it critically, but no luck there either. I despair that people can write so well and yet write such crap.