Most books paragraphs are larger than an HN comment without spacing. Since the ability to read books is crucial, it is better to exercise the skill of reading text without spacing than asking commenters to add them.

Books have an incentive to minimize whitespace, as it costs money (paper). Computer screens don't have this limitation so the cost: benefit calculation is different.

This supposition that only book-length text blocks deserve appropriate spacing is fascinating to me.

Do you write code this way?

What I mean is that book length content has paragraphs longer than single not spaced comments. Thus it is very odd that readers have issues with one but not with the other. Moreover making it too simple to parse comments and social network posts, creates users that struggle to read more complex content: as a society we don't want that.

> making it too simple to parse comments and social network posts, creates users that struggle to read more complex content

That's a very strange argument - would you apply it to coding too? Perhaps remove comments so people are forced to interpret the code alone.

In this case it's like if there were centuries of already written code with huge value, all written without comments. You don't want to limit the ability of programmers to read it. However things are very different in their dynamics: reading text without well separated paragraphs is mostly a matter of habit: a simple skill to achieve, so discouraging this ability has very little return. Lack of comments make reading code a lot harder in certain cases, especially since many informations in the comments are non local.

Also I'm not against proper formatting of posts. Just if it's not separated in paragraphs readers should so the small effort of doing it mentally, instead of complaining. Similarly I'm not against code comments (but strongly in favour).

Btw I replied for the sake of argumenting but the two things are not comparable. Just so this test: splitting text written by others in paragraphs is a very easy task you can do just reading the text one time. Commiting code you don't yet understand is impossible: many informations you should write are not implicitly in the code. It's the contrary actually: most good comments are about things that are not evident.

Thank you for the paragraphs, sir.

I still don't agree with your point fundamentally, but I appreciate your work immensely, and that is far more important.

Do we ever purposely complicate UIs with the goal of increasing literacy? If not, why should we do that here?

Gatekeeping perhaps? Surely that's not the argument that you're making.

Literacy needs to be handled in primary and secondary school.

lol, that's one of the easier things to check on the internet, actually, given who you're asking. ;)

My question was rhetorical ;)

Redis is an excellent codebase and an extremely useful piece of software. I am a very grateful user.

I'm just mystified by the idea that functions, modules, and paragraphs are not only useful, but expected, while newlines in HN comments are not.

The best answer I can come up with is that internet etiquette and formatting is constantly evolving. If that's the case, I don't see the issue with suggesting a formatting that might be more effective or accessible.

> I don't see the issue with suggesting a formatting that might be more effective or accessible.

Neither do I, as I'm up-thread with the same point. I just thought it was sort of funny. :)

Paper & ink have a higher contrast than screen.