Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.

CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.

I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.

Wait, the acronym for "Tap To Action" is "TPA"?

Nah, I meant to type TTA but now that I have mistyped TPA I should make that Tap Pour Action - Tap for Action (I am not trying the double meaning here, just to clarify).

I've worked in software engineering on Internet things for decades and I have not once heard or seen this abbreviated before.

It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.

I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”

What the hell does GTM even mean?

How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?

Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.

Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.

If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.

In a B2B company context, the Go-To-Market or GTM team means the whole sales team, plus everybody else who manages customer accounts. Customer Success, etc. as opposed to the product parts of the company.

Again, why wouldn’t that be the common approach?

Involving people who should care doesn’t seem like a revolutionary idea.

“Call to Action” is common. CTA instead of call to action is not common.

It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"

I don't know why people refuse to look things up.

They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.

Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.

Who's going all the way to Google translate to copy and paste? You just select the text and right click/long press and select translate.

I'm not sure what you are attempting to add by being pedantic while not affecting the conclusion in any what whatsoever.

Boy are you going to be surprised when you find out that there is an entire French literary tradition that doesn't concern itself with who does and does not speak the language.

Is this some snarky reddit comment?

Yeah, there are literally billions of people in the world who don't speak English. And yet HN is de facto English.

Do you see many people commenting on HN in French? How's that working out for them? Are they succeeding or failing to communicate?

It seems that people are, for the most part, succeeding in tailoring their message for their audience.

They think it makes them sound knowledgable.

I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")

Without context ATM could be Asynchronous Transfer Mode or automated teller machine.

At the moment

> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.

The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.

So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.

And "ATM machine" tells me most people think the acronym is the name instead of an acronym.

I don't know why people can't take 0.3 seconds to type "what does CTA stand for?" into their favorite search engine/LLM/text-message-to-a-friend. This is "Hacker" News, yes? What do hackers know how to do? Learn things, yes?

Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on approximately every single post that has an abbreviation that someone doesn't know.

To be exact, it takes more time than 0.3s to type it, even for a fast typer.

I don't know why people can't not exaggerate things? Doing it is certainly making their message less reliable, not more

I googled it and it was defined as a marketing term, so I figured that can’t be the right one in a comment about freedom of speech.

It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTA

The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.

Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.

A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.

I don't see why that's the author's responsibility to manage this for you.

Because... that's how communication works? Managing the understanding that readers will take away from what you've written is a pretty central definition of the author's job.

It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained for the reader to get the basic meaning without research. How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep up?

I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.

You are absolutely right that communication need not be effective.

No, they're just not pandering to children who can't help themselves.

There is absolutely no issue with using obscure abbreviations or acronyms as long as it is defined in the first use.

IA (I agree).

IAOTM (I approve of this message)

In scientific papers (where acronyms are common) this is definitely the rule.

The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.

I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.

I really don't know why people refuse to look things up. And I don't understand how the parent's comment isn't off-topic and unnecessary and pedantic and mine apparently is. This place is a goddamn cesspool.