Saturday, December 15, 2018

Primer: How to avoid a wall of text in comments, and in life

This was meant to be a reply to someone who submitted a wall of text in a comment in YouTube. I'd decided against posting that reply, because the person used a nickname instead of a real name and photo, and that person's comments showed early signs of aggressive behavior (calling a person who complained about lack of punctuation and grammar a "budddy"), if he felt, that my reply would escalate the debate.

Your comment text anywhere — including in social media — would be much easier to read and quite a bit more useful, if you were to use punctuation, paragraph breaks, and correct spelling. Then people will take all the written comments and the comment writer more seriously. And not just comments, but really most everything you write.

Instead of offering a long search link that tells more about you than you'd volunteer, it would be more convenient to either submit a truncated search link, like this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=q6600+for+sale

or say, that: 'if people would search for

q6600 for sale

— they'd find results starting at the ballpark of U.S. $7.95 to $10.88.'

Currently, your search link tells everyone in plaintext [the commenter posted a very long search results URL], that you have an HTC phone with Android, and it could be inferred from "android-home", that you might have possibly made a voice-based search (via speech-to-text). It could then be further deduced, that your entire comment was dictated through your phone.

It may be tedious, but you will reveal less information about yourself, when you copy the search result, and shorten it in your browser's address bar, leaving only the /search?q=searchable+thing part after the domain.

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