Hype on HackNews and Silicon Valley

One of the consequences of refusing to drink the in vogue kool-aid is that you remain sober and take in the full brunt of the silliness going on around you.

The technology industry overflows with such silliness, like any credible geek I spend too much time reading HackerNews even when I don't want to.

One odd phenomenon I have observed over the past few years is the fact that there is a rather peculiar writing style in Silicon Valley, seemingly meant to make writing more efficient in conveying hype.

Specifically, the desire to create emphasis when otherwise the point being made is prosaic has lead people in Silicon Valley to come up with this odd writing style where adverbs are deployed in ways that no decent writer would. Let's just say a good chunk of "influencers" in SV suffer from Hype-Nitis.

I have gleefully collected a small sample of these gems on HackerNews over the past couple of years:

atrociously bad
crucially important
astonishingly successful
growingly wants to be secular
closely involved and crucially helpful
severely unique and an incredible thing to witness
Something is dramatically wrong with her
It is an exceptionally great salary
early decline are vastly significant
made an amazingly interesting point
It was a hugely important quarter
You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
team massively grew
the hugely important and popular site
startup to a significantly larger organization
hugely newsworthy figure
This is insanely sad. This brilliant woman had so much left to share with us.
The OP is impressively throrough
informatively good

Comments

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