Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related to something written in the article as I had just opened up the comments
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
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")
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.
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’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.”
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"
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.
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.
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.
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
Moral: A good TLA can be surprisingly memorable.
(edited)
> Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related to something written in the article as I had just opened up the comments
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
There is absolutely no issue with using obscure abbreviations or acronyms as long as it is defined in the first use.
In scientific papers (where acronyms are common) this is definitely the rule.
IA (I agree).
1 reply →
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")
6 replies →
No, they're just not pandering to children who can't help themselves.
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.
9 replies →
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.
3 replies →
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.”
3 replies →
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've worked in software engineering on Internet things for decades and I have not once heard or seen this abbreviated before.
“Call to Action” is common. CTA instead of call to action is not common.
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.
4 replies →
Call to Arms! ^_^