Comment by crazygringo
23 days ago
It's self-centered to want to communicate well?
It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for.
Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing? Which this site provides no way of doing. That's the problem. Why choose to be inaccessible like that, when it's so easy to add a couple of works and links?
> or poke around out of curiosity
You mean like by following links that are supplied? Because that's my complaint: there are no links.
> it's self-centered to want to communicate well? > > It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for
What is the main country where dying pubs is such a big subject?
For f**ks sake I am not from UK yet it is easy to understand what it is all about from context and language. And I wasn't even aware of that tax change.
Pure US arrogance.
> What is the main country where dying pubs is such a big subject?
How should I know? That's the point. It might as easily be Ireland for all I know. Or maybe pubs are dying in Boston or something?
> For f*ks sake I am not from UK yet it is easy to understand what it is all about from context and language.
I'm happy you're so smart. Not all of us are so lucky, I guess.
> Pure US arrogance.
Who said anything about the US? You know there are people from a lot of other countries who speak English too? If your concern is arrogance, it seems like it's your own that perhaps needs to be dialed back a little.
Suggesting that communication can be clearer isn't a form of arrogance. To the contrary, it's something that comes out of empathy, identifying how communication could help more readers/listeners.
> Who said anything about the US?
I just read your account name.
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It's not for you.
It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.
You want to learn about the thing? You have the entire internet at your fingertips. Click search bar, type "pub rates," boom, thousands of news stories.
If you want to know what's going on, put in the bare minimum effort to find out. If you don't care then ignore it and move on.
> It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.
For private communication, of course.
For public communication? On a .com? It's simple politeness, courtesy, and respect. It's about not wasting other people's time unnecessarily. It's just decency. I'm amazed that you can be arguing against basic decency and respect here.
Basic decency and respect is either ignoring it or putting in the three seconds of effort it takes to understand it, instead of complaining to someone who isn't even attempting to talk to you.
Are you the sort of person who goes up to people in public and asks what they're talking about? Because that's what you're doing. Except you aren't even asking, you're just saying "if you're going to talk in public then you need to explain your topic so everyone can understand it."
Your time isn't being wasted. It doesn't take any more time to think "I don't know what this is talking about, oh well" than it does to think "this mentions England and Wales, I guess it's about some local issue there." Unless you're so self-centered that the very idea of a web site's purpose not being immediately comprehensible to you personally is such an affront that you have to put in time to complain about it.
4 replies →
> Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing
This is fair enough, but they don't make it too hard -- there's an About page, where the first line mentions England and Wales and the rest of the page makes it clear that the issue is about rate increases. Googling something like "england pub rate increases" will get you the rest of the way if you're interested.
(I think us non-Americans sometimes go a bit far with the whole "finally you're tasting some of your own medicine, Yanks!" thing, and I'm sorry some people are being aggressive. But I don't think this site is as opaque as you're suggesting, nor that it makes any more assumptions about its audience than lots of US-based sites do. They're targeting locals, and I think it's fine for a home page to start talking to its intended audience immediately rather than wasting space on an introduction for outsiders.)