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Comment by fg137

7 days ago

As someone who spent years reading academic journals where spelling out acronyms on first occurrence is mandatory, the comments here are jarring. Think about it -- those are academic journals where most people do know what those acronyms mean.

It's such a small but immensely helpful thing to do.

This isn't an academic journal or general purpose news article though. It's a small blog about a subculture. It'd be like spelling out GPU on a blog for building custom PCs, or BDSM on a kink blog.

Spelling it out when 99.9% of your audience doesn't need it actually is the opposite of in-group signaling, it makes it feel like it's aimed at a wider audience, when it's not.

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