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595 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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marginalia_nu ◴[] No.43505551[source]
My general takes (as someone who also has a somewhat popular blog) is that

The inverted pyramid is almost always the correct format for your text. I often put the tweet-length version of the post in the title or first paragraph. Get to the point quickly, then elaborate. Means you can bail out at any point of the text and still take home most of what mattered, while the meticulous crowd can have their nitpicks addressed toward the end.

The problem of finding an audience is best solved by being really transparent about what you're about. Inverted pyramid solves that. There's no point to drawing in people who aren't going to be interested. Retaining existing readers beats capturing new readers.

I'm less bullish on images, unless they are profoundly relevant to the text. Illustrations for the sake of having illustrations are no bueno in my opinion. You want to reduce distractions and visual noise. Images should above all never be funny.

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sunk1st ◴[] No.43505573[source]
Wouldn’t that be a regular pyramid? In what sense is it inverted?
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jasode ◴[] No.43505690[source]
> In what sense is it inverted?

The triangle is upside down:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

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azornathogron ◴[] No.43505938[source]
It's funny because from that diagram I really don't see any particular relationship between the shape and its content. You could draw a regular pyramid with three segments and write the same labels on it and it would make just as much sense to me.

If anything a regular pyramid makes more sense to me: you want the smallest/narrowest useful description at the top and then you gradually expand on it as you go down, providing more (wider) context and detail for the key information.

Edit: Of course, it's a widely used term and good to understand in that context; the Wikipedia link is useful.

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1. wonger_ ◴[] No.43506097[source]
I think it's about laying foundations at the beginning, not the length of the text at the beginning. The first sentence/paragraph is the foundation of everything beneath it, whereas the base of a normal pyramid is the foundation of everything above it.