http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick

of PZ Myers when he writes blog posts. Most of his conduct in writing posts on his blog would not be considered civil or decorous conduct here on HN, but he knows his biology, and his reply to the biological aspects of the recently reported claim should be taken seriously. PZ Myers also had one of the first good analyses on the Web of the claim that a different scientist affiliated with NASA had found an "arsenic-based" life form. Not so, as PZ aptly pointed out.

Anyway, PZ continues in his blog post to write, "So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus." He then comments that he can't even count on links to the website for the article staying valid, because of the way the website is administered, but he proceeds to analyze the content of the paper, and to find it below the usual standard of biology papers about newly discovered microorganisms.

In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium. Sometimes good factual points are made with less than ideal decorum.

Even though that's precisely one of the things the author does.

Also I think the key word in "it is not always valid in either direction to judge" is "always". Would you feel wrong incorporating the fact that someone had submitted a resume in badly formatted handwriting as part of your assessment of their application?

On the one hand, you say that the ugliness of a website doesn't matter, it should be taken seriously nevertheless.

On the other hand, you don't take an article seriously because it contains superficial statements.

I mean, ranting is just another kind of ugliness, on language level instead of the graphical level. It's a bad first impression, that's all. I find it strange to apply different standards to both kinds of ugliness.

Visual ugliness is often either an intrinsic quality of something or comes from a lack of effort to improve the visual quality.

Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand, are at best fallacious - they're simply illogical at their core. At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal, in a way that is both wrong and simply mean. It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.

If ranting was really extra work, it wouldn't happen so often. Ranting is actually easier than trying to convey the message objectively and fair.

The differences between a first draft and good writing are editing, editing and editing. And by editing I don't mean just finding better words here and there, but also cutting out lots of irrelevant stuff and rewriting whole paragraphs for the sake of clarity.

So a big text that contains lots of crap doesn't mean it was designed this way. It merely means that the "editing" phase was very short or has even been skipped.

It's a sign that the author took less effort rather than more – on the perfect analogy of poor website design.

> It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.

I strongly disagree. You can always strip cut out these nasty (half-)sentences and see what's left. The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.

>The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.

It doesn't? From an information-theory standpoint, it does, because it makes the valuable parts harder to find, decreasing the overall value. From a human standpoint, it does, because it makes the valuable parts harder to find, and wastes more of our time due to reading through the worthless parts. And since time is at the very least valuable, adding worthless fluff adds to the cost to retrieve the value, decreasing its overall value.

If I had used up several pages to state all the above, would it be worth less to you than those four sentences? Would you be more likely to say "what a waste of time, they could've just said 'X'"? From a social standpoint, would it be more or less likely be voted down, or broadly ignored?

I fully agree with that, as I was just pointing out that the good content is still there, although somewhat hidden. There is a mental barrier (consisting of crappy text) between the reader and the good content, making it harder to find and harder to read.

But this is, again, the perfect analogy on an ugly website, where you also have a hard time finding and reading the good content. Not because of too much text, but because of things like bad colors and fonts. And because the overall structure is hard to grasp, and because the ugliness makes you don't wanting to read into that. Those are all mental barriers, too. It's just a different kind of crap that hides the good content here. (... increasing your search effort, thus decreasing the information value)

The moral question here is whether it should matter that you have to search for the good bits. And in both cases (language as well as optical design) this question is equivalent to the question of whether we should hold up the strong value: "only content matters" (... even if its hidden behind crap).

But no matter how you answer this question, it should be the same answer for both kinds of ugliness. Otherwise you're applying double standards.

This is interesting. I see your point, but I don't want to concede it :)

To me, visual ugliness is far far less offensive than verbal. Probably because there's so frickin' much assaulting our eyes daily, while there's less verbally, so I'm just more used to filtering things out.

This is especially strange when you consider that, in the case of the Real World, visual ugliness is typically persistent while verbal is transient... but for some reason we put up with billboards every few hundred feet along highways, every time we drive anywhere, but not ads every few minutes on the radio. Is it just that (it seems to me that) we have more choice in what we hear / produce vocally than in what we see, so we put up with it less? I.e., muting something is easier than removing / fixing / repainting it. Though for comparison's sake, I don't have a TV and I don't miss it.

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At least part of it, for me, is that I can absorb information far more quickly visually than audibly. And I can sort out visual clutter more easily than audible clutter. I was able to parse their page in an instant, and find whatever I desired (and can search within the page for specific terms). Its ugliness didn't significantly impact my ability to interpret its information (some sites do, but rarely, and certainly not this one). But if someone had read the page's contents to me, inflecting at the wrong points or completely monotone, I would have had to sit for a half hour, listening, paying attention, and would've probably left within seconds after realizing that would be the case.

This is answered by information about the journal that it was published in.

Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I was building a web-based tool under contract for conducting studies for a university's psychology department. I sent them over a functional prototype with a note that I hadn't done any design work on it yet, and they were blown away. Some direct quotes: "that looks amazing." and "we love it".