Suggestion for users: avoiding excessive use of acronyms
The internet slang is full of acronyms. Some are harmless and well known, such as "lol" or "IMHO", but others not so much. Tildes is explicit by design, with a preference for clear text labels instead of icons. In my opinion, that's a great design choice, and maybe we should take inspiration from that in our communications. On Reddit, it's common to find obscure acronyms. Some subs require glossaries to understand their particular lingo. Sometimes this is necessary, but, in excess, acronyms can be annoying and even excluding, especially for non-native speakers. Because there are situations in which the use of acronyms is required, I don't think there should be a rule on the matter. That's merely a suggestion. What you lovely Tilda Swintons™ think about it?
You can use a link to nowhere to provide the meanings of acronyms on hover.
Becomes IMHO, which doesn't go anywhere*, but shows the provided text when you hover over it.
*Edit: it scrolls to the top of the page, but you can get the id of your comment after posting it and change the
#to that, so#comment-3197for this comment@Deimos, it would be nice to have some support for the abbr tag, either by converting that specific formatting (an empty link) to it or by adding it to the supported "HTML-exclusive formatting" tags.
Yeah, hover is problematic. From another comment of mine from ages ago:
@mrbig, in most cases acronyms can just be googled if you don't know what they mean, and not using them is often a PITA (pain in the ass), especially when what they are short for is extremely long and/or you need to use them several times in the same paragraph. But when an acronym is somewhat obscure or very domain specific, making them potentially harder to google, I usually try to spell the full meaning out the first time I use them and only subsequently use the acronym. E.g.
I agree and that's what I do. What I meant to address was the excessive use of acronyms, because in that case the constant searching would hinder the reading flow.
It only hinders your reading flow if you are unfamiliar with the acronyms, but that is something that can be remedied by learning what they mean. And because of that, what is excessive to one person is not necessarily excessive to another who is more familiar with the subject being discussed.
And I also think it's worth noting that if Tildes develops in the way that it's hoped (similar to usenet) then ideally many highly technical niche communities will exist here, and not all of those communities are going to be meant for layman to understand what is being discussed in them... nor should they be.
E.g. If ~science.forensics.comp is eventually created I am not going to spell out what EnCE, Exif or FDC means every time I say them, because it will be assumed that other people in that group already know what they mean... unless it's a thread specifically meant for an outsider to understand (e.g. an "ask" topic posted by a layman).
I agree that there are many situations in which acronyms are required.
BTW, even though I'm being somewhat critical and nitpicky, I do understand where you're coming from. As I said, when I use acronyms that are obscure or domain knowledge based, especially when I am talking to someone I know is not familiar with them, I do try to spell them out at least once before switching to the acronym form... which I think is pretty good advice for everyone regarding their use.
This seems like a good compromise. Besides, what I was trying to address was not justified situations like the ones you're describing, but when the use of acronyms is not justified by a truly complex or specialized subject matter.
That's why I said the abbr tag should be supported, obviously the link solution is a little hacky and unintuitive for readers. On the other hand the abbr tag has default styling that tells you there is hover text (dotted underline).
As for mobile, it's kind of annoying that it doesn't support the abbr tag (or I guess title text in general). This article proposes a bit of a hacky solution (adding the title text in parentheses as
::aftercontent).For me I often use these USENET acronyms to save some typing. If you'll put the effort in to just type out the whole thing, what's the point of the acronym in the first place?
Edit: That H stands for "humble" BTW.
I could add
<abbr>as an HTML-only option, but it's pretty annoying to type them out (so people would almost never bother doing it) and I'm not sure how useful it is overall. It doesn't seem to have any support in mobile Chrome or Firefox at all, I can't figure out any way to get the title to appear.Edit: This seems to be the relevant issue on the Firefox tracker, but I don't see any specific plans for fixing it yet.
On Firefox for Android, I can long press the link, and the title text will show up above a bunch of options for interacting with the link. It's not an intuitive UX flow, and I don't believe it handles long title text well, but I can technically get it to work. (I have disabled Chrome on my Android device, so I can't test it there).
For links with a title, yes. Not
<abbr>tags though - on this page on MDN, there should be a way to get "Cascading Style Sheets" to show up for the "CSS" in the demo output right at the top. On desktop you hover over it, but I can't figure out any way to get it to show on mobile. Long press just selects it and gives me the options to Copy and etc.Ah, I see what you're saying. I cannot get it to work either.
DNWFM: Chrome/Android.
(Does not work for me)
What happens when this page is printed on paper? The hover definition disappears.
Why is this a concern? I struggle to find a use case in which someone prints a tildes comment page. I mean normal links would also disappear if you print them.
Yes, but links are not designed to explain, they are there to assist the reader should the reader want to learn more -- operative "more". The use of hover/linking to provide contextual meaning or explanation or definition is an adoption of a mechanism to achieve something it was not designed for and to provide an excuse for writers who cannot be bothered to define what they publish. Your determination of use case may satisfy you, but its not not a conclusion universally shared.
When you publish something, you should not send your reader on a hunt to understand what it is you are writing about.
That's potentially useful in one-off situations, but it's twice the work, no?
I personally don't think it's an issue on tildes. As a lurker, I see a lot of content and comments and posts and people aren't really even using acronyms beyond the very common and obvious ones. To me, this is a non-issue. I think that the way tildes handles itself inherently discourages very informal slang and the use of acronyms in most forms. From my time here with all us Tildoianorinos Swintons, we/they DON'T use an excessive amount of acronyms. Unlike reddit, there aren't these exclusive and hyper specific communities with too much jargon and a whole index dedicated to deciphering any information on the subject.
I see no point to the suggestion. If there were an excess of acronyms within the different communities and threads, I would agree with you. But that isn't the case from what I have seen here. If an acronym truly and really needs to be described, do it academically (ex: "Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is complete..."). This can help avoid the issue of people not understanding if a word or phrase or whatever has a hover and allows it to be visible in plain text. And if someone needs clarification on an acronym for whatever reason, and can't find it on the internet, than they can easily address this to the user in question privately or publicly.
If it ever becomes a real concern, than sure. Or just something to keep in mind but I think it's fine as is.
I agree with you that currently this is not an issue on Tildes. I'm sorry if my choice of words made it sound otherwise. I was thinking about the feature development of the community. Like you said, maybe there really is no point in this suggestion. This is just something that bothers me in other places and I wished to discuss here, because since we're a relatively new online space there's more openness to mold our collective habits through constructive discussion.
No worries. Part of tildes is wording consideration. I think posting it as a discussion point would have made me inherently read what you were saying as something to consider as opposed to reading it as a suggestion for something that is a concern in the here and now. Pedantry is definitely an aspect of Tildes.
In regards to acronyms, it'd be something of concern in the future as the user base grew and perhaps there'd be more people less concerned about that sort of thing. As for any future implementation, it'd probably be dependent on how the site evolved as more users came to the site.
"Lots of love"? :P
In many fields, it's common to find obscure initialisms (of which acronyms are only a subset). I've seen "CBT" used in a psychology-related subreddit because that's a technical term in the field of psychology - and that can be a problematic initialism to look up because a second popular meaning is definitely adults-only. And, in these early days of Tildes, where every second Tilder works in
ITInformation Technology, the number of technology-related initialisms abounds. Initialisms are not restricted to online lingo - they're everywhere! I agree it's annoying.But I don't think we should ban them.
I have been quietly changing some tags on topics here, to replace initialisms with full phrases.
I learned a rule way back in high school: if you're going to use an initialism in your writing, spell it out the first time you use it. It would be nice if more people did that around here.
We also have to acknowledge that a lot of people these days are using mobile devices to access websites like Tildes, which means it's more difficult to type. These people almost need to use abbreviations.
Ditto... although some are rather unwieldy in their full form and so I leave them. E.g. In ~music
edm= Electronic Dance Music,idm= intelligent dance music, etc. That's a lot of space for one tag to take up and the vast majority of music users should know what they means anyways. And similarly in ~compcpu= central processing unit,ram= random access memory, etc. Also incredibly well known and pointless to change.Not to argue unnecessarily, but I'm an avid music fan and had no idea what
idmmeans because I'm not into dance music. But that's really no different than me not knowing the difference between trap music and house music or whatever other categorization people apply to music.I am going to assume you meant EDM(electronic dance music), Electronic music, and especially EDM is often, at least for me, extremely hard to put into category's and genres. If you would create a map of all the different names and genres it would almost be endless at this point. There are hundreds different types of EDM, and fusions of them, EDM is definitely in its own class of confusion. And it does not help that new types and genres pop up all the time. There is also a common occurrence of elitism when it comes to naming electronic music genres, perhaps a necessity to keep some order. But it´s also quite annoying in my opinion.
No, they meant "idm", as per the parent comment.
Your reply is a perfect example of why initialisms are problematic.
Damn, indeed it is. At least i learned a new phrase within the electronic music genres. Question is, will it help me describe music better or just add to the endless confusion? As someone who are "bad with names" it`s hard to tell.
This a good practice.
Yes, typing on mobile is awful! But, if you type something frequently, you define text expansions for it. I know it's not ideal, but can be useful sometimes.
Maybe you do, but I don't. I'm only vaguely aware of what you're referring to, and it's not a feature I would use even if I knew how. And I'm guessing I'm not alone in not using this feature.
Absolutely.
The only good technological solution I’ve seen for this problem is on r/spacex. They use a bot,
u/decronymto post a single comment after a while with an acronym legend. This solution works great for that specific knowledge domain, space and spacex. I don’t think it would be great for all domains.I think the solution is one of user convention. I try to always spell it out, at least the first time. Say it was PPC, and I used it more than once in a body of text. I would write “Pay per Click (PPC).” Then use PPC later in the text.
Probably not. My favourite example of ambiguity in initialisms is “CBT”, which has very different meanings in the fields of psychology and sex.
A so-called decronym bot would have to be intelligent enough to interpret the linguistic context in which an initialism is being used, in order to begin guessing an appropriate expansion for it.
How about just ABC. It completely depends on the geo-context of the conversation, and that’s just thinking of TV networks. You’re right, a bot capable of this might need near Artifical General Intelligence levels of natural language processing.
Of course! I'm always having to write “Australian Broadcasting Corporation” in full, so as to avoid confusing our poor American Tilders.
As someone with a quite limited vocabulary, none native English speaker/writer, with a lower class education, i cherished the culture of "correct" writing that i used to see on reddit in its earlier days. it was part of the appeal. I am new here on Tildes, but i can see that this type of communication etiquette is important here.
From my point of view this is an opportunity to learn from all of you with better trained skills. I often rewrite my comments over and over, to show respect, and to try and uphold the culture of good communication which i think is important.
Acronyms often are perceived as sloppy writing, of course that's not always the case. But it is something to consider.
No, it's not. Initialisms do have their place. But, like every tool in the English language, they have to be used appropriately and carefully.
I agree with you, maybe often was the wrong word of choice. But i do think some people perceive them as, lets rephrase, lazy writing. It would most likely be a person who do not understand how they work or how to use them i guess.
I think that's a stylistic choice and it'd be too far reaching to have a rule or an official suggestion governing that. I use a few of them (IMHO, OTOH, BTW, w.r.t./WRT, FWIW, FYI, AFAIK, AFAIU, IIRC are the ones I can tell off the top of my head), they are nice shorthands. They are also "acts of identity", i.e. speech acts, that are an integral part of the hacker culture, so that is significan in some ways for the hacker folk (that includes me too, FWIW). I should acknowledge the overuse of these acronyms is off-putting and that it harms communication tho.
Here is a glossary of the "hacker jargon", which includes the definition of most of internet acronyms.
In legal writing, acronyms are used often, but only if the acronym is defined at the first instance of words it stands for. Example: Plaintiff John Smith ("SMITH") is a resident of.... SMITH was in the vehicle when...
This has been a very long standing rule. Why it cannot apply to social media interactions is beyond me.
That's not an acronym. An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of other words. For example:
“Laser” from “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”.
“NATO” from “North Atlantic Treaty Organization”.
You're right, my example does not meet the definition of acronym. Your pointing out my error highlights the resiliency of the policy which can also apply for shortened names, e.g. SMITH. So here's another example that does meet the definition of an acronym.
Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA")....
Not to be “that guy“ (except that I was born to be “that guy”), but even “FOIA” isn't an acronym - unless you say it as a word (“foy-a”). Otherwise it's just an ordinary initialism (acronyms are a subset of initialisms).
I didn't know about "initialisms". And, yes, FOIA is pronounced "foy-yah" and used often in conversation. We both learned something. Thank you, "that guy."
Yes, we did. Thanks!
Because social media interactions are brief and informal, not an exchanging of legal documents.