If every reply is pointing out how confusing it is, maybe the original comment is just poorly written.

You’re not going to hear from the people who thought it made perfect sense, so the replies are a pretty biased sample. (This is also true of the parent complaint about reading comprehension, tbh.) But I see three confused replies and three corrections (not counting my own), so it doesn’t seem to be every reply.

I think the problem is that I took an artistic style in an attempt to paint a picture for the reader, but I did it in a long thread on a technical forum where people are probably mostly skimming rather than engaging in literary criticism, so I should maybe have anticipated this would be a problem.

I thought it was fine, I wasn't confused for a moment. The only real problem here is that HN attracts a certain brand of nerds who are inclined to think it's hilarious when Maurice Moss says "Yes, it's one of those", many of whom are likely frothing right now because I just committed a comma splice in the previous sentence.

> The responses to this comment show that people's ability to read and comprehend text has decreased dramatically in the last few years

Or they show that GP wrote an ambiguous piece of text.

Or HN just has a lot more international readers now and English isn't their first language.

I was afraid of this too but it turned out to be presbyopia

Aaron695's comment are always fun to read. For some reason he's kinda 86'ed here.

I (and others) have vouched a few of his comments back to life, he does write a good comment.

I don't know the original reasons for his apparent perma-dead'ing (users can option to "show dead" and see these comments) but I suspect it's due to going fully Australian wih swear words and invectives when he gets a bit passionate about something .. or even just adding colour for a lark, as we do.

An engineering forum may not be the place for creative prose, too.