Vent: I spent 8 years formatting my forum posts wrong and nobody told me

I was reading a thread about internet trainwrecks and realized everyone uses line breaks between paragraphs but I've been jamming everything into one giant text block since 2016. It took a mod in a gardening subreddit posting a screenshot of my 500-word wall of text with a crying emoji for me to finally get it. How did you figure out you were the unwitting star of a dumpster fire and not just another commenter?

2 comments

2 Comments

sammartinez8d ago

eight years is wild... like i'm genuinely in shock you went that long without someone pulling you aside. i had a similar thing happen in a gaming forum where i kept using the wrong thread tags for months and nobody corrected me until a mod literally moved all my old posts into some "formatting graveyard" thread as a joke. @morganmartinez i feel you on the emoji thing though, i used to end every sentence with "lol" back in 2014 and thought i was being friendly until someone told me i sounded like i was laughing at everything they said. the gardening subreddit screenshot is brutal but at least it snapped you out of it... imagine if you had kept going another five years without knowing. i still check my old posts sometimes and cringe at the formatting but it feels good to fix them one by one.

morganmartinez8d ago

oh man the "jamming everything into one giant text block" part got me. i was that person too but with emojis. i used to put a smiley face after literally every single sentence for like two years. nobody said anything until my friend sent me a screenshot of one of my old reddit posts with a caption like "why does this person type like a bot from 2009". brutal but fair tbh. for you, just hit enter twice between paragraphs from now on. it makes a huge difference in how people actually read your stuff. also check your old posts and edit them when you have a free afternoon. i went back and fixed like 40 replies once and it felt weirdly satisfying.