Haha! Point taken!
Although, i would usually frame this to be less about niche-construction and more about cognitive loading and chunking, which is incidentally another favorite topic of mine.
Sadly, with the modern extreme drop in reading of texttypes such as novels, textbooks, and so on - reading unbroken blocks of texts becomes more and more intolerable for the average reader. For that reason paragraph spacing, i think, even of the kind that i would consider conceptually arbitrary and in no service to the point of the text, becomes more and more prevalent.
For example take almost all news outlets online, (i here google "yahoo news article and click:"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/teen-girl-killed-her-dog-103344284.html)
Here, oftentimes a TITLE is longer than a spaced paragraph! This seems to me an absurd way to consume/take in text, but i suppose i am wrong-by-majority.
It was only half a year or so ago that we discussed this in my lab, and my labmate disagrees with me. He thinks it is more about attention spans (and the neuroscientifically controversial term "executive function") more generally. He believes that this smaller "text chunking" is not text specific, but more just like the shortening of videos on youtube shorts or instagram/tiktok etc.
I tend to view this as less of a general thing and believe people can retain quite immaculate abilties of concentration/attention in very context specific ways. But who knows. What do you think?
Do you think there's something specific about the Ists and Pgems that make you like this specifically? Does it have to do with their relevance over time in D2, or perhaps the size of the currency in relation to the/your economy? Or something else? Perhaps you beleive it to have been random that your focus fell there?
I like your style emiq
Honestly the initial comment on it was just being a contrarian ass to poke fun at the wall of text but I do agree with what you’re saying in some cases. I think it honestly depends on the purpose and content of the text, if the text is built to flow in paragraphs it can be jarring to not have that visual accompaniment, it also depends on the spacing of the individual lines in my opinion. Usually in books walls of text aren’t too bad due to dialogue and other descriptions causing variations in line length but somewhere like a forum where the way posts are formatted can cause them to look like a literal block.
I both agree and disagree on it being similar to short form media, I don’t think that the spacing itself is necessarily an issue, I just got a whiff of the aesthetically pleasing formatting you can do in markdown and have gotten used to 1.5x line spacing in other areas. As long as the content is sound, the spacing shouldn’t matter but at the end of the day if humans can make things more visually appealing and comfortable, they do. Brutalist architecture by definition meets its need of function but it never took off because even though you’re technically fine in a plain concrete dwelling, humans will want to make it look nicer for the sake of it looking nicer.
Depending on what you’re writing about using more spacing is an easy way to visually chunk out ideas for your reader and to make your writing more digestible and aesthetically pleasing to the reader. That being said written media has taken a nosedive where quality and reading level is concerned. Just about every article is “x SLAMS y” “z in SHAMBLES you won’t believe what happens” and is gamified to make you click on their links. The average reading level around the world is awful and in the capitalistic pursuit of ever increasing profits news outlets and journals have willfully lobotomized themselves to court the lowest common denominator.
For the Ists and Pgems I just think they’re neat

easiest way for an unlucky new player to start making some money. When you start dealing with them in bulk it becomes really easy to find your margins. Beyond that the ist > hr conversion rate can be subjective and at least +/- 1 in most cases making it really easy to eek out profit