It’s so annoying. I’ve been thinking of running an auto-formatter on people’s comments just to stop the people who are so helplessly used to typing in email programs or other places without paragraph spacing that they don’t notice they added a huge empty paragraph in the middle of their post (or who copy-paste from some other program without checking the copy-paste looks right).
Actually some people intentionally use an extra paragraph break as section break/horizontal divider because imo the ckeditor one is way too tall and the lexical one is still a bit too tall
like this is probably 2 paragraphs tall
...
...
Uhh ok it is taller when editing, what. The lexical divider is only 1.5 paragraphs or so after saving.
Or something like a warning box whenever you have an empty dangling paragraph in between two paragraphs with content for non-destructive action, but honestly auto-formatting is probably fine, I can’t think of any use for an empty paragraph except maybe as a bad way of spoiler blocking.
It will never not feel utterly insane to me that people can just not notice such ugly formatting errors, but human minds are diverse I guess.
Collecting comments on LW doing the annoying double newlines. Noticing enough of it to be salient recently.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gi36hyq4e2DRq5hGD/aweirdkid-s-shortform?commentId=wpQMaKFwv9nmEjxpp
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sLytmYq2qwitqTGCY/jaivardhan-nawani-s-shortform?commentId=KuCYBeBJRNspsvgyN
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjzLuhdneE3mXY8we/open-thread-winter-2025-26?commentId=9bEGiuKCSzDd3FP7h
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans?commentId=nMaCBrnd2SpDRvGG3
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BWaELFdcBM8ydnXe6/jmh-s-shortform?commentId=9ctAMHvSSgz6eqqBX (raw ChatGPT copy paste I think)
*https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KYnM5ZRgaDA4isbbw/jemist-s-shortform?commentId=aAv22CDagTnuXnFBk
*https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RzPyDcNgqnEvspZSu/tristantrim-s-shortform?commentId=ZgzHoTtigqQW4sDj9
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fGpQ4cmWsXo2WWeyn/personality-self-replicators
**https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JjzdRJjwLQKWkXakC/the-new-lesswrong-llm-policy-is-worse-than-you-think?commentId=m8zBJx8YLWfqWSiof
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NQESGMMejxsnEJsTh/my-willing-complicity-in-human-rights-abuse?commentId=HidYrzuuTC2AsjAYn
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NQESGMMejxsnEJsTh/my-willing-complicity-in-human-rights-abuse?commentId=i4FD7onTAJjgNQR9p
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RA7jb5h6sjnzivKv3/peterbarnett-s-shortform?commentId=uopzHsLG6RfgeH6As
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zombjEubpz6pcPPHL/mass-surveillance-red-lines-and-a-crazy-weekend
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xDfcLHzdA9tbK6k6X/scaffolded-reproducers-scaffolded-agents (footnotes)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjzLuhdneE3mXY8we/open-thread-winter-2025-26?commentId=3cqsf8oxmnJg4j6dq
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nQd64RC5vXyqiFZLD/slack-in-cells-slack-in-brains
*Paragraph break as a smaller horizontal divider
**Separating two quote blocks
It’s so annoying. I’ve been thinking of running an auto-formatter on people’s comments just to stop the people who are so helplessly used to typing in email programs or other places without paragraph spacing that they don’t notice they added a huge empty paragraph in the middle of their post (or who copy-paste from some other program without checking the copy-paste looks right).
Actually some people intentionally use an extra paragraph break as section break/horizontal divider because imo the ckeditor one is way too tall and the lexical one is still a bit too tall
like this is probably 2 paragraphs tall
...
...
Uhh ok it is taller when editing, what. The lexical divider is only 1.5 paragraphs or so after saving.
Ah yeah, we should sync up the spacing between editor and published content here.
Btw LW is already trimming empty paragraphs in the top/bottom of a comment
Or something like a warning box whenever you have an empty dangling paragraph in between two paragraphs with content for non-destructive action, but honestly auto-formatting is probably fine, I can’t think of any use for an empty paragraph except maybe as a bad way of spoiler blocking.
It will never not feel utterly insane to me that people can just not notice such ugly formatting errors, but human minds are diverse I guess.