I've been a Helium member for all of three hours, so I don't know how qualified I am to comment. But that's never stopped me before, so what the heck, I'll just run my mouth anyway.

In my not-so-humble opinion, to bestow the title of 'article' upon most of what I've read so far is absurdly generous. Little one-sentence blurbs are not articles. They're blurbs. Article, to me, implies some kind of obvious effort, or scholarship, or careful wording, or at least basic grammatical competency. Length should not be a criteria of good writing, of course, but nevertheless if you skimmed your Helium post off the top of your head, and the whole thing is in lower case and abbreviated in internet slang, then it doesn't have much literary merit. Most of these snippets aren't 'small works of art,' they're simply small. I don't mean to sound like a snob, because I'm not all that brilliant myself. I doubt I would consider this very piece an article. But at least it's coherent. Maybe a decent rule of thumb is, if it would look appropriate in an IM conversation, it probably doesn't qualify as an article. There's plenty of skilled writing and intelligent thinking on Helium, but let's be a little more discerning about what we call an article.

Learn more about this author, Ben Goldfarb.
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