Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters.
I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-laconic. Elmore Leonard would approve of that.
> Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes.
This is wild speculation.
Newspaper journalism has always tended toward paragraphs of one or two short sentences at most. It's a stylistic choice born partly out of the physical constraints of newspaper layouts, but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high. This style has always been shared with news articles online, which don't have the same width constraints, but which do have similar considerations when it comes to be easy to skim.
Ultimately, paragraphs are just a tool for grouping that's bigger than a sentence. Writers should use whatever groupings makes sense for whatever they're writing. In this case, it seems to be just an expression of the writer's voice. That's probably how they talk in real life.
People like to find reasons to hate "things nowadays", but this isn't one of them.
This writing style was popularised on LinkedIn, and has the unaffectionate nickname "broetry". A quick search serves up this definition:
> Broety is a style of writing, often popular on LinkedIn, that uses line breaks after every sentence to create long posts that tend to drive high views and engagement. These “broems” usually follow a standard formula: A clickbait-style “hook.” Followed by a somewhat unrealistic conversation.
I used to write like that, because I worked for a Japanese company, and most of my stuff was translated.
Doing it that way, allowed the translator to write their translations inline, and it also helped me to “modularize” my thoughts; so each sentence was a fairly atomic thought.
A paragraph break should be heavier than a sentence break. If every idea is its own paragraph, then paragraphs are no longer a meaningful part of your structure. It's exactly the same as if he simply wrote a wall of text in one giant paragraph -- in both cases, he's getting no organizational value from the structure.
Good writers craft paragraphs the same way they craft an overall idea. It's structured, organized thought all the way down. The author of TFA couldn't be bothered to do any of that. He's leaving it up to you do figure out the structure from his -- not wall; soup? -- of text. He's being lazy and a shit writer, and it's vastly detracting from what he has to say.
Of course, the actual message of TFA is "I'm a shit writer so I rely on an overused brain-SEO shortcut to bludgeon my readers into being interested instead of actually writing something that's valuable to them." So I guess the style fits.
Yeah, this is the "And that boy's name? Albert Eintein." writing style that was used by every SEO/SEM/growth hacker account up until recently. It feels dated now.
I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-laconic. Elmore Leonard would approve of that.