I am not a fan. To me, these blurbs are little different from those "like if you've experienced this" posts on Facebook. Whereas the author sees these blurbs as "stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence", I see them as guarded attempts at inclusiveness. They assume to be part of an ongoing conversation, but backpedal on individual and intellectual ownership.
I think the origin may be a medium hack achieving the effect of "like if...". On some sites the notifications take the form of "X likes that feel when..." (where "like" is to be interpreted in the Facebook⢠sense of +1 more than specifically enjoyment). From there it has spread to sites that don't display it that way because internet people are used to seeing the format (and who doesn't like a shibboleth), because it's cheap inclusiveness, and in some cases because the grammatical turbidity suggests emotional turmoil without outright saying anything.
I disagree. It's not just some magic thing that popped up overnight. It's a way of titling something that got mangled into a conversation. "That moment when X" - You are meant to show something or write something explaining it and digging into "that moment". If your whole comment is "That moment when you read this article on hubski.", then it's a sentence fragment. Not a sentence. Which is a problem for when you are actually trying to communicate. It's fine for a title, not so when you are trying to get a point across. But then again, writing that is better than nothing. And I suspect that's a large cause of it. People read the very first line of things, and it becomes a memetic way of expressing shallow thoughts that don't really deserve much time/effort. It's also why I'm not particularly a fan of twitter. There's not really a point. There's no room to go in-depth on a topic. It's just a shallow "here's a tiny snippet of what's going on, since you don't even care about that." It's information clutter. Which has become an increasing problem since the masses came online and storage has become cheap.
For me Twitter is useful for sharing links, but not for a conversation. I know they've tried to retool it so that it better enables discussion, but really it's just a stream. The necessary tools aren't there to allow people to filter other people's tweets and selectively-cast their own tweets. Not without third party tools anyway. So past a certain number of follows, it's just noise.