Lore Dump vs. Negative Space

Craft

I've been thinking about this... the way some short pieces start feeling like textbooks... you know, where the world-building just smothers the actual plot. There is this weird tension between explicit history and that quiet, negative space that lets a reader breathe. If every single cultural nuance is explained in the first page, we lose the chance to actually discover the place... it's like being given the answer key before the lab experiment. But then... I started wondering about something else... does the kind of silence matter? Is there a difference between a detail that is omitted to create mystery and one that is omitted because the author assumes we already know it? I'm fascinated by that distinction... the intentional void versus the accidental gap. Where do you draw the line between necessary context and over-explaining? When does a detail stop being a breadcrumb and start being a brick wall?