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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried about our attention spans as humans. Mine has certainly gone down. When I was a kid and the internet was less popular and showy, I used to read long-form articles and message boards and do actual reading. Now there's so much content out there it seems to be genuinely hard to not just look for the next "quick fix" in the form of a funny or insightful comment. Reading even a 20 minute article doesn't seem to be the norm anymore.

God only knows how bad this is going to be for kids that are now growing up with youtube.

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Mine went down the hill so much that I can't even read books nor enjoy films / videogames anymore.

I've found that crippling my tech is a nice workaround. Some examples:

Sticking to dead tree or kindle-like devices instead of PDF on a computer / tablet makes me concentrate, finish and think about the book I'm reading.

Playing in some dumbed down console allows me to enjoy a videogame and relax without distractions. I rarely play PC games to the end.

I reach my productivity peak with an OpenBSD netbook without internet connection and some spartan window manager like cwm or wmii. I'm also reading man files regularly now instead of compulsively asking my search engine of choice.

I still hate sitting still for 90 minutes in order to watch a movie though.

I don't see what's wrong with the trend of encouraging people not to use 5000 words when 50 would do.

Not that these kinds of forums correct it: people will still link long arguments that they are unable or unwilling to summarize in their own words.

The problem is that it takes a lot less time to come up with 50 words. 50 words don't require the kind of organization that 5,000 words require in order to stay coherent. It takes an afternoon to write an article. It can take years to write a book. Through bare necessity, longer spans of text require more attention and quality.

Not true! As the saying goes, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."[1]

Writing a shorter post, especially one that summarizes what you'll get out of an article, typically takes more mental work since you have to pack more insight into fewer words.

Writing an investigative article, of course, takes more time and thought but it's not because you're putting more words out; if anything, padding it with flowery novel-style antidotes (that took little research) is how they make them artificially long, and it annoys me greatly.

If what you have to say legitimately requires 5000 words, go for it! Otherwise, your long post is not improving the exchange of ideas.

[1] https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

Counter-argument: Bad writers are bad writers. But a longer piece means the author can't hide the fact that they can't write.

> I don't see what's wrong with the trend of encouraging people not to use 5000 words when 50 would do.

If 50 would do. That's rarely the case.

Most of the time short articles aren't the result of distilling hundreds of hours of wisdom down to an easily digestible few hundred words.

Instead they are the result of dropping all consideration of context and pushing a simplistic view. Or rushing junk out the door.

An article goes from:

"Given our specific set of circumstances (industry, team size, project size, project makeup, technology stack, turnover, strategic direction, short term goals etc) X is great. We considered alternatives Y and Z but discarded them because of A, B, and C. We ran into issues D and E and were able to do F and G to work around them. We later found we had missed risk H in our analysis but we were lucky enough that it didn't come up.

To:

"X is great. We used it to increase our productivity by 10%."

I think we're in agreement, in that I would love for articles to look like the first example you gave. In practice, though, they're more like:

[long anecdote about someone using not-X that mixes in numerous other factors and is vague on what caused what]

[long description about meeting with a subject of the story that painstakingly details their hair, their clothing style, their mannerisms, and the general appearance of the venues]

[much more confusing presentation of the paragraph you just gave]

Also, when people link the article or recommends it, they will tend to give either no summary, or a clickbait(ier) version of your second example, like, "The miracle of X".

Totally agree. There have always been plenty of crappy articles and simply being long doesn't mean being on point.

I.e. just about every article on New Yorker that I've clicked the link for. Ugh, I can't stand that writing style. Please just tell me the relevant information. They should save their justification for all the money they spent on creative writing classes for their short stories that no one will ever read.

But we read material that is significantly more difficult when we are adults, no?

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