Take your comment for example. Your comment's thesis is the last sentence "Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9", but delaying that to the end yields a different effect for the reader than if you began with the thesis and then supplied examples.
But time went on and I got tired of it. I discovered time is not infinite even when I have about sixty years ahead of me. I don't read mainstream news because knowing about the latest terror attack (or even positive news, like the latest rare animal being born in a zoo) doesn't help me in any way. Most of the time it just makes me feel bad for or angry about something that I can do nothing about nor affects me in any way.
I still read fiction as a past time activity and as I said, I used to enjoy these articles too, so I understand your point. It's just not the format I like to read for news.
(As for my own comment, burying the main thing, in my defense: it has structure that you can skip past very easily until the last sentence. But again, I see your point.)
also with time, it should be common practice to highlight the tldnr parts.
i could t help but think though, i thought the nightmare scenario for the LHC was to create a singularity and suck us all into a black hole ^_^
Here's my guess on why the article's slow build up irrated many readers: It was the apocalyptic armageddon title and then the first sentence the reader sees is, "I finished high school in 1995."
If the title is bombastic or provocative, your readers are going to want the Inverted Pyramid[1].
Had the author titled it something more toned down like, "Coming to grips with LHC's lack of new particle discoveries" ... the immediate juxtaposition of "I finished high school in 1995" wouldn't have been such a letdown. The phrase "coming to grips" sets up the reader to sit back and relax for a "timeline".
Put another way, if the writer puts a promising title but buries the reader with personal details, it is often seen as a self-indulgent style of writing that does not respect the readers' time.
This is not analogous. If parent had begun the comment with a personal history of experience in reading verbose articles with clickbait-y headlines that then meander to the actual meat of the bait, then it'd be similar.
The parent comment is instead succinctly presenting evidence /observations which build to a conclusion. Not the same thing.
If you're going to have a title like 'LHC nightmare scenario" tell me precisely what it is -- briefly -- in the first paragraph and then introduce me to the fact that we're going to follow your maturing into a physicist and how that went along with the development and end with a good bang of expanding on that nightmare scenario.
Don't lure me in with a grabby title and then ignore it until the end. Make an interesting title, sell the title and the rest of the article in the first paragraph, and then get to the content.
I enjoy reading about the lives of scientists, just let me know that that's what I'll be reading.
Clicking on a title with this amount of drama and urgency, I expect to read something related to the title. So I see this as clickbait of sorts.
Makes me wonder if writing of this type comes from educational requirements having a word minimum, equating wordiness with value.
Similar to YouTube tutorials filling 5 minutes with fluff before the 30 seconds of what I was hoping to see.
I wish there was a "scroll to the topic related to the link you clicked" kind of thing.