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Comment by alaithea | Hacker News Reader

I haven't looked at their script. I'm curious whether they transmit selected text, as Daring Fireball seems to suggest, or only copied text. If the former, they're going to get a lot of false positives from those of us who neurotically select blocks of text on pages for no reason while reading.

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I guess at least now I know I'm not alone. I'm very OCD about clicking on random words, triple clicking on paragraphs to highlight them entirely while I'm reading or just dragging my mouse over random amounts of text on the page. I don't know why I do it but it drives pretty much everyone reading the same thing as me on the same computer insane.

I do all of this, too. Especially selecting paragraphs. Actually, now that I think about it (which I do fairly often, tbh), this is one of the reasons I've stayed with Firefox. It only highlights the text of the paragraph. WebKit highlights to the end of the line, and some more, I think. It isn't as visually appealing, at all.

We had an intern at our company for a week, a smart guy who is graduating from high school, and he pointed out all of these things about me. I also manically tap caps lock with my left pinkie.

I'd rather not think about this part of me too much, especially when it comes to picking browser based on how it renders (manically) selected paragraphs.

No it doesn't, at least, not any more :)

Chrome 6 on OS X, triple-clicking on the word "WebKit":

http://grab.by/4DKh

My cousin does this as well. When she reads something online she highlights the half-line she's reading at the time. You can always tell when she's gotten distracted and started reading something because there's a constant clicking coming from her mouse.

I do this as well, more of a "track where I am when I'm reading" when I get distracted by something else, I quickly return to the spot.

I dislike it when something like WSJ puts those 'learn more' links after you highlight something right under the cursor.

That's fairly common (I do it too). I remember reading one of MS Office PM's blogs (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/) and he mentioned they had to do work on the minibar in Office 2007 to not annoy people who select while reading.

It still annoys the hell out of me.

I do this too and I think its the same part of my brain that likes the bounce of the window on the iPhone after an inertia scroll. I pull the window down over and over when I'm bored. It's like bubble wrap.

Everyone does this sort of thing! The first time I saw it named (as "One Free Interaction") was this blog post: http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/01/one_free_interaction.h...

caught myself at it while reading your comment, always good to know you're not alone

It’s not neurosis; it’s not OCD. It helps establish a line for your eyes to follow when flicking back to the left side of text. It’s just like the ruler or piece of paper that speed-reading and sight-reading teachers instruct students to use.

Notice that you will hardly or never do this on narrow columns of text.

Not everybody highlights text in a functional way. In fact, what I'm highlighting usually has nothing to do with what I'm reading at the moment, and is more of a nervous habit/tic than anything else.

You're making the assumption that the two things are mutually exclusive. Not all functional behaviors require overt mental processing.

It's selected text. And they're trying to spin that as a feature (i.e. they can show you the section of text has the highest "user engagement" based on relative number of selections)

That sounds like a better feature than the inserting of text into the copy. I would say that over a large same of people selecting text you could see engagement patterns.

I wonder how representative the "selects text while reading" crowd is.

It sounds more reliable. I'm not sure about better, though - I can only see it helping to identify unclear writing and witty editorialism, and I only want more attention on one of those.

It seems to only report back when you actually copy the selection (either ctrl/cmd+c or right click+copy). Just looking at the headers, the JS is obfuscated and I'm too lazy to look at it.

Just joining the chorus of "me toos"... Didn't think it was that prevalent, I wonder where the instinct comes from? Anyone have any fun pseudo-scientific theories?

Maybe it's the equivalent of sliding your finger under the line of text you are reading? Like they teach small kids in school.

That is a nice theory, but I don't do that when reading. Why would I highlight on screen, but not use a ruler edge when reading?

What if it's not to help follow the line for reading, but to "feel" the page as you read it? A proxy for dealing with immaterial bits on a screen instead of holding and feeling the paper of a book or magazine? Showing you have some sort of control over it.

I think it's just that highlighting is neat. Some portion of my brain is pleased by the flashing/changing colors (different than a flashing ad, etc., since I'm controlling the action).

Indeed, I highlighted your comment at least a few times while reading it.

The only name that I've seen for this is "impulsive highlighting". There used to be a Wikipedia article about it, but it was unfortunately deleted since it cited no sources.

http://awurl.com/C8uVAsoJN

(Yes, I know it looks like a questionable URL, but it's all I could find since, as I said, it was deleted).

I also do this, but I think it is at least slightly correlated with what I am reading. So the false positives aren't really false, they might represent, to a degree, what people are spending time reading.

Also, this would be really to filter out, the amount of highlighted areas would just be ridiculously large.

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