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Comment by nmg | Hacker News Reader

There's a more subtle point in the article about how digital media have trained us to be less tolerant of delays, more impatient for new information. How often have you gone to a website on a whim, but clicked "back" after waiting 2s for the page to load? -- Nevermind, it wasn't important... I haven't got all day, what's next in my feed?...

This reflexive aversion to interruptions and delays make prolonged focus more difficult. Maybe you don't experience it, but I do, and like the author of this article I notice it most when I try to read a book.

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I devoured books growing up but a couple of years ago I suddenly realised that I hadn't read a book purely for pleasure in a long, long time. I mean years long.

I set myself a habit of 30 minutes each night before bed of reading fiction (because to me it's more pleasurable.)

It's wonderful and I really enjoy losing myself in other characters and their situations. It's not as visceral as movies or TV but a much deeper experience.

It was a big struggle though, but the immersion did get easier with prolonged practice. If I miss a night now I actually feel like I've missed out. I stress that it was a conscious and deliberate effort over several months before it even started to feel natural and effortless again.

I have to agree with the parent poster. In my adulthood, as my responsibilities have grown, I found that I had no time or patience for reading anymore. As it turns out, I just needed to develop an appropriate level of discipline to make reading happen in my new context.

There have always been distractions and there always will be. Excusing ourselves as some kind of lost generation is incorrect and not helpful.

> [...] but clicked "back" after waiting 2s [...]

This is not a new phenomenon. 2 seconds is already well within the "users/viewers tapering off" band in the Nielsen thresholds.[0] The Nielsen study formulated the usability latencies in early 90's, but the effects of measurable delays have been known at least from the 70's.

The moment you're above 1 second, you're making your users wait for something to happen. Apply power law to get an estimate how many are getting annoyed and giving up.

To make things even worse, keep in mind how horrible the mobile internet latencies are for connection handshakes. It's not impossible to have a base latency of ~700ms for any new connection. That leaves you with no more than 300ms to actually serve the content. And for the mobile device to render it...

0: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...

Except that phenomenon is far more attenuated by interaction and the complexity of the medium. I'd argue; to the point perhaps of being an almost new phenomenon.

I find myself disagreeing with you. You are right about this being driven by interaction, and humans needing to see that something is happening. But even if your application responds with "processing request", you have - at best - reset the timer.

If it takes longer than one second from the reset for the data to be shown, the user is again entering the "is this slow or broken?" time band.

The Nielsen thresholds appear to be fundamental to human nature, and I would be surprised if we have somehow managed to teach humanity to be less impatient over the past few decades. If anything, the dopamine-hit fueled online systems have taught the users to expect even more immediate feedback.

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