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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

There is the trend on so many articles linked from HN to not get to the point until 8+ paragraphs in. They don't even reference the headline and the main point.

Then when the address the point briefly they flashback to the subject's childhood and talk about some formative event that shaped everything to put him into the place where he might take on this problem.

I skim because I trust very few sources to actually deliver on the promise of a headline and I don't care to invest a page or two reading before the article actually starts and I can make a judgement.

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> I don't care to invest

I think this gets to the core of it.

When we're bombarded headlines from hundreds, if not thousands, of articles in a day, how do you know which ones are worth investing your time in?

This is a question worth answering, because many many people are investing their time mostly in headlines, and skim reading. Which means they never get depth, which has obvious negative consequences.

This is not just a question that we should answer individually, but as a society. There is a real cost to disproportionate amounts of headline surfing and skim reading.

Absolutely.

I have spent a good amount of time writing and editing professionally. The absolute worst writing happens when someone believes they are owed attention simply because they wrote something.

The gall! Maybe people would skim less if so many writers weren't cramming tomes down our throats to serve their own interests.

Even then, skimming is a fundamental reading skill and I simply cannot imagine how ignorant I would be if I never did it.

I really don't even mind tons of extra words. It just seems to be some new style (last 10 years especially) that deliberately avoids touching on the theme as long as possible. Also hard-jumping away from the theme frequently to tell other stories. It's beyond digression or elaboration IMO.

And that's when Steven realized what had been causing the illness in tens of thousands of people for over a decade...

- - -

Two poplar trees stood in the backyard of the house where Steven was born in 1958. Not so much a "back yard" as a "back lawn", one of the trees, nearly 200 years old...

Is this a real article or just brilliant satire?

Seems to be some excellent satire, Google shows this page as the only result for the phrase

I just made it up.

This is what I'm talking about.

I almost reflexively closed the tab just from reading this comment.

Someone should make a well-being app that forces you to get up from your computer by displaying enraging text snippets in a modal, with no close button, for 15 minutes.

Oh Lord yes! I'm totally with you. That's a whole separate tier of Hell.

I think they're either chasing gamified time-on page metrics, or are just deeply conceited. Whenever that happens to me I consider myself pranked by the writer.

This is the problem. Low quality journalism and lack of trust.

How do you know if this article is actually good and worth your time? You don't, and the last 20 articles you read are crap. In fact modern journalism is so bad, that once in a week I'll come across a real article, well-structured, providing good background, written by a knowledgeable individual that understands the subject, and oh my, the difference is incredible. I had forgotten journalism can be that good. You know, actually useful.

The way to fix is is to financially support good journalism. It's not easy (there isn't a good system built for this, how many subscriptions can you really pay for?) but it's definitely possible.

> How do you know if this article is actually good

By author's name. The problem is, even on sites, where you can subscribe to not the whole site, but particular section, you usually cannot subscribe to particular author.

Then Twitter provides a way to do it. Find the author at Twitter, and subscribe - usually he or she will be announce there every publication he or she made - you can even trivially gate his or her tweets with links to RSS if you wish, using Twitter groups and IFTT.

By the way, if you want to support the author, using Tweeter you can do this too - likes and retweets are valuable and to promote good author among your subscribers is good for everyone.

The problem is authors don't tweet links on their own works only, more often than not they tweet links on many other things, and more often than not, you are not interested in the everything the author read or discuss, but only in his or her journalist works. Technically it's possible to filter this by parsing the pages from author tweet links, and find there his or her name.

In a traditional magazine, those stories would be in a sidebar or as minor articles on the same spread. The web isn’t conducive to this sort of multiple text flows presented together, so they’re being shoved into the main body of the article. Hopefully we’ll end up with some sort of compromise between these two, but it will take years of experimenting with this new format before the publishing industry really figures out the right solution.

I think a lot of fluff is because the publishers require the writers to have a minimum number of words.

Same seems to be with books. Most books I see are almost around the same thickness and size which might mean the publisher has some influence on the length of the texts.

For what it’s worth, I had one of those make the front page a couple of months ago. I did a big background explanation lead in (that several people commented wasn’t necessary) mainly because I wanted to establish a bit of a “right to have an opinion” on the subject.

Might not have been necessary but I felt like I needed to do it.

A bio can be handy for that.

post hoc "right to have an opinion" blurbs probably work equally well.

When a headline makes a big big biig case, and the body of the text doesn't immediately starts with the smoking gun, then I feel cheated. Sure, background and setting are important, but epistemically they gives us almost nothing.

This article in particular doesn't seem like a good example of your generalisation. No ridiculous childhood flashback, and the headline is a facet of the main point expressed in the first paragraph.

I was saying that I start skimming to see if I'm in one of those articles.

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