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Comment by bootsz | Hacker News Reader

I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of very-short-form content on a daily basis. On HN and elsewhere on the internet you can consume a huge number of distinct ideas in a very short time. This causes me to now be impatient with long-form pieces where I find myself wanting to just "get to the point already". It's a quantity vs. quality problem. The internet tends to favor quantity.

It's something I'm trying to work on because there's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads (and a lot you get out of them that you can't get out of little snippets and quick articles).

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I’ve experienced this off and on but I disagree with the cause.

The only reason that HN and Reddit interfere with my ability to read books is because they both compete for the same ~100 waking hours each week that I don’t spend at work. If I don’t read any novels for a few months it’s hard to pick one up and actually get through it. If I just finished reading three books in the Dresden Files or Vorkosigan Saga, picking up book #4 is a no-brainer and with Kindle it’s easy to slip into the habit of binge-reading. Like, I’m halfway through the book but if I call in late tomorrow I can probably finish the book tonight. And then a couple months later, if I haven’t been reading books, book #5 can seem like a total chore.

What kind of long-form content do you have problems with? All kinds, or just long-form articles/journalism we're told we're supposed to enjoy?

I have huge problems with the latter, but that's just because I hate fluff, and most of those articles are 10% content and 90% offtopic musings about boring things (like life stories and emotions of people tangentially related to the main theme). Wanting a piece to "get to the point already" is healthy IMO, as it's a natural defense mechanism against wasting time.

There is an invalid assumption that I believe underlies a lot of those "kids these days have no attention span" observations - that all content is automatically deserving to be consumed. It's not. On the contrary, most content is pure waste of time. Given how limited our lives are, and how flooded the world is with content these days, being extremely selective and intolerant of bullshit is the right, healthy thing to do.

> 10% content and 90% offtopic musings about boring things

The worst problem I have with them is the structure. It is bait and switch, structured a bit like US TV Shows:

"Coming Next - you will learn the extraordinary conclusion X reached", but first let's go back 20 years to X formative years. Back to the present, X started working on Y where he made his huge discovery, but before talking about it let me give some context. And now you know why it is important, and X has been taking an original approach, to really understand how original, let me explain you all the other approaches first, except I won't explain any of those fully, just jump back and forth from one to the other, not necessarily in chronological order, just to build some sort of bullshit tension leading up to ... the sister of X explaining what she thinks of X and now we are back 40 year to learn about X grand parent living in the rigour of communist somewhere would create the core family value X is the present culmination of ...

You can't even reach directly to the end because the conclusion it is wrapped in pages of semi-intellectual musing.

edit: Make me think also of the semi-intellectual vocabulary. Nothing should be said clearly. X didn't have a dog, he "had a canine confident that contrasted with the rest of the family which was generally more attracted to the feline order"

Definitely this. I'm currently carrying a book (as always), and still here I am reading HN. I've long observed this happening, but the novel reading habit is surprisingly hard to re-establish.

>I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of very-short-form content on a daily basis

I'm curious. Is your difficulty reading long form in paper form, or on a device? Have you tried reading actual paper (or even an ebook that is not "connected")?

When I switch to physical paper, it's almost as if my brain goes into a different mode.

I think it might be a bit easier on paper but I still struggle with it regardless of the medium.

"there's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads"

Is there? Or are you just saying that because it's expected and you'd feel embarrassed if you said otherwise?

Humans are pattern matchers, what if we see patterns more easily from many examples, rather than one? What if we extract patterns more easily seeing them from many points of view instead of just one author?

Is a neural network better trained on one high detail photo, or a dataset of many photos?

Someone's got to have a better comeback than a downvote. You know where there's "obviously immense value"? Oil fields. People literally kill to control them.

Nobody kills to take control of a library.

At best you could say people get into massive debt for education. But at the same time, education is clamouring for online courses, videos, conferencing, teachers, interaction, and textbooks are widely considered a problem - low priority, low quality, a racket, going back years since Richard Feynman's famous story about reviewing them at least.

Books, especially academic books, are increasingly given away for free online - when people will pay for entertainment.

How many people learn from a teacher, a course, or learn by doing, vs how many actually learn from books?

People don't treat books the way they treat things they value. There may be immense value in books, it's not "obvious".

> Is there?

In my experience, yes. Some of the best & most memorable stuff I've read were in books both novels and non-fiction.

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