Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by quickben | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

quickben·

Do people prefer this reading experience on mobile?

Personally I found it very hard to want to continue reading with all the interruptions.

View on HN

No, this is insane. Having to scroll a full screen for a single sentence — who thought this was a good idea?

It's more a photo essay than anything else.

It's the kind of thing the NYT has been doing since Snow Fall back in 2012 [0], to mixed feelings [1][2][3].

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-y...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020689/the-new-york-times-fight...

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/...

Perhaps on mobile the experience is missing, but on my desktop the article is able to convey its message through pictures, sentences and short paragraphs.

Also on a desktop, I had to "restart" reading everytime I scrolled through a whole page. Lost interest, which is quite a shame because the content seems actually interesting and some of the pictures are very pretty, but the reading experience is just abysmal.

I do.

The pictures are as much a part of the story as the words and this format lets the pictures be a part of the flow of reading.

I think it's fantastic on mobile and desktop.

I did a web scraping project of all major news publications in the US and the NYT was by far the most difficult to parse because their article structures are extremely arbitrary and inconsistent.

Is there a name for this kind of experience, where scrolling triggers different kinds of animation?

I can think of a few choice words.

Scrollytelling

I believe more time was spent on formatting the page HTML/CSS than research on the subject matter itself.

Considering how often NYTimes publishes essays in this format, I doubt it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com