Hacker News Reader

Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that the set of people who

A) want to read long form writing online, rather than in print,

B) but they don't use RSS, they don't use Readability, they're not using a mobile app, and they use the default website layout instead of the print stylesheets

C) and they're irritated or turned off by weird ads,

D) but they don't use an ad blocker

is a very large set, and I don't think it's growing any bigger.

View on HN

I'm almost certain this is the majority of the people who read the New Yorker online. Among the HN crowd, you might be right (though I doubt it), but regular people just aren't aware of almost anything you listed.

It might be hard to believe, but there are millions of intelligent people out there who read long-form writing online but have almost no idea that websites are mutable. There's nothing wrong with that--they just have different priorities.

That does seem surprising to me. I can pretty much divide up my social circle into people who don't read, people who have print subscriptions to stuff like the New Yorker and Harper's and think that the Internet is mostly good for shopping, and people who have every writer in the universe in their RSS feed and never leave Google Reader.

I can see a lot of the same people in my social circle as well, but I'm not sure they're representative of the norm. I think as geeks who know what HTML and CSS are, own approximately a dozen devices that can access the web in some capacity, and don't think that Greasemonkey is a brand of motor oil or something, we have a tendency to form an everyone-must-be-just-like-me myopia. And even worse, we tend to (even subconsciously) assume that people who, say, don't know what the difference between a browser and Google must to be too stupid to read long-form content online. They're the ones reading MSN.

I'm not accusing you of doing this personally, it's just a recurring deficiency I see in tech communities (and I'm certainly not immune to it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com