Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service
longform.org
longform.org
I gave up on the site when I realized that I was spending more time scrolling for something interesting than actually reading articles. Even now, out of their top 10 "best of 2021" I find only 3 of those even remotely interesting, and IMHO one of them is garbage (I read it when it came out).
The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane. The Guardian's article on what will happen when the Queen dies [1] is my go-to example of long form journalism done right. longform.org articles always felt more like "here's a sad story about some global issue", which is not the type of article I want to read during my commute.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
But filtering and discovering new things is somehow much more rewarding than reading or understanding itself.
When I get a chance, I might make myself a pocket to Amazon Polly pipeline or something. The difficulty is that to make this a commercial product would almost certainly be a copyright violation and not ethical to the actual writers anyway.
I'd love to do the same for a lot of my email but I don't know if I want to upload that and I'd have to do quite a bit of parsing to get the meat and skip the re: re: re: re: so that's out there a bit.
I'm a fan of high-quality, significant, long-form, content.
I'm ... not really seeing that here. A few good pieces, but that's from their own self-admitted "best of".
If not necessarily an outright failure, then a mismatch of goals and attainment.
And as has been frequently noted on HN (occasionally by myself), length itself is not a marke of quality in writing. Requisite complexity is, that is, the structure of the piece itself should be suited and fitted to what it is it addresses. Longform wouldn't be the only place the false equivalence that "long" == "good" seems asserted. The New Yorker, which likewise has both a long legacy and recent history of producing good high-quality long pieces, also seems to fall far too frequently into the trap of mistaking length for quality.
I appreciate the effort and intent. I'm sorry to see the attempt failed. But execution was in fact lacking.
Switching formats without improving content won't address the core problem.
May I humbly suggest this long-but-interesting 2008 New Yorker article about elevators, if you haven’t already read this seminal work in the genre?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-do...
(I subscribe to the Guardian, so I don't know if there's a paywall in front of those articles, my apologies if there is)
I think a lot of long form content sadly is long in order to be long, not because it has particularly much to say. Instead you get an overlong mess of barely relevant anecdotes and flourish that don't add to anything other than the length of the piece.
The problem with quality writing is that it takes time to think through and time to produce, and time is not something that is afforded journalists and writers today.
But over the past few years it drew in the attention of people who really don't have much to say, and stretch these videos on, talking in circles, as if longer video = better/more interesting.
I recently saw YouTube recommend me a video essay on the Nickelodeon TV show, Victorious, that was literally more than 5 and a half hours long. Admittedly I haven't watched it (for obvious reasons) but I just can't imagine it really justifies that entire runtime.
totaly sucks and something i really miss about having evwryone put these little tidbits in writing on a personal blog is that you can skim. even as annoying as recipe sites are, you can at least scroll down to the ingredients.
I absolutely hate video tutorials, it's a waste of so much time.
This seems intuitive, and also provably false.
Joe Rogan is currently running the most famous and successful podcast in the world, and those conversations routinely go over three hours.
Dan Carlin is on a lower tier, but still highly successful, and his podcasts are far more polished and produced and integrate huge amounts of research, and the runtimes are even longer than Rogan's.
Maybe written content doesn't afford the detail you're looking for, which kind of makes sense, because you can listen to a podcast while commuting, exercising, showering or doing various chores, but you can't read doing almost any of them. But I'd argue almost anything done in an article can be done in a podcast or audiobook, so maybe the current failure of long-form journalism is not realizing that the medium has moved on.
So I think you’re right but it isn’t the medium that’s dead. More like, it takes up a weird spot on the ROI curve to read through that’s rarely worth the time.
Since time is of the essence, they also don't go off on diatribes about California divorce laws, or posit personal theories about alien life forms, before getting to their question.
In some ways, this is not too dissimilar to articles on the web where articles that could be very short are padded out with extra paragraphs to help with SEO, though in this case the "searcher" is the reader looking for long, meaty articles.
Right, and that's why longform.org was a great resource, because they curated long form content.
FWIW, one of the long form articles I've most returned to in my mind, discovered via longform.org: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-s.... See also https://longform.org/archive/tags/lost-at-sea, though I can't vouch for any of those added over the past 5 or so years, and that tag is missing some related stories, like the story of the father and his autistic son swept out into the Gulf of Mexico.
I have been thinking about this for a while and it now just clicks.
Arts & Letters Daily : https://aldaily.com/
Aeon: https://aeon.co/
Nautilus: https://nautil.us/
Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/
The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/global
https://undark.org/2017/12/13/freelance-writers-nautilus-pay...
I used to write more essays but now often post links to http://jakeseliger.com
Literary Hub's weekly roundup is another good source of essays that take maybe 10 minutes to read. I find the meat of the newsletter is the bottom where they link out to excerpts from new books. https://lithub.com/. One good example: "Did the Russian Wizard of Oz Subvert Soviet Propaganda?" https://lithub.com/did-the-russian-wizard-of-oz-subvert-sovi...
But would it have survived as anything more than a personal bookmark organiser (ie pinboard) anyway?
The killer feature of delicious was popular links, which has since been used as the main structure for forums such as Digg (originally), Reddit, and Hacker News. Curated feeds on Twitter/FB/etc also work to share popular links.
For example, you can use r/longform to find the same kind of links delicious would have provided. https://www.reddit.com/r/longform/top/?t=year.
This is now the chance to get to them and re-read the best ones, without being distracted by new things.
The other pain point in curation is the relentless poaching. If you find any success doing it right--by keeping tabs on creators directly--soon other lazy (often more popular) "curators" will be using your hard work as a major source of their own links, without giving any credit.
I wouldn't consider it poaching for content I curate to appear here; to the contrary, I sometimes share relevant links on HN myself. I am mostly put off by sites that claim to be hand curated by a few people, and then a significant fraction of their links are clearly based on my efforts. I don't want to name names, but there was a very popular curated site/newsletter that was leaning heavily on my work for a few years. Fortunately someone there seems to have realized it was uncool, and they backed off.
Edit: To be clear, here I am discussing my site's curation of third-party links. We also create our own content, but I don't share those articles on HN myself, I would consider that gross.
Not a good thing
And by love I mean absolutely despise.
State the fact and be done with it.
(As I've just done here.)
If the writing has value, the fact will be immaterial to that value, and the true reward for the reader is in the telling of the story, the narrative developed, the introduction and interrelation of facts, concepts, characters, strengths, and flaws. And yes, telling those, where they are material to the story, takes time, but also is its own constant reward.
We have classics of literature and mythology. The stories are well known. The boy loses the girl, then wins her back. The dog dies. We all die. A tree grows in Brooklyn. George slays the dragon. Cinderella wins the prince. The Wicked Witch is overcome. Jesus dies, then returns. Buddha is enlightened.
Those facts don't matter to the value of the story. It's the details built up along the way, the morals and principles exposed, which do.
Build your stories around those, then pull away all that truly does not matter.
(This sounds simple. It's much harder than it seems.)
I have never finished a single Cal Newport book because of this, and they're only about 250-300 pages as it is. All the value can be found in the first 50-75 pages. It's pure fluff after that.
I'm surprised "book summarization" services like Blinkist haven't become more popular.
https://t.me/+pwdYcfBiV1I3Njll
Users clicking on it will need Telegram. I plan to have a private group to share/discover and amplify other best finds. Each of the links posted here is personally vetted. Long form links are encouraged. Reactions are switched on by default (you can react to the posts). Forwarding is restricted.
My use of Longform declined as long, intricate articles became something nearly any publication could pull off, but I think that Longform deserves some credit for bringing about that change in journalism.
There are new forms of journalism emerging and new curators will appear to popularize them.
Mostly they curate other's long form journalism, but also have some of their own and usually quite good. They'll link out to eater, ny magazine, aeon, nautilus, outsideonline, nytimes, propublica (super recommend these) and anyone else producing good content.
Eater has quite a good collection of long form articles on food and culture, if that's your thing.
It's as if I have a guilty, deep-down feeling that the longform stuff is the really good, nourishing stuff, and anything else is basically fast food.
But perhaps this is just not true anymore. Maybe it never was. I always come back to the adage “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
When I think of a garden-variety longform piece, it is often one or more narrative components bolted onto lots of historical and background material. There is some new stuff, some reporting, some original thought -- but always laced with flourish and narrative.
Occasionally this is fun to read, but more often I just don't have the time. There is a time and a place, but as a matter of course, it's not practical anymore. One must carefully choose which long pieces to devote time to, whether they be longform articles, books, or otherwise. There is just so, so, so much to read.
I wonder why authors of this kind of thing don't put more energy into providing TL;DR executive summaries. Is it because it obviates their job? Or is a summary somehow less than the real thing?
My opinion is that the information loop has entered hyper velocity and anything long form cannot be mainstream anymore.
If I take my case as an example, the only activity where I focus for more than 5 minutes is coding. I skim news just reading the titles, occasionally reading an article, I can't watch a full length movie without opening a browser on the second screen, I listen to audio books while driving.
The short story is now a dead artform. Even 'trilogies' aren't a thing anymore - anything less than five thick tomes doesn't sell.
Movies are now three hours long, but even that seems to be a half-measure and the cinematic form is now being replaced by miniseries.
(I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.)
I think we all still agree on that!
Thank you very much I needed a good laugh this morning!
Yes, most people have enormous amounts of discretionary time. Long form content has a pretty large base that enjoys the content, and it's some of the best content that appears on HN.
To condense, I find the notion that no one has time simply ludicrous. As otabdeveloper4 mention, it's remarkable how content has grown and grown rather than the opposite.
Having said that, I don't understand the site. By appearances some people post some links of some content that they enjoyed? What is there to "shut down"? Are we to believe this was some sort of business or something?
Refs: https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-woul...