Hacker News Reader

Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

I am sorry to see them go, but more for the principle than for the site itself.

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...

View on HN

When I was seven years old, I had an uncle with a grey beard and an eye-patch that would take me out on walks and tell long stories about his history as a sailor in the merchant marines. He had been at sea for fourteen years and visited just about every country, even the landlocked ones he would say with his signature smoker's laugh. Uncle Robert tapped his pipe on the heel of his boot as we stopped. Not that his tale stopped, it would go on and on, but on this particularly vibrant autumn day I didn't mind that the old man didn't quite seem to make any point in his meandering story with endless fractal-like asides as the dappled sun played teased the pile of pipe-ash on the ground. I sometimes wonder if he talked just because he couldn't stand the silence and the memories of what really happened out at sea.

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.

I almost zoned out there, reading about your uncle. Limited attention span.

I was looking for the recipe for some maritime dish that I was sure would appear at the bottom of that comment.

Agreed; majority of long-form doesn't actually necessarily have a lot to say, and is not written as cleverly or engagingly as hoped/needed. There are however exceptions and those are real jewels :)

I've noticed that this is something that also happened in YouTube video essays. I remember at the dawn of them when I thought it was so cool that there was people out there making these super in-depth videos on all sorts of topics.

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.

i think videos that arent about 10 minutes get downranked. thas why when you want to see which wire to connect to on your cars wiring harness you gotta learn about the whole history of the car first.

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.

and time is not something that is afforded journalists and writers today.

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.

When I want all the details, I look for a full book. When I want the summary, I check Wikipedia. Articles are somewhere between. Either something is too new or obscure/niche or not quite worth the time investment of a book.

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.

Journalists usually don't have the luxury of 3 hours with their interview subjects.

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.

This is my pet peeve on long-form writing. I'll get all excited about, eg, a 20-page article on a new discovery about black holes, but then bounce pretty quickly when the first 9 paragraphs are meaningless descriptive details about the reporter's first visit with the scientist who made the discovery. I realize the need to add human interest throughout a long read, but I get annoyed when it turns out it's just a 2-page article's worth of content spread out over 20 pages.

This is very similar to documentary series today on streaming services. There's not a whole lot of story to fill 4-5 episodes, but they need to pad it, so they have meandering narratives and asides that don't really add to the overall story but give the viewer just enough "hooks" to keep going.

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.

Love your sense of humor and great writing.

Longform - where we bury the lede and you get to find it, for fun!

> 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.

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 to say my own impression is similar.

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.

How is this a failure? They are evolving with the times. Longform served their users with article recommendations for nearly 12 years, but times have changed. Services like Instapaper, Pocket, etc. are no longer popular, and so they’re focusing on podcasting — which is basically the future of longform journalism. Kudos to them.

There are successful long-form text sites. Longform.org ... hasn't delivered.

Switching formats without improving content won't address the core problem.

> The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane.

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...

This is one of those articles I think about constantly. Especially when I get on the elevator. I wish we had more articles like this.

What a great read, thank you for sharing!

May I also suggest "Going Down the Pipes" by Darcy Frey. Written in 1996 about the strange and stressful world of air traffic controllers at Newark airport. Well-written long form journalism on display. https://www.topic.com/going-down-the-pipes

Your point applies to much more than long-form articles. We spend so much time subscribing and scrolling through information sources just to be "aware" things exist (it's the worst for news). If we'd really want to read something great or understand a topic deeply, everyone has huge read-it-later lists and bookmark collections.

But filtering and discovering new things is somehow much more rewarding than reading or understanding itself.

Much of my leasure time is spent working with my hands when I'd rather be reading thinking and learning. I burn through audio books at a good clip but I still haven't found a good way to get random articles read to me. And in the mean time, they stack up for true pleasure time which is rare for me.

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 think you will thoroughly enjoy Adam Savage's (of Mythbusters fame) recent video on measurement.

https://youtu.be/qE7dYhpI_bI

> The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane.

I have been thinking about this for a while and it now just clicks.

What an outstanding article! Thanks so much for posting it.

That Guardian article is part of a series called "The Long Read" which seems apropos: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read

(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)

The Guardian doesn't use paywalls, anywhere... but you might have to create a free account and log in.

Thinking About Things [0] is fantastic. They're also great for discovery because they link to many other sites - they've feature a lot of little-known blogs that are quite interesting.

[0] https://thinking-about-things.com/

URL fix, bare domain doesn't redirect to www: https://www.thinking-about-things.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com