Do lengthy articles make you bored? | Hacker News Reader

Do lengthy articles make you bored?

pknerd.tumblr.com

13 pointspknerd28 comments

Well I'm a writer of excessively long content... including a twenty thousand word review of The Social Network.

http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...

It makes an interesting test case of what people are willing to put up with length wise in a blog post.

In this case the post has been visited 11763 times by 10880 uniques. The average time on page is 8 minutes and 3 seconds. Certainly not long enough to read the entire article - but it's a fairly significant degree of engagement.

Different sources yield differing amounts of engagement. Avg time on page for (min:sec)

Facebook: 23:41 Google: 13.37 Hacker News: 12.42 Twitter: 9:00 Reddit: 6:12 givementsomethingtoread.com: 5:18 instapaper: 4:47 tumblr: 2:32 stumbleupon: 0:06

If that average time is a mean time, then that would mean that you do have a significant number of people reading the entire article.

I would assume that people who are skimming the content, or just leaving straight away would only spend a couple of seconds, a minute max on the site.

Also, it is very interesting that the average time for people from Facebook is so much higher than all the others!

I don't find lengthy articles to be inherently boring.

I do find that a long uninterestingly-written article will lose my attention when or soon after a shorter uninterestingly-written article would have finished.

At times you need to know the CRUX of the article or blogpost before you get into it. It has different reasons; either you are in hurry and want to know the basic idea about it before you go in deep, the starting of the article is not so exciting etc etc. So what if someone who have already read it could do me a favor to write an excerpt?

I got this idea from QUORA's answer summary which really helps me a lot.

Length doesn't mean I'll be bored, but a disorganized or meandering article/post means that I'll give up soon.

Get to the point people. After writing, put a TL;DR at the top, then reorganize the article to match that TL;DR.

Clarity and good organization means I'll keep reading.

At times you get bored because you don't get into conclusion soon. So many times it happened that I had to quit in middle because the article was in multiple pages(I hate pagination!). If I can find a way to know the excerpt or so called "Executive Summary"(Similar to Quora) then it might create or die my interest rather than wasting time.

Newspapers are the absolute worst at this. Next time you read a paper, take notice of how many times to have to flip to a back page to find the information implied by the title. More often than not, it could have been summarized in the first paragraph.

True and I myself despise it. I can't think it is possible in papers but digitally it could be done.

Some things take a lot of space to explain. But as a general rule, if you can trim it without losing content you should. That's a golden rule of good writing.

If you get paid by the word you might disagree with that.

Its not trimming. If any of you have used Quora, it has a feature of summarized the entire thread. It is summarized by one of the people like you and me. The excerpt is then voted up and voted down. I have similar thing in mind.

It really depends entirely what you're writing, which is why I hate people who say stuff like "that's a golden rule of good writing". I can disprove you instantly by saying something like "Charles Dickens".

When your aim is to just portray information as quickly as possible (so yes, often that is the case with blogs submitted to HN) then sure. But as another example look at the New Yorker, they have some of the best articles written and they are great because they tell the story well, not because they give you the TLDR version.

We're talking about articles here, see title.

Your quote was "of good writing", without specifying context. Sure, because it was in this particular thread maybe you meant that context to be implied, but I have seen people make that same statement without the context too, hence my assumption.

Either way, I still hold the New Yorker up as an example that it isn't always the case for articles, either.

The point is, provide a quick way to find the crux of the article/blogposts/anything before getting into it.

Yes, the boring ones. And that's what it's really about. A lot of people aren't good at writing "long" content but aren't much better at editing it to be shorter. We're really just getting bored of sub-par writing rather than its length per se.

One could ask the same way "Do Books make you bored"?

It is all about the writer and the reader. If there is a high overlapping interest between both, the "boring" part should be no issue.

The only thing "truly" boring are writers who are writing boring stuff. And then it doesn't matter how long a piece actually is. What we need is better writing and structure.

Usually books have Table of Contents, Foreward and Review. You usually can't have for an article on nytimes or a blog posts. Comments does not reflect the crux of the article/post.

No, it's just that I'm likely to finish a short article before I've noticed that there's no content.

depends on what you read. I would prefer to read an excerpt before reading political articles or stuff on Techcrunch :-)

Too often I've seen excerpts that are the content equivalent of a movie trailer for a bad movie-- all the interesting bits are provided in the excerpt/trailer and the remainder of the article/movie is boring fluff and not worth my time. In these cases (where the excerpt has lured me into expecting more quality material), I feel I've been the victim of bait-and-switch just to sell more ads or popcorn.

I agree, which is why I think interface-wise, Reddit/HN type link sites are somewhat of a step backwards from Slashdot, by providing only titles rather than a brief blurb summarizing why the article is being linked and what's interesting about it.

(The fact that Slashdot blurbs are often not very good is of course a problem with that model.)

Only when the writer isn't teaching me an appropriately larger volume of material.

and you learn only after reading the entire post, No?

There used to be a company called brijit.com that did this.

They paid $5 for quality summaries. It was a neat site, had great design, but went out of business sometime around 2008.

Any long article makes me bored.

Discussions like this always bring Shaw to mind:

"I apologize for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one"

And that's really it. Seeing super long blogposts/articles is a bit insulting, it feels like the author does not care about me.

The really good one are concise and long at the same time.

At times one doesn't have capability to wrap things up in few words.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com