How We Read Now | Hacker News Reader

How We Read Now

charlesschifano.substack.com

40 pointsvitabenes26 comments

How We Write Now: pretentiously, with heapings of bullshit, apparently.

> as the writing in our century, it seems, comes in sentences that are a tad more malleable, with the age of permanence pretty much at its end

Does the author even care if this has any resemblance to truth, or does he just think it makes him sound smart? The age of permanence is at its end? What is he even talking about? Is literally anything he says in this article backed by any sort of research or evidence?

This is a good example of the Uncanny Valley just before actual interesting writing. If it were a few Twitter sentences or a snarky YouTube comment it might be boiled down to an actual point or two. But clearly this author is too good for such philistine methods of writing. No, he's much, much better than you are, you Twitter users. He's a writer. A writer with absolutely nothing to write about, apparently. So he fills an article with almost-intelligent-sounding language and unsubstantiated claims and derisive assumptions about you and everyone else and "society" and "kids these days" and shakes his fist at some cloud we're not even sure is really there and fails to make a single rational point along the way. And then he preemptively insults you for not reading the whole thing, as if this somehow proves him right.

>, comes in sentences that are a tad more malleable,

>What is he even talking about?

The "malleable" is referencing his later paragraphs about SEO A/B testing of headlines[1] and dynamically generated text of news by A.I. based on your personal data.

Unfortunately, his writing style doesn't make it easy for readers to extract his main idea.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=a%2Fb+testing+headlines

As stated in TFA - with an emphasis on news articles - article titles, and the articles themselves are being modified in real time as the metrics collected with the article are aggregated and interpreted.

We also see this with titles for YouTube videos, taking down social media videos which don't get much attention to create a specific narrative, and so forth.

In other words, the media of today is not static, even once publicly published.

and _that_ imnsho is a serious problem for political discourse. in paper days you inherently knew that we both had read the same text in that same newspaper --- today you don't know that anymore. kind of byzantine generals all over the place.

I think the article definitely overstates its case.

It's not true (or common, at least) that you can discover anything by skimming through random shelves in a library. Libraries are big and this method is unlikely to expose you to the whole range of diverse ideas and works out there; you'll just find some, possibly filtered by your own choice of library sections.

I do enjoy browsing the shelves of used book stores, though!

browsing a well sorted library is rarely a random walk is it?

usually you go to a specific section _because_ it will contain a plethora of views and ways to express them, in that section, and the librarian, if asked, will guide you to the core works and what to read first to get an overview, or has them singled out in an extra shelf or table.

and in addition, your skimming is not page limited.

discoverability is the second, subordinate case the article makes, though.

persistence is the even bigger challenge: how do I know the article I've recommended to you is the article you're going to see? not just some little edition and helpful factual correction, but a subtle rewrite, twist in tone? or even worse, differently tuned articles depending on who we are, as identified by, say, our cookies, we see a 'libdem' and a 'repcon' version of the same article under the same headline? and we'll never know because your device shows one, my device shows the other one?

Like I answered to a similar question, while your questions point to a plausible dystopian near future, this is not the situation right now. We don't see liberal vs conservative versions of the same article based on our browsing history.

It could happen, but it doesn't right now, and therefore the article is overstating its case.

> This is a good example of the Uncanny Valley just before actual interesting writing.

I had a strange feeling while reading the article, and this describes it so well! This is what I imagine writing generated by an AI to sound like if you give it the prompt “pretentious”.

And that’s coming from a self-described lover of pretentious writing.

> If Herodotus can ask 2,400 years ago for immortality while striving to prevent his subject from being “forgotten in time”, then perhaps it is not too presumptuous for me, more than two millennium later, to ask you to read for five minutes

If you're going to have a pop-up asking for my email as soon as I scroll the page, yes it is.

What you say about some writing today is true, but beware of the bubble effect of social networks and the internet: not everyone reads or writes like you do, and just because the set of people famous now doesn't intersect with those still writing and reading conventional books doesn't tell you anything about the future. Truth is, bad writing has always been wrote, there was throwaway writing also in ancient Rome for instance, which was something like (but not quite) our newspapers. And again, newspapers came, book persisted. Smartphones came... books are persisting.

What's more important from this article, to me, is that things that are written today are not stable - they can and do change as the engagement with them is measured and interpreted.

But are books malleable, though?

Are we comparing articles, opinions and news (mostly impermanent, at least by intention) with books and treatises (mostly permanent)? Or is this about how we index supposedly permanent stuff, i.e. "the library" where we store it?

I'm confused because the article starts with Herodotus and the alleged elegance and permanence of his works; but Herodotus was a historian, not an influencer. We still have historians and writers in this day and age; aren't their works as "permanent"?

Ebooks are absolutely malleable. New versions and patches are applied behind the scenes by publishers on a regular basis. And less frequently, these books are removed from publication completely, including pulling them from readers.

And given that even physical books have multiple releases with changes, they are not exactly written in stone either.

Whether this should be allowed is a topic in and of itself.

But by your own admission, ebooks are malleable in the same sense that books always were: later editions fixing typos, removing or adding chapters, even dealing with censorships issues! This was also true in Herodotus' time. People in ancient times also had to deal with censorship, only it was enforced by sword or fire instead of by removing from digital storage.

It's only made technically easier with ebooks, but this is nothing new or extraordinary.

Ebooks are not malleable in the sense I think the author meant, of impermanence and of being specifically tailored for your living-in-a-bubble preferences. At least not now, who knows in the future?

I think the notable difference is that ebook alterations most often occur without user input (buying a new version, downloading a new version) and without notifying the user (no alerts, no version increments, or release dates).

As for the "tailored for each user", we do have proof that some personalization can and is made for ebooks (DRM, buyer's name). Is the content itself being tailored? I believe it is (with the caveat of I have no evidence). I think some censorship for sales to Russia, China, et.al. is being done transparently.

I agree ebook technology could be used for this in totalitarian states. But is that the argument of TFA? I don't think that's the case he's making, I don't see malicious intent in what he describes.

I think my Kindle notifies me when there's an update of a novel. This could of course be subverted. But are we ready to claim this is what happens to the majority of e-novels? I don't think it is. I'm also willing to bet that so far no novel in my Kindle has been edited with changes specifically tailored for me by an algorithm (meaningful text changes, I mean. I don't mean the book cover or DRM or whatever, and neither does the author of the TFA. That's why he talks about the elegance of words, which has nothing to do with DRM!).

This could change and I absolutely see a dystopian future where this can happen. But my understanding is that the author is describing the situation now, and I just don't see it.

> I just don't see it.

Because you've focused on one kind of writing: books. The original article was more broadly scoped.

Even if books were more permanent than articles, less people are reading books. What matters is the content that the general public is consuming, and that is trending towards malleable media

You can distill the gist of a book down to a few notable paragraphs which you then memorize and integrate into your life. I've done it with 100s of books. You have to read the entire book though, so you can't really cheat here by skimming, then cherry picking something interesting. There is a fallacy that whole books have to be inculcated into your life. In my case, a paragraph will do.

Isn't that what Cliff's Notes do? Are they still a thing? That's what got me through High School English lit.

I've seen this advertised as a similar option for books and podcasts. https://www.blinkist.com/en I haven't used it though, so can't vouch for it's effectiveness.

I really dislike newsletter popups which don't have X button to close (I'm aware there is hidden unintuitive text button), so I'm not gonna read this.

Popup asking me to subscribe to the newsletter with no visible way to close it. Could not read the article.

Here's the TL;DR;

> you’ll have a difficult time stumbling upon anything outside your current awareness on most screens

tl;dr

Subtle but succinct

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