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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

Maybe ironic but, I don't watch TikTok or Instagram so I blame ChatGPT for killing my attention span: I used to enjoy reading Wired articles (and others) a decade ago.

Now, I can't stand all the irrelevant prose about the authors' personal experiences, how they met the subject in a cafe, and so many other extraneous details injected in for padding and storytelling. Hunter S Thomson did this decades ago.

If this is about how some TikTok manager games the system, a simple bullet list would be great...and a worthy length given its subject matter.

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I have never in my life had any patience for those meandering sorts of articles. And yet I eat up novels full of detail, and I have an endless attention span for reading comment sections like this one.

At the end of the day, it comes down to what I'm looking for: information or entertainment.

When I read a new article (or a recipe, etc.), I do not want to be entertained: I am after specific information.

When I read a novel, though, I absolutely do expect to be entertained, so I enjoy all the fluff.

When I used to read print magazines and papers, they fell into the "entertainment" category. But when I read on a screen, that's not what I'm after; reading on a screen is an inherently uncomfortable process and better suited to bite-sized chunks.

Hunter S Thompson’s interjections were the story. Remember, he wasn’t the fly on the wall, but the fly in the ointment.

Perhaps you could get ChatGPT to read the article, and then post here on your behalf -- it might contribute more to the conversation.

To each his own. I find the meandering prose refreshing. Especially in an article like this where I’m predisposed to find the subject distasteful, it breaks down the defenses a bit and helps me to keep an open mind. When you get to that point, you find it’s not just about “how some TikTok manager games the system.”

Not that every article written in this way is a winner. But this one benefitted from the format imo

Funny how it had the opposite effect on me. Sure, I already think the whole thing is distasteful (to put it mildly), but all that "meandering prose" only drove it home to me, paragraph by paragraph, just how despicable the whole thing is.

"How some TikTok manager games the system" is an abstract thing. A deep dive into a real step-by-step approach of pumping phony "content" and sneaking it past viewers' defenses - that's a concrete thing that couldn't be more disgraceful, save only for if the article explained that it's all done for a singular reason: every part of this self-referential loop of "content" is an opportunity to get viewers to spend money. That's where the funds for all of this come from: everyone there is a piece of the advertising machine.

That's an interesting observation and it applies to me too. I just asked ChatGPT to summarize it.

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