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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in a permanent shift to humanity's ability to concentrate?

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There are much more things to consume. There were of course books and newspapers in the past (in fact even more press and higher quality than now), but I think for average person there was much less of everything - you had one book, one newspaper, few tv channels to choose from.

So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the people who write them must pump few per day

That's an interesting observation -- perhaps the proliferation of quantity is encouraging audiences to care less about engagement time so they can maximize exploration of all that is available.

The ability to speed up the playback speed of Netflix content would be an example of this.

I worry about the same thing. I will say, however, that I worry more about this in the context of news articles, conversation, and other shorter-duration activities. Books are a big commitment, and it is highly disappointing to find out someone stretched a 50 page book into 250 pages to get it published. Sometimes it helps to instill the idea, or provides useful elaboration, but sometimes it is filler with no discernible benefit to the reader. Our time is important and as such, I think there ought to be a referendum against wasting it. That is not to say all content should be short, but that it should be no longer than it needs to be, and that information density should be as high as is tolerable.

This is largely an issue of trust and priority, not attention span, right?

The same people who fly through TikTok videos also regularly sit through a two hour movie or read the entire Harry Potter series.

I think that people can pay attention if they want to, and the cultural shift is _what_ we expect to give attention to.

I too used to believe that, but I've since met too many children who have told me they don't like going to the movies because you have to pay attention for two continuous hours during which you aren't allowed to use your phone.

Perhaps it’s the movies fault for not being interactive or engaging enough

Or for being unnecessarily long; 90 minute films seem scarce nowadays even for kids

If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters get shorter while books get longer.

Of course take that with a grain of salt because *waves wagely at the statement full of issues*. But it tracks with other trends in social media. Many people will be able to tell you more about their favorite tik-toker than their favorite long-form-content producer. The length of the snippets doesn't dictate the depth of the story

You could even draw a comparison to the rising popularity of series over movies. People now prefer 6 45 minute segments over one 3 hour installment.

> If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters get shorter while books get longer.

Except, that assumption might not be true.

To set a baseline I looked at LOR statistics:

    62 chapters
    1255 pages
    381103 words
    7759 words/chapter
    20 page/chapter

Then I looked at the 100 most bookmarked fanfics on AO3 in one of the most popular fandoms (Harry Potter):

    218401 average word count
    33 average chapters
    9435 average words/chapter

Now 15 of the 100 fanfics are one-shots with only one chapter, if we exclude those we get the following numbers:

    253386 average word count excluding one-shots
    39 average chapters excluding one-shots
    7544 average words/chapter excluding one-shots

For reproduction, I used the following for scraping and processed the data further in vim:

    lynx -dump 'link to ao3 filter page' | grep -A2 'Words\|Chapters' | tr -d '\n,-' | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g;s/  */ /g;s/Words/\nWords/g'

On the other hand, you have people binge watching long series. Which is something that would not exist a generation ago. A movie used to be 2 hours. Now it is something unserious, serious stories have one mega story over 20 hours of a watching time.

I think this is because of two things.

1. the commitment for one more 45-minute episode is a lot less than a 3h movie, even if you then spend 6h bingeing it because you're hooked.

2. Netflix allowed binge watching which wasn't possible before, except after the series ended and you got the complete DVD collection.

Yeah, but people intentionally set themselves to binge watch. They wait till whole series is out and plan to watch multiple episodes at the same time.

I agree it is possible only due to technologically advancement.

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