Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child... It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

It isn't hard to imagine, if you've spent any time on internet message boards or social media. The level of reading comprehension is astonishingly low. Heck, even the willingness to read short articles is low, let alone to understand them. I'm not by any means excepting places like Hacker News from this.

View on HN

I took a college class with a friend about 15 years ago and he was struggling to pick up the material, so I tried to help him through it. In the process, I learned how TERRIBLE his reading skills were.

He was almost 30 years old and could read at probably only 80 words per minute, about the speed many people will type. It was agonizing listening to him try to read something. It's like he was 5 years old and sounding out each word in his head before saying it.

No wonder he was struggling with the material. But the time he's finished reading a sentence, the beginning of the sentence was so long ago that he had forgotten it because all his brain power was being spent merely reading the words that there was nothing left to actually comprehend them.

I wouldn't necessarily link reading comprehension level with willingness to read internet articles.

Personally, I'd like to think I have a reasonably high reading comprehension level, but I have a very low tolerance for long-winded articles, largely because the volume of articles is increasing over time, but the SnR is often extremely low.

I have finite and ever-shrinking time left (as do we all), so I wish more people would get to the point rather than add a bunch of filler to show off their writing skills.

I can relate to what you are talking, but...

1. it depends on my interest in the topic of the article. If I'm interested, I'll read the whole article, and then I'll read copyright like at the bottom of the page, just to be sure I didn't missed anything. If I'm interested then time doesn't matter, or even it matters with a negative sign: the longer I spend reading the more satisfaction I got. So "a bunch of filler" can be bad or good depending on a reader.

2. Articles mostly follow some form, if you are familiar with it you can skip big chunks of text to get to the point quickly. For example, a lot of articles of professional reporters looks like:

  a. Intro that tickles curiosity but says nothing substantive

  b. Jump back in time to tell the biographies of the involved people

  c. The substance

  d. Some form of a conclusion.

(a) is needed to detect the form of the article, (b) can be skipped easily, I scan (c) for direct quotes and read the text around them, (d) I skim to see if there are any non-obvious statements, because it may be a sign I missed something important in (c).

Non-professional writers are less predictable, because they do not follow any rules when composing text, but if you are ready to scroll back and use browser's ability to search on the page, you can extract the core message of the author in no time at all.

s/excepting/exempting/

What other places are like HN? I can't think of a single one, much less multiple others.

I'd say the comment section of the website acoup.blog (which have been linked a few times on HN, that's how I discovered it), the commenters usually give the impression they've read the article. Of course it can also be due to the fact that it's a blog comment section, not those of a link-sharing site.

Slashdot is at least part of the same haplogroup, if not a close cousin.

There are some HN-alikes, such as Lobste.rs, which appears to be ~10% the size but often carries similar article selections. <https://lobste.rs/>

There is Tildes.net, which was inspired by Reddit (founder is an ex-Reddit employee). <https://tildes.net/>

There remains Metafilter, which continues to have exceptionally high S/N: <https://www.metafilter.com/>

Individual blogs and podcasts occasionally have useful discussion.

Mostly the mode seems to be waning in my experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com