Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

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Click-bait longform is where things went wrong.

I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.

Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.

When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.

And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here. Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles paid off.

Any good sources for longform articles?

Read this if you have time to kill:

"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:

https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm

I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.

One of the best! If memory serves there was a This American Life segment excerpted from it too (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/195/transcript).

https://old.reddit.com/r/Longreads/

They have a convention of prefacing articles with a category from their own taxonomy (“Personal History”, “Shouts and Mumurs”, “Reporter at Large”, “Talk of the town”, etc.) that signify the sort of article you’re going to get. In print this works well, as the heading is prominent, and each type occurs in a somewhat consistent order in the magazine, so you have a few clues you might be reading a type you dislike. I worry this hasn’t translated well to their online readership, and has contributed to a poorer reputation than they deserve.

But this isn't new, this is something that was very common pre-internet too.

It's an art form, and it's about exploring the people behind the ideas as well as the ideas themselves.

I used to love reading the Saturday and Sunday magazines that came with the paper, this was back in the 1990s. Many of those were always of this long form, rambling, structure.

If you can see the pattern it's obvious once you start reading.

There's a sort of teaser at the beginning. Then they dive into a person's history like this:

Super Bionics is an exciting new form of prosthetic that's revolutionising lives.

Steve Jones was sitting on his porch when he first thought of super-bionics. Steve had always been fascinated by robotics when he was growing up. At 3 years old.........

5 paragraphs later they'll finally do a bit more about the super-bionics.

Then each section gradually moves the story forward in exactly the same way. They intro the subject. They introduce a new person behind the subject and explore them and their motivations. Then they say a bit more about the actual subject.

You're mistaking a writing style with time wasting.

I don't have the patience for it any more, but lots of people do.

I just watched Wild Ones on AppleTV, and I feel the same way about that series. IMDb has a tag line "Investigates the delicate ecosystems of our globe and finds information on how to help conserve and protect the most priceless endangered species." However, the entire thing felt more like a glorified influencer vlogging their vacay. It was much more about the camera people than the animals. I know this wasn't Planet Earth, but the footage they acquired was not the prominent bits of the series. It was produced well enough that I watched each episode and I was curious about each episode, but they all left me with the same feeling of meh about it.

Some of these articles are definitely more about the author being able to say they write than it is shedding light on anything or providing any kind of insight. It's all just gross to me

Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?

Click-bait. I'm not immune. I see something tantalizing and then I have to know. I've been burned by Hacker News more than once.

It clear when long form gets 7 upvotes in minutes and hits the top of hacker news . I avoid those now

https://longreads.com/ maybe

I mean I read the New Yorker OP article because it was posted on hacker news, and highly voted. It was probably too short to be considered long form, but I feel like I was baited into reading a rambling article where I gained nothing of value other than at best a summary of other peoples thoughts, where the only conclusion I can practically draw with out reading a lot more is "Joshua Rothman and others don't like how people are consuming content".

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