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Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

Plausibly some kids might still be reading entire novels worth of text online on the regular. Think of all the massive fanfic archives (Including original fics) Lots of fanfic authors have fans of their own, and those have got to be coming from somewhere.

It doesn't need to be in dead tree format. It doesn't need to be famous authors. Just so long as they read!

For long form original see eg:

* The last angel https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.24420...

* The wandering inn https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/

* Or eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel) which made its way off the net and into print, possibly to the detriment of both. :-P Original location (afaict) (no longer available there) : https://www.galactanet.com/writing.html

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> "massive fanfic archives"

Ye gods, that's like saying that youth may not be willing to consume a nutritious, balanced diet but we should rejoice that they are at least consuming vast quantities of sugar and fat. With vanishingly rare exceptions, fanfic is crap in textual form, laden to bursting with literary sins both venal and mortal.

The usefulness of reading books is not about what factual information you can glean from them. They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously. In that sense traditionally published works aren't going to offer all that much more than fanfiction.

> They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously.

- that nudges readers in interesting (to society) or new (to the reader) directions. Or at least in not in actively harmful ways. Otherwise, OF, livestreaming, or whatever latest social media BS, etc. are king: purposefully designed to create parasocial relationships that trick you thinking you have chance to be noticed.

My main beef with most fan fiction is that in my experience, it unconsciously locks readers into an extremely rigid way of thinking. Of course, this varies from fandom to fandom but woe upon the budding writer who ships the wrong pair or violates the canon.

It mirrors religious dogma, but somehow even worse when compared to all the disputes in Christianity throughout the centuries. (Plus, there's at least a connection between Christianity to modern democracy.)

People said all kinds of nonsense about comic books and cheap novels leading kids astray in the past. What actually happened is those kids ended up being slightly better readers.

That you don't like something doesn't mean it's actually harmful.

People said that comic books and pulp novels were morally harmful and caused juvenile delinquency, which is indeed nonsense. However that has nothing to do with the quality and depth of the writing so your post is irrelevant.

People also said the pulp novels and comic books had no literary value. But, if the kids end up better readers, who cares?

Since then, people have suggested such things are a useful way to get kids interested in reading, because they've seen results.

The writing quality and complexity of amateur content, even long-form is only around the level of a YA novel, truth be told alot of the stuff I was reading back in junior high in my school library had more depth than this.

It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.

90% of everything is crap.

  --Sturgeon's law.

Maybe even 99+% these days, seeing how easy it is to publish your first finger-painting online. Doesn't mean there isn't any good stuff, or even a lot of good stuff. 1% of a lot is still a lot.

(ps. and once you get people reading, they tend to keep doing it and develop taste over time. if it's even just a few who wouldn't have done it before. That's good, right?)

(pps. For example: at 2M words, I think pirateaba might exceed the "first 1M words are practice" threshold)

Who cares? If people enjoy it, let them enjoy it. I've read a few YA novels as an adult that I enjoyed, even though I regularly read more complex stuff.

Most people, for most of history, have only ever enjoyed what might be considered "low quality" entertainment - pulp fiction, shitty plays, etc.

> real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.

Interestingly, even discounting YA and other stuff like that, you are only describing a very small subset of novels.

>Who cares?

I do? Why would I want my kids to be consuming crap when they could be engaging with great works and high art?

What if that's not the choice? What if the choice is "engage with art they enjoy and appreciate, or not at all"?

They're great works to you, and a slog to them.

They can read Minecraft strategy guides and Yahoo auction fan fics for all I care, since that's a lot better than nothing. I remember not wanting to read what school assigned me and how that killed my desire to read most fiction writing, and would prefer that not happen to more kids.

Art is a matter of taste, and if you go counter to your audience's taste, don't be surprised if they disengage.

Because what constitutes "crap" and "great works and high art" is highly subjective both to personal tastes and the culture of the time.

If the works are so great then you've got nothing to worry about. Kids will read them on their own. Of course we both know that's not true, because the works are not that great.

Jane Austen was considered pulp. So was Charles Dickens. And Conan Doyle.

Nobody considered those high literature back in the day!

That cherry picks the best of the best without comparing them with the other 99.9% of their contemporaries who were pulp authors. They and their literary output are forgotten for good reasons.

I don't think GP is cherrypicking anything; rather, illustrating how what is seen as slop one day may be seen as "great works" down the road.

Are you suggesting Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or Conan Doyle were considered slop during their own lifetimes? If not, my point stands.

How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality [1].

HPMOR is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to promote rationalist concepts, and is somewhat influential in startup and AI circles.

Directly: Emmet Shear {co-founder of Twitch (YC S07)} is apparently superfan and gets a cameo.

So for once I get to post something that's almost on-topic for yc. :-P

[1] https://hpmor.com/

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/what-does-a-harry-potter-f...

Maybe not the best thing for kids to be reading!

https://www.thecut.com/article/milo-youngblut-max-snyder-ziv...

Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.

> How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

If you find out, let me know. I wish I could.

I've never read such self absorbed drivel in my life. To be fair, I've not read any Ayn Rand, so I might be judging harshly.

Beyond a basic level of literacy, I'm not sure it's clear that reading pulp is better for any defined outcome than reading nothing. And I'm not sure why it would be. Once you are able to fully grasp a level of literacy, reading more of that level or below probably isn't really doing anything for you.

The question is whether reading:

- an entire novel worth of short texts, beginning to end

- an entire novel worth of short excerpts from longer texts

- an entire novel, beginning to end

are the same things.

Oh, are you responding to my examples?

* Last angel: A web serial, sure it's chunked into chapters/updates, but paper novels have chapters too.

* The Wandering inn, same as above, it's at 2 million+ words and counting. People read it.

* The Martian: Actually the shortest text of the bunch. Now available as a traditional paper novel.

I am not responding to the examples, and I am not challenging the claim that famous vs not famous author does not matter, or that dead tree vs screen does not matter; I am raising the question whether it's just a quantity issue ("Just so long as they read", "entire novels worth of text").

Is it? I am not sure either way. Do you lose something by only reading chapters of a novel but never the whole story from the beginning to the end, even if you're still reading the same amount?

Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.

Thus it can tend to become limiting; and I say this as someone who actually does enjoy fanfiction.

> Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.

So the Lord of the Rings series counts as one book? I'd believe diminishing returns, but not one and done.

Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.

I believe the publisher of LOTR broke it up into multiple books.

Yes, pedantically, and as mentioned in the Notes in the Text in most editions, the Lord of the Rings is a single book sometimes published in three volumes.

Yeah I thought it was such a funny example yo pick out bc, yes it is!

>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.

Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.

Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.

Most online text is shit and doesn't count IMO. Why would you want to waste your time reading the thoughts of average people (including this one)?

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