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Comment by dlss | Hacker News Reader

I do use this feature -- I often select random blocks of text while reading. This feature means I often (5-10% of the time) have to click discard and then reply again to get my desired behavior.

In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused me to stop reading their site.

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Yes! In fact, the Office 2007 team ran into the same problem with "selection readers"[1]. They purposefully designed the minibar (small useful toolbar that appears on text selection) to not interfere with us that like to select while reading/navigating.

It's a shame so many designers out there (NYTimes, Google, and many, many others) fail this basic usability test.

1: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/10/06/477801.as...

Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.

I'm kind of happy to have just learned I'm not the only person in the world who habitually selects like this. I've done this for as long as I can remember, and the NYT thing drove me nuts as well.

Oddly enough I guess I always habitually deselect as well, so I've never noticed this gmail feature. Pretty useful.

Now if it browsers supported Sublime Text-style multiple selections for quoting several different bits of a long email, that'd be perfect.

On a sidenote it's kind of fascinating how polarised people are about this feature.

Do you also use your text selection as a bookmark?

I do this to save my spot on a page when I need to scroll up or down, but on Windows you can do one better: scroll anywhere by dragging the scroll bar at the edge of the window, then move the cursor away from the bar and your view will snap back to where you were before you started dragging.

It's the single Windows feature I miss the most on other platforms.

Thanks. That's the first time I've ever heard of a use-case that validates that functionality.

I still remember the rage I felt when I switched from the Amiga in 1996 to the PC and found that Windows did that; screwing up a large part of the usability of scrollbars (for me) by adding a (to me) completely incomprehensible requirement for ultra-precise mouse movement or else you get BAM! back to where you started.

Note: not trying to claim that you are in any way "wrong", of course, I'm just pointing out the opposite perspective since I found yours interesting.

People are polarized because some find it very useful and some very annoying. Seems like a perfect example of what would be the best candidate for configuration option.

I used AdBlock to stop the NYT script that implements it from loading.

A large chunk of the reason I dislike Chrome is because of its weird text selection logic compared to Firefox - boundaries around paragraph starts and ends feel unnatural.

As another habitual text selector in this impromptu support group, I'll vouch for the assertion that Chrome's text selection behavior is really, really strange. Especially bizarre is when it wraps the highlight around the entire width of the page when selecting in a column of text.

Ah. Finally someone here who share my dislike for Chrome for the same reason. It does not snap selections at end of lines and paragraphs and makes too hard to read for people like us. Whenever I used to explain this as my reason behind preferring Firefox to Chrome, I've got curious looks.

> habitual selectors

Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.

HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment and the next.

Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other reason?

No legitimate reason. Part habit, part compulsion, part tic. It's basically doodling with the selection highlight.

Edit: don't need to share all that, I think.

I often select text so that I have an easy visual reference when I'm scrolling down. I don't want to scroll too far!

I do exactly the same. For me it's not really selection reading, but selection marking, when scrolling.

To me it has become a sign that i am bored of what i am reading and should just skip to the story's punchline. Or sometimes abandon it altogether.

Great, we have our first theoretician. Now we do need some sort of organizational structure for advocacy.

We do. I can smell allowances and tax exemptions. Maybe even an annual fun run.

I don't much mind about the structure, but it'd be really nice if it all lined up perfectly straight.

"Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other reason?"

Sometimes unconscious compulsion, otherwise to put together a quote in the context of an existing thread.

I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards :)

Scrolling. Selected text or word is just a marker when scrolling fast. It is much easier to follow visually fast moving selected part of the text than to keep track about sentence that I'm currently reading.

When using keyboard it's not that important, since one quickly learn how much PgDn scrolls, but when using mouse it is good to have a selection marker to quickly continue to read from there after scrolling.

I'm waiting for a bug in incognito to be fixed before I start promotion but I built a chrome extension that specifically solves this problem if you'd like to try it out.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magicscroll-web-re...

>I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards

the same here.

New recruit reporting for duty. I've never seen anyone else read webpages the same way I do - by selecting to scroll - so it's a surprise to finally find my kin. I guess it was more likely to happen on a place like HN?

Scrolling without selecting is just disorienting when I'm reading.

Same here. For a couple months tabs where I habitually selected text (repeatedly) would crash in Chromium (on Linux). It almost cured me of this habit but it doesn't seem like this happens anymore.

I've created a poll to collect the reasons why people, like me, select text when they read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839436

It needs a "Yes, and I don't know why I do it" option

Indeed it does. An other commenter noted that he did it in a way similar to doodling, just habitual and keeping occupied while reading. That's pretty much my case.

I often select a paragraph I am reading in case I get sidetracked or have to tend to a child nearby. It bugs the hell out of me when something got in the way of me selecting a paragraph!

So happy to see that others have this habit of selecting and highlighting bits of text as they read. I've been ridiculed for it, but I'm not the only one!

I'm a clicky-reader too and I'm not ashamed to say it!

I'm amazed and excited we're all in such good company. Thought I was the only one who selected text all the time. But then, I but most of us view source often, and hover and look at where links point to before clicking, both things the general populace doesn't do.

Oh my god that shit.

I remember how the nytimes did that and, like you, it destroyed the experience for me.

Are there any other reader-highlighters out there?

Thunderbird and other email clients do the same. It's pretty handy.

I'm a habitual selector, but I also have the habit of clicking away from my selection before I perform any other action. Thus never had a problem with this feature.

I agree that select-causes-action in the NYT site is bad design, I'm not sure that select-then-take-action-affects-selected is bad design. In the later, it is the normal, expected way to take actions on a subset of the text. Sure, they could add a "reply - selected" button or dropdown option, but that would be a bit kludgey, and people would complain about the complicated/bloated UI.

The NYT "feature" can/could be disabled at the client by blocking one of their JS files. I still have the block in my config.

P.S. I see now that barrkel has already described this and one way of accomplishing it, elsewhere in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839170

Yep. It happens to me in gmail, and Thunderbird has the same misfeature.

Quora has a very similar annoying behavior. Every time you select some text, it asks if you want to "Embed Quote". I select text just to get some focus.

Yes! And the worst part is that the "Embed Quote" box appears below your selection, obscuring text you're about to read.

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