Hacker News Reader

Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

Completely unrelated: 13 paragraphs, 4 of which are single simple sentences, and the longest of them is 72 words, qualifies an apology for "wall of text" now?

This makes both very sad and very angry.

View on HN

This was posted on Tumblr, which is generally known for its short attention span, and the blogger has a large contingent of younger fans, who may not be interested in reading about Youtube and would prefer to continue viewing cute cat gifs.

That being said, I didn't realize that YouTube was funding original channels! I'm reminded of the talk Dan Harmon (creator of the television series "Community") gave regarding the death of television/the Internet as a new platform for stories [1]. The majority of people already consume television shows on the internet, I'd love to see a larger shift towards an internet-only tv series model.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...

That's never easy, though. Just like newspapers before it, TV show creators will discover that internet advertising doesn't attract anywhere near the premiums of TV advertising.

So you have to find alternative revenue streams, which isn't always easy.

I've wondered for a while if the price for television advertising was/is inflated due to the fact that there's no way to track its impact. Web advertisements usually pay per click these days, which at least measures some kind of engagement, and yet advertisers apparently pay significantly less for it in aggregate than they do television advertising, which seems backward to me.

I guess when your content width is 400px, 200 words is all you need to make it a wall of text and push it past the fold.

It sounds like a person who is in tune with their audience. The reverse problem is more common

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/

This post is from 1997 (16 years old). I wonder how different would it be today.

The concepts are still exactly the same. Most people scan instead of read. Here's a resource I use (not affiliated) http://www.4syllables.com.au/resources/web-writing-tips/

"People don't actually read newspapers; they get into them every morning like a hot bath." -Marhsall McLuhan (1911-1980)

The form of the content is perfect for me, I don't see why he says it's a wall of text. It was very clear and easy to follow. Extracting the key takeaways to make the discussion richer was easy: http://tldr.io/tldrs/5156cd92b0eb7fae5800016b/lessons-learne...

It's Tumblr, which has a younger audience. A younger audience made up of people like myself, who have grown up with the internet, and unfortunately have awfully short attention spans as a consequence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com