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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Why do authors/sites insist on doing this:

https://i.imgur.com/aCAmbQ2.png

It is super annoying and adds no additional content by design. There's like four or five of these throughout the article.

As to the article most of the issues seem to revolve around a broken healthcare system (i.e. no public option, insurance through employers, unemployed pay more than employed, etc). Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren't meant to be in positions like this...

I liked the first 2/3 of the article, just the end is kind of irksome. Harvard, CEO pay, gender gap, etc none of this came across like the author likely intended. I bet she didn't customise her resume for "The Container Store" job and just forwarded her normal/writer one.

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So, it's a carry over from glossy print magazines, which is probably an effective tool, when your periodical is adrift in a sea of other periodicals, and you need to catch the reader's eye, as they skim through 400 pages, like a flipbook animation, scanning for content.

It's supposed to be a climactic snippet of a punchline without the set up, presented significantly earlier in the article than it's actual inline appearance, so that the reader has a hard time finding it in the normal scale wall-of-text, and can't skim to it. Then the time they spend sifting through the article, they read more of it, and (if it's a good article) they become more enticed into buying the magazine, as the newstand clerk scowls at them, because what is this? A library? No reading!

  But damn it! I need to know the whole joke! 
  I guess I'll just buy it an read the rest on the train...

That's how those things are supposed to work. But they're a little anachronistic for the internet. Some people are just attached to the look and feel of the design, probably. But on a web page that you scroll through, it's much less effective at courting the reader, and in this particular instance, the examples are intrusive, and counter-productively placed right next to the passages from which they originate.

Thanks for the feedback!

I actually definitely agree with you: that pull quote in particular added no value and I've removed it.

We've had this debate internally (I'm personally not a fan of pull quotes), but a lot of writers like them for the ability to highlight key points and to break up the stories.

Would it maybe be helpful if we didn't make the pull quotes full width? Or required that they be shorter?

I find them annoying because I naturally "have" to read them. So I wind up reading the same-ish paragraph twice (intended?).

It doesn't help that because of the size and margin you actually need to scroll past it rather than it being a more subtle part of the text.

Something like this:

https://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/files/2012/07/pullquote_reg...

Likely wouldn't bug me because it is impossible (given the context) to assume you're meant to read it. Whereas when you stick it inline but make it bigger it could be either read or not read depending on the author's intent.

This too looks better:

https://www.drupal.org/files/images/better-pullquote-example...

Not inline also and easy to ignore (which might be "bad" depending on the intent of the pull quotes).

They made it like that for the mobile readers obviously. Ideally you'd want responsive design so it doesn't need to stay full width even on wide computer/tablet screens, but if you can't do that then you have to give priority to the iPhones. For some reason.

If I remember the old newspaper days correctly, pull quotes and boxes were used to enhance context via additional quotes, facts or summaries instead of repeating the content that's already in the article. The other reason for having them was to make a longer piece more scannable, which doesn't work as well when you have to scroll.

At least none of your pull quotes came before they are actual quoted in the article. I too hate pull quotes (I already ready it once! :) ) but there is a special place in hell for writers that write like reality TV shows ("Coming up on....", "Previously on..." on either side of commercial breaks). Great article by the way!

That technique is called a pull-quote[0] and is largely a relic from print publishing. It can still work well on occasion, but the example you cite is particularly bad because it's too long and interrupts the content rather than being floated to the side, allowing the content to flow around it.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote

Why do authors/sites insist on doing this

I suspect that apart from the uncontrollable desire to add something that is perceived to add some aesthetic value to the article, that there is some precedence to these enlarged excerpts actually resulting in increased readership. I don't have data to back this up, but I know that David Ogilvy regularly discussed his almost formulaic use of serifed bold headers, slightly smaller, bold subheaders, and images because they were shown to increase the readership of his advertisements.

My guess is that these are used for a similar reason.

> Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren't meant to be in positions like this...

In her defense, I guarantee she was told that they shouldn't at some point in her life. Every time an employer goes with social proof over qualifications, they implicitly tell the world exactly this.

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