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Comment by borgchick | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly a little surprised at some of the comments here. I thought most people on here would agree that many of us do suffer from this. I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found? I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and not give in to that urge to get a hit of dopamine. But of course, YMMV.

I think the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task is going to become more and more useful, because it is so easy to give in to that temptation to flip away, just for a quick moment. I've been working on practicing mindfulness through meditation, and have thought of reading a book as a form of meditation (nice to see the author allude to that a little).

So your TL;DR: good article, read more books, re-learn how to focus on single tasking.

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I'm frequently disappointed when I do finish a web-published article to the point where I don't think there's anything wrong with skipping though most of them.

Most of them are poorly written or written in a way to make money.

That is

* clickbait titles when the bulk of the information in the article could be summarized in the title instead

* lack of introduction / thesis / abstract at the beginning summarizing or outlining the actual content

* meandering content with no clear overarching goal

* content padding – lots of words addling little information

So why should I feel bad about not finishing things I think aren't worth finishing?

I agree here. I began to read the article but the format completely deterred me from finishing it. I assume the format was on purpose to prevent it from becoming the very thing that it was saying the people have a hard time reading. But in the end, at least for me, I had a harder time reading the choppy, repetitive wording than a well thought out set of paragraphs. I have read many books and also started many and never picked them back up. There is no reason to force yourself to read something that does not capture your attention.

To add some followup thoughts, I am often incredibly frustrated when I have to spend 5 minutes reading two thousand words to find information that could have been contained in fifty.

In a similar vein are youtube howto videos which spend 2+ minutes with bad animations, awkward greetings, begging for likes, and rambling irrelevant introductions followed by the actually useful 15 seconds of content.

I have similar problems with university lectures, textbooks, and, professionally, finding any information in documentation. It might be specific to my style of brain wiring; I find low-information-density media to be at times almost debilitatingly frustrating.

> I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and not give in to that urge to get a hit of dopamine.

It's actually reverse for many of us who like to read. If i read an interesting article, i just cannot get over it. The stimulation from this is so strong, that its difficult to concentrate on anything else. Mostly after the first read, i will think for a while on it and then re-read it again. More slowly this time. I keep the tab open and will come back again to re-read. Sometimes the thought provoked by the articles lingers for days and i have to write it down somewhere where to get over it.

> how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?

Err, I don't know, but I was very surprised by reading all the comments (and original blogpost) implying you can't handle reading a 3000ish signs post without any interruption.

Of course, I see that we are "jumping" frequently, like every ten minutes or so, to find "brain fresh-air"; but if you have that much trouble to focus on a so simple thing like reading a simple article, maybe there is something more serious that you have to check without waiting.

(…honestly, I don't know how you can work in any environment with such an extreme rythm of "brain jumping".)

After just reading a book cover to cover yesterday, I'm not really impressed by the article, I read a bit and then all these large bold and italic things started popping out of the text haphazardly in the middle of my flow.

From there i skimmed a bit and stopped realising it was a boring article, if not a little bit whiny.

In other words I can't really blame him for jumping to twitter midway through the author obviously wanted to break the text up in such a way it was easy or encouraged to do so.

I read it, start to finish, on the can.

It probably helped that the men's room at work seems to be some kind of Faraday cage, so whatever is cached in your mobile browser when you lock the cubicle door is your reading for the duration.

>> I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?

Like you it really took me some effort, I had to force myself to stay engaged, not skip over whole paragraphs and not flip to something else.

But I got there!

"I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?"

This is precisely the reason I don't actively participate in Twitter or Facebook :)

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