Do lengthy articles make you bored?

http://pknerd.tumblr.com/post/10883348530/do-lengthy-articles-make-you-bored

by pknerd • 15 years ago

13 28 15 years ago

pknerd.tumblr.com

mooism2• 15 years ago

I don't find lengthy articles to be inherently boring.

I do find that a long uninterestingly-written article will lose my attention when or soon after a shorter uninterestingly-written article would have finished.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

At times you need to know the CRUX of the article or blogpost before you get into it. It has different reasons; either you are in hurry and want to know the basic idea about it before you go in deep, the starting of the article is not so exciting etc etc. So what if someone who have already read it could do me a favor to write an excerpt?

I got this idea from QUORA's answer summary which really helps me a lot.

sp332• 15 years ago

No, it's just that I'm likely to finish a short article before I've noticed that there's no content.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

depends on what you read. I would prefer to read an excerpt before reading political articles or stuff on Techcrunch :-)

delinka• 15 years ago

Too often I've seen excerpts that are the content equivalent of a movie trailer for a bad movie-- all the interesting bits are provided in the excerpt/trailer and the remainder of the article/movie is boring fluff and not worth my time. In these cases (where the excerpt has lured me into expecting more quality material), I feel I've been the victim of bait-and-switch just to sell more ads or popcorn.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I agree, which is why I think interface-wise, Reddit/HN type link sites are somewhat of a step backwards from Slashdot, by providing only titles rather than a brief blurb summarizing why the article is being linked and what's interesting about it.

(The fact that Slashdot blurbs are often not very good is of course a problem with that model.)

smoyer• 15 years ago

Only when the writer isn't teaching me an appropriately larger volume of material.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

and you learn only after reading the entire post, No?

0x122• 15 years ago

Some things take a lot of space to explain. But as a general rule, if you can trim it without losing content you should. That's a golden rule of good writing.

If you get paid by the word you might disagree with that.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

Its not trimming. If any of you have used Quora, it has a feature of summarized the entire thread. It is summarized by one of the people like you and me. The excerpt is then voted up and voted down. I have similar thing in mind.

corin_2• 15 years ago

It really depends entirely what you're writing, which is why I hate people who say stuff like "that's a golden rule of good writing". I can disprove you instantly by saying something like "Charles Dickens".

When your aim is to just portray information as quickly as possible (so yes, often that is the case with blogs submitted to HN) then sure. But as another example look at the New Yorker, they have some of the best articles written and they are great because they tell the story well, not because they give you the TLDR version.

0x122• 15 years ago

We're talking about articles here, see title.

grovulent• 15 years ago

Well I'm a writer of excessively long content... including a twenty thousand word review of The Social Network.

http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...

It makes an interesting test case of what people are willing to put up with length wise in a blog post.

In this case the post has been visited 11763 times by 10880 uniques. The average time on page is 8 minutes and 3 seconds. Certainly not long enough to read the entire article - but it's a fairly significant degree of engagement.

Different sources yield differing amounts of engagement. Avg time on page for (min:sec)

Facebook: 23:41 Google: 13.37 Hacker News: 12.42 Twitter: 9:00 Reddit: 6:12 givementsomethingtoread.com: 5:18 instapaper: 4:47 tumblr: 2:32 stumbleupon: 0:06

lachenmayer• 15 years ago

If that average time is a mean time, then that would mean that you do have a significant number of people reading the entire article.

I would assume that people who are skimming the content, or just leaving straight away would only spend a couple of seconds, a minute max on the site.

Also, it is very interesting that the average time for people from Facebook is so much higher than all the others!

petercooper• 15 years ago

Yes, the boring ones. And that's what it's really about. A lot of people aren't good at writing "long" content but aren't much better at editing it to be shorter. We're really just getting bored of sub-par writing rather than its length per se.

Swizec• 15 years ago

Discussions like this always bring Shaw to mind:

"I apologize for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one"

And that's really it. Seeing super long blogposts/articles is a bit insulting, it feels like the author does not care about me.

kiba• 15 years ago

The really good one are concise and long at the same time.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

At times one doesn't have capability to wrap things up in few words.

zdw• 15 years ago

Length doesn't mean I'll be bored, but a disorganized or meandering article/post means that I'll give up soon.

Get to the point people. After writing, put a TL;DR at the top, then reorganize the article to match that TL;DR.

Clarity and good organization means I'll keep reading.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

At times you get bored because you don't get into conclusion soon. So many times it happened that I had to quit in middle because the article was in multiple pages(I hate pagination!). If I can find a way to know the excerpt or so called "Executive Summary"(Similar to Quora) then it might create or die my interest rather than wasting time.

nhebb• 15 years ago

Newspapers are the absolute worst at this. Next time you read a paper, take notice of how many times to have to flip to a back page to find the information implied by the title. More often than not, it could have been summarized in the first paragraph.

adelevie• 15 years ago

There used to be a company called brijit.com that did this.

They paid $5 for quality summaries. It was a neat site, had great design, but went out of business sometime around 2008.

stfu• 15 years ago

One could ask the same way "Do Books make you bored"?

It is all about the writer and the reader. If there is a high overlapping interest between both, the "boring" part should be no issue.

The only thing "truly" boring are writers who are writing boring stuff. And then it doesn't matter how long a piece actually is. What we need is better writing and structure.

pknerd9• 15 years ago

Usually books have Table of Contents, Foreward and Review. You usually can't have for an article on nytimes or a blog posts. Comments does not reflect the crux of the article/post.

trusko• 15 years ago

Any long article makes me bored.

Do lengthy articles make you bored?

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