

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

======
grovulent
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...](http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end-of-
intimacy-and-the-birth-of-hacker-sensibility/)

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
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!

------
mooism2
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.

~~~
pknerd
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.

------
zdw
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.

~~~
pknerd
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
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.

~~~
pknerd
True and I myself despise it. I can't think it is possible in papers but
digitally it could be done.

------
0x12
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.

~~~
corin_
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.

~~~
0x12
We're talking about articles here, see title.

~~~
corin_
Your quote was "of good writing", without specifying context. Sure, because it
was in this particular thread maybe you meant that context to be implied, but
I have seen people make that same statement without the context too, hence my
assumption.

Either way, I still hold the New Yorker up as an example that it isn't always
the case for articles, either.

~~~
pknerd
The point is, provide a quick way to find the crux of the
article/blogposts/anything before getting into it.

------
petercooper
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_.

------
stfu
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.

~~~
pknerd
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.

------
sp332
No, it's just that I'm likely to finish a short article before I've noticed
that there's no content.

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

~~~
delinka
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.

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

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

------
adelevie
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.

------
trusko
Any long article makes me bored.

------
Swizec
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.

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

