
Read Me - MindGods
https://readymag.com/designs/readme/
======
xmprt
The article put in so much effort in all the wrong ways. Things were moving
all over the place and there was no consistency between sections. I had to
retrain myself every time I read another paragraph.

The only interesting parts for me were the interactive elements. This is the
same article except much easier to read:
[https://readymag.com/designs/1961839/](https://readymag.com/designs/1961839/)

For me, there are only 2 things that would make an article better to read. 1\.
Better, more concise writing. 2\. Interactivity

And if the goal is read through rate then perhaps this method will work (if
only because people are more likely to scroll blindly through an article to
see all the animations). But if the goal is education then sometimes boredom
is what's needed.

~~~
occamrazor
This version is much better indeed, with “boring” but ergonomic fonts, images,
and typography. How did you figure out the URL?

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xmprt
I clicked around their page and looked at some of the templates they were
selling.

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scandox
Too many words. Too few insights. Too little information.

We're drinking from thimbles and pissing Oceans.

~~~
LilBytes
This is such a fucking great saying, that I've not heard before. Thank you.

A similar saying I've heard is 'it was a very long walk for a short drink'.

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jek0
Some bits of text are missing (because of badly written CSS I assume), stuff
floating in front of the text... I definitely stopped reading before the
average 40% of content: annoying layout.

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rstuart4133
It's a page discussing readability of text.

Perversely I found the way it was presented made it very difficult to read.

~~~
WA
I stopped reading exactly for that reason. It's like a designer toyed around
with annoying things to make it somewhat "special", which distracts from the
text and its message.

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jrockway
> However, by the end of the 1960s, computers with led screens had become
> relatively mainstream.

Can someone point me to these mainstream LED displays? Are we talking about
calculators, or were there 80x25 terminals that used LEDs?

(Also interesting fact... "LED" was displayed capitalized on my screen but
copy-pasted as lowercase. Indeed, in the DOM, the text is "led". I'm extra
confused as to why someone would do that!)

~~~
wrs
I was trying to parse that too. “Computers” were themselves not commonplace,
and even within that rarefied subcommunity, “screens” were CRTs, not LEDs.
LEDs were limited to seven-segment digits and individual dots.

I think “LED” is in small-caps, which is correct for typographical purposes,
but requires the underlying text to be lowercase.

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cocktailpeanuts
The fad success of the "Snow Fall" by NYTimes has created a generation of
confused writers who think they're artists.

Even the NYTimes has moved on from the all over the place interactive format
for articles because it's not good for readability. If you are confident about
your writing you should focus on the writing itself instead of trying to
package it in all kinds of bells and whistles. It just signals insecurity.

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asalahli
> Read Me

Well I can't, because apparently my browser (iOS 10) isn't supported.

I wonder what advanced JS features the page is using, that are only available
on the latest browsers.</snark>

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coffeeiscold
Ironically unreadable with Firefox for Android. Lots of text is cut off.
Possibly due to not handling text scaling (accessibility) correctly.

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egypturnash
“ More and more text-based content is shared over the Internet, but not
everything is thoroughly read. In fact, by the time this article reaches the
next screen, a significant share of you will have already stopped reading.”

All of this is crammed into a tiny column on the right side of the iPad I’m
reading this on. When I start scrolling to read more it starts flickering and
jittering because... this article is full of huge amounts of JavaScript doing
shit whenever I scroll, and making it move super slow.

It also breaks Safari’s “reader view”. Which honestly is about where I usually
say “okay does the first paragraph of this illegible piece of the modern web
feel worth the next level of hoops I’m gonna have to jump through to read it”.

This is an article that does not _want_ to be read.

~~~
boring_twenties
Sometimes these kinds of crap pages work perfectly fine if JavaScript is
disabled. This particular one just displays a completely blank page, however.

I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion.

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barnaclejive
yea, no interest, showing off your js skills while telling me whatever my
audience likes is wrong and bad, all while doing it with an extremely
difficult to read and totally inaccessible page isn't a great way to get me to
care about whatever your position is, idek, didn't get that far. I realize
this may been an attempt at irony, either way it is done so badly. I really
hope it is meant to be ironic.

~~~
denysvitali
This seems to be a shared thought in pretty much all the comments so far, and
I agree as well. The entire article is based on how readable your text should
be, yet they managed to not follow some of those rules themselves.

i honestly liked the design of the page, but readability was certainly not on
focus here, which is just ironic.

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sigsergv
“However, by the end of the 1960s, computers with led screens had become
relatively mainstream.”

What? Sixties?

Anyway, I've read a lot of materials about readability and some authors
provide very different recommendations. A lot of subjective opinions that are
supported by questionable researches. Perception of text changes and you
simply cannot use the same methods evaluating people from different
generations or cultures.

In USSR for example all books for children MUST BE printed using sans-serif
fonts because some “scientists” decided that serif fonts are harder to read
for kids.

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daledavies
For an article concerned with readability, I thought the text was quite
difficult to read!

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dredmorbius
Blank page (JS disabled).

Given others' comments here, I'm thankful.

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tgvaughan
I don't understand why most of the things discussed in the article continue to
be the responsibility of web page authors. For print media of course it makes
sense for publishers to hire typesetters to agonise over font size. But for
online content, please just send me the text itself and let _me_ choose how to
most comfortably read it! Doing anything else is pretty obnoxious.

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ibiuebeii
The information presented was interesting, and the way it was presented was
playful and kept me reading despite me being currently exhausted. Soooo,
that's a positive from me!

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kissgyorgy
The author uses the word "problem" multiple times. Is it really a problem? It
feels natural and right to just get the information you need and move on with
your life.

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nop90
Is this supposed to be satire? Start off all about readability, but all the
text is written like an ingredients label to the side.

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comfyinnernet
I can't tell if the joke is deliberate.

