Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?

A cautionary message from someone who used to think long form content equals quality and indepth coverage:

Long form content in magazines still used to have limited pages. So there needed to be a balance between information and prose. So even in long prose, the content was well edited, every sentence brought something important to the table.

Nowadays, on the web, an article could have infinite length without any limits. Less editing skills required and more importantly, the longer you stay on page, the better their metrics.

So the content tends to be way longer with more passages that do not really add anything to the central message. Most of them are approaching novellas in length.

At one point in time, this became such a big time sink for me, I wrote a firefox extension to warn me how long the page was and how long I spent on it. I am a moderately good reader and still some of these articles would typically take 45 mins to finish.

One heuristic I follow nowadays: Before reading, I think about what my purpose of this article is, what I hope to learn from this exercise: (It could just even be entertainment)

A few mins in, I see if this purpose is being fulfilled. If yes, I continue. If not, I just bail out.

It’s hard to see outside of your bubble when you’re so deeply integrated within it. I recommend anyone here turning off any news and media for a few months and see the world a little bit more clearly afterwards. I’m not a huge fan of Rogan myself but at least he’s not bound by the secret rules of what you can talk about in mainstream media

The mecanism that supposedly was making Ivermecting work against Covid is that it was acting as a protease inhibitor

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protease_inhibitor_(pharmaco...

longform.org used to be my go-to, but they have stopped curating long form content. Would be interested if anyone could recommend a replacement.

How about audiobooks?

Had I had the option to listen to audiobooks while I was in school, I would’ve been a much better student. I never read any of the assigned reading when I was in school because I couldn’t keep my focus on the words, but I’m finding myself cruising through about one very long book per month. Most of the books had been non-fiction (social science and history mostly), but more recently I’ve been getting into novels. They’re just so easy to listen to at the gym, or while driving, or while playing video games.

For all of you who have kids, please encourage them to listen to audiobooks if they don’t like reading paper books. That is, unless you think it’s a valuable skill to know how to bullshit their way through a paper on a book they haven’t read…