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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#301

Post by mattmanser »

beloch wrote: post #165
asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong. I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading. Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're…

But this isn't new, this is something that was very common pre-internet too.

It's an art form, and it's about exploring the people behind the ideas as well as the ideas themselves.

I used to love reading the Saturday and Sunday magazines that came with the paper, this was back in the 1990s. Many of those were always of this long form, rambling, structure.

If you can see the pattern it's obvious once you start reading.

There's a sort of teaser at the beginning. Then they dive into a person's history like this:

Super Bionics is an exciting new form of prosthetic that's revolutionising lives.

Steve Jones was sitting on his porch when he first thought of super-bionics. Steve had always been fascinated by robotics when he was growing up. At 3 years old.........

5 paragraphs later they'll finally do a bit more about the super-bionics.

Then each section gradually moves the story forward in exactly the same way. They intro the subject. They introduce a new person behind the subject and explore them and their motivations. Then they say a bit more about the actual subject.

You're mistaking a writing style with time wasting.

I don't have the patience for it any more, but lots of people do.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#302

Post by asimpletune »

8note wrote: post #282
asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

i for one always enjoyed reader's digest even though i knew it was heavily critiqued by all the fancy people. i still like reading the adapted books into chapters from the walrus too. i havent been a subscriber in a while, but they tend to be nice reads that dont require me to commit to reading the same thing for the next couple weeks on the toilet

That’s a blast from the past. I also loved readers digest! I would find them all over the place when I was little and devoured them.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#303

Post by mfro »

asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

I found very quickly when I started associating with philosophy majors, reading the material usually does not correlate to understanding it, and many people simply don't want to put in the effort to understand something that isn't clear at first glance.

I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace. I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#304

Post by anthonypasq »

maksimur wrote: post #227

I wonder if we even need to consume content by reading , as opposed to watching or listening, to be neurologically healthy and developed, considering it's something we didn't start doing until a few thousand years ago. Isn't reading kind of a specialization of watching?

written language is just much more information dense than talking. the goal of writing is to distill someones thinking into the most effective vehicle to transfer it without time constraints.

i imagine cultures that refined oral histories over generations ended up at a similar place, but that doesnt really happen nowadays. It really is true that instead of listening to a 3 hour podcast about a topic, you could probably get all that info within 30 minutes of reading.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#305

Post by bumby »

stavros wrote: post #244
dfxm12 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case. I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was goin…

You put the LLM in the wrong place. Put it as the first tier of email reply, then the people reaching out to you will get their LLM reply and not bug you.

I believe this is a prime example of platform decay (“enshittification”). This tends to make the customer experience worse to reduce the workload/increase profits for the company. At least with the current version of LLM chatbots, I’ve yet to call and get a satisfactory answer to any mildly nuanced problem. It tends to add a layer of needless frustration and delay before eventually linking me to a human anyway.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#306

Post by bumby »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #262
yannyu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to. "Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field. How…

My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics,…

>higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides.

I have this experience too, until I remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. There are certain forums where there appear to be loads of high value takes, people discussing with confidence and conviction. And then you run into those same types of comments on a topic you’re actually a relative expert in, and they prove to be quite low value perspectives, but said with the same confidence and conviction. That tends to temper my feelings that any low-effort medium can be generalized as high-value.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#307

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

genewitch wrote: post #115
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.

thankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux, mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever isn't as good as it was in the past. Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside th…

Yes. Copernic desktop search indexed document content. And it was quick. It's pretty hard to understand that MS still can't do useful search

Re: What's happening to reading?

#308

Post by thesuitonym »

doka_smoka wrote: post #89
thesuitonym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that for most of human history, all writing has been behind a paywall.

For most of the history in context of the article, libraries have been a thing

Yes, but its only in the last hundred or so years that public access libraries have been the norm.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#309

Post by conductr »

andelink wrote: post #267
conductr wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If someone sends me a full page email, I immediately skip it. No time for that. They'll follow up more concisely when it becomes important. Or if it requires such elaborate description, a phone call or meeting would have probably been a better channel for this communication. Likewise, anytime I start typing an email and it gets lengthy I know I'd be better off picking up the phone/scheduling a call.

I’m sorry, but you can’t find five minutes (if even) to read an email? No way your day-to-day life is so completely composed of things demanding your full attention that you don’t have a couple minutes to read an email. You typed out this comment, presumably after reading the thread. Surely you have time if someone you know sent you an email. You could read it in the time it takes to brush your teeth.

I think you're assuming my inbox activity looks like yours, and based on your comment I can assure you it does not.

Work only, I get 300+ per day. They're all valid and most of them go unread, especially the long ones. I also am in meetings most of the day, so email is not my highest priority. I scan and respond where essential, or often CC someone that I can delegate an action/decision to. Like I said, if things get urgent and I've not responded - people can find me other ways.

If email was as much as a priority to me as you want it to be, you're right, I probably wouldn't have time to respond here. I also wouldn't have time to use the restroom or sleep.

To flip the script, why are you composing full page emails? How much time does that take? Are you allergic to the phone? Do you want an answer? Do you want it timely? So on... as the sender in async communication, it's poor taste to jam wall of text infront of someone and have any expectation of when it will be read or acted on (same as the guy in the grocery store mentioned in this thread). The only exception is perhaps if it's from a superior and your job is to prioritize their communications - which of course I do, do that when I scan my inbox. There are people I always read and respond to, the vast majority of people sending me emails are not in that list.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#310

Post by whycome »

rpdillon wrote: post #187
whycome wrote: post #184

> These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.

This has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times. https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs

This is cool! Though, in canada that link breaks and there's no mention of it.

There should be a way to do this 'manually' with an ebook paired with the audio book. As simple as timestamps embedded in the text?

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