> "To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm"
> "The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade"
I find titles promising a specific piece of useful information combined with longform, author storyline based content to be one of the most fustrating things about reading traditional journalism on the internet. A form of bait and switch.
Journalism students spend so much of their time doing pointless writing exercises, they feel like they should continue with it, as if their reputation depends on it.
In the modern world the opposite is true - attention spans are short, you must get to the point.
A similar thing is true in video - I can't stand vloggers who dance around or have to explain the whole history of the subject before getting to the point.
I blame Google - they incentivise long articles with lots of keywords and longer videos.
Long form content actually does very well online when it is an interesting subject and well-written (and, increasingly, creatively designed).
For example: this article has been voted to the front page of HN, which is more than thousands of terse, AP-style inverted-pyramid news articles can say.
Usually long form content in specific fields is entertaining for me but when it comes to news articles, I'd much rather read summarized content with a only few exceptions.
That's pretty much why I never read the articles on reddit/hn and always jump straight in the comment section. I suspect that it's the reason most people do this as well.
It's at least reasonable to expect skimming everything above the fold to tell you specifically what the subject of the article is and where it's going.
I thought I was the only one suffering from this madness! good to know others are tired of this shit too!
I've completely stopped reading past the first sentence of articles that begin like this, which is a lot of articles recently. If I wanted to know what people ate for breakfast, I'd use facebook!
I feel like it must be some SEO requirement - because otherwise who wants a rambling tale of the time someone's gammy took them down to the shore to experience the beach life, finding adventures and making new friends and then paragraphs later ok here's the recipe for Maple bourbon glazed salmon you wanted
> "The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade"
I find titles promising a specific piece of useful information combined with longform, author storyline based content to be one of the most fustrating things about reading traditional journalism on the internet. A form of bait and switch.