Online we tend to read these conversations as they’re being written, as people are engaging in live conversations.
I think that Online we tend to read these conversations as they WERE written. Starting at the top. Wading through the middle. Skipping to the end.
If we were joining a conversation, we would join at the (current) end, then try to figure back to get some context, then join with a comment relevent to the (current) state of the conversation.
Which is to say, conversations should be “top posted”. Which might excite an avalanche of criticism, but would be an interesting excercise.
Area of the trouble is seasoned visitors. Countless articles you get related to on-line are just waste. You wind up skipping several articles, after which it people produce a routine connected with not really reading through the whole thing, regardless if this content is good.
You’ve touched on one of my main problems with stack exchange - Reputation.
It’s totally normal to want to encourage good answers by rewarding people who help others, but as you say, people will do anything to get that number up.
So, reputation is tied to a user, and the more rep someone has the more they have contributed to the community. Make sense… except… this isn’t really a good representative of the quality of the contributions - Just the number of the contributions themselves.
Yes, answers that are better tend to get more upvotes, but the easiest way to get that number up is to flood the board and collect where you can.
So, as a new user I see this every day. Regulars that post one paragraph answers and are assumed to be the expert because they have more rep then me. I put effort and research into an answer just to be overshadowed by someone who has been around longer because they hopped on it quicker then I did.
I’ve almost quit the site because of the system. It’s a good idea, but I just can’t get around the “my number is bigger then yours” syndrome.
This comment is quite revealing, but likely not in the way you intended: #GamerGate was intentionally created by 4chan as a harassment campaign, using allegations of corruption to provide a shield for attacks on Zoe Quinn and, later, other women (this is exhaustively covered on Wikipedia). This was well understood by anyone who actually read any of the articles or primary sources being attacked; the people who lobbed words like grenades, however, never cared to do so because the point was spamming attacks, not understanding.
This is amusingly meta: you’re commenting on an article about people not reading before commenting to defend the practice by repeating propaganda which depends on people not actually reading something before repeating it. I guess you’re at least consistent in preferring conspiracist fantasies.
But it has a lot to say about the quality of discussion and how to preserve it.
It opens thus:
Arguing on the internet is like trying to give a cat a bath. Whenever you finally seem to have someone cornered with evidence and superior reasoning, they somehow squirm out and reset the stand-off as if nothing had just occurred. We’ve all experienced that frustration of “winning” an e-debate only to realize that, since it’s on the internet, no one ever has to admit they were wrong. They simply move on, more often than not restarting the same argument hours or days later. It’s intensely frustrating for people who don’t understand that there’s no winning beyond appreciating the rush of the in-the-moment zing against some nasty internet troll. With that in mind, I understand the temptation to demand a way to hold people accountable for what they do and say online.
I wonder if not just recording how long you’re on the page but also how long you’ve spend at a certain scroll position, you might be able to tell which paragraphs were read and which ones weren’t read.
This depends on the speed and comprehension of the reader. But these are things your system could learn over time to be able to tell that Bob reads really fast and makes high quality posts etc.
I just now created an account with facebook, have been a loongtime lurker. This is my favorite philosophy website. Stack Exchange and Coding Horror all day err day.
@shapira_yehuda So not even the professor read the whole thing?
I wonder if scrollbars might be too primitive for reading. We’re certainly used to them, but but they’re in the context of document height or section height.
Maybe a pagination + scrollbar combo that isn’t necessarily tied to the content of the webpage but the content within the article. I probably should draw a picture, but I mean something similar to what discourse has for comments, except pagination. When the scrollbar reaches the bottom of the page, the next page automatically loads and the previous page automatically closes.
Its hard to describe but the idea being that you’ve always got two pages loaded, the scrollbar shows you where you are in the context of the later of the two pages that you have loaded, and the pagination keeping track of which page of the article you are on.
If you want to scroll beyond the article, that could perhaps be tied to scrolling outside the visual boundary of that article.
One more thing @codinghorror I’d like to point out about people not finishing an article, and I’m not sure that you’ve covered this before, are that some authors are not considerate to their reader’s time.
To the authors that do a hasty mind-dump to their keyboard and don’t proofread or get to the bloody point and instead fumble around for 10 pages of ICANTEVEN, they sometimes are deserving of the tl;dr.
And honestly, you aren’t the average blogger. Yours are courteous to your readers’ time, thought provoking, and worthy of having been written.
There are so many mind-dump blogs out there that, we may have been conditioned to scan. We don’t have all damn day to read through 10 pages that could have been condensed down into 2 1/2.
If readers only read 50% of the article does that suggest that the article is too long for the web? How about writing shorter articles and get to the point? Personally, I don’t read web pages like a book – I scan through it. You need to visually grab my attention with stop words or get to the point with the first sentence in a paragraph.
I think it is interesting that in the gamification paragraph there’s a typo - “but if you’re going to reward someome” - is the incorrect spelling of “someone” there a game that nobody has picked up on yet or just an honest typo?
I’m curious if you think there’s a strong difference between forums and stack overflow sites. You obviously felt strongly that both had a place in the world, since you worked two create two great versions of the two technologies, but why not just combine the two, ensuring that there is a place for people to discuss random things, or get specific answer if they want them. The most problematic aspect then becomes the voting functionality disorganizing comments that might need to appear in chronological order, but I can think of ways to solve this. I think in many cases, one or the other might be a better fit, but I’m starting to see a lot of companies create a space for both, and this seems like a waste of resources and space, and will make it more difficult for users to find the answer they’re looking for in many cases.
Do you have any other reasons why you feel strongly that these should be two distinct/separate technologies?
Let’s not pretend that authors posting on the paywall-less corners of the internet aren’t soliciting from a different reader pool than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
There’s a reason newspapers write with a spiral rhetoric. Don’t hide your point to the end in an attempt to be clever or to create a ponderous logical argument if you’re posting content whose medium is designed for quick consumption.
I still consider your point to be true, people who are reading the whole text can contribute better to communities than those only interested in brodcasting their opinion.
This is great! You care about this minute details and are working to align the incentives with the desired goals of online behavior.
However, how would you convince someone this is important? Your post provides a good argument but how do you respond to people who feel this is unimportant? Arguments with anecdotes aren’t good enough. We have to show the size of the problem.
There are plenty of people who just don’t care about the minutiae and just want to get on.
Do not automatically redirect instead of paginate. Some barriers to reading are also mechanics of comprehension. Paginated articles can be bookmarked. Autoloading can result in misfires (what if I’m reading the last paragraph? What if I hate the article already and want to scroll up to get the writer’s name to invoke a curse?) I find “auto scrolling” content difficult to digest and automatic browser events unreliable to the point of offensively opinionated. I agree that there are improvements to be made, but I don’t want to lose my place or scramble to stop a browser’s robot like behavior to avoid the barrier of clicking “next”. I also don’t need books that magically turn their on pages and slap my face when I’m reading too close to the page.
Comments that address points already covered speak more to a reader’s eagerness to chime in than to how far they’ve read. This may still speak to an issue of online discourse being more about waiting to speak instead of listening, but any graphs or studies on the topic shouldn’t assume a direct correlation between what someone says with how much they actually read. The same problems occur in any community meeting with actual talking.
As always, awesome post. I think there is some real value in watching what gets rewarded and how those metrics get twisted. As a 17k rep SO member, I can testify the value of the right metrics. I’ve taken an afternoon to write helpful answers just to hit some personal goal. And as someone who’s had a gf in tears because some site abused her simply through malicious down votes, I can also attest to how truly dark and counterproductive these systems can become.
Also, do lurkers actually need kudos? Would this be more for the benefit of other users, since they likely will keep reading without incentive?
