Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:03:28 GMT
In Because Reading Is Fundamental, the author talks about the culture of online discussions. He comes to the conclusion that there is far too much talking already, and we badly need to incentivize listening and reading, and supports it by an experiment performed by Ars Technica. An article (which I did not read entirely) which contains the line If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first. Apparently, the assumption was correct.
On the other hand, such articles are lengthy, and you usually get the relevant information by just looking over it. Even worse, for many news sites, you can predict most of the content. And most "heated discussions" just contain the same arguments over and over again.
Furthermore, it seems like many writers consider their writings an art, use complicated grammar and lots of lengthy phrases, where a short text with only the relevant information would be sufficient.
I admit, I am tired of reading. There is so much information, produced by so many pressure groups who think their topic is the most important. Complicated software, complicated telephone charges, complicated taxes, laws so complicated not even the high courts are sure what they actually mean. One has to apply noise-filters to cope with this flood of (dis)information. If your text is written in a way that people who are interested in that topic (and who you probably wrote the text for) do not read it carefully, this might be a flaw in your text rather than a flaw in the persons.
I could have wrote this as a comment on CodingHorror, but I do not want to register yet another account, and support yet another software project that tries to replace IRC and SMTP and forces me to activate javascript just for writing and reading comments.