These things are nothing new. First time I saw them was on Medium com, if I remember correctly.
Honestly I never understood why they were useful in the first place. Why would it even matter how long do I spend reading things? And how would such a guess even make sense in the first place? I mean, define “reading” – is it just skimming the text with your eyes and not even thinking about it? Or somehow thinking at the exact same rate & speed for all parts of the article, from intro to any novel ideas to unclear parts to conclusion?
Also, doesn’t putting a “minute price tag” on a body of text kind of devalue it?
Disclaimer: I’m probably heavily biased here, all I can think of is some sort of a pseudo book nerd who wants to be as efficient at “reading” as many things as possible with no pauses for thinking, but there has to be a real serious reason why these guesstimates are ever really useful?
(A more honest disclaimer: I actually find them distracting, to say the least. I am prone to problems with managing focus, as well as expectations, so sometimes when I open an article with curiosity, having this thing whisper to my ear “you must spend about 14 minutes and go away” is not helping. On bad days it sort of hurts even if I know it’s BS.)
Again, this is not anything new but I wonder about it recently, since it’s been my feeling that I’ve been seeing them pop up more and more, even in places they make no sense (like programmer’s guides or API references). This suggests to me that they are getting incorporated into publishing platforms, and it’s more about turning them off than deliberately including them.
What’s the deal?
People’s attention span is very short these days. The “x-minute read” is a courtesy to those who fear they might get trapped in an arduous and impossible-to-complete 2-digit-minute read.
brain rotted lol
Exactly this. I don’t have time to read a 10+ minute article during this hour of shit post scrolling
I distinctly remember getting about 1% into this article about the heist of the McDonald’s Monopoly Game money, but not knowing how long it would be. I ended up getting to the 5th paragraph and read
JEROME PAUL JACOBSON always dreamed of becoming a police officer. He was born in 1943which is when I realized this was a long story and I couldn’t read the entire thing while on the toilet at work.Yeah I have bad attention span but all that means is that even if the article is 5 minute I will be googling every other word and and opening every other link, and THAT’s far more significant than the length of the article.
After all, there’s a reason I did not end up reading the original “14 min article” (which by the way got rated almost an hour by Firefox reader mode, go figure) and went on to post this… :D