10 ms·
Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service
- jeppesen-io 5y agoI feel bad, I tried it but if I'm honest I couldn't focus on long form Not a good thing
- lisper 5y agoYes, the loss of ability to focus is truly one of the most... oh look! A kitten!
- brazzy 5y agoTBH, a lot of "long form" articles are just shitty. Randomly interrupting a current event story with unrelated biographic episodes of the protagonists does not magically result in a more valuable, high-brow form of reporting.
- reincarnate0x14 5y agoI love the scheme of repeatedly building up towards the answer to one of the central questions of the subject and then yanking the rug, digressing into some backstory of a minor personage or historic aside to pad out another page. And by love I mean absolutely despise.
- md_ 5y agoWhat really gets me is how, in narrative fiction, the author knows what's going to happen in the plot at the very beginning, but they only gradually reveal it to the reader throughout the story.
- reincarnate0x14 5y agoComposing narrative fiction by ending every chapter in a cliffhanger is an excellent way to get your readers to skip to the end and then throw it away.
- dredmorbius 5y agoIf the entire value of an item of writing hinges on the revelation of a single fact, then the writing is flawed. State the fact and be done with it. (As I've just done here.) If the writing has value, the fact will be immaterial to that value, and the true reward for the reader is in the telling of the story, the narrative developed, the introduction and interrelation of facts, concepts, characters, strengths, and flaws. And yes, telling those, where they are material to the story, takes time, but also is its own constant reward. We have classics of literature and mythology. The stories are well known. The boy loses the girl, then wins her back. The dog dies. We all die. A tree grows in Brooklyn. George slays the dragon. Cinderella wins the prince. The Wicked Witch is overcome. Jesus dies, then returns. Buddha is enlightened. Those facts don't matter to the value of the story. It's the details built up along the way, the morals and principles exposed, which do. Build your stories around those, then pull away all that truly does not matter. (This sounds simple. It's much harder than it seems.)
- phgn 5y agoI think some of the value of long articles is simply that they are long -- if you can get into them, they get you away from news feeds long enough so that the effect feels calming. Regardless of actual content.
- rchaud 5y agoA lot of long-form writing is lazy and designed to pad out the word count/page count. I have never finished a single Cal Newport book because of this, and they're only about 250-300 pages as it is. All the value can be found in the first 50-75 pages. It's pure fluff after that. I'm surprised "book summarization" services like Blinkist haven't become more popular.
- zaphod12 5y agoReally recommend longreads.com Mostly they curate other's long form journalism, but also have some of their own and usually quite good. They'll link out to eater, ny magazine, aeon, nautilus, outsideonline, nytimes, propublica (super recommend these) and anyone else producing good content.
- 1123581321 5y agoLongform was a respected service and I wish them the best focusing on the podcast. My use of Longform declined as long, intricate articles became something nearly any publication could pull off, but I think that Longform deserves some credit for bringing about that change in journalism. There are new forms of journalism emerging and new curators will appear to popularize them.
- axiomdata316 5y agoDo you have any recommendations for similar services that aggregate quality long form articles?
- adwi 5y agohttps://longreads.com/ https://longreads.com/
- 1123581321 5y agoThere are so many ways to collect them now, e.g., there are hundreds of twitter accounts that reliably share 'interesting articles' and nearly all are long form anymore.
- spoonjim 5y agoWhat made nearly any publication able to pull of long, intricate, articles?
- 1123581321 5y agoMultiple factors, but I think the biggest are the format becoming more imitable over time, better baseline design tools and CMSes for multi-section content, and automation/semi-automation of short form articles to make room to focus on big hits. There is also some survivorship bias as search engine improvements and changed tastes through sharing have diminished or forced sale of content mills.
- drx 5y agoThat's a shame. Fortunately, it looks like the archive will stay up: https://twitter.com/aaronlammer/status/1478749874053169154 https://twitter.com/aaronlammer/status/1478749874053169154
- jart 5y agoIt's a bunch of links to Wired and GQ. Maybe they wouldn't have needed to shut down if only Yahoo hadn't killed del.icio.us which used to be the social media platform for bookmarks. I'm still crying on the inside over that.
- mmahemoff 5y agoDid Yahoo kill Delicious? They bought it, didn't do much with it, and sold it to YouTube's founders. But would it have survived as anything more than a personal bookmark organiser (ie pinboard) anyway? The killer feature of delicious was popular links, which has since been used as the main structure for forums such as Digg (originally), Reddit, and Hacker News. Curated feeds on Twitter/FB/etc also work to share popular links. For example, you can use r/longform to find the same kind of links delicious would have provided. https://www.reddit.com/r/longform/top/?t=year https://www.reddit.com/r/longform/top/?t=year.
- phgn 5y agoFor me, the archive seems by far the most valuable part of longform.org. I'd guess no-one has even approximately read most of the best articles they recommended in the past. This is now the chance to get to them and re-read the best ones, without being distracted by new things.
- urda 5y agoSee prior post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29810046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29810046
- optimalsolver 5y agoAlternatives: Arts & Letters Daily : https://aldaily.com/ https://aldaily.com/ Aeon: https://aeon.co/ https://aeon.co/ Nautilus: https://nautil.us/ https://nautil.us/ Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/
- killjohncoulton 5y ago
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI might have to try out that Hacker News thing. Sounds interesting.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoBe careful, it's slightly addictive.
- SLWW 5y agoI can quit anytime man =_=
- guiseroom 5y agoLongreads is also great. https://longreads.com/ https://longreads.com/
- alexilliamson 5y agoLongreads is great... I actually thought that was the one shutting down and just breathed a sigh of relief
- lastofthemojito 5y agoSame here! I had an article on Longreads [0] open in another tab when I saw this headline and felt like I'd better hurry to finish it! 0: https://longreads.com/2019/05/30/born-to-be-eaten/ https://longreads.com/2019/05/30/born-to-be-eaten/
- jmnicolas 5y agoNever heard of this site before, but if I could hazard a guess to why they're shutting down, who nowadays has the time to read a long text for leisure? Not many people I guess. My opinion is that the information loop has entered hyper velocity and anything long form cannot be mainstream anymore. If I take my case as an example, the only activity where I focus for more than 5 minutes is coding. I skim news just reading the titles, occasionally reading an article, I can't watch a full length movie without opening a browser on the second screen, I listen to audio books while driving.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoReally? The short story is now a dead artform. Even 'trilogies' aren't a thing anymore - anything less than five thick tomes doesn't sell. Movies are now three hours long, but even that seems to be a half-measure and the cinematic form is now being replaced by miniseries. (I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.)
- tangjurine 5y ago90 minutes?
- rvieira 5y agoThe unit is called "1 Woody Allen".
- brnt 5y ago> (I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.) I think we all still agree on that!
- ratww 5y agoYep. The fact most of my friends binged the Beatles 9 hour documentary in one or two days still surprises me. I also did the same. People do have time.
- aligray 5y ago> (I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.) Thank you very much I needed a good laugh this morning!
- vr46 5y agoThe Browser rules, though. https://thebrowser.com/ https://thebrowser.com/
- blntechie 5y agoSeems expensive for just curation even though I don't discount the work required for top quality curation.
- jabroni_salad 5y agoplus it would be trapped in my email. Is there a backlog to review? seems like a downgrade from longform which is a normal functional website.
- phgn 5y agoNot having an archive of links may be a feature -- relieving you of the responsibility to decide what to read.
- saperyton 5y agoThinking About Things is free https://thinking-about-things.com/ https://thinking-about-things.com/
- probably_wrong 5y agoI am sorry to see them go, but more for the principle than for the site itself. I gave up on the site when I realized that I was spending more time scrolling for something interesting than actually reading articles. Even now, out of their top 10 "best of 2021" I find only 3 of those even remotely interesting, and IMHO one of them is garbage (I read it when it came out). The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane. The Guardian's article on what will happen when the Queen dies [1] is my go-to example of long form journalism done right. longform.org articles always felt more like "here's a sad story about some global issue", which is not the type of article I want to read during my commute. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
- phgn 5y agoYour point applies to much more than long-form articles. We spend so much time subscribing and scrolling through information sources just to be "aware" things exist (it's the worst for news). If we'd really want to read something great or understand a topic deeply, everyone has huge read-it-later lists and bookmark collections. But filtering and discovering new things is somehow much more rewarding than reading or understanding itself.
- jethro_tell 5y agoMuch of my leasure time is spent working with my hands when I'd rather be reading thinking and learning. I burn through audio books at a good clip but I still haven't found a good way to get random articles read to me. And in the mean time, they stack up for true pleasure time which is rare for me. When I get a chance, I might make myself a pocket to Amazon Polly pipeline or something. The difficulty is that to make this a commercial product would almost certainly be a copyright violation and not ethical to the actual writers anyway. I'd love to do the same for a lot of my email but I don't know if I want to upload that and I'd have to do quite a bit of parsing to get the meat and skip the re: re: re: re: so that's out there a bit.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
- PotatoNinja 5y agoI've been using longform.org with the Send To Kindle Chrome extension. That way, I've always had a library of articles on my Kindle. Sad to see them go.
- jordanpg 5y agoI sense in myself a disconnect between my desire to read longform journalism and my willingness to actually spend the time to do it. It's as if I have a guilty, deep-down feeling that the longform stuff is the really good, nourishing stuff, and anything else is basically fast food. But perhaps this is just not true anymore. Maybe it never was. I always come back to the adage “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” When I think of a garden-variety longform piece, it is often one or more narrative components bolted onto lots of historical and background material. There is some new stuff, some reporting, some original thought -- but always laced with flourish and narrative. Occasionally this is fun to read, but more often I just don't have the time. There is a time and a place, but as a matter of course, it's not practical anymore. One must carefully choose which long pieces to devote time to, whether they be longform articles, books, or otherwise. There is just so, so, so much to read. I wonder why authors of this kind of thing don't put more energy into providing TL;DR executive summaries. Is it because it obviates their job? Or is a summary somehow less than the real thing?
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoHuge shame to see them go. My usage of them dropped off in recent years, but I still greatly enjoyed the curated service. I always had five or six longform articles saved to Pocket and loaded onto my Kobo if I needed a quick distraction.
- Jupe 5y ago"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Refs: https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-would-have-written-a-shorter-letter https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-woul...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- d3fault 5y agoSad to see them go, but at least the archive will be there. Eater has quite a good collection of long form articles on food and culture, if that's your thing. https://www.eater.com/longform https://www.eater.com/longform
- psadri 5y agoIf I’m not mistaken they didn’t honor their email “unsubscribe”. I unsubscribed several times only to continue receiving their newsletters :-(
- EconoBen 5y agoI’m just discovering this site even exists and it’s shutting down… Are there similar sites out there people recommend?
- DamnInteresting 5y agoI think people tend to underestimate the effort involved in curating content. Reading and assessing all of that stuff is time consuming. And there are a lot of complainers and axe-grinders out there who harass you when your curation does not exactly match their interests and values. People assume you linked to a thing because you 100% agree with it. People respond flippantly to the titles without reading the articles. People get mad because they hit a "you've read X articles" paywall. It can be a lot to deflect. The other pain point in curation is the relentless poaching. If you find any success doing it right--by keeping tabs on creators directly--soon other lazy (often more popular) "curators" will be using your hard work as a major source of their own links, without giving any credit.
- dang 5y agoThanks for the great articles, and I hope no poaching of them ends up here. We do switch URLs and ban sites when we see that kind of thing, but we don't always catch it.
- DamnInteresting 5y agoThanks for the kind words! I wouldn't consider it poaching for content I curate to appear here; to the contrary, I sometimes share relevant links on HN myself. I am mostly put off by sites that claim to be hand curated by a few people, and then a significant fraction of their links are clearly based on my efforts. I don't want to name names, but there was a very popular curated site/newsletter that was leaning heavily on my work for a few years. Fortunately someone there seems to have realized it was uncool, and they backed off. Edit: To be clear, here I am discussing my site's curation of third-party links. We also create our own content, but I don't share those articles on HN myself, I would consider that gross.
- karaterobot 5y agoReading articles I found on Longform used to be part of my Sunday morning ritual, the same way reading the NYT is for some people. However, at some point I found myself looking elsewhere: the quality of their selections went downhill, or rather changed focus toward politics during a time when I wanted an escape from that on a Sunday morning, so it no longer really fit my needs.
- stereoradonc 5y agoI am tracking the best reads on Internet and have a private Telegram channel. You can access it here: https://t.me/+pwdYcfBiV1I3Njll https://t.me/+pwdYcfBiV1I3Njll Users clicking on it will need Telegram. I plan to have a private group to share/discover and amplify other best finds. Each of the links posted here is personally vetted. Long form links are encouraged. Reactions are switched on by default (you can react to the posts). Forwarding is restricted.
- Zacny_Los 5y agoAlternative: neologism.substack.com