9 ms·

Thinking out loud here...is it possible to use the same patterns for good? Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a

by judah 4y ago

Thinking out loud here...is it possible to use the same patterns for good? Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?

tomrod 4y ago
I've always been frustrated by the Kindle App for this very reason. It should be infinite scroll!
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  It has that. Hit the "Aa" button in a book, go to "Layout", and select "Continuous Scrolling". https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-vertical-scrolling-window-splitting/ https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-ver...
  - myth2018 4y ago
    Wow I use the app since a long time ago and had never noticed it. Thanks for that!
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Nice!
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  The Kindle app’s infinite scroll is what finally made me let go of paper books. It’s that good. I get completely immersed. Can’t do it on an e-ink device, only on phone or tablet. Don’t forget to shut off the progress indicator or location or whatever they call it. Not knowing how far along you are is the other transformative feature of ebooks. In paper books, you always see the end coming.
  - Aditya_Garg 4y ago
    On the kindle oasis (highest end model) no matter how many times you turn off the progress indicator, it always pops back up the next time you read the same book. Completely kills the immersive experience you’re talking about
    - ZeWaka 4y ago
      Strange, it disables fine on my old Paperwhite.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  I have the opposite view having used a large-format (13.3") B&W e-ink reader for nearly a year and a half.[1] The device itself is the size of a printed full-format magazine. It's larger than most books, and if you're reading principally textual material, an 8--10" screen might be preferable (smaller, slightly lighter, more portable), but if you're inclined to read old-school articles scanned in with middlin' quality, this is excellent. I far prefer paginated navigation. I use the device as well for much web reading, almost entirely using the Einkbro browser, which as the name suggests is optimised for e-ink. Basically, that amounts to full-page navigation based on touch (not gestures), and some settings for favouring a high-contrast black-on-white style on most websites. (HN's slight off-white main-page background is highly distracting. Even on desktop, I've inverted the main body and margin colour schemes using the Stylus extension (Firefox).) I find that Pocket, though it typically renders articles well, navigates them poorly. It's instead hugely preferable to either read them on Einkbro or use that browser's print-to-PDF or print-to-ePub[2] features and then read content directly via Onyx's bookreader software (NeoReader). For formatted books and articles generally, I far prefer paginated formatting, and will usually opt for PDF rather than ePub formats because the PDFs read better. This is after decades of being a PDF critic. It turns out that the problem is far less the PDF format than device displays. Laptops and desktops are landscape rather than portrait (though a sufficiently large desktop is good for viewing content with other applications/windows visible, and/or in 2-up mode), and phones are Too Damned Small. E-ink at 8" or larger is a whole new world.[3] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Onyx BOOX Max Lumi. Not GPL compliant, but otherwise excellent HW & SW. Wish I could bump the onboard storage up from 64 GB to ~512 GB or better. Starting to look into HW hacking options. Oh, and it also has continuous scroll for the ebook reader if that's your kink. 2. The ePub export is truly transformational, I describe it in more detail here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973824> 3. That's not to say that there aren't really horrible PDFs, or that the file format itself is especially good. I'm talking UI/UX here, with reasonable care to design matching print standards and conventions.
judah 4y ago
Thinking about this a bit more, I realized that Duolingo, the language learning app, does exactly this. It breaks up a large task, learning a language, into smaller bite-sized chunks. It rewards users with coins that can be used to do power-ups. It turns learning into a rewarding game. Perhaps this principle can be applied to other domains as well.
- tayo42 4y ago
  do you really feel like you learn a language with duolingo though? everytime ive tried to learn a language i got much further doing it by studying a book.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    so... repetition I find is very important for speaking and writing. Duolingo nails that. In the same way German class in high school did, hours of practice really helped my speaking. Now I can't really put together sentences - but I have a decent shot at deciphering my mom while she speaks to my grandomther in german, or reading an article. So I think duolingo attacks that nicely. If you want a lot of vocab and reading comprehension I think books are good for that.
    - cobertos 4y ago
      I always struggled with the learning grammar mechanisms in Duolingo. I liked it for learning words in another language though.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cheunste 4y ago
  The word you're looking for is "Gamification" and I honestly, I fucking hate it. The problem with Gamification in this context is that apps like Duolingo that uses Gamification to award you good boy points (daily streak) in the form of streak building mainly to build up "good habits". Unfortunately, the reality is that there is only so much what one app can do before it starts holding you back and become detrimental, but because of the gamification aspects of an app and how some people really really want their good boy points they don't want to abandon it and deep down, they probably don't want to. Now some people just end up thinking that one app is the one and be all solution and end up being "expert beginners" while in reality, they had to abandon it and do something deeper (like reading an actual book in another language) or else they'll never learn to being competent. You can even take this further with reading books. Sure, you can get a star by reading a book for like an hour a day...if you're using Apple's iBook or whatever. That just means you're locked out of other books not on that platform or books you have in other unsupported formats or gasp physical books.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Not from this blog article's premise. The whole argument that Postman has is that education should not be "edutainment". He's quite against Sesame Street for propagating the idea that everything we do has to be entertaining rather than taken seriously. The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?
dredmorbius 4y ago
I'd suggest ... not, for the most part. Though there's the option of planting little long-focus concentration seeds by dropping references to both longer-form high-quality works and the mindset that it takes to absorb them within more accessible materials. Books have pretty much always had an accessibility problem --- they're hard to publicise and attract readers to, and there's a considerable infrastructure that's been set up in all manner of contexts to make this easier, including lectures (academic, public, business), interviews, serial and excerpt publications, etc. The fields of education and pedagogy (amongst others) are consumed with this challenge --- minds are not simply buckets into which torrents of content should be jetted. It seems somewhat similar to me to autopsy and dissection --- the goal is to open up the body and reveal the interesting bits inside, ultimately with the hope that some might find a way to appreciate the integrated (and still functioning) whole. Books, unlike humans, typically survive such treatments. I see the two approaches as bringing deep content to the distracted (what you're proposing) vs. calming the distracted and bringing them to deep content and teaching the process of attending. Ultimately I think we're going to need the latter. Though some morsal-isation may be of use. Keep in mind that there's been a long history of this throughout the history of media technologies (cuneiform, papayrus, codices, books, photography, phonography, video, computer games, ...), most of high excpectations and exceedingly limited success.
- mordae 4y ago
  I second this. What has worked for me in the past to get away from reading morsel-sized content and back into reading long prose was a lighthearted, but captivating book. I have read something from Terry Pratchett and by the end of the book, I was itching to finally give a read to other works in my library that were just collecting dust. In some of his works the gags flow so well, you just can't stop turning pages. You "win the jackpot" pretty often.
- currere 4y ago
  I am curious. If it's not too personal - you seem to be someone who reads a lot and synthesises it together into interesting output. You appear to have some control and resistance to the attention stealing machine, and haven't succumbed to the traps we're bemoaning elsewhere in the thread - tiktok, instagram. What use you make of hackernews and reddit appears to be controlled and productive. Is that a fair assessment? Was it ever a struggle? How did you do this?
cheunste 4y ago
Ever heard of webtoons? Its that one Korean web comic format that is just infinite scrolling until a chapter ends. I HATE that UI design so much that I really think whoever actually came up with it knows nothing about UI or UX design to begin with. So in my opinion, I really do not think so.
cxr 4y ago
See "Hundreds of thousands of people read novels on Instagram" (2019) <https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-platform-may-be-instagram https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-pl...> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122075>
mordae 4y ago
Wouldn't that be contrary to the goal? If the goal is to facilitate deep thought, you cannot slice it up into little chunks. If you do, you still guide the mind instead of letting it find it's own path. The Aha! moments are the best way to remember things, for one. And slicing up a book would be an unduly burden to the writer.
nicbou 4y ago
It might be a good way to inform people about things they should know (worker rights, important financial decisions) without having them sit and read 10 pages about it. You could instead release the information in bite-sized chunks as a feed they can subscribe to. For example, I wouldn't want to read a lot of the content I write, so I considered releasing the tl;dr as feed.

by judah 4y ago

Thinking out loud here...is it possible to use the same patterns for good? Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?

tomrod 4y ago

I've always been frustrated by the Kindle App for this very reason. It should be infinite scroll!

ceejayoz 4y ago
It has that. Hit the "Aa" button in a book, go to "Layout", and select "Continuous Scrolling". https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-vertical-scrolling-window-splitting/ https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-ver...
- myth2018 4y ago
  Wow I use the app since a long time ago and had never noticed it. Thanks for that!
- tomrod 4y ago
  Nice!
Kaibeezy 4y ago
The Kindle app’s infinite scroll is what finally made me let go of paper books. It’s that good. I get completely immersed. Can’t do it on an e-ink device, only on phone or tablet. Don’t forget to shut off the progress indicator or location or whatever they call it. Not knowing how far along you are is the other transformative feature of ebooks. In paper books, you always see the end coming.
- Aditya_Garg 4y ago
  On the kindle oasis (highest end model) no matter how many times you turn off the progress indicator, it always pops back up the next time you read the same book. Completely kills the immersive experience you’re talking about
  - ZeWaka 4y ago
    Strange, it disables fine on my old Paperwhite.
dredmorbius 4y ago
I have the opposite view having used a large-format (13.3") B&W e-ink reader for nearly a year and a half.[1] The device itself is the size of a printed full-format magazine. It's larger than most books, and if you're reading principally textual material, an 8--10" screen might be preferable (smaller, slightly lighter, more portable), but if you're inclined to read old-school articles scanned in with middlin' quality, this is excellent. I far prefer paginated navigation. I use the device as well for much web reading, almost entirely using the Einkbro browser, which as the name suggests is optimised for e-ink. Basically, that amounts to full-page navigation based on touch (not gestures), and some settings for favouring a high-contrast black-on-white style on most websites. (HN's slight off-white main-page background is highly distracting. Even on desktop, I've inverted the main body and margin colour schemes using the Stylus extension (Firefox).) I find that Pocket, though it typically renders articles well, navigates them poorly. It's instead hugely preferable to either read them on Einkbro or use that browser's print-to-PDF or print-to-ePub[2] features and then read content directly via Onyx's bookreader software (NeoReader). For formatted books and articles generally, I far prefer paginated formatting, and will usually opt for PDF rather than ePub formats because the PDFs read better. This is after decades of being a PDF critic. It turns out that the problem is far less the PDF format than device displays. Laptops and desktops are landscape rather than portrait (though a sufficiently large desktop is good for viewing content with other applications/windows visible, and/or in 2-up mode), and phones are Too Damned Small. E-ink at 8" or larger is a whole new world.[3] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Onyx BOOX Max Lumi. Not GPL compliant, but otherwise excellent HW & SW. Wish I could bump the onboard storage up from 64 GB to ~512 GB or better. Starting to look into HW hacking options. Oh, and it also has continuous scroll for the ebook reader if that's your kink. 2. The ePub export is truly transformational, I describe it in more detail here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973824> 3. That's not to say that there aren't really horrible PDFs, or that the file format itself is especially good. I'm talking UI/UX here, with reasonable care to design matching print standards and conventions.

judah 4y ago

Thinking about this a bit more, I realized that Duolingo, the language learning app, does exactly this. It breaks up a large task, learning a language, into smaller bite-sized chunks. It rewards users with coins that can be used to do power-ups. It turns learning into a rewarding game. Perhaps this principle can be applied to other domains as well.

tayo42 4y ago
do you really feel like you learn a language with duolingo though? everytime ive tried to learn a language i got much further doing it by studying a book.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  so... repetition I find is very important for speaking and writing. Duolingo nails that. In the same way German class in high school did, hours of practice really helped my speaking. Now I can't really put together sentences - but I have a decent shot at deciphering my mom while she speaks to my grandomther in german, or reading an article. So I think duolingo attacks that nicely. If you want a lot of vocab and reading comprehension I think books are good for that.
  - cobertos 4y ago
    I always struggled with the learning grammar mechanisms in Duolingo. I liked it for learning words in another language though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cheunste 4y ago
The word you're looking for is "Gamification" and I honestly, I fucking hate it. The problem with Gamification in this context is that apps like Duolingo that uses Gamification to award you good boy points (daily streak) in the form of streak building mainly to build up "good habits". Unfortunately, the reality is that there is only so much what one app can do before it starts holding you back and become detrimental, but because of the gamification aspects of an app and how some people really really want their good boy points they don't want to abandon it and deep down, they probably don't want to. Now some people just end up thinking that one app is the one and be all solution and end up being "expert beginners" while in reality, they had to abandon it and do something deeper (like reading an actual book in another language) or else they'll never learn to being competent. You can even take this further with reading books. Sure, you can get a star by reading a book for like an hour a day...if you're using Apple's iBook or whatever. That just means you're locked out of other books not on that platform or books you have in other unsupported formats or gasp physical books.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Not from this blog article's premise. The whole argument that Postman has is that education should not be "edutainment". He's quite against Sesame Street for propagating the idea that everything we do has to be entertaining rather than taken seriously. The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?

dredmorbius 4y ago

I'd suggest ... not, for the most part. Though there's the option of planting little long-focus concentration seeds by dropping references to both longer-form high-quality works and the mindset that it takes to absorb them within more accessible materials. Books have pretty much always had an accessibility problem --- they're hard to publicise and attract readers to, and there's a considerable infrastructure that's been set up in all manner of contexts to make this easier, including lectures (academic, public, business), interviews, serial and excerpt publications, etc. The fields of education and pedagogy (amongst others) are consumed with this challenge --- minds are not simply buckets into which torrents of content should be jetted. It seems somewhat similar to me to autopsy and dissection --- the goal is to open up the body and reveal the interesting bits inside, ultimately with the hope that some might find a way to appreciate the integrated (and still functioning) whole. Books, unlike humans, typically survive such treatments. I see the two approaches as bringing deep content to the distracted (what you're proposing) vs. calming the distracted and bringing them to deep content and teaching the process of attending. Ultimately I think we're going to need the latter. Though some morsal-isation may be of use. Keep in mind that there's been a long history of this throughout the history of media technologies (cuneiform, papayrus, codices, books, photography, phonography, video, computer games, ...), most of high excpectations and exceedingly limited success.

mordae 4y ago
I second this. What has worked for me in the past to get away from reading morsel-sized content and back into reading long prose was a lighthearted, but captivating book. I have read something from Terry Pratchett and by the end of the book, I was itching to finally give a read to other works in my library that were just collecting dust. In some of his works the gags flow so well, you just can't stop turning pages. You "win the jackpot" pretty often.
currere 4y ago
I am curious. If it's not too personal - you seem to be someone who reads a lot and synthesises it together into interesting output. You appear to have some control and resistance to the attention stealing machine, and haven't succumbed to the traps we're bemoaning elsewhere in the thread - tiktok, instagram. What use you make of hackernews and reddit appears to be controlled and productive. Is that a fair assessment? Was it ever a struggle? How did you do this?

cheunste 4y ago

Ever heard of webtoons? Its that one Korean web comic format that is just infinite scrolling until a chapter ends. I HATE that UI design so much that I really think whoever actually came up with it knows nothing about UI or UX design to begin with. So in my opinion, I really do not think so.

cxr 4y ago

See "Hundreds of thousands of people read novels on Instagram" (2019) <https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-platform-may-be-instagram https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-pl...> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122075>

mordae 4y ago

Wouldn't that be contrary to the goal? If the goal is to facilitate deep thought, you cannot slice it up into little chunks. If you do, you still guide the mind instead of letting it find it's own path. The Aha! moments are the best way to remember things, for one. And slicing up a book would be an unduly burden to the writer.

nicbou 4y ago

It might be a good way to inform people about things they should know (worker rights, important financial decisions) without having them sit and read 10 pages about it. You could instead release the information in bite-sized chunks as a feed they can subscribe to. For example, I wouldn't want to read a lot of the content I write, so I considered releasing the tl;dr as feed.