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> If you hate the format of these kinds of article You mean long-form articles? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wik

> If you hate the format of these kinds of article You mean long-form articles? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism I don't think the problem is with the format, but with your expectations. Somehow you were expecting a straight answer to the question in the title; instead, it's a detailed look into the incident and the context around it.

lopis 3y ago
The tiktokification of our minds.
- echelon 3y ago
  I didn't like these articles 15 years ago. Unless the subject matter absolutely grabs me, I still don't. I skim voraciously, and I always have. I skimmed newspapers and magazines as a kid. It's a filter for signal. Fluff grates me. I wouldn't blame TikTok.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  This is the same literary technique that Homer uses to open The Iliad, Virgil uses to open The Aneid, and that Vyasa uses to open The Mahabharata.
ethbr1 3y ago
Indeed, I'm curious what specific portions parent would recommend excluding from the article. I found everything fairly relevant to the topic.
danielbarla 3y ago
I think this article is actually a pretty good example of long-form journalism; the jump it makes to reveal the context is fairly small, and relevant from the first few words. In many other articles, however, the context switch is almost nonsensical, making the reader wonder if the writer will ever actually get to the point. While I agree that in the past few decades our attention spans have gotten very short, I also think there's a slight disconnect between the clickbaity titles and many articles. For that matter, this happens with videos as well; things that can be answered in 2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video with a large amount of fluff.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video This is just the advertisement affect. Short videos don't get monetized so longer videos are necessary to make a living.
QuantumGood 3y ago
Nowadays there is so much fluff added (as an "SEO hack" to increase reading time) to what could be otherwise short posts, that long-form was bound to suffer by association. Of course, some never liked long form. I prefer it, but not it's SEO'd brethren
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  The worst is when they make a large eye-catching quote that is just text from two paragraphs down. I hate spoilers.
  - neilv 3y ago
    For bonus points, they combine that with a screenshot of the Tweet they're quoting, so that you read the same quote three times.
genman 3y ago
I think hating something is kind of personal matter. But very often these "long-form" articles can be tiring. They just circle around something, never getting to the point, adding just unimportant details that should create some form of "connection". It very often feels that it is not long because the author has something to say but it is long because it is meant to appear that "long-form" article. It's like reading novels from Victor Hugo, where he takes good part of the volume to describe rooms in detail. Now it is certainly interesting for a movie director who would like to build an authentic interior but the fact is that he just got paid by the length, so this was his tool go accomplish his goal - getting paid more.
- eastbound 3y ago
  “What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back? … Space exploration has been a long dream for humans. Starting with Aristotle… (follows 2000 years of history with excruciating details)” I enjoy watching how youtubers circle around while never, indeed, getting to the point. In a sense, the expectation they set in the title is not respected, but an excuse to listen to them for as long as they can stretch it.
- boxed 3y ago
  Just saying something is "long form" because you counted the words is silly. This is Ars Technica. They aren't long because some fifth grade teacher gave them a minimum amount of pages. If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks. And yet it feels fluffy. The incident could be described in a single paragraph. The response could be an other. The organisation of the crew training and how it effected the incident could be third, while future instances when the lock was used could be a fourth. So about 800 words, compared to the 3000 words it is. Multiple of us on this comment thread feels it is fluffy, you are asserting it is not. But you are not providing any reason other than that the author is a professional and we should trust them? That is not quite convincing when at the same time I am reading their fluffy article. Why do i feel it is fluf? Because the article is going on and on while not answering any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule. Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed by the payload specialist a normal thing ever? Did anyone from Nasa follow up with him? Was this a misunderstanding? Are we sure he didn’t just say he is not going to return to space one more time just to try his experiment again? Where the expectations about the experiment shared between the experimenter and mission control? Have they discussed contingencies in the planning steps? Did they in future spaceflights? But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping off point, the article is about the human factors and how we should design machinery to account for (and prevent) emotionally disturbed people harming themselves and others with them” in which case I have an other set of questions: space is not unique in the sense that people have access to simple means to end themselves. People who drive are often a simple twitch away from dying as surely as you do if you open a hatch in space. What are the statistics about that? Same about airplane piloting, same about weapons. In which ways is space different from the above, and in which ways is it the same? Are there other things to worry about, or is it only the hatch? Did anything similar ever happen on a submarine, or an artic station? And instead of answering any of these important and interesting questions the author is going on in length what feels like the same 2 and half facts again and again.
voytec 3y ago
>> If you hate the format of these kinds of article > You mean long-form articles? I think the grandparent meant blabbering to get to 3k words.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I don't think this article is guilty of that. Maybe OP thought this was one of those "<Interesting intro with a simple quickly answerable question> ... Dave lives in a small house nestled into the hills of rural Wales. He has long flowing hair and a slight stutter. His three children - Mary, Anna-belle and Calista - have long sense left home and he spends most of his time blah blah blah blah I don't care." This isn't that thought.
tshaddox 3y ago
I wouldn’t like that comment of yours if you had expanded it to 20,000 words long, even if there was a name and a Wikipedia article for that type of HN comment!
pif 3y ago
Is there a rule preventing an abstract from being added at the beginning of such an article? You know, just to understand rapidly whether the rest of the read matches your interest.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Yes, the rules of Dramaturgy. It is not a scientific paper, but at least partly meant to entertain. And for most people it is very simple - they care about space and its challenges - and then they will read it - or they don't and find something else.
wackget 3y ago
Personally I hate articles which are split across multiple pages. It's unnecessary.
- acheron 3y ago
  Think of all those extra ad impressions though!
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Journalism is intended to inform, which is why the inverted pyramid[1] is a thing. Withholding the important information is, IMHO, bad journalism. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Do you think important information was withhold here? Which information was not important? It was a investigative article, about an incident that happened long ago, with most participants already dead by today. If something is worth a long article - then this is.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on. The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric. It's writing for television, where any yes/no question always happens to take exactly 30 minutes (and multiple commercial breaks) to answer, starting with the history of philosophy and reason itself. It's scummy behavior, like timeshare sales or giving people free samples of spicy beef jerky and making them wait in line for water. The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. Then you'd know what to expect. But they went the clickbait route, hence the irritation.
    - Cheer2171 3y ago
      > The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on. It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen. So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear). If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.
mattjaynes 3y ago
No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story). However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story. I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...." You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly. For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.
- ycombinete 3y ago
  Ian Kung poked fun at this wonderfully: https://youtu.be/HySlYLkFieQ?si=ugnFU7PhgZmEXaXn https://youtu.be/HySlYLkFieQ?si=ugnFU7PhgZmEXaXn
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  I watched Dumb Money (2023) last night and it starts this same way. It was completely unnecessary, was done in a confusing way, and this plot device didn't add anything to enhance the excitement of the story. A completely linear plot would have been just fine, especially since everyone knows the story gets more interesting (even from the trailer alone). In fact, the interesting part of the story that most people don't know is the beginning... how it all started before it was exciting. It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  > No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" This is like saying: This is not simply a mug, this is porcelain. Narrative and narrative technique are two different things, just like the function of an object is different thing than the material of the object. It's also probably just a hook, not a full "in media res".
BobaFloutist 3y ago
To be honest, I find feature articles exhausting. I just want the information, not everything has to be narrative!
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
There's a difference between looking into the context around the issue, and filling the article up with endless irrelevant stuff like the weather on the day of the interview or a description of some person's apartment decorations, and often pages of this before you even learn what the point of the article is supposed to be. This article had a clear subtitle that showed where the story is going: "If you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." -- this immediately lets you know that this is about a specific incident (not a hypothetical scenario) and why the threat was made. It then proceeds to add new, obviously relevant information with each paragraph. This felt like a good article, despite its length, but most "long-form" content is trash. Compare https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl... (bad) with this or https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w... (good).

lopis 3y ago

The tiktokification of our minds.

echelon 3y ago
I didn't like these articles 15 years ago. Unless the subject matter absolutely grabs me, I still don't. I skim voraciously, and I always have. I skimmed newspapers and magazines as a kid. It's a filter for signal. Fluff grates me. I wouldn't blame TikTok.
Cheer2171 3y ago
This is the same literary technique that Homer uses to open The Iliad, Virgil uses to open The Aneid, and that Vyasa uses to open The Mahabharata.

ethbr1 3y ago

Indeed, I'm curious what specific portions parent would recommend excluding from the article. I found everything fairly relevant to the topic.

danielbarla 3y ago

I think this article is actually a pretty good example of long-form journalism; the jump it makes to reveal the context is fairly small, and relevant from the first few words. In many other articles, however, the context switch is almost nonsensical, making the reader wonder if the writer will ever actually get to the point. While I agree that in the past few decades our attention spans have gotten very short, I also think there's a slight disconnect between the clickbaity titles and many articles. For that matter, this happens with videos as well; things that can be answered in 2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video with a large amount of fluff.

pixl97 3y ago
>2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video This is just the advertisement affect. Short videos don't get monetized so longer videos are necessary to make a living.

QuantumGood 3y ago

Nowadays there is so much fluff added (as an "SEO hack" to increase reading time) to what could be otherwise short posts, that long-form was bound to suffer by association. Of course, some never liked long form. I prefer it, but not it's SEO'd brethren

thomastjeffery 3y ago
The worst is when they make a large eye-catching quote that is just text from two paragraphs down. I hate spoilers.
- neilv 3y ago
  For bonus points, they combine that with a screenshot of the Tweet they're quoting, so that you read the same quote three times.

genman 3y ago

I think hating something is kind of personal matter. But very often these "long-form" articles can be tiring. They just circle around something, never getting to the point, adding just unimportant details that should create some form of "connection". It very often feels that it is not long because the author has something to say but it is long because it is meant to appear that "long-form" article. It's like reading novels from Victor Hugo, where he takes good part of the volume to describe rooms in detail. Now it is certainly interesting for a movie director who would like to build an authentic interior but the fact is that he just got paid by the length, so this was his tool go accomplish his goal - getting paid more.

eastbound 3y ago
“What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back? … Space exploration has been a long dream for humans. Starting with Aristotle… (follows 2000 years of history with excruciating details)” I enjoy watching how youtubers circle around while never, indeed, getting to the point. In a sense, the expectation they set in the title is not respected, but an excuse to listen to them for as long as they can stretch it.
boxed 3y ago
Just saying something is "long form" because you counted the words is silly. This is Ars Technica. They aren't long because some fifth grade teacher gave them a minimum amount of pages. If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks. And yet it feels fluffy. The incident could be described in a single paragraph. The response could be an other. The organisation of the crew training and how it effected the incident could be third, while future instances when the lock was used could be a fourth. So about 800 words, compared to the 3000 words it is. Multiple of us on this comment thread feels it is fluffy, you are asserting it is not. But you are not providing any reason other than that the author is a professional and we should trust them? That is not quite convincing when at the same time I am reading their fluffy article. Why do i feel it is fluf? Because the article is going on and on while not answering any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule. Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed by the payload specialist a normal thing ever? Did anyone from Nasa follow up with him? Was this a misunderstanding? Are we sure he didn’t just say he is not going to return to space one more time just to try his experiment again? Where the expectations about the experiment shared between the experimenter and mission control? Have they discussed contingencies in the planning steps? Did they in future spaceflights? But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping off point, the article is about the human factors and how we should design machinery to account for (and prevent) emotionally disturbed people harming themselves and others with them” in which case I have an other set of questions: space is not unique in the sense that people have access to simple means to end themselves. People who drive are often a simple twitch away from dying as surely as you do if you open a hatch in space. What are the statistics about that? Same about airplane piloting, same about weapons. In which ways is space different from the above, and in which ways is it the same? Are there other things to worry about, or is it only the hatch? Did anything similar ever happen on a submarine, or an artic station? And instead of answering any of these important and interesting questions the author is going on in length what feels like the same 2 and half facts again and again.

voytec 3y ago

>> If you hate the format of these kinds of article > You mean long-form articles? I think the grandparent meant blabbering to get to 3k words.

IshKebab 3y ago
I don't think this article is guilty of that. Maybe OP thought this was one of those "<Interesting intro with a simple quickly answerable question> ... Dave lives in a small house nestled into the hills of rural Wales. He has long flowing hair and a slight stutter. His three children - Mary, Anna-belle and Calista - have long sense left home and he spends most of his time blah blah blah blah I don't care." This isn't that thought.

tshaddox 3y ago

I wouldn’t like that comment of yours if you had expanded it to 20,000 words long, even if there was a name and a Wikipedia article for that type of HN comment!

pif 3y ago

Is there a rule preventing an abstract from being added at the beginning of such an article? You know, just to understand rapidly whether the rest of the read matches your interest.

hutzlibu 3y ago
Yes, the rules of Dramaturgy. It is not a scientific paper, but at least partly meant to entertain. And for most people it is very simple - they care about space and its challenges - and then they will read it - or they don't and find something else.

wackget 3y ago

Personally I hate articles which are split across multiple pages. It's unnecessary.

acheron 3y ago
Think of all those extra ad impressions though!

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Journalism is intended to inform, which is why the inverted pyramid[1] is a thing. Withholding the important information is, IMHO, bad journalism. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

hutzlibu 3y ago
Do you think important information was withhold here? Which information was not important? It was a investigative article, about an incident that happened long ago, with most participants already dead by today. If something is worth a long article - then this is.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on. The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric. It's writing for television, where any yes/no question always happens to take exactly 30 minutes (and multiple commercial breaks) to answer, starting with the history of philosophy and reason itself. It's scummy behavior, like timeshare sales or giving people free samples of spicy beef jerky and making them wait in line for water. The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. Then you'd know what to expect. But they went the clickbait route, hence the irritation.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    > The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on. It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen. So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear). If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.

mattjaynes 3y ago

No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story). However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story. I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...." You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly. For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.

ycombinete 3y ago
Ian Kung poked fun at this wonderfully: https://youtu.be/HySlYLkFieQ?si=ugnFU7PhgZmEXaXn https://youtu.be/HySlYLkFieQ?si=ugnFU7PhgZmEXaXn
bonestamp2 3y ago
I watched Dumb Money (2023) last night and it starts this same way. It was completely unnecessary, was done in a confusing way, and this plot device didn't add anything to enhance the excitement of the story. A completely linear plot would have been just fine, especially since everyone knows the story gets more interesting (even from the trailer alone). In fact, the interesting part of the story that most people don't know is the beginning... how it all started before it was exciting. It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
GeoAtreides 3y ago
> No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" This is like saying: This is not simply a mug, this is porcelain. Narrative and narrative technique are two different things, just like the function of an object is different thing than the material of the object. It's also probably just a hook, not a full "in media res".

BobaFloutist 3y ago

To be honest, I find feature articles exhausting. I just want the information, not everything has to be narrative!

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

There's a difference between looking into the context around the issue, and filling the article up with endless irrelevant stuff like the weather on the day of the interview or a description of some person's apartment decorations, and often pages of this before you even learn what the point of the article is supposed to be. This article had a clear subtitle that showed where the story is going: "If you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." -- this immediately lets you know that this is about a specific incident (not a hypothetical scenario) and why the threat was made. It then proceeds to add new, obviously relevant information with each paragraph. This felt like a good article, despite its length, but most "long-form" content is trash. Compare https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl... (bad) with this or https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w... (good).