4 ms·

I'm in a weird position. Can anyone provide a summary of this article? I have all the time in the world to read things that are interesting (to me) and really

by geuis 3y ago

I'm in a weird position. Can anyone provide a summary of this article? I have all the time in the world to read things that are interesting (to me) and really absorb the content. But I've increasingly been noticing a "recipe article" trend with blog posts. People throw 100 words in when 10 will do. This article is an example. I've even gotten to the point with certain important blog posts where I copy paste the content to chatgpt with a simple prompt to summarize the main points. I'm not happy that I have to do this, but people have seemingly forgotten the art of getting to the f'ing point. Your audience has an attention slightly shorter than this comment. Unless you catch their attention, none of your nuance is going to matter. Generally I've found just skimming the first line of each paragraph works well, but even that is getting harder to find.

riwsky 3y ago
TL;DR: “TL;DR”
saurik 3y ago
This is a magazine (note the "mag" in the hostname). The reason people read magazines is not to "get to the f'ing point": if you want that, find a newspaper or something. The intended audience of a magazine is people who actually want to have the leisurely fun of reading an article that isn't just long but might actively bury the lede or use rhetorical devices such as a false start... honestly, your comment -- which is itself three times longer than it "needs to be" to make your point, btw -- feels as insulting and asinine as someone complaining that Romeo and Juliet could have been summarized in five minutes or so, demonstrating that Shakespeare clearly didn't know how to write. (And sure, maybe some articles are just bad, and don't have writing which captivates anyone, but an article is not a bad article just because it is long or just because can be summarized with fewer words by someone who merely wanted to "get to the f'ing point", and if you come into articles with that mindset you are also going to find slow movies extremely boring and whine about "nothing happened"; but... did you feel anything?)
- richrichie 3y ago
  Yup, you just need to check out the author’s bio.
waveBidder 3y ago
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" from Pascal comes to mind.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
alexashka 3y ago
This is a woman who is sharing an anecdote akin to what every episode of Sex in the city (the greatest tv show ever created according to many women) is about. If you don't get it, you are not understanding what more than half the population is about. Not to worry, almost all people don't understand themselves, others or the world at large and LLMs will not help, since they are trained on data produced by people who don't understand much of anything :)
dhfbshfbu4u3 3y ago
“ In a reflective and deeply personal essay, the author navigates the evolving landscape of reading, from a childhood adorned with gold stars for fairy tale conquests to an adulthood grappling with the digital age's quantification of literary consumption. Amidst New York's vibrant book scene, a place of lit gossip and subway commutes, the author encounters the double-edged sword of being part of a community that both enriches and, at times, imposes unwelcome pressures. With a critique as much of Goodreads' role in transforming reading into a competitive sport as of the social media-induced urge to keep up, the piece eloquently argues for a return to reading as an unquantifiable, personal journey, a haven from the public eye and a refuge in the joy of books for their own sake.”
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
grugagag 3y ago
It’s understandable and may work for you but I have the feeling it’s a bad habit. But again, if it works for you all the better.
- cgriswald 3y ago
  I think it is more or less just an automation of what used to be a more manual process of reading from the outside in.
msy 3y ago
Ironically it’s because increasingly it’s 100 words generated by an LLM from a 10 word prompt. We’ve effectively found a way to keep entire datacenters humming to do nothing more than obfuscate signal in very expensive noise and the lossily try and extract it again.
- switch007 3y ago
  My colleagues use chatgpt to generate very long and eloquent walls of text in slack, then I use slack's new AI summarisation feature to extract their actual point. Insanity
- Terr_ 3y ago
  To be fair, advertisement-economics already created that problem, but the degradation of communication in pursuit of lucre was done by human employees. The technology changes just allow those companies to be more ruthlessly inane about it. Some companies measure and human attention as an exploitable asset, yet individuals have a hard time controlling who takes it from them and how much... Is that a market failure? Or just a physiological one?
bicx 3y ago
I often use the old trick of skipping to the end to see if there is a coherent conclusion, and if I think the conclusion is interesting, I’ll go back and pick my way through the body of the article. I agree with your points though in general. I think this is even worse with many non-fiction books. So much fluff when the main points could be summarized in 10 pages.
- HKH2 3y ago
  The worst fluff I think is from analogies/anecdotes that get spaced out because the author wants you to feel what it's like or something like that. I'm sure some readers really appreciate it, but when the author doesn't tell me what I should be looking for beforehand, I just don't have the patience.
codetrotter 3y ago
> Can anyone provide a summary of this article? Well that’s too much work. But here is an LLM produced summary of the text: Molly Templeton's article, "On Letting Go of the Idea of 'Keeping Up'," explores the pressures of contemporary reading culture, contrasting it with the joy of reading she experienced in childhood, symbolized by earning gold stars for each book read. She describes how, as an adult, reading has become entangled with competition, social performance, and the need to keep up with trends, turning the solitary pleasure of reading into a public performance marked by obligations and quantifiable achievements. Templeton criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have transformed reading into a task-oriented activity, where success is measured by the number of books read, detracting from the intrinsic value of reading itself. She shares personal anecdotes from her time in New York's bookish circles, where she felt the pressure to be well-read and current, highlighting the anxiety that can come with trying to meet external expectations. Templeton recalls a turning point when being asked about her recent reads felt more like a competition than a shared interest, prompting her to reevaluate her relationship with reading. She argues for a reading culture that values personal experience over productivity, emphasizing that the number of books one reads should not dictate one's worth as a reader. Templeton advocates stepping away from the competitive and overwhelming aspects of online book communities to reclaim reading as a personal, unquantifiable joy. Her reflections serve as a reminder that the true value of reading lies in the individual growth, enjoyment, and insights it provides, far beyond any statistic or social media status.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  > Templeton recalls a turning point when being asked about her recent reads felt more like a competition than a shared interest, prompting her to reevaluate her relationship with reading. She argues for a reading culture that values personal experience over productivity, emphasizing that the number of books one reads should not dictate one's worth as a reader. It feels to me that Templeton needs to re-evaluate her relationships with friends asking this instead of with reading. Sometimes I read a lot, sometimes barely at all but I don't get questions from friends like "Only two books in half a year? Bro, do you even read?!".
- voisin 3y ago
  So many of the same things apply to running/Strava and living/Instagram.
newzisforsukas 3y ago
Not perfect, but helps to determine if something is worth the time: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Kagi is one of the greatest quality of life improvements I've had in a while. Here hopes I'm putting my trust in the right place though, search history is one of the most personal and identifiable datasets possible
- cgriswald 3y ago
  For kicks, I gave it the URL to these comments (shortly before this post, ~30 comments). Here are the results: Summary: geuis: I've noticed a trend of "recipe articles" that are overly wordy when they could be more concise. I've resorted to using ChatGPT to summarize key points of important blog posts, as the authors don't seem to value their audience's attention span. meristohm: I've become more selective about what I read as I've realized I can't consume everything. I don't feel compelled to finish books that don't interest me anymore. msy: The problem is that much of the content is generated by language models, creating "expensive noise" rather than meaningful signal. Terr_: The degradation of communication for the sake of advertising revenue is a market failure, as individuals struggle to control how much of their attention is taken. bicx: I often skip to the end of articles to see if there's a coherent conclusion, and if so, I'll go back and read the body. I agree that non-fiction books in particular tend to be overly padded. HKH2: The worst fluff is when authors use excessive analogies or anecdotes without clearly explaining what the reader should take away. throwaway2037: Why read the full novel when you can just read the back cover or watch a short summary? People seem to value efficiency over depth these days. steviem: I read a lot of "shitlit" or inconsequential literature, but I don't see that as better or worse than anyone else. Reading should be for enjoyment, not a target to hit. deebosong: I respect people who read a lot, but I worry that reading 100+ books per year could become more about appearances than true engagement. theK: How does someone manage to read 150 books per year? What's their routine and how do they avoid distractions? harrisi: When you get in the habit of reading regularly, you can read books surprisingly quickly. spxneo: Reading 150 books per year is impressive, but it would be tough to apply all that content to real life.
throwaway2037 3y ago
I need to troll a little bit here: Do you watch the whole 90 min film, or the YouTube summary in 10 mins? Or even shorter: Just the 2 mins trailer? Why do you read a whole novel instead just reading the back cover? Why read Der Speigel or The New Yorker long form journalism when you can get the summary in 90 seconds on the toilet with CNN?
- 2143 3y ago
  Not the same. The key is weather it captivates the reader/viewer/audience. If the 90 min film gets hopelessly boring, I wouldn't hesitate to stop watching. Heck I've abandoned 10 minute YouTube videos because it got boring. I have abandoned novels halfway because it was boring. Perhaps it may have been the greatest novel ever and I'm missing out by not completing it, but it's okay for me. Now I'm not saying it should be interesting right from page 1. But if it's not reached any major plot point by page 200, I'm skipping. Relevant discussion about this from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35340083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35340083
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- esafak 3y ago
  It's not a difficult question: people will watch the trailer or read the summary to decide if they want to invest their time in the complete work. That's why trailers exist!
meristohm 3y ago
Strikes me (in my 40s, regularly read books and sometimes full articles in magazines) as lazy. When I understood I will not be reading all the things, and that a lot of what is written is trash (to me, anyway, given my values and sense of purpose), and that books are technology that replaced oral tradition, it became a whole lot easier to be very selective about what I read. I've started many books now that, before, I'd feel compelled to finish. You're not happy you have to do this- why do you have to do this, again?
karambir 3y ago
I had same feeling. I have been using AI summarizers more and more for these type of articles/posts. Though I haven't checked the summary quality, here is what I got from Kagi Summarizer: The passage discusses the author's experience with the growing sense of competition and obligation around reading and book consumption. It criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have turned reading into a quantifiable task, with people feeling pressure to read a certain number of books per year. The author argues that reading should be about the experience and personal enjoyment, not about keeping up with others or hitting reading goals. The passage encourages readers to step away from the social media side of reading and not worry about the "right" way to read. It emphasizes that the value of reading is not quantifiable and that people should read at their own pace without external pressure.

by geuis 3y ago

riwsky 3y ago

TL;DR: “TL;DR”

saurik 3y ago

This is a magazine (note the "mag" in the hostname). The reason people read magazines is not to "get to the f'ing point": if you want that, find a newspaper or something. The intended audience of a magazine is people who actually want to have the leisurely fun of reading an article that isn't just long but might actively bury the lede or use rhetorical devices such as a false start... honestly, your comment -- which is itself three times longer than it "needs to be" to make your point, btw -- feels as insulting and asinine as someone complaining that Romeo and Juliet could have been summarized in five minutes or so, demonstrating that Shakespeare clearly didn't know how to write. (And sure, maybe some articles are just bad, and don't have writing which captivates anyone, but an article is not a bad article just because it is long or just because can be summarized with fewer words by someone who merely wanted to "get to the f'ing point", and if you come into articles with that mindset you are also going to find slow movies extremely boring and whine about "nothing happened"; but... did you feel anything?)

richrichie 3y ago
Yup, you just need to check out the author’s bio.

waveBidder 3y ago

"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" from Pascal comes to mind.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

alexashka 3y ago

This is a woman who is sharing an anecdote akin to what every episode of Sex in the city (the greatest tv show ever created according to many women) is about. If you don't get it, you are not understanding what more than half the population is about. Not to worry, almost all people don't understand themselves, others or the world at large and LLMs will not help, since they are trained on data produced by people who don't understand much of anything :)

dhfbshfbu4u3 3y ago

“ In a reflective and deeply personal essay, the author navigates the evolving landscape of reading, from a childhood adorned with gold stars for fairy tale conquests to an adulthood grappling with the digital age's quantification of literary consumption. Amidst New York's vibrant book scene, a place of lit gossip and subway commutes, the author encounters the double-edged sword of being part of a community that both enriches and, at times, imposes unwelcome pressures. With a critique as much of Goodreads' role in transforming reading into a competitive sport as of the social media-induced urge to keep up, the piece eloquently argues for a return to reading as an unquantifiable, personal journey, a haven from the public eye and a refuge in the joy of books for their own sake.”

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

grugagag 3y ago

It’s understandable and may work for you but I have the feeling it’s a bad habit. But again, if it works for you all the better.

cgriswald 3y ago
I think it is more or less just an automation of what used to be a more manual process of reading from the outside in.

msy 3y ago

Ironically it’s because increasingly it’s 100 words generated by an LLM from a 10 word prompt. We’ve effectively found a way to keep entire datacenters humming to do nothing more than obfuscate signal in very expensive noise and the lossily try and extract it again.

switch007 3y ago
My colleagues use chatgpt to generate very long and eloquent walls of text in slack, then I use slack's new AI summarisation feature to extract their actual point. Insanity
Terr_ 3y ago
To be fair, advertisement-economics already created that problem, but the degradation of communication in pursuit of lucre was done by human employees. The technology changes just allow those companies to be more ruthlessly inane about it. Some companies measure and human attention as an exploitable asset, yet individuals have a hard time controlling who takes it from them and how much... Is that a market failure? Or just a physiological one?

bicx 3y ago

I often use the old trick of skipping to the end to see if there is a coherent conclusion, and if I think the conclusion is interesting, I’ll go back and pick my way through the body of the article. I agree with your points though in general. I think this is even worse with many non-fiction books. So much fluff when the main points could be summarized in 10 pages.

HKH2 3y ago
The worst fluff I think is from analogies/anecdotes that get spaced out because the author wants you to feel what it's like or something like that. I'm sure some readers really appreciate it, but when the author doesn't tell me what I should be looking for beforehand, I just don't have the patience.

codetrotter 3y ago

> Can anyone provide a summary of this article? Well that’s too much work. But here is an LLM produced summary of the text: Molly Templeton's article, "On Letting Go of the Idea of 'Keeping Up'," explores the pressures of contemporary reading culture, contrasting it with the joy of reading she experienced in childhood, symbolized by earning gold stars for each book read. She describes how, as an adult, reading has become entangled with competition, social performance, and the need to keep up with trends, turning the solitary pleasure of reading into a public performance marked by obligations and quantifiable achievements. Templeton criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have transformed reading into a task-oriented activity, where success is measured by the number of books read, detracting from the intrinsic value of reading itself. She shares personal anecdotes from her time in New York's bookish circles, where she felt the pressure to be well-read and current, highlighting the anxiety that can come with trying to meet external expectations. Templeton recalls a turning point when being asked about her recent reads felt more like a competition than a shared interest, prompting her to reevaluate her relationship with reading. She argues for a reading culture that values personal experience over productivity, emphasizing that the number of books one reads should not dictate one's worth as a reader. Templeton advocates stepping away from the competitive and overwhelming aspects of online book communities to reclaim reading as a personal, unquantifiable joy. Her reflections serve as a reminder that the true value of reading lies in the individual growth, enjoyment, and insights it provides, far beyond any statistic or social media status.

caskstrength 3y ago
> Templeton recalls a turning point when being asked about her recent reads felt more like a competition than a shared interest, prompting her to reevaluate her relationship with reading. She argues for a reading culture that values personal experience over productivity, emphasizing that the number of books one reads should not dictate one's worth as a reader. It feels to me that Templeton needs to re-evaluate her relationships with friends asking this instead of with reading. Sometimes I read a lot, sometimes barely at all but I don't get questions from friends like "Only two books in half a year? Bro, do you even read?!".
voisin 3y ago
So many of the same things apply to running/Strava and living/Instagram.

newzisforsukas 3y ago

Not perfect, but helps to determine if something is worth the time: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html

hughesjj 3y ago
Kagi is one of the greatest quality of life improvements I've had in a while. Here hopes I'm putting my trust in the right place though, search history is one of the most personal and identifiable datasets possible
cgriswald 3y ago
For kicks, I gave it the URL to these comments (shortly before this post, ~30 comments). Here are the results: Summary: geuis: I've noticed a trend of "recipe articles" that are overly wordy when they could be more concise. I've resorted to using ChatGPT to summarize key points of important blog posts, as the authors don't seem to value their audience's attention span. meristohm: I've become more selective about what I read as I've realized I can't consume everything. I don't feel compelled to finish books that don't interest me anymore. msy: The problem is that much of the content is generated by language models, creating "expensive noise" rather than meaningful signal. Terr_: The degradation of communication for the sake of advertising revenue is a market failure, as individuals struggle to control how much of their attention is taken. bicx: I often skip to the end of articles to see if there's a coherent conclusion, and if so, I'll go back and read the body. I agree that non-fiction books in particular tend to be overly padded. HKH2: The worst fluff is when authors use excessive analogies or anecdotes without clearly explaining what the reader should take away. throwaway2037: Why read the full novel when you can just read the back cover or watch a short summary? People seem to value efficiency over depth these days. steviem: I read a lot of "shitlit" or inconsequential literature, but I don't see that as better or worse than anyone else. Reading should be for enjoyment, not a target to hit. deebosong: I respect people who read a lot, but I worry that reading 100+ books per year could become more about appearances than true engagement. theK: How does someone manage to read 150 books per year? What's their routine and how do they avoid distractions? harrisi: When you get in the habit of reading regularly, you can read books surprisingly quickly. spxneo: Reading 150 books per year is impressive, but it would be tough to apply all that content to real life.

throwaway2037 3y ago

I need to troll a little bit here: Do you watch the whole 90 min film, or the YouTube summary in 10 mins? Or even shorter: Just the 2 mins trailer? Why do you read a whole novel instead just reading the back cover? Why read Der Speigel or The New Yorker long form journalism when you can get the summary in 90 seconds on the toilet with CNN?

2143 3y ago
Not the same. The key is weather it captivates the reader/viewer/audience. If the 90 min film gets hopelessly boring, I wouldn't hesitate to stop watching. Heck I've abandoned 10 minute YouTube videos because it got boring. I have abandoned novels halfway because it was boring. Perhaps it may have been the greatest novel ever and I'm missing out by not completing it, but it's okay for me. Now I'm not saying it should be interesting right from page 1. But if it's not reached any major plot point by page 200, I'm skipping. Relevant discussion about this from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35340083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35340083
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
esafak 3y ago
It's not a difficult question: people will watch the trailer or read the summary to decide if they want to invest their time in the complete work. That's why trailers exist!

meristohm 3y ago

Strikes me (in my 40s, regularly read books and sometimes full articles in magazines) as lazy. When I understood I will not be reading all the things, and that a lot of what is written is trash (to me, anyway, given my values and sense of purpose), and that books are technology that replaced oral tradition, it became a whole lot easier to be very selective about what I read. I've started many books now that, before, I'd feel compelled to finish. You're not happy you have to do this- why do you have to do this, again?

karambir 3y ago

I had same feeling. I have been using AI summarizers more and more for these type of articles/posts. Though I haven't checked the summary quality, here is what I got from Kagi Summarizer: The passage discusses the author's experience with the growing sense of competition and obligation around reading and book consumption. It criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have turned reading into a quantifiable task, with people feeling pressure to read a certain number of books per year. The author argues that reading should be about the experience and personal enjoyment, not about keeping up with others or hitting reading goals. The passage encourages readers to step away from the social media side of reading and not worry about the "right" way to read. It emphasizes that the value of reading is not quantifiable and that people should read at their own pace without external pressure.