These things are nothing new. First time I saw them was on Medium com, if I remember correctly.
Honestly I never understood why they were useful in the first place. Why would it even matter how long do I spend reading things? And how would such a guess even make sense in the first place? I mean, define “reading” – is it just skimming the text with your eyes and not even thinking about it? Or somehow thinking at the exact same rate & speed for all parts of the article, from intro to any novel ideas to unclear parts to conclusion?
Also, doesn’t putting a “minute price tag” on a body of text kind of devalue it?
Disclaimer: I’m probably heavily biased here, all I can think of is some sort of a pseudo book nerd who wants to be as efficient at “reading” as many things as possible with no pauses for thinking, but there has to be a real serious reason why these guesstimates are ever really useful?
(A more honest disclaimer: I actually find them distracting, to say the least. I am prone to problems with managing focus, as well as expectations, so sometimes when I open an article with curiosity, having this thing whisper to my ear “you must spend about 14 minutes and go away” is not helping. On bad days it sort of hurts even if I know it’s BS.)
Again, this is not anything new but I wonder about it recently, since it’s been my feeling that I’ve been seeing them pop up more and more, even in places they make no sense (like programmer’s guides or API references). This suggests to me that they are getting incorporated into publishing platforms, and it’s more about turning them off than deliberately including them.
What’s the deal?
So I know whether to waste my time
How does the estimate help you decide?
I don’t get it. If I’m interested in something, I’m interested in it regardless of the length of an article, right?
I mean, maybe I’m not interested in all of it, but then I can just spend, say, 30 seconds evaluating whether the article is any good and whether it spends a paragraph or two on the very topic I’m curious about. Length of the article does not have much bearing on that, it’s more about whether I know the terms I’m looking for and can spot them. (Of course, massive length may hint I will spend more time sifting through, but peeking at scrollbar is enough to realize that.)
If the thing I’m interested in is buried in a massive wall of text, so what? I can ignore the rest of the article as much as I can ignore the rest of the blog (or the internet…)
The real unpredictable thing for me is always that even if I’m looking for topic X, I might actually need to learn about W first, and often I’m underestimating the relevancy of W and its own depth. So I could spend 1 minute reading about X but still find myself unable to use the knowledge. That’s regardless of whether the knowledge was in a 1h long article or 10 min.
For you, maybe, but not for me. I literally didn’t read your whole comment that I’m replying to right now because it was too long.
My attention is conditional.
If I know it’s a 10 minute read:
I can decide NOW whether to continue.
Or in 1 minute whether to continue.
Or in 4 minutes whether to continue.
Or in 8 minutes…
Or…
…or in 30? That’s how it would work for me since I’m a very slow (distracted!) reader.
I get the point, though. Thanks.