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'Our Addiction To Links is Making Good Journalism Harder To Read' (qz.com)
The building blocks of the web have become its intellectual Achilles' heel, Quartz reports. Links have turned against us, and they're making it impossible to read and learn. From a report: I know, you got here via a link. Links are crucial for navigation and seem instinctively useful to journalism. But when they're embedded within an article that should be a calm, focused learning experience, they are a gateway to distraction and information addiction. A 2005 study suggested that "increased demands of decision-making and visual processing" in text with links reduced reading comprehension -- a challenge we face every day as we try to parse the web's infinite information. Last week, one of my favorite publications ran a thoughtful, well-written article that I could barely read. It contained 57 links in less than 2,000 words. Today, the top five articles on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal averaged a link every 197 words -- that's one link for every minute of reading. Since the advent of the written word, there's only been one reason to change the color, style or weight of text: emphasis. Your eye is trained to pause and assign added importance to any word that carries a different style than the words before it. A great article deserves focus, and it's almost impossible to achieve any level of focus when random words are emphasized for no reason other than their association with a previous article or the fact that they refer to an outside resource. Read the full story on Quartz.
Am I alone in this? As long as the color of the link isn't overly distracting - darker shades of green, blue, grey, etc work well if the text itself is black - then I am fine with it.
I wonder if it is just a problem for folks who aren't accustomed to this sort of reading, perhaps because they were already well into adulthood before online articles with links became prevalent? I'm no spring chicken, and grew up reading books and magazines, but I don't have a problem with this.
Moreover, I'd prefer to have plenty of links rather than have whole articles where you cannot follow the sources or fact-check easily!
I will say that sometimes links in text are annoying on mobile browsers, but that has more to do with the risk of clicking a link when trying to scroll than anything else. I do prefer when the default behavior of a link is to open in a new tab, so I don't lose my place in the original page, but that can be manually controlled if necessary.
Ads in-line with articles are a much bigger complaint for me, personally, and much more distracting when trying to read (and again, they are usually worse on mobile).
William George
Your "good" link is almost as pointless as the bad ones. Even CNN readers know how to use wikipedia.
No actually, many don't. Most think that google or bing is an objective search for information rather than an unsolicited advertising polluted wasteland with useful information few and far between.
Embedded links should be citations for quoted facts, not lmgtfy stuff or "Here's some random barely-related shit we hope you accidentally click to boost our ad revenue".
Links should be anything that benefits the reader, including reference material that may be inconvenient to find, rather than unsolicited advertising drivel that is only going to waste their time.
If you can't read an article because some of the text is tinted blue you have bigger problems.
A few years back, I read a piece from a researcher (IIRC) that argued that the presence of a link caused you to break your reading flow to decide if you wanted to follow the link or not. As I recall, the researcher backed it up with reading retention tests of the same text with and without links, where test subjects had better retention if they had read the text without the links. From TFA:
A 2005 study suggested that “increased demands of decision-making and visual processing” in text with links reduced reading comprehension
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
If you can't read an article because some of the text is tinted blue you have bigger problems.
But we do have those bigger problem. Text emphasis was designed to stand out. Its sole purpose is to break the flow of reading. It's purpose is to emphasise certain part of the text. If this text that is being emphasised is not actually the important bit then the text itself becomes hard to read and confusing.
ITS MUCH THE SAME AS WRITING ALL CAPS or omitting grammar from the sentence all of this is designed to make it easier for us to read the important points
The way text is displayed conveys meaning.
I hope you never have to read a scholarly article with all those distracting footnotes.
There is a very good reason why they are footnotes, why they are on the bottom of the page, and why references to the footnotes are made as unobtrusive OMG FOOTNOTE READ ME NOW [[[[1]]]] as possible rather than being something incredibly attention grabbing [2].
Providing links to enable people to get more information is a huge boon
Yes it does. One good way of doing it would be to put links into ... footnotes.
[1]: You don't need to read this.
[2]: I hope you recognise how hard it was to read this post compared to if I just replied normally.