Slashdot Mirror
'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.
There's a generation of writers and editors today who believe that the inclusion of a boat-load of hyperlinks obviates the need to provide any background for the reader. Slashdot's cradleful of content-curators are among the worst offenders. They say, "I don't have to explain anything, just clink on the link and you'll understand!" I say, "Learn to write, you lazy sons of bitches, before I remind your ad sales guys that you are intentionally driving your readers off your site."
If you can't read an article because some of the text is tinted blue you have bigger problems. I hope you never have to read a scholarly article with all those distracting footnotes. Providing links to enable people to get more information is a huge boon, and you can easily ignore the links if the summary in the article was sufficient for your level of interest, or you are already steeped in the previous writings on the subject. In the later case it is much easier to skip over a single blue link than to have to skim paragraphs and paragraphs of information you already read the last time the issue was reported on to get to the kernel of new information, which is what reading the news used to be like (and don't get me started on inverted pyramid writing style - thank god that has all but died).
... I am *NOT* going to read TFA, although in this case mostly as a matter of protest, because it would require me to follow a link.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Linking to an official source or out of one's website is good. It's a citation-style linking. It's when there are links for no good reason that you get bad linking.
Good Link:
(CNN) The president announced today that the Paris Climate Accord (linked to Wiki) would continue tentatively based on continued good faith measures.
Bad Link:
(CNN) (link to CNN stock) The president (link to all recent CNN articles with Trump) announced today that the Paris Climate Accord (link to the last time Trump talked about PCA) would continue tentatively based on continued good faith (link to CNN - Religion Section) measures.
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
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.
How do you know? Are you just reporting your subjective perception, or have you actually tested it?
Subjective perceptions of cognitive performance are often terrible.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I see three classes of links in articles.
1. Trivial ones. These lead to definitions of words and things like that. I prefer this over spending a paragraph defining terms the author may be afraid people will be unfamiliar with. If you don't need them, skip them. Even if one of these appears useless to you, it's not. It just saved you a few seconds of skimming explanatory text.
2. Fact verification. Sometimes these are pure CYA, so that if something dicey proves to be false, the author can say "it wasn't me that made it up, I was just going with my sources". Other times they are a defense against the troll hordes and autists looking to challenge the basic validity of an article based on "fake news" which really isn't. Unfortunately the only way to tell the difference is to look.
3. The author (or company's) back catalog. This can be perfectly legitimate – why should someone have to paraphrase themselves when expanding on a prior article if you can just read it? But other times it's little more than a scheme to drive more click-throughs. Unless it has a particularly clickbaity title, the only option here is also to look and see.
The solution I implement is to take or leave Type 1, and to launch Type 2 and Type 3 in the background and read them after the current article if indeed I read them at all. Sometimes it is sufficient merely to know where the link goes, to know what agenda is likely to be pushed. This still can result in a Wiki-Walk style vortex, but at least it only pulls me off topic after I've read the initial article.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.