Slashdot Mirror
Not Every Article Needs a Picture (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Pictures and text often pair nicely together. You have an article about a thing, and the picture illustrates that thing, which in many cases helps you understand the thing better. But on the web, this logic no longer holds, because at some point it was decided that all texts demand a picture. It may be of a tangentially related celeb. It may be a stock photo of a person making a face. It may be a Sony logo, which is just the word SONY. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I think it is stupid. I understand that images -- clicks is industry gospel, but it seems like many publishers have forgotten their sense of pride. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's hard for me to imagine there'll be much value in the text of an article illustrated by a generic stock image. As with so many problems, social media seems to deserve much of the blame for this. Until the mid-to-late '00s, a publication's homepage played a dominant role in driving people to individual articles. Homepages mostly mimicked the front pages of newspapers, where major stories -- things that warranted investment in original art -- had images. Other stories just got a headline. Over time, the endless space of the internet lowered the standard for which articles needed art, but still, not everything got an image. [...] Even the unflinching belief that people won't read articles if there aren't pictures doesn't hold up to logic. Sure, interesting pictures can attract readers, but most of these images are not interesting. And even if it were slightly better for business, is that really a compromise worth making?
If "an image for every article" is the current fashion, I worry that could quickly morph to "images and scrolling effects for every article" You already see a ton of that across articles today.
I find it really distracting, and has the effect often I think of creating a distraction if the scrolling is at all choppy (which it almost always is).
The fundamental problem is there are so many places that want content now that the little content there is is being stretched super thin, with layers of articles referencing a single original piece of work. I'm not quite sure how to solve that but I think eventually we'll see new approaches that are not quite so insane.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nor should there be 1 picture per page for 25 pages and ignore that you're simply trying to generate more Ad Rev by making me click through page after page.
I've pretty much stopped reading articles once I see that mess.
I'll agree that stock photos are lame. BUT, photos are not just about communicating information; photos are also layout elements that break up the huge mass of text, and make an article more readable, or, less intimidating to read. So, I can live with the lame stock photos, as better than nothing.
If the article does not have a picture how can you stop the advertisement from dominating the page?
Social media and the rest want to see an og:image (or similar) meta tag, should you happen to post a link.
Once you have selected something suitable for a 'hero' image, you may as well use it to add some colour to your page.
For me it was near impossible to manage manually on my main site, so I simply have some scripts to manage and insert variants of the basic hero image I selected, so it's nearly free. And yes, I work very hard to keep the page-weight down, coming in an order of magnitude below typical, including the image(s), AFAIK.
Rgds
Damon
PS. I use very little stock, maybe 2 or 3 total out of hundreds of pages' images.
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Tell that to Ars Technica.
I've also seen tons of stories with a headline similar to "Drone takes amazing pictures of volcano" without the actual picture.
Forget images. Who decided that when I'm reading a news story -- and this might be a dozen paragraphs of text, now -- I'd want a video of someone reciting a paraphrased version of that same story to play automatically and cover part of the text I'm trying to read?
Breakfast served all day!
The other day a local TV news piece was showing meaningless clips of the Netflix interface instead of items pertaining to the fake account info site the story was about. Not quite needing no picture, but still, making the wrong choice.
And yet here we are.
You have wayyyyyyyyyyyy too much time on your hands to overthink things like that.
for example, in stories about police action, the picture is a large photo of the top of a police car. sigh
i.e. facebook's all too common mode of putting large font text in a big block of color - social media's version of all caps SHOUTING in my mind. Apparently people can't read normal sized text...
How will we know a story is about a legitimate cyber security threat without a picture of a kid in a black hoodie?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I find way too often the picture is much more interesting than the article..
My God the underlined text being animated is more offensive than having to put photos with every article.
If only modern articles didn't require 50 megs of JavaScript( mostly in the form of bloated libraries ) just to display! Yes, I'm exaggerating, but holy shit modern websites are a waste of bandwidth in general for what little information they provide. And fuck Animated GIFs to high hell! These stupid little animations are often 100s of megs in size and that's not an exaggeration.
In utter irony, linked TFA when clicked displays a full screen image before you can scroll down and actually read the story.
I used to work in news (for 30 years). Some people at the paper I last worked at were constantly mocking a local radio station's website for having a picture with every story. It was kind of silly sometimes; a story about a major crime might be accompanied by a photo of a police badge. Then we got a new CMS, and one of its "features" was that it REQUIRED some sort of photo/graphic with the Top Story.
I use Inoreader as my RSS newsreader. It has a universal "images off" control. I have petitioned the developers for years to make this a feed-specific option without success. It is great for food and travel sites, but I would love to block images from general news sites that just dump a stock photo into every article.
So where is the petition to address this issue and influence an end to this photophilia? Can I surf to change.org and sign it?
Are you putting this concept on Linux?
Videos are huge waste of time for me. I'm a reader and find that that most videos that run for minutes only really contain a paragraph's amount of information that I could read in a few seconds.
... at least since a few years in academic publishing. Now almost every journal requires you to send o "TOC graphic" with your article. Even if your work has no graphics and is just about solving some difficult equation, you need to submit a "graphical abstract" thingy, which sometimes ends up being just the aforementioned equation in a bright color. And I'm afraid this has also led to many articles being judged, at least at first sight, by their "TOC graphics", even before reading the title. So sad.
Another stupid thing people tend to do is post videos of text. How many times have we seen the "instructional" video that amounted to 10 minutes of someone trying to type instructions (and correct typos) into a Notepad window? Often in those cases a single line of text would have sufficed.
If you're going to make a video, at the very least speak the instructions and only make videos for things where seeing someone perform the actions is beneficial (ie. crafts or repair). If you're just telling someone where to download something or which registry edit to make, you don't need a fucking video for it.
...you break them up into 20 pieces and display them in a 'slide show' format where every page has a dozen images and a bunch of advertising. If you have your brain turned off, you only realize after slide number 10 that the whole thing is fake and not leading anywhere at all and quit.
Problem solved
You're talking now about a significant number of the populace that can't read a book, even if it has pictures....and people you can ask "who won the civil war", and will either not know the answer, or answer "America?".
It's just been a steady downhill spiral with the common least denominator dropping at an alarming rate.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No picture didn't read
I think it is just another symptom of the dumbing down of the general population....
You're talking now about a significant number of the populace that can't read a book, even if it has pictures....and people you can ask "who won the civil war", and will either not know the answer, or answer "America?".
It's just been a steady downhill spiral with the common least denominator dropping at an alarming rate.
This guy not sure interrupted me while I was watching Ow, My Balls and that is not ok.
or he doesn't give a damn Anand Paka = Google News product manager
So if your content is to appear in a biased, bigoted, populist, publication (I realise that doesn't narrow the field very much) then having a face of a member of whichever group you wish your readers to associate with whatever the article is about, speaks volumes that you couldn't possibly put into words.
It's like the music in a film's sound track. It "tells" us when we should feel sad. it programmes us to expect danger. It builds up tension, fear, light-heartedness. So the pictures do the same for an article.
For newspapers and corporations that feel they are too "enlightened" to specifically mention the race, gender, creed or age of someone - then a photo of them does the job without them dirtying their hands with a specific -ism.
And hopefully, the audience won't notice when one of those images just happens to be an advertisement!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
remember pre-web, folks went nuts with clip art. I still have a Beagle Brothers 20 CD collection of clip art.
and fonts, too. remember all those garage sale signs and lost cat signs people made, with Macintosh fonts, all 6 of them.
no one needed any of that, but it was fun.
but yeah, the web has gone way too far with overcoddled presentations. I agree with all the commenters, who needs all this autopklay video scrolling effects ad-click-bait crap.
remember when the web was surfable over a modem!?? and web pages really were just a few kB of text, no other crap.
Webpages in the last five years have turned into absolute shit I find that I can barely surf the web without some type of adblocker installed. And most webpages seem to have the urge to randomly refresh themselves, which causes whatever I was planning on clicking on no longer being in that spot where my mouse/finger is, and I wind up clicking on something else that I didn't intent to. And I can't blame it on just click-baity or news sites, because even the login pages for my finances (banks, credit card, etc.) seem to randomly reload as well, forcing me to start all over typing in my credentials. I think the people that design websites now don't actually ever USE their own website.
Not every slide needs a graphic. Seriously, just explain the concept instead of throwing up some kooky graphic pulled out of the depths of your arsehole to try illustrate something complex.
Saw this with my kids textbooks. Honors textbooks are generally small and thin, presumably from lack of pictures.
love is just extroverted narcissism
.
Now, you'll have to excuse me. There are some kids on my lawn I need to chase away....
The hilarious thing to me about that is I've been conditioned to see those blocks of color with words as typically being a copy paste from elsewhere. I frequently just keep scrolling without even attempting to read it because I presume it isn't something my friend actually wrote.
Remember when information density was a thing? On my glorious 30", 1600px-high display at work, this page takes THREE screenfuls. https://about.mattermost.com/
Select all, copy, paste, word count: 298 words.
As for file size, the page itself -- no includes -- is 650k. When I save as an archive with scripts and images, it's 4.5 MB.
FOR ONE FUCKING PAGE. With 298 words. Unreal.
And this page, from Apple: https://www.apple.com/iphone/c... -- long rant at http://pixelcity.com/index.php...
TL;DR: 1,049 vertical pixels are used for SIX lines of text.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There is an information glut. There is nothing to "solve" except to accept that there is an information glut, and stop returning to low quality sources of information.
Most have the same problem, but not all do. What are the people who find a lot of high quality content doing differently? Could it be as simple as the algorithm they use to decide which links to click on, and which to skip over? Does it require always opening links in new tabs so that there is less of a time penalty to closing a newly opened link as soon as it starts displaying lame or trendy web design? Does it require the discipline not to turn on javascript, but instead to simply close the tab and try a different source of information?
Why do you believe you should be able to decide what it or isnâ(TM)t interesting, as opposed to the content creator?
The "content creator," that is, article writer, usually had no input in whether any images are used with the piece or which ones are used.
I would never include gratuitious image in anything I published. Never!
If you post it, they will read.
Far, far too often I see an online article *about* something visual, which does NOT include a picture.
If your article is about say "new animal discovered in the Blargh Desert", there is *absolutely* no excuse NOT to include a photo.
Don't have one yet? Wait until you damn well do!
I agree with a log of the comments here, esp. about those full-screen pics that you have to scroooollllll past before you can even begin to read.
OTOH, a picture can serve as a shortcut for a summary, or help to create interest. For better or worse, the web is largely a visual medium.
In my own case, I started publishing my (technical) blog without pictures, and it just looked boooorrrrrrrinng. So I started sticking whimsical little pictures next to the lede, and I have to say that I think it looks a lot better that way, and I suspect that it helps create interest for people who may just stumble upon it.
FWIW, here's the blog: http://btorpey.github.io/
But apparently every bullshit article needs ads with pictures in them.
On Slashdot you don't even need words. Just a topical headline and it's an instant 200 comments
Twinstiq, game news
In your example the writer created only the text portion of the content. That text was moved to some subsequent step of the content creation process where images were added, etc., prior to delivery to your browser.
So yes, the content creator chose to add images.
The stupidity of so many CMS themes requiring a HUGE image that takes up over three quarters of the first "scrool" (page) of an article at the top is ridiculous. I hate reading "news" stories now where it's massive images I'm just going to scroll past every third of a page taking up three quarters of a page each. Give me content. Real content. Not every damn story should be image laden, and not every damn web site needs to be another version of imgur.
There is no "information" glut; there is a glut of slightly editorialized versions of "information." Oh, and fscking videos.
Information is actually more limited than I would have predicted 15 years ago; I expected us to see more people contributing original information to expand the knowledge base of humanity. Instead we got a carrot.
The Drudge Report seems to understand this principle, but they just link to articles with tons of pictures.
And cat videos.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
How good a monetization strategy? Every time a search pulls up a video when I just wanted text telling me what I needed to know, it gets ignored. I'm not going to waste time looking at the pretty moving pictures. They haven't achieved anything but irritating me immensely.
It would have been nice for the submitter to include a screenshot of a good example.
FTFS:
Not Every Article Needs a Picture
How else are you going to get conservatives to understand the article?
And that goes twice, if you're Donald Trump. We know he doesn't like to read. Probably because he probably never got past picture-books.
Worse, a video for every article, generally with auto-play. And usually all the video consists of is some talking head reciting the article more or less verbatim, with no added information, just a waste of bandwidth.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Sometime ago CNN decided that every article required a Video to go with it. Yes - sometimes the video is the TV broadcast recording of the article.
But **many** times the video has little to do with the article itself. For example if Boeing is having an off year the accompanying video might have to do with the launch of the 787 Dreamliner from a few years ago. And then when the video is finished playing it just moves onto whatever video is next available. Somebody was tasked with "find a video" and they do. One cannot watch the selected video and be informed about the actual Text of the article.
Think of all the used bandwidth due to this. Not that I've looked hard - but I haven't found an easy way to block their new video platform. Used to be I could block Flash until clicked.
1. Images whose content is 100% textual in nature (usually, as some ham-handed DRM)
2. Videos that are largely or entirely slideshows of static images with narration OVERLAID AS CAPTIONS.
3. Video captions laid directly into the video so that they do not disappear when you unmute the audio.
tone
Specifically, it's not an online-only effect. Print media has been subject to this plague for decades.
Speaking as a former print journalist, I would guess that it has always had a significant effect on the chance of a particular story getting published.
Sorry, but the evidence is not with you on this. It's been shown repeatedly that plain text articles have a markedly lower retention.
Heck, even Something Awful figured this out like 10 years ago: when they put even random images alongside an article, readership went up.
Why do articles have them? It works. To do otherwise would be irrational.
There's a balance between substance and appearance, and a simple still image alongside is a pretty minor and understandable step toward the appearance side. Where should sites draw the line? Certainly before auto-playing videos and scrolling effects, in my opinion, but I don't think a still image is a bad tradeoff.
The header image could be copied & pasted into a text editor. Obviously, this is just another example of deviant journalism with no legitimate place on Slashdot.
Worse, a video for every article, generally with auto-play. And usually all the video consists of is some talking head reciting the article more or less verbatim, with no added information, just a waste of bandwidth.
Worse that a waste of bandwidth - it's giving me the information at a far slower rate than the text does.
All news sites do it these days. You go to read something and there it is, a great big video set to auto-play about some topic that's kinda related to the same subject, but nothing to do with the headline that got your attention in the first place. These things are a plague and the sooner reputable news sites stop doing this, the better their subscriptions might be.
cayenne8 opined:
I think it is just another symptom of the dumbing down of the general population....
You're talking now about a significant number of the populace that can't read a book, even if it has pictures....and people you can ask "who won the civil war", and will either not know the answer, or answer "America?".
It's just been a steady downhill spiral with the common least denominator dropping at an alarming rate.
What you say is true, but I think root causes bear examination (because just bellyaching about societial problems doesn't really accomplish much):
a. The problem of functional illiteracy in the U.S. is, I think, directly traceable to the policy of teaching reading skills via the "whole word" approach. This method severs each word from the language as a whole, and it actively discourages generalized thinking in new readers. The result of generations of this misguided educational philosophy - which is omnipresent in public school education in this country - is that the vast majority of the population regards reading as a chore, rather than a pleasure. So most Americans avoid it whenever possible. A phonics-centered approach, by contrast, introduces beginning readers to the structural components of language that all English words share: the individual sounds that make up the spoken language, and the syllables that represent them in the written one. It enables the reader to "sound out" unfamiliar words, and to easily grasp that many words are related to a core meaning via prefixes and suffixes. Instead of a laborious process of memorizing vocabulary lists, it encourages the reader to approach discovering new words as an exercise in problem-solving. A puzzle, if you will. Were the public education establishment to discard the disasterous policy of "whole word" memorization - and the incredibly dull, mindlessly repetitive primer texts it has generated - in favor of phonics, students could easily progress from simple, introductory material to much more complex, subtle, and interesting stuff quite rapidly. And thereby learn to love reading, rather than seeing it as a boring chore to be avoided whenever possible.
b. The abandonment of teaching history and context in favor of "teaching the (standardized educational accomplishment) tests" has robbed millenials, in particular, of an understanding of how we got here. Anything that happened before they entered school is history - and history doesn't interest them. Nor are they alone. We would not have gotten enmired in Iraq (thereby generating legions of extremists bent on jihad against "the crusaders"), had more Americans remembered the cruel lessons of the Vietnam War. But we don't teach that - and students don't read history on their own, because "whole word" methods have actively discouraged them from reading anything.
c. The omnipresent use of TV as an electronic babysitter - especially given how mind-numbing so much of children's programming is - encourages passivity, and the belief that all problems, no matter how complex or recondite, are handily solvable inside of no more than an hour, including commercial breaks. The current explosion of programming sources, particularly premium-channel cable/satellite and online streaming services, that increasingly are adopting long-form storytelling is encouraging - but it's a trend that programming aimed at children has not adopted.
d. The millenial generation's reliance on "just in time" knowledge, mostly via Wikipedia, has entirely robbed them of context. They don't study things. They simply look them up on Wikipedia, whenever they have a question about a particular subject. What they don't get is the historical, cultural, literary, or mythological context in which that individual datum exists. Instead, it's a naked factoid, isolated from its antecedants and effects on the fabric of knowledge itself. They get the "what", but not the "
Check out my novel.
I think it is just another symptom of the dumbing down of the general population....
People have always been dumb, and there is no evidence that they are getting dumber. Every generation has believed that they are the smartest, and the next generation is dumb and lazy. Your parents thought the same thing about your generation.
Yep, so tired of video slideshows with annoying music that should simply be written lists.
If you're going to make video of typing, just don't. "Video" adds no value. It is what we avoid when searching for info, because video takes time.
I don't give my time to 2min of video, when I can read the material in 10s. Text is so much faster. Video is for funny cats & such.
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...reading this post, I scrolled past. Until I thought "wait, interesting point". I scrolled up. Then down again, then back up, forcing myself to read the entire post.
He's right, of course. The problem is diminishing attention spans force authors to 'illustrate' their articles to grab attention -- the eye imbibes images faster than text. Sometimes it's well done -- the author went to upwork and commissioned original art by an artist -- sometimes not (stock images). Now attention spans are diminishing further, and people are shifting to video. The eye imbibes movement faster than art. Mark my words, stock video will soon be a thing for most articles.
The problem is attention isn't free. It's a limited resource. When surfing the unmediated web, we suffer information overload. That's why people prefer curated feeds like Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. But again, those mediators really don't work for us -- their don't always have our best interests at heart. For that we need Intelligent Agents that are owned by you, and that work for you, curating and mediating your experience.
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Hate it - about to quit reading news on the web again because of this trend
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
And articles are almost Never made better by an (autoplay) video. Just let me read what it has to say!
-In space, it is very hard to rig lights.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, that's one way of hiding information from Alabama.
Now that I think about it, this a great application for AI helpers: Paste a plain text file in your CMS and allow that a plugin helper (AI driven) suggests different Typographic presentations using only free web fonts...
The only thing I read is these stupid comments. I watch video now. And I used to be a massive reader.
No, every article needs the biggest possible stock picture you can find. How would I identify news about Trump without another extreme closeup of his face making one of his characteristically intelligent expressions?
Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In your example the writer created only the text portion of the content. That text was moved to some subsequent step of the content creation process where images were added, etc., prior to delivery
Why even require that step in the process in the first place?
It is just like Timothy Leary was saying in the 80s; with computers, everybody gets the electrons they deserve!
"He who controls what enters you mind, controls your brain. You've got to control the screens you're looking at."
A lot of people enjoy cat videos, and they deserve it. They shouldn't watch something else because somebody thought it was better.
This week I learned how to program an ATmega238 microcontroller to output NTSC signals. With just a $3 microcontroller I can write to a television through the composite video port! Not only is there a bunch of different versions of the code online, but there is even a nice PDF and a youtube by video by professor Bruce Land at Cornell. In the past I wouldn't have even been allowed access to that sort of stuff. Now I can not only copy the circuit, I can even watch the associated lecture! I can build an old-style TV video game for less than $10. Not only because the parts are available, but more importantly, the instructions are now available.
I can get access to advanced information on almost any topic. I'm getting the electrons I deserve. And you're getting the electrons you deserve.
First, you are illiterate. He made a statement, he never expressed any "befuddlement".
Second, thanks for producing and promoting utter shit like this.
Were you born stupid or did your mother drop you on your head?
And someone interrupts or the phone rings and you miss the key bit you were interested in. And you go back but not far enough. So you go back some more but by too much. What do you do now - just keep watching? No that'll waste time. So you go forward, but it's too far. And so you go back ...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
America did win the civil war, though.
I'm really surprised to hear this. I learned using phonics, as did my kids.
All the kids I see and interact with (not a lot, but a few) struggle to learn new words. They have no idea how to even sound them out, see the words as ... whole words ... not components that make up the word.
I don't have any more info than this personal experience. No research, etc. Just was surprised that Whole Word reading was ever better in real life.
The amount that videos have helped me is significant.
Videos / Youtube
Diagnosing and replacing coil on friends fathers car.
Transmission valve body gasket replacement
Front end parts replacement
Painting techniques on auto body
I.T. - well, just can't imagine how many hundreds I've watched and learned from.
Cooking howtos
phone repair / rooting
dash disassembly
I could go on. I prefer usually, text. The articles, books, blog posts, whatever that is text format is just endless online. I've contributed, but certainly not enough.
In the old days of newspapers, articles were fit together on paper and pictures help "soften" the text by breaking it up into smaller chunks. Also, people are more likely to read an article if the author's picture is also featured. So, it is really just an effort of the publisher to get more eyeballs on the article.
Who won the civil war?
The parliamentarians
John V (and the Ottomans)
The Red Army
The Free State Forces
The Communists
The Partisans
and many many others.
I'm talking now about a significant number of the populace who don't realize that a questions such as "who won the civil war?" requires further clarification, because they are so narrow minded they can't think beyond the USA.
Not very infrequently, I use an image block extension to block the images in websites like the ones reported in the article.
I don't think GP is saying people are getting dumber. Users of the Internet is getting dumber ON AVERAGE.
Good old Internet was used by educated mass(univeristies, large corp etc). Web2.0 is used by everyone with a smartphone. Of course former group had a higher average IQ. Quality of article of respective period reflect the IQ of audience they are serving.
Actually, phonics was exactly how I was taught to read in my early years in school....
I think it helped me a great deal, but also...my parents, especially my Mom, read to me almost daily as a young child, and I learned to love the *magic* of reading from all that, and was an avid reader from a very young age.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
DNS-and-BIND blathered:
Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.
Oh, really? Perhaps you should tell that to the National Institute of Health, because their 2000 article on the report of the Congressionally-mandated, independent National Reading Panel concludes exactly the opposite. Or, if you require training wheels, you'll have an easier time of it with PBS's summary of the panel's major findings.
But, since you have such a well-documented contempt for all things USA, you might be more comfortable referring to the Australian state of New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics, instead. Or, given your general dismissal of governments as oppressors, it's possible that a private corporation that has spent decades focusing on primary-level educational materials like Scholastic.com's Parent & Child Magazine could seem more credible to you.
Or, alternatively, you could just read the Wikipedia page on phonics, which not only explains what phonics is and how it works, but goes into the history and controversy of phonics, especially phonics vs. whole language, not only in the USA, but in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, as well.
There're plenty of other resources available to support the view that phonics (and its sister technique phonemics - you really need to use them in combination with each other for best results), in conjunction with primer material that is actually interesting, is the most effective strategy for teaching new readers.
And I'm sure you don't care, but my own, anecdotal experience is all the evidence I require. You see, when I was expelled from first grade for being disruptive (due to not having been diagnosed as being nearsighted to the point that I was legally blind), my mother undertook to teach me to read at home. In less than a month, I went from not even knowing the alphabet to reading at an eighth-grade level. Much of that was due to her using the phonics+phonemics approach, a roughly equal part can be credited to her choice of Dr. Suess, rather than the achingly-dull Dick and Jane books, as my primer. (When we exhausted his catalogue, she introduced me to the Reader's Digest, instead.) Within 30 days, from a standing start, I had read my first Tom Swift, Jr. novel, and embarked on a lifelong love affair with reading - especially science fiction, but also history, biographies, science and technology, and, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, "words in a line" in general.
So, please, by all means, pray continue to explain how phonics has been "discredited" for decades. You ignorance of the subject is simply fascinating.
Wait, what's the antonym for "fascinating" ... ?
Check out my novel.
Articles with images perform much, much better on social media when they have an image.
Beyond that, complaints about human nature (people like pictures) are irrelevant.
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
106 BCE - 43 BCE
it resembles me the obnoxious clipart abuse in the nineties' amateur desktop publishing.
I opened that Mattermost web page. On my regular browser, first-world Interwebs connection (not wireless), NoScript blocking scripts.
It's been two whole minutes and the browser still hasn't loaded the page fully. (It recently loaded a black-and-white guy holding a pen.)
I think they have worse problems than the 4,5 MB download size...