This is probably gonna sound like a humblebrag, but: I apparently read so fast that when I got to the end of that post, it thought I had only read 80% of it. Judging from the comments there I was...
This is probably gonna sound like a humblebrag, but: I apparently read so fast that when I got to the end of that post, it thought I had only read 80% of it. Judging from the comments there I was not the only one with that problem, either. I turned on their visual debugging and scrolled back up and there was a lot of text earlier in the article that it thought I hadn't read--perhaps because I tend to scroll to keep the part I'm actively reading roughly centered in the browser window. Seems like they recognize the need for personalizing reading speed, at least.
Now, with the humblebrag out of the way... when I come across something like this, I try to put myself in the shoes of the developer being asked to implement it: if it had been me I probably would've said it couldn't be done! Or at the very least, couldn't be done well. Of course, if I'd had a cofounder who wouldn't take no for an answer/pushed back against my perfectionism, I'd probably have eventually come around to a solution very similar to this.
All that being said, this is an interesting idea, and on the one hand I do like the idea of gating the ability to discuss content behind some form of proof of having read it, but on the other hand, their implementation would seem to shut out users who either can't or won't run JavaScript, and I suspect that particularly proficient screen reader users (if they're using a JavaScript-capable browser, which is more likely these days than in the past), the ones that have the reading speed cranked up so high it's unintelligible to the untrained listener, would probably run into the same problems I did with it not "tracking" rapidly enough. Then again, I suppose these would probably not be large enough constituencies to worry about, particularly at the early stage they're at.
This is probably gonna sound like a humblebrag, but: I apparently read so fast that when I got to the end of that post, it thought I had only read 80% of it. Judging from the comments there I was not the only one with that problem, either. I turned on their visual debugging and scrolled back up and there was a lot of text earlier in the article that it thought I hadn't read--perhaps because I tend to scroll to keep the part I'm actively reading roughly centered in the browser window. Seems like they recognize the need for personalizing reading speed, at least.
Now, with the humblebrag out of the way... when I come across something like this, I try to put myself in the shoes of the developer being asked to implement it: if it had been me I probably would've said it couldn't be done! Or at the very least, couldn't be done well. Of course, if I'd had a cofounder who wouldn't take no for an answer/pushed back against my perfectionism, I'd probably have eventually come around to a solution very similar to this.
All that being said, this is an interesting idea, and on the one hand I do like the idea of gating the ability to discuss content behind some form of proof of having read it, but on the other hand, their implementation would seem to shut out users who either can't or won't run JavaScript, and I suspect that particularly proficient screen reader users (if they're using a JavaScript-capable browser, which is more likely these days than in the past), the ones that have the reading speed cranked up so high it's unintelligible to the untrained listener, would probably run into the same problems I did with it not "tracking" rapidly enough. Then again, I suppose these would probably not be large enough constituencies to worry about, particularly at the early stage they're at.