Do we really need to add summaries to posted articles?
This seems to happen quite a lot here. Someone will post an article, and then add a comment with an extract from the article, or a summary of the article. Or someone else will come along and summarise the article.
This is pointless clutter.
On a site where we're hoping for high-quality discussion, we should expect people to actually read the articles they're discussing. If the article's so long that it needs a summary, then reading that summary isn't going to give people a good enough insight into the detail of the article before they start discussing it.
It also has the effect of misleading readers. They see an article post, read the article, and then notice that someone has already commented on the article. When they open the thread to join in the discussion, they discover that the existing comment is nothing more than a summary of the article they just read. They opened the thread for nothing.
EDIT: I give up. Lesson learned! I am the odd one out here. It is not normal to read articles beforing opening the comments sections. Summaries are desired, even preferred, here on Tildes.
I shall adjust my behaviour accordingly:
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I will start including summaries & extracts in my article posts.
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I will not waste my time opening posts that have only 1 comment.
I'm not going to reply here any more.
There's a ton of articles that I would never have read if they weren't posted with a summary that immediately piqued my interest. Even posting a comment with an interpretation of what the article contains can be good fuel for discussion, so I don't see why they should be discouraged.
Why? Why do you need someone to pique your interest about an article? Why can't you just start reading it for yourself to see if it's interesting for you? Why do you need someone else to tell you this?
Here's a case:
I often browse Tildes on my phone. Opening up an external website takes me away from Tildes, and then I have to wait for whatever is on the page to load, and then I have to start reading the article. That's a lot more complicated than reading a short summary. I appreciate the summary because it helps me decide if I want to commit to reading an entire article.
Not just waiting for the page to load. Browsing the internet on mobile browsers is actually annoying as hell. In the EU I have to first click away the notifications for cookies and their personalized ads, then I have to click away some additional shit about newsletters. Top and bottom are filled with their status bar and ads or other shit. And the text itself is filled with ads. In germany where we get fucked on data compared to other countries, all this shit eats our data and is hell to navigate. And adblocking doesn't really work well most of the time. If anyone has a rootless solution/ a solution for the iPad, please correct me it im wrong. I am using the VPN or private internet access with an adblocker, but VPN are tedious on mobile internet.
(which one of my professors apparently didn't think when he took my points in an exam, not that I'm still bitter about it 2 years later)
looked at pi hole?
You can't do that on mobile data. But you can use AdAway which I personally do and it works great. Needs root though. (also blocks ads in apps AFAIK!)
Not Handy on the road, I think? And my internet provider doesn't let me change my DNS of the router
Maybe I should switch to Firefox as well. Chrome is just so convenient for me since I have used it for my logins and everything for the last years
So far you've provided the only valid reason I see for providing summaries.
Because my time on this good earth is limited. Not everything that is worthy of a post by virtue of being on here is worthy of my time. Some articles might be topics I'm not interested in. Some might not be, but get me a starting point to a topic. Some articles I've read a thousand times in different flavors, some I couldn't even grasp after additional research. Some amount of filtering is necessary, and a tl;dr is a valid tool in the toolbox.
When you're reading a newspaper or a news website or any other website that isn't a link aggregator, how do you decide which articles to read and which to skip?
Usually there's a lede below the headlines. Here we only get the headlines
But when you open the article from the link posted here, you'll see the same lede at the top before you launch into reading it.
Opening the article takes a while on my slow mobile connection, and depending on how much garbage Javascript the site is using, could eat up a good chunk of data.
By that same token, couldn't you just scroll past the summaries? I find them helpful, as do a lot of other people.
Those summaries are often the only thing that makes me open the thread in the first place. I see an interesting title, click on the link, read the article, and then notice that someone has already commented in the thread. I open the thread to see if there's any interesting discussion I might join in - and find out that the comment is nothing more than a copy of a couple of paragraphs from the article I just finished reading.
I can't scroll past the summaries when they're what caused me to open the thread in the first place.
If somebody opening a thread and seeing the lone comment being a summary is enough to be a waste of their time, since they've "opened the thread for nothing", and that is something to lament, then so is somebody reading an article blindly and finding it is not interesting to them, and thus have wasted their own time.
It's really a matter of efficiency, primarily.
Let's say you have thirty minutes of time allotted for yourself to read news articles and interact with media, right?
Now, I could either read every single article I see until my time runs out, or I could read the summaries, open articles that interest me in new tabs, keep reading summaries, keep collecting them, then read the few I picked out, resting assured that I had gotten the most important articles read, rather than what could be effectively just fluff.
On top of that, summaries are really good for articles that don't have an outline.com page. Outline cuts out all of the trackers, sidebars and whatnot, and is really essential to focusing on modern written news for people who get distracted easily (I have ADHD, so YMMV). If it doesn't have an Outline page, I can just search a few lines from the summary and find an article that's compatible with Outline on the same subject, and just read that one.
Ideally, this would be something that comment tags could alleviate; filter the word "Summary," and magically your problem is solved, while still allowing the rest of us a critical thing for reading news.
Actually, I open the articles themselves and read the first para or two. I then decide whether to keep reading the article or close it if it's not interesting.
There is another way to solve this with the current features of Tildes. People who want to copy-paste some paragraphs from the article they're posting can post the article in a text post rather than a link post. Put the link and the copied paragraphs in the text box of the text post. Bingo - there's no comment in the thread to mislead me into thinking there's the beginning of a discussion.
The reasonable expectation for natural user behaviour there would be to put it in the text box of a link post.
We don't have a text box for link posts, but putting the link in a text post works just as well.
We do; it just posts a comment. Probably what everyone you're complaining about does.
I did not realise the text box was active for link posts. I assumed it was an either/or situation: I could use either the link field or the text box but not both. I've just tested it and you're right: if put a link in the link field and type text in the text box, the system posts my text as a comment.
Well, that's stupid! But at least now I know it's the system being annoying and not the users.
Thanks for pointing that out.
That system was put in place as a compromise for all the people wanting to combine text/external link submission types and also all the people trying to suggest that summaries be mandatory (neither of which is a good idea, IMO). So the current way it's set up, where adding text to the external link submits that text as the first comment, allows people to still submit extra content beyond the external link but at least forces that extra content to be judged on its own merits rather than being attached to the submission itself, and it also allows people to still post a summary if they want to but doesn't make it a requirement.
No prob.
Recently I saw a link and just by the topic thought it would be really long and didn't want to commit to 10-15 minutes reading it. But their was a comment mentioning how short it was so I went ahead and read it, then read an even longer related link. Really payed off having that small summary by a user.
Slow-ish internet means it's annoying to wait for some slow, bloated page to load, and 50/50 I have click through some box asking for an email address or if it's ok to track me, with literally no option to say no. It's a small irritant, but it adds weight to the camels back. I've turned back from reading an article just because of that box, I hate being forced to agree. Then if it's dark their is that blinding white background. It's small things and if I've got a direct interest I'll read it, but tangential stuff it helps to have something that extra something to convince me it's worth it to leave the comfy surrounding of tildes.
On the flip side though I kind of agree, it's better to just read it, too much information is hand-me-down with bit's missed and meaning contorted. It would be amazing if just the original article could be displayed on tildes, but obviously that's not an option.
*Just realised this is a really old discussion, woops.
Flashynuff wrote a usability issue. I'd like to add a simple content related issue that is solved by having summaries:
Titles, nine times out of ten, don't give me a real information about what the article is going to cover.
And with that I mean: bias in the article is not exposed or how in depth the article goes for the topic.
A summary help me have more info about it and choose which article really is interesting me.
Also, it could be not your case, but the most common user, browse internet content on mobile, during downtimes (commuting, a break, etc) and in that case, time is "limited" as well as data/month.
In this particular case, I think the "is" is more important than the "why".
Does a book need a summary on the back, or inside the dust jacket?
Titles can often be hot-trash, and not give much insight to the content within.
Write a better title when posting the article! It's not like we have rules saying that topic titles must be exactly the same as the article headlines.
Better is often subjective, and changed titles can easily derail discussion towards the OP's title choice as opposed to the contents of the article—especially if the title they editorialized is largely perceived as worse.
But then you might be accused editorializing the article by putting a bias the article didn't intend. You can't win here.
I think that might lead to the issue of editorializing titles, which is worse...?
Maybe a middle ground could be allow to post a link and accompanying text?How is that a middle ground when that's exactly what's happening now? People are posting links and then adding accompanying text.
However, if you mean that the accompanying text should be in the post itself rather than in a comment, that ability is already available: simply post the link in a text post, and write a paragraph about the link you're posting.
It's a middle ground because it would address your last point about how you get tricked by "1 comment" and clicking in to see that it's just a summary.
I disagree that this practice warrants a whiny meta post and this level of discussion. Some of the navel-gazing here makes members of the community feel like they're walking on eggshells. FFS, users can't even quote or summarize an article without someone telling them they're not doing enough or without someone making a meta post to indirectly tell them they're not doing enough. I'm more concerned that tildes' meta culture is overly discouraging and toxic than I am that someone quoted an excerpt from an article they posted.
@flashynuff makes the point I had in my head, but I have some ideas to add. Say you're a newcomer and the first few posts you see on the front page are meta drama. Since you're new, you don't understand site functionality and how the front page algorithm ranks posts, but you see a thread with 11 votes at the very top of the entire site whining about users quoting and summarizing articles. Are you more likely to react positively or negatively to that as your first experience here?
With a lot of people coming from reddit, the implication of the front page ranking is that something at the top has consensus (or is at least popular) when that is not the case on ~ or this specific thread. A redditor has the context of reddit as a basis for comparison, so they might misconstrue this as site culture and assume exhaustively whiny users that want to chastise others with meta threads about harmless behavior are the norm. The people making these kinds of threads should not be the ones setting the tone at the top because well... they're insufferable. They should not be the site's welcome mat to new users.
This is about site culture and how users react to it, not my personal preferences. We shouldn't foster a culture of constant, petty navel-gazing just because we have the ability to ignore it. I'm participating in this thread because a better site culture is what I want to see and contribute to.
I wouldn't mess with any of the things you mentioned quite yet but potentially down the road. Here's the solution, IMO, and it doesn't involve filtering posts. This site exposed the phenomenon where users prefer to comment on (read: argue with) content they disagree with rather than content they agree with. As the linked comment describes, these arguments heat up and spiral out of control very quickly, then they dominate the front page because each new comment sends the thread back to the top.
One user suggested the following to me in private:
I would add to this by saying that maybe a bump to the top of the front page should follow some kind of logic like requiring X number of unique users commenting in the thread during Y minutes/hours with the bump totally ignored if the thread is Z hours old. That way, a slap fight between two users won't attract the masses to pick sides (thus preventing the vicious cycle effect), and the thread will eventually die off the front page completely.
If people don't want to see so-called "meta drama", they can unsubscribe from the meta group: ~tildes.
I'm not too worried about folks who have been here for a while. They know what tildes is about and can deal with some growing pains. I'm more worried about newcomers who come in to an impenetrable mess of meta drama about what should and should not be allowed, as well as setting a bad precedent for having many meta posts that choke out actual content.
I like the idea of a ~tildes.meta, preferably one that newcomers aren't subscribed to.
I'm trying to discuss what I see as a growing practice on this site as it grows. Is this a practice we want? Is it not? How does the Tildes community want to approach this?
It doesn't necessarily have to be a summary, but it helps to provide something to stimulate talking points - what you found interesting, what you found controversial, what you'd like to know more about, your thoughts on their viewpoint/analysis, etc.
There's a lot more nuance to this, I think, especially if the article is particularly long or short, but I disagree with the premise that "you don't need to post a summary". I'd revise it to "sometimes you don't need to post a summary".
That's not what I'm seeing. Sure, some people comment on their own articles in order to start discussions, but most of what I'm seeing is people simply copy-pasting paragraphs from the article into a comment. I wouldn't mind if people were starting discussions on their articles. But most people who do this aren't trying to start discussions.
The implication there is that most of the time you do need to post a summary. In other words, you're arguing for this to happen more than it is now (it's currently only happening in a minority of cases).
Do you have any evidence for this statement, whether it's clairvoyance or a poll you've conducted of people who do this and their motives?
I do this for some of the articles I post, and I am trying to start discussion. Maybe you disagree with the method I'm using to kickstart the discussion, but please don't make sweeping statements about the motives of other users.
Yeah. We don't even have Karma on Tildes. What do you think their intentions are, if not starting a discussion, @Algernon_Asimov?
Buggered if I know. It seems like a waste of effort to me.
Hmm... I know a few people have commented that it helps orient them to the content in the article or some of the important points that are mentioned, beyond just the title. Personally, I hate opening up other pages unless I'm going to actually read it, so I really like it.
Turning the question around then, how does it affect you to have these summaries posted if the OPs did, in fact, think it was helpful to them or other users?
I've said a couple of times here that those summaries cause me to open the thread for no purpose. They appear as a comment in the thread. I assume someone has started discussing the article. I open the thread to see that discussion. I find out that there's no actual discussion at all, just a copy of some paragraphs I already read.
I have noticed your comments on some of your posts and I have to say that I appreciate them. I enjoyed the one about NotPetya, since you pulled out the most interesting part of the story and that got me to click and read the rest of the article.
Most people doing this are simply copying sections of the article into a comment. They're not adding anything of their own: no opinions, no analysis, no questions. Only paragraphs that are already in the article I just read. If the full article isn't sufficient to spark discussion, then a couple of copy-pasted paragraphs won't do it, either.
Looking at your recent history, you're adding a bare minimum of your own input. However, I don't see how something like "My favorite detail of the story:" is going to spark discussion. I already read that section in the article. Knowing it's your favourite section is mildly interesting, but it's not really enticing me into a discussion.
The quote I lifted in that thread was about extraordinary measures to recover from an IT disaster. That could certainly spark a related discussion about other examples of that, either in users' own lives or "that reminds me of this other article I read..."
For some additional examples, here's a thread where I lifted quotes from two different parts of the article and laid them side-by-side, because I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition. That did spark discussion.
Here's one where I pulled out a single line from the defense attorney's closing argument and commented on it. That also sparked discussion.
I think the root cause of the disagreement here is that you seem to be taking the way you use the site, and generalizing it to the way everyone, or a substantial majority, uses the site.
So you read the article and then the comments. That's fine, but doing it the other way around is fine too. I'll sometimes read the comments, if any, and use that to determine if I'm really interested in reading the article. Or I'll skim the comments, read the article with an eye towards any of the critical points raised by the commenters, then come back to read those comments more fully and reply to them. To borrow a saying from the Perl community, There's More Than One Way to Tildes.
Also, in your original post:
I think would be better worded in the first person:
Again, don't make sweeping generalizations about how others use the site, or their motives in doing so.
And honestly, I think this post applies here.
Yeah, I've noticed that people like to cite that thread when they want someone to just shut up.
I'm not trying to tell you to shut up, sorry if I gave you that impression.
What I am saying is that I think the discussion over this issue is disproportionate relative to the impact of the issue itself.
How much of your time does it waste to click on a thread, see the only comment is a quote from the OP, then close the tab? Maybe 10 seconds, by a generous estimate?
And how many posts like this do you read per day? 20, again by what I think is a generous estimate? That works out to a little over 3 minutes of wasted time per day. And if each one of those articles themselves takes 3 minutes to read, that's 60 minutes of reading vs. 3 minutes of wasted time.
By comparison, how much time has this meta-topic taken up?
To quote from that post by Deimos:
I think I'm starting to see a key point.
Not everyone read the article first. I always open the comment section before I read an article. A summary post is potentially useful for those who do the same, and look completely useless to people like yourself who open the article first.
It's just a difference.
So I should NOT read the article before diving into the comments? I should try and discuss an article I haven't even read yet? That just doesn't make sense.
I don't care what you do fam, follow your bliss.
Well... I'm currently reading articles, then opening threads to see the discussion which someone appears to have tried to start (because there's a comment present), only to find that there's no actual discussion. Yeah. I'm blissed out.
While it's certainly not a process for everyone, I find it can be useful to read the comments first, then read the article, and finally return to the comments for participation. Assuming everyone is commenting in good faith, it can prime your mind for the topic before diving in, give additional context that may have been omitted from the article, highlight key points to focus on, point out potential flaws to watch for, etc. All of these can improve clarity and understanding while reading the article itself. It also can save time on an interesting sounding long-read that ultimately goes nowhere (though the bar is higher here on Tildes, so this last one should be less frequent)
Link us to examples of what you are seeing.
Ooohhh... no. I'm not falling for that. I already called someone out here in the past 48 hours for naming & shaming people. I'm not going to do the same thing, and leave myself open to accusations of hypocrisy.
P.S. This isn't about individuals, anyway. It's about a practice I'm seeing taking root across the site.
Fair enough. Sounds more like low effort is your bone to pick here, and I agree that higher effort = better.
Okay then "most of the time you don't need to post a summary". 😂
I have done this in the past, and probably will continue to. Here is where I did it: https://tildes.net/~news/5e9/venezuela_and_trinidad_struck_by_massive_7_3_magnitude_earthquake
My initial response when seeing the title was: oh no, how many people have died. When I opened the article, it seemed that no people had died, but anyone wishing to find that information out had to open the article. So the answer is surely to make sure everyone reads the article? In theory, yes. But the reality is there are plenty of reasons that people wouldn't open the article.
I'm doing something else and don't really have time to read the article but am still interested in the content (ex: how many casualties were there)
I'm outside on mobile data and don't really fancy using up my data on ads and pictures
I want to know the hard facts, not information like this, taken from the article I replied to:
I'm slightly dyslexic and honestly don't want to traipse through an entire article of fluff and difficult words just to get to the basics of the article.
I'm interested in what people are saying about the article but don't really want to read it. These help me gain some understanding of what people are discussing.
Privacy. This one is only half valid, but the article I replied to has the share to Facebook button. As I understand it, websites with that button allow Facebook to know who's viewed the article, regardless of whether or not you have a Facebook account. It's understandable wanting to minimise your online footprint.
I don't see these TLDR's being a legitimate concern in terms of low effort and low quality content, I think they help people to understand the discussion and help potentially unwanted stories in articles be separated from important facts that inform the users. I do think that anyone adding a contribution to the comments section should read the article, but there are also plenty of lurkers here as well. So ideally people should be reading the article, but we don't live in an ideal world and I think that these summaries are the next best option.
My two cents, if you want your discussion go anywhere, you need to start the discussion yourself, unless the topic itself is virulent enough to self-sustain. OP needs to be the one to start and direct the conversation. They need to keep topic fresh and engage in the debate to keep it moving forward.
Posting a link and hoping it gains traction wont work well.
Remember, Tildes conversations only work by engaging in the topic. If you want a topic that you don't like to go away, then don't engage. (Remember any post in the topic refreshes it to the top.)
Like I already wrote elsewhere in this thread:
That's not what I'm seeing. Sure, some people comment on their own articles in order to start discussions, but most of what I'm seeing is people simply copy-pasting paragraphs from the article into a comment. I wouldn't mind if people were starting discussions on their articles. But most people who do this aren't trying to start discussions.
I will say that those who put thought into their post are generally getting better discussions in their threads.
But I have seen an uptick in the copy/paste which you described. A lot more circle jerking too
Personally, I disagree with the assertion that it is clutter. I like to see summaries + discussion prompts, and would encourage people to post them, but it's also okay if someone doesn't want to. I think adding summaries helps spur discussion, and at the very least, isn't harmful in any way.
How? How does seeing a copy of some paragraphs from the article spur discussion? If you've already read the article, the copied paragraphs are just repeating what you've already read? If you haven't already read the article, you're looking at a single point from the article without any wider context.
Summaries often include one or two key quotes, which can get others who have read the article to respond to those quotes since they're already in the comment section. Those same people might not have bothered to pick out those quotes otherwise. It's anecdotal but I have done it myself.
Additionally, summaries can provide a good launching off point for prompts or questions from others or the OP, and those definitely spur discussion .
Sorry I'm guilty of wanting TLDR. I blame my schooling and other things on a slow reading rate. It feels tiring for me on some articles.
I don't think it's necessary, but I do it because so many people were so loud and insistent about it. Basically, I'm giving in to mob rule.
Do your own thing your own way. :)
I don't really like providing summaries when I post and generally don't read them when others post them. However, I do find them helpful if I start reading an article and honestly don't know where it's going, or simply don't understand why anyone bother posting it. And especially if the article is really long, that's when I read the summary.
has me thinking you (mods, rather) should be able to tag certain comments as 'low-discussion potential' which would either show up or not, but be ranked badly in the comments (i.e. regardless of amount of votes go lower) because it'll not get any discussion.
what i'm trying to say is i agree 100%
I would rather no one decide that for me when I'm browsing or for my topics when I'm posting. There's already been "too fluffy" discussions here that I honestly disagree with.
Any examples?
There's some threads discussing it:
There's also more that cover specific types, like "should be link articles directly" ones, that I can't seem to find quickly.
And before the Just... try to relax a bit, they showed up in specific posts too, where people just "called out low-effort" content as they were posted.
We had a tag like that in the earliest days of ~ then got rid of it because of misuse. It became a de facto downvote.
it might be a bad use-case for the subject at hand, but could work for inflammatory comments instead, or super off-topic comments. idk, just a thought.