10
votes
Is there any consistent definition for what a long read is?
This article I posted has been marked as a long read with 2.7k words but this other article I posted has 4.7k words and hasn't been marked as such so what gives?
We should probably also consider a 'medium read' and apply some of these standards to videos as well.
Probably because tagging things on Tildes is a volunteer job and someone just missed it. Even though the websites get scraped for info like author and word count, the tag ´long read´ is applied by humans, and considering how young Tildes is, we barely have any standards.
Personally I'd consider anything above 20 mins to be a long read for an article, but I don't know how many words that is, and everyone reads at different speeds.
For what it's worth, I added the tag to your other post.
I think someday we'll have the link checker making tag suggestions based on its own analysis of the length of videos or word counts in articles and other available metadata. Once that is in place, the rules we set up to trigger each tag suggestion will clear up the problems in uniformity. It could also be run against historical links to correct/update their information once we've reached a place where we're all happy with the results.
The lack of uniformity is less of an issue when you look at it this way, even if it is mildy annoying. ;)
The shortest article with the
long readtag that I found with a cursory search is 2143 words long.The bulk of the tags seem to be applied to articles with a word count in the region of 3000+ though. Maybe this is a good benchmark to start from?
As for video content, I have been applying a
short watchto all videos less than five minutes long, unless they are expressly tagged astrailersormusic videos, where it seems apparent that these are naturally short in nature. Thelong watchtag is then applied to any video over thirty minutes.I'd be against a middle tag such as
medium readormedium watchas it seems to be superfluous with the other short and long differentiators and would probably be considered unneccesary clutter in the tags.This makes sense. I've seen at times you've removed my
long watchtags on some videos I've submitted, usually Bon Appetit posts—but 30 minutes seems like a good cutoff for a long watch.To provide some data, google says the average reader would read a 3,000 word article in 10 minutes.
Given current attention spans, frankly I'd say anything 2,000+ words should be tagged long read, but I also mainly check tildes while at work and read articles between messages, when code is running, etc. and down times tend to be less than 10 minutes in length.
Sorry. I forgot to tag the China article when I read it. I see @Grzmot fixed it.
I've also restored the
long readtag that @mycketforvirrad removed from the USA article - because I still think it's a long read.And it's as simple as that. People are only human. We make mistakes, and we're inconsistent.