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I’d like to suggest avoiding long excerpts
I’d like to suggest the practice of posting smaller excerpts. Long excerpts are less likely to be read and resemble articles in themselves.
Their comprehensiveness may render them irrelevant, and demotivate readers from going to the source before commenting.
IMHO an excerpt should generally have no more than two paragraphs, with exceptions for long reads (3500 words+).
For reference (and out of personal choice), 750 characters may be an ideal max, give or take.
I've been thinking that we should talk sometime about how we can handle excerpts better in general. Quite a few users obviously like posting them, but there are also quite a few other users that label them as Noise. I can't really argue with considering them noise—they don't add anything beyond the article itself, because they're literally part of the article. Anyone that reads the article will already have read them.
Maybe there's some non-comment way we could come up with to include excerpts in a post, and that could make it easier for both the people that like seeing them and the people that don't to get what they want.
I don't know if this thread is really the place to try to have that discussion (though I'm open to hearing input), I just wanted to mention that it's something I've been thinking about recently too.
I like to use excerpts as sort of “teasers” for the article itself. So it’s true that it doesn’t add anything not in the article, but the hope is that it does encourage people to read the article. This custom was basically standard in the blogosphere.
Even if it doesn’t add anything to discussion, just promoting people to read an article that they wouldn’t have otherwise might encourage them to discuss something they wouldn’t have checked.
Yeah, I understand why people do it. My point is mostly that they're definitely not comments, so equating them doesn't make much sense and is really just a software limitation (that we could improve).
I usually post excerpts. One reason is that the site might be paywalled for some people, and I'd like them to have more than just the headline. The other reason is to indicate why I'm sharing the article by quoting the bits that I think are most important. Often, the headline isn't enough to indicate why a long article is worth reading, and going by the headline alone can be actively misleading.
I'm flabbergasted that someone would mark that as noise.
I do think it's a bit odd that the comment count is one more than it should be and that it's ranked along with the other comments, but currently we don't have anywhere else to post a summary.
Maybe both link topics and non-link topics should have a place to post some text, and it should work about the same way?
Quoting one paragraph instead of another is an editorial decision that says something. Just like taking a photo distinguishes what's in the picture versus what you leave out. Or, choosing to link to one article versus another.
I guess that's too subtle?
Yes, this is true, but sharing just a link doesn't explain why you shared it either, and that often seems okay?
I usually post quotes with a bit of boilerplate: "From the article". The reason I do this is that when I was posting links with quotes on Google+, one of my readers didn't quite understand quoting and thought I was writing the thing I was quoting. That hasn't happened here but I got in the habit. I suppose I could update the boilerplate a bit and write "Here is a quote from the article that I thought was important," but I don't think that's quite what you want.
One reason I rely heavily on quotes rather than summarizing in my own words is that I'm worried about inaccurately summarizing things in a way that's a distortion of what the author said. If I use quotes, the worst I can do is quote out of context in a way that's misleading. It seems safer when posting a link in a hurry. And I'd rather focus on the article and not my own opinion of it, since often I don't know more than what's said in the article.
Anyway, if you find a quote mystifying then please do ask and I'll explain more.
Many articles already contain a summary in a "description" <meta> tag. Maybe Tildes could show that summary along side the other metadata (length, author, etc) on a link page?
Like not disabling text content for link-based topics? I'm still confused about reasoning behind it. You had to go through extra work to prevent and redirect it.
I have the perception that I’m expected to add excerpts, and that is why I do so. If I thought they were merely controversial I wouldn’t waste my time.
In the abstract it makes sense to have a space for a small introduction, avoiding trivial misunderstandings and helping the reader decide if the content is worth their time. Concretely, we may be doing that way too much, and also too extensively.
I disagree with this for a few reasons. This is a bit of a combined response to both you and @ThatFanficGuy, since you're both basically making similar suggestions (that submitters should post text along with a link) from slightly different angles:
Mainly, the topic itself should be restricted to whatever the "focus" is supposed to be. So if the focus is some kind of external content (article, video, etc.), it should be a link topic pointing to that. If the submitter has some thoughts about the content, they should post them as a comment, since that's what they are. The exception to this would be if the submitter's comments themselves are meant to be the focus. For example, if they're posting a long rebuttal to an article or something similar.
If you combine the submitter's thoughts into the topic, it causes issues related to them being linked. If someone posts a great article along with a terrible comment, you force people to vote on both of them as a unit. They can't support the content itself without also seeming to support whatever the submitter said about it. It effectively guarantees the submitter's comment will always have similar exposure as a pinned/stickied comment on everything they post, and there's no reason they deserve that just because they were the one that posted the link. Top-level comments also become a mix of ones that are commenting on the content and ones that are replying to the submitter, splitting something that should have been a single thread into a bunch of separate ones.
The approach of using a text topic to post a link along with excerpts/remarks also breaks existing and future site functionality. Just as one example, Tildes can show a word count for most articles, but if you put the link inside a text post, it's going to show the word count of the text post itself instead. In the future, people will be able to do things like filter out videos, but that won't work if the link to the video is inside a text post. It's important to have links posted as link topics, or anything that depends on the topic type won't be able to work reliably.
Not a reply to me, then. You're replying to a suggestion that text topics should be used as a vessel for link content if the poster has something else to share about it. My suggestion was to make link topics also take text content as a possibility, rather than shove it down the line as a comment, which is counter-intuitive to the user and shifts directions of the topic itself.
I usually post some excerpts because I am so poor at finding words to discuss what I read, or why I found it worth posting. For shorter articles I think you're right, I could probably come up with a few sentences, but with longer for stuff, I wouldn't know ho to show that it's interesting.
I experimented with posting links as a non-link topic a while back, and I was told to use link topics for links, due to the extra stuff Tildes does for links.
I like all the excerpts, long and short, and they don't prevent me from going to the article.
I respect your opinion.
I concur. It's also bad form to reproduce almost the entirety of an article on another web site.
The role of an excerpt is to pique the viewer's interest or help clarify something a confusingly-short title would miss. Your goal as a poster, should you choose to add an excerpt, is to capture the essence of the article: what it's about, what it elucidates, why reading it matters. Length alone doesn't matter, but long excerpts betray a failure to engage with and understand the article.
Then again, some articles are short enough that you can use an excerpt to cover it in its entirety. What to do with those is beyond me. I suppose a TL;DR-type excerpt is not beneath us.
In those cases there might be no excerpt whatsoever.
Perhaps not. Would be silly to cite half the article and still be under a reasonable limit, wouldn't it?
But then you have to let the reader know if it's worth reading. Titles don't always cover that function. I'm not even talking about clickbait: sometimes the concern within the article is brief but diluted by the circumstances of it.
I would like to see data on the engagement of posts with excerpts vs. without, short vs. long, etc. Whatever drives more comments/voting, we should expect.
If we end up keeping excerpts, I would be in favor of a box dedicated to the excerpt under the link, like a text post, but is modifiable by the users that have that privilege. Personal comments about the post would just go in the comments as they do now.
I realise that many people post excerpts here as a sort of posting statement for the article itself, but isn't the main reason for reproducing the entirety of the article to help those who can't read it because of a paywall or similar? How should that be handled?
@deimos advised against using Tildes as an anti-paywall before. I suggest generating a link on outline.com and sharing it alongside the content. You can also give instructions such as “try that extension” etc.
I like Pocket.
Thank you for the clarification. Legal issues were not my original concern though. Unless someone wishes to copy an entire article—something discouraged—I think we’re covered.
"Oh no, I certainly have nothing to do with this."
To make my excepts more readable, I often try to format them and include links from the article for people who take it seriously enough. I mainly do this with separate quote blocks instead of paragraphs (also serves as a visual cue for the
[...]symbol.), and most standard formatting practices, along with insert.Sometimes I make the headline longer, including secondary headlines or summarizing it myself, something I find kinda underrated.
As for (ahem) making the quotes shorter and more concise, I'd be lying if I said that was something I could do intuitively.