16
votes
Post estimated reading time next to the article/post length
Basically, convert Article: 5234 words to Article: 5234 words, 23 minutes.
Not much to explain, I'm lazy and I don't like to do math just to see how much time it would take me to read an article, it would be great to have an estimate similar to how Medium does it. It doesn't have to be as precise, a rough estimate would do the job, for my example I divided the number of words by the average WPM for the english language (228±30 according to Wikipedia).
Additionally, a setting can be added to set a personal reading speed.
I personally find the word count is enough. Estimated reading time is not something I rely since people read in different speeds and patterns. For example, I’m a non native speaker with ADHD. Estimate times are useless for me, but word count is something I can mentally compare with my own perception of effort.
It would also make the interface a bit more information heavy and I think we should be conservative about what we add.
Personally I really like this idea. Single/double digits units of time feel a lot more intuitive than three-four digit word counts. I do think that the ability to provide your own WPM in the settings would be pretty useful, since a single standard deviation of a population from the mean seems to be fairly significant (201-273 wpm from a mean of 237).
(Study is specifically about Portuguese, but likely applies to English as well): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sample-sentences-from-the-34-sentence-optotypes-developed-and-tested-for-the_fig1_306131605
I agree it might be nice to have, but thinking from a development resources/priority standpoint, will this really accomplish much more than the word count already does? Especially if the reading time doesn't need to be precise. I don't imagine many of us are that much more willing to read a 20-minute article than a 23-minute one,
Eh, if it's 228±30 WPM then it's not even math that needs to be done on the user's end by saying you're a 250wpm or 200wpm. If you're fast it's 4 minutes per 1k, 5 minutes if you're a slow reader.
First digit of a word count times 4 or 5 is "instantaneous math" the same way you don't have to count the number of eggs, one by one, in a carton to know how many are remaining.
you want us to do MATH?
I was going to add this suggestion to gitlab, but looks like @Bauke beat me to it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/700 :P
Thank you