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by chmod775 2240 days ago
> Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an article

In online journalism practice many do the exact opposite. They make you read paragraph after paragraph of speculations and bullshit before elaborating/explaining their click bait headline. Anything to make you stay and scroll so their ads get more screen time.

3 comments

Relating to another HN submission today about site optimization: my brain interprets this as "a slow loading site" and I just abandon the page after the first paragraph or two (exception: some private blog pages).

Then again I started reading print newspapers about 40 years ago and this was also the approach for reading the paper so I learned a long time ago to be parsimonious with my time.

I stopped reading several links from HN today when it was clear the author wasn't getting to the point. If they had told me the point at the top I might or might not have continued to read but at least they would have gotten their point to across. As it is they got nothing across.
SEO also has encouraged this.