[josho]

I think they made sense in a world filled with paper magazines. You could quickly pickup a magazine flip through pages and see if anything caught your eye, if so then you buy the magazine.

On the internet it only makes sense if people scroll through an article to decide if it's worth reading. Does anyone do that? I generally don't. The scroll bar tells me how long the article is, and the heading and subheading usually tells me if it's something I care about.

[openknot]

Pull quotes could still make sense for long articles (1600-2000+ words, which take 10+ minutes to read), especially in online magazines. For these lengthy articles, a reader could be interested from the heading and subheading, but then stop reading or skim a section due to the length.

I do skim through articles that are a time commitment to read to decide if it's worth reading in full, but I generally look for section headings (e.g. that would let an article be split into multiple shorter articles). If there aren't any, pull quotes are decent strings to look for; and if not, it's manual skimming to better understand the structure (e.g. the first sentence of each paragraph).

[cgriswald]

Maybe. I still think just heading and subheading would suffice. However, if pull quotes are used, they should function as links to bring you to the part that caught your interest and to give context for the quote. Or, alternatively, provide that context in a pop-up on hover, with the quote itself bolded.