[bhaney]

Honestly, it's articles like this that lead me to be so stingy with my attention. I wanted to close the tab a third of the way into the article not because I'm incapable of paying attention, but because the article was wasting my time by shoving the same simple point into my face over and over again with no evidence or interesting implications. I will pay attention to articles with a reasonable density of information all the way through to the end. This was not one of those articles, but I read it through to the end just because of the meta-topic. After several paragraphs of restating the title in different words, peppered with pointless prose, the author assumes that you must agree with them about this problem by the last section. So what's the solution they give? "I have no idea."

And sure, you don't need to have a solution in mind in order to present a problem to someone, but you need some content to turn a problem into an article/blogpost that I'm willing to read. And this article has basically no content of substance.

[mordae]

My favorite take from 2015: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-b... To the point and consistent.

[npteljes]

That is a very good take, wow. This piece emphasized what I've been missing from the usual discussion of advertisements: that it's ultimately unethical to influence people is such a way. Especially considering the techniques that marketing employs.

"There is no paid version of Facebook."

There's only paid versions of cable television, and yet it's jam-packed with advertisements, to the absolute detriment of the programming itself. There's never a guarantee to avoid advertisement, since it's working so well in influencing people, and influence is power and money. Advertising is also a race for attention - entities risk their status or even existence, if they are not advertising, because if they voluntarily don't advertise, their competition surely will.

Regulation could help here, but I'm not holding my breath. So what remains is user side blocking, as much as we can.

[dredmorbius]

There's a ton of just plain bad writing. The focus of the Web on the Now and Immediate tends to emphasize this.

My own (somewhat aspirational) preferences / guidelines as to reading priorities: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>

[II2II]

Agreed. I gave up reading part way through, not because of the simplicity of the examples but because of the triviality of the evidence. Writing worth reading takes a lot of work. It means reading the draft and trimming the cruft. It means taking the time to do research on the relevant points.

[mpalmer]

Counterpoint: I am heartened to see this post. Weaker writing skills are the norm, even if they don't (always) bubble to the top of sites like HN.

The shortening of our collective attention span hurts our ability to reach and be reached in many ways, writing included.

It would be easy to cry "hypocrite" on seeing someone whose writing needs work (and significant editing) calling for longer-form content and more focus on the written word, but I feel a bit more hopeful instead.

[bloppe]

This really is the laziest take on attention erosion you could possibly make. Why even write it.