Maybe I’m more like a bovine when it comes to digesting.
I graze on stuff, then later I will regurgitate it and slowly chew and process it again. (…and sometimes again, etc… until I suddenly realize that I’ve learned something…) The grazing is separate process, and my greed makes it already unpredictable enough. (The thing with Internet meadows is, there’s always another meadow nearby.)
Yeah I have bad attention span but all that means is that even if the article is 5 minute I will be googling every other word and and opening every other link, and THAT’s far more significant than the length of the article.
After all, there’s a reason I did not end up reading the original “14 min article” (which by the way got rated almost an hour by Firefox reader mode, go figure) and went on to post this… :D
How does the estimate help you decide?
I don’t get it. If I’m interested in something, I’m interested in it regardless of the length of an article, right?
I mean, maybe I’m not interested in all of it, but then I can just spend, say, 30 seconds evaluating whether the article is any good and whether it spends a paragraph or two on the very topic I’m curious about. Length of the article does not have much bearing on that, it’s more about whether I know the terms I’m looking for and can spot them. (Of course, massive length may hint I will spend more time sifting through, but peeking at scrollbar is enough to realize that.)
If the thing I’m interested in is buried in a massive wall of text, so what? I can ignore the rest of the article as much as I can ignore the rest of the blog (or the internet…)
The real unpredictable thing for me is always that even if I’m looking for topic X, I might actually need to learn about W first, and often I’m underestimating the relevancy of W and its own depth. So I could spend 1 minute reading about X but still find myself unable to use the knowledge. That’s regardless of whether the knowledge was in a 1h long article or 10 min.
The orange guy is the Kool-Aid Man of Overton’s windows.
…or in 30? That’s how it would work for me since I’m a very slow (distracted!) reader.
I get the point, though. Thanks.