#oneaday Day 260: Catching up

Did I miss a day? I think I missed a day. With that in mind, I'll attempt to think of two posts' worth of things to say today. Well, even if I didn't write on here yesterday (which I don't think I did), I did at least write something about The Excavation of Hob's Barrow over on MoeGamer, which you can read by clicking on this link. Click it. Go on.

I actually often find myself wondering if it's even worth linking things any more, because I really don't know if people actually click on them any more. I feel like everything I was taught about the Web and supposedly "good" Web design back in the relatively early days has pretty much gone out of the window these days as everyone's collective attention span has declined and the whole Internet, in general, has kind of gone to pot.

I sort of think we've brought that on ourselves to a certain extent, though. I know at the day job I've often been asked to "make things shorter" or suchlike, based on the belief that people won't look at anything that takes more than six picoseconds to digest, and while I don't doubt that people will click away if they're not immediately blasted in the face with some sort of blaring short-form media designed to obliterate their attention span even more than it already has been, I feel like consistently pandering to that perceived audience is just making the problem worse.

When I write, I generally write with my own preferences in mind. When I read something online, I want to feel like I got something out of what I read. It doesn't necessarily have to be learning something completely new to me, but I do need to feel like I got some sort of "value" from the experience. Maybe I got to know the writer a bit better. Maybe I found out a new detail about something I was already familiar with. Maybe I learned to look at something from a new perspective. All of those things are what keeps me reading, not whether or not an article has a bullet-point summary before the text begins so I can decide whether or not to grace this page with the honour that is my attention.

I feel like if you constantly pander to people who have no attention span, all you're going to attract is people with no attention span. I don't think there's anything wrong with someone writing something online — whatever the purpose — and effectively saying "no, fuck you, I have things to say and you are damn well going to sit down and listen to them, or just piss off". This is why I respect writers such as Ed Zitron so much; Ed works with an editor on his blog, but each individual post is still thousands of words long — even longer than the longest posts I've written here or on MoeGamer. Sitting down to an Ed Zitron post is an event, and on no occasion have I come away from the time it takes to read one thinking "I wish I'd spent that time doing something else".

And yet everything about the modern Web seems to be discouraging that kind of in-depth, thoughtful writing. We have websites posting an estimated reading time at the top of their articles, along with the aforementioned bullet-point summaries. We have asides linking to completely different pages after just a couple of paragraphs, before anyone could have possibly read the whole article. We have unrelated videos inserted into the middle of articles, vapid polls whose results aren't used to inform anything whatsoever, and, of course, if you're still foolish to browse the web without ad protection, advertising.

We are constantly bombarded with things vying for our attention and seemingly, at every opportunity, discouraging us from diving deep into things. I was looking up information on a wiki earlier and while I was doing so, a sidebar popped up with "popular posts" that were being pulled from a completely different fucking wiki on a totally different subject.

It takes effort and mental fortitude to resist all this, and honestly I don't blame anyone who just doesn't feel like trying any more. It is a real effort to maintain your focus on something these days, but I would argue it is a worthwhile effort. And to that end, I would encourage everyone who feels like they have ever been struggling to take some time and unplug from the noisiest parts of the Internet — or the Internet altogether — and immerse yourself in something that demands focus. Whether that's a blog you want to catch up on, a book, a TV show you always meant to watch, doesn't matter. What's important is that you pick that thing, then you focus on it to the exclusion of all else. Put your phone down, close all your other browser tabs, just focus.

I can guarantee you'll feel a thousand times more relaxed and about a bajillion times more intelligent after doing this for a bit.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I'm all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I'm becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I'm going to call "nostalgia fluff". What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says "This is a thing that existed." and then don't provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There's a simple explanation for this, of course: it's engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting "Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television", the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say "Wow! I remember this!" and "SO NOSTALGIC!" and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn't interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn't always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are "good content". Some of these people will even get snippy if someone "steals" their "content", by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There's a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I'm not doing so just to go "this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed". Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you "shouldn't" post anything too long or in-depth online, "because people won't bother to read/watch it". This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can't read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that's what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible "because people will click off within 3 seconds" or whatever kind of insulting. It's insulting to the people who don't click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone's attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it's insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I've done isn't "interesting" within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I'm concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don't really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It's not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don't give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it's reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don't have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

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#oneaday Day 62: Too Long, Still Read

I'm almost entirely certain I have ranted on this topic at least once in the past. But, well, it bears repeating, given what I do both here and professionally.

More than one paragraph isn't bad.

More than 140 characters isn't bad. (Unless you're using Twitter, when all the deck.ly and TwitLonger nonsense kind of defeats the object.)

I read an answer to a question on GameFAQs earlier. The original poster had asked something which required quite a detailed answer. One respondee gave a detailed, good answer that was two paragraphs long, probably about 150-200 words or so. He apologised for writing "alot of text" (sic)—and I'll let the "alot" slide for the minute because there are bigger issues at work here, dammit. (Incidentally, if you've never seen this, well, you should.)

No. Stop apologising when you write things. Stop complaining at people in forums if they write detailed thoughts. Stop providing lazy people with "TL;DR" summaries and make them read. No wonder people haven't got the patience for books any more if they can't bear to read more than 10 words of someone else's opinion at a time and inevitably respond with something utterly inane like "lol". (And I bet they're not even really laughing out loud either, the bastards.)

Language is an incredibly powerful thing. Look at all the things it's built over the years. Those things didn't come about by people worrying about writing an "OMFG WALL OF TEXT" and people ignoring them. Those people had something to say and damn well said it, in detail, and argued their case. Their passion for what they were talking about came through in the power of the words that they chose, their enthusiasm for the topic came across with the depth into which they explored their topics verbally and on paper.

Now granted, there are times when brevity is better than verbosity. Anything from any government agency or law office, for example. I received a letter from the tax office a while back which went on for 3 pages when the single word "no" would have sufficed. These people have nothing to say and ironically spend pages and pages proving how little they have to say. Why? Who knows. To sound "official", perhaps.

But people with opinions? People debating things? People being—who'd have thought it—helpful? There's no sin in using a few more words if it might make someone think, discuss or smile.

So stop apologising when you write something, be it a blog post, forum post, Yahoo! Answers answer (well, someone has to write them) or blog comment. If you have something to say, it is absolutely your right to be able to say it without worrying about whether its length is going to put people off (*deftly sidesteps "that's what she said" gag*). And those who are too lazy to read a couple of paragraphs of comment? Well, they're probably not the sort of person you'd want to engage in a debate anyway. So F them in the B.

TL;DR: Stop being a dick.