A majority of long form writing is extremely low information density and, even worse, just designed to retain attention as long as possible. I now dislike majority of news articles which starts with pseudo-literary description of anecdot and a main detail is revealed 3/4 of the way in sentence or two. It’s purely filler and like sugar it has a purpose. I want all long form writing to have sub title to tell the core of story in one line, followed by abstract, or let Twitter guy summarize it for me.
This puzzled me until I realized you're talking about mainstream news-type sites. I agree on that, but these barely qualify as writing in the first place, since none of the traditional goals apply. It's like if the only kind of video you've seen are ads and you then proceed to complain about the info density of video as a whole. Though most video on YouTube also sucks, some things are very well expressed in video, like the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth or Blue Planet II.
For me "long-form writing" brings to mind textbooks, LWN, some bug report emails, some HN comments. These are a different category of writing. I don't think you should sit around to wait for someone else to summarize these for you -- that attitude must be terrible for you in the long run.
A lot of books are just as bad, especially mainstream non-fiction. May be it's because they're typically written by journalists, but I often see the same awful New Yorker style of spending three pages on a personal story of some scientist in an article about quantum physics.
That's Sturgeon's Law[0]. Most writing isn't very good, and most writers irritate readers with paragraphs of navel-gazing that tries and fails at being profound.
Yes, and I have the same issue with videos: 30 min videos with something that fits in 1 written sentence. Ugh. People are so afraid of reading (or are just very slow readers?); many even here won't read beyond the first line of this comment and if they comment, they comment only on that line often).
But... this does not apply to this post. It is not that long, not low density and does not have fillers or sugar.
I have exactly this issue with video, moaned about it here a few weeks ago -- and another HN reader explained, very pithily why the trend has occurred: money. It's much easier to monetise a YouTube video than it is an easy, or a blog post. Video impressions get more currency/eyeball even outside of YouTube. Our lack of ability to skim read or rapidly search for information doesn't enter the calculus.
