Posts can be as long as they want but who is going to read them?  

So before you submit a long post ask yourself who is going to read (all of) this?

Cheers

bs

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by bean_sprout

3 hours ago, bean_sprout said:

I understand why some posts are long (> 10 lines / paragraphs) because the poster want to be clear. 

No.

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by n4gix
NO reason to quote the entire darn post for a two-letter reply!!!!!!!!!!!

23 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

+

^

18 minutes ago, stubbornswiss said:

If a post is too long for you, just ignore it and move on to the next.

Exactly, meaning I'm not reading your well constructed post.

bs

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by bean_sprout

One of the things I appreciate about this forum is that -- for the most part -- we have a high rate of literacy and many people who are capable of both creating thoughtful content and sharing it in a way that is fluid, comprehensive, and highly consumable.  Sure, there are also some folks here who seem borderline illiterate or incapable of stringing two thoughts together, but you get that everywhere.

The written word is a wonder, one of the crowning achievements of human culture, and just because we live in a world where peoples' attention spans are being destroyed by everyone needing to chunk their thoughts up into 140 characters to fit in a tweet doesn't mean there shouldn't be places where those who have complex thoughts to communicate are able to do so in a way that is worthy of the history of the written word.

I'd suggest that if you think a post that is only a few hundred words long is "too long" you should do one of two things:  find a community that is more inline with your tastes in media consumption, or do what most folks do when we see something on a forum that we don't consider worthy of our time:  skip it and move on.

There's a third option, too:  work to culture a longer attention span.  Some things in life cannot be TLDR'd.

(This text up to the end of that sentence has only 238 words.  Is that really so bad?)

 

 

 

4 minutes ago, snglecoil said:

^

'

It isn’t about quantity. It is about quality. 

I appreciate all the response.  I grew up when speedreading was the thing - IOW I can read 10 paragraphs in 5 seconds by only reading the first line of each paragraph (if there are paragraphs) and scan the rest until I get the gist of the content. 

Problem is is that the long post may have alot of irrelevant content (to the original post) so I throw it out.

Like I said less is more especially when so much info is being thrown around.

 

bs  

  

18 minutes ago, bean_sprout said:

Exactly, meaning I'm not reading your well constructed post.

bs

A case of 'can't have your cake and eat it'.

3 minutes ago, stubbornswiss said:

A case of 'can't have your cake and eat it'.

Question is - is it cake or a lot of baloney?

 

bs

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by bean_sprout

42 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

I don't mind long posts, as long as the info is interesting and relevant

Hear hear.

1 hour ago, bean_sprout said:

they ... require excessive storage on the servers...

Given that the bulk of the forum's servers contents are in plaintext, the forum messages should be easily compressible and not an issue.

For example, I'm working on a second draft of a novel, and I'm writing it in plaintext. My word count is right about 16,000 words, so roughly 64 formatted pages if printed as a US trade paperback (rough rule of thumb says 250 words = 1 page). This takes only 96 KB of space. On a 1.44 MB floppy disk, I could store this file 15 times—even though this technology is so old and so space-restricted that none of us use it.

And this is uncompressed. If I compressed the file, I could probably fit even more copies. In fact, for kicks and giggles, I compressed the file using 7z. This compressed the file down to 36 KB. Now I could fit roughly 41 copies of the file on the 1.44 MB floppy disk.

Storage is so ridiculously cheap today that it's a non-issue.

1 hour ago, bean_sprout said:

they take a long time to read, ... and often lead to information overload

Given others have already addressed this, I'll try to not pile on, but just to suffice that if you've read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, he likens the literary mind to a landmark development which allowed the human race to do a great many things. He argues that studies are demonstrating that computers and the internet in particular are destroying the literary mind, creating a mind which rewards small hits of dopamine in rapid succession (i.e. social media) and is unable to sustain the concentration required to read a book. This is terrifying.

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by samcan
Word choice

If you want shorter posts, got to twitter.

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by Farlis

I rather read a very long well-thought, knowledgable, interesting and constructive post than a dozen short-sighted, hostile, know-it-all and self-opinionated posts that are completely useless and are of no avail at all for the community.

Unfortunately the latter are much more prevalent on avsim - just like on almost every other internet forum - than the former. I'd like to have more of the former.

 

Edited September 27, 20205 yr by RALF9636

2 hours ago, bean_sprout said:

I understand why some posts are long (> 10 lines / paragraphs) because the poster want to be clear.  However they take a long time to read, require excessive storage on the servers and often lead to information overload.  Then it may be quoted 1 or more times to exacerbate the problem.

Please state your message concisely and relevant to the topic and if needed add more clarity in a second paragraph.

We with old eyes will appreciate it.

 

Thanks

bs

TL;DR (soz 😉)