About halfway through a one-page article was this quote.
"If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first."
Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas.
Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url.
In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or business advice. Anything with quantum physics in the title works too.
Well, I don't comment on Reddit without reading the article, but I notice that, on contentious topics, by the time I've read the article there are 2000 comments already and there's not much point posting a comment after that. If you want somebody to read your comment, you have to post on something nobody cares about, or post REALLY fast.
Just yesterday an article that went in depth on all different kinds of atmospheric water harvesting was filled with comments on how this was 'debunked', despite some of the methods being used in practice (notably fog harvesting).
Moreover, the article was discussing emerging changes in the technology and the hurdles they would face (it's almost always energy!) but none of the comments seemed to discuss that at all.
Most of the discussion today is buried under "reactions". People just state their shallow opinion and fight over them. I hope new more coherent way of discussion emerges again.
In the Usenet there was custom of writing summaries. Article writer would direct the discussion.
> Authors of articles occasionally say that readers should reply by mail and they'll summarize. Accordingly, readers should do just that---reply via mail. Responding with a followup article to such an article defeats the intention of the author. She, in a few days, will post one article containing the highlights of the responses she received. By following up to the whole group, the author may not read what you have to say.
>When creating a summary of the replies to a post, try to make it as reader-friendly as possible. Avoid just putting all of the messages received into one big file. Rather, take some time and edit the messages into a form that contains the essential information that other readers would be interested in.
>Also, sometimes people will respond but request to remain anonymous (one example is the employees of a corporation that feel the information's not proprietary, but at the same time want to protect themselves from political backlash). Summaries should honor this request accordingly by listing the From: address as anonymous or (Address withheld by request).
HN would need to make a significant number of changes for it to restore its signal ratio, including:
1. Flagging sources of information that are known to use clickbait tactics, stupid popups and generally low effort content. Paywalls can also be labeled as such.
2. Niceties like showing original title next to the updated one, or page title next to the submission title. I want to know what the original title was so I can appropriately shame the individual into trying to clickbait a boring topic onto the front page.
3. Downvotes should need to be justified and reviewed. A “I disagree with this comment because it offends me” is not a valid reason to bury good commentary. Happens too frequently. Remove showdead etc altogether.
4. Limited number of new seats for posting/commenting. Read-only for general public. Remove accounts that are regularly submitting garbage to the front page (happens more frequently than you think).
This community has degraded over the years and it’s easily seen in most high volume commentaries. A lot of it is emotionally charged nonsense with people being “convinced” of things with nothing to show where they obtained such strong convictions.
Dan shouldn’t moderate, he should outright ban, and in the process push the low effort armchairing to Reddit and other sites.
HN is first and foremost a vehicle for YC ventures to post their stuff anyway.
While I can understand people are optimistic that this site is somewhat more “intelligent” or “knowledgeable” about particular subjects compared to other sites, the range of that subject matter is so narrow that in majority of categories you’re more likely to find higher quality, insight and volume of posts elsewhere. Namely Reddit.
Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.
I see HN in the same way. It happens so often that HN discussion is much better that article itself that I go there first, and RTFA only if the discussion makes me want to read it.
For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got bored.
The readability of lot of web articles tend to be quite poor as they are written from viewpoint of SEO rather than readability. I rarely can read complete web article unless it was published in a paper magazine or newspaper.
HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from themed serious subreddits.
Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.
I would have given Reddit a chance if they were not constantly screwing around with the UI. The new UI is sluggish and really affects the reading experience negatively.
I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.
It's frustrating, but utilizing old.reddit.com / Reddit Enhancement Suite (https://redditenhancementsuite.com/) goes a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience.
Heh, I remember maybe a decade ago, some e-magazine in spanish which marketed itself as a truly cultural experience, with long articles on interesting cultural topics. It was so badly formatted for SEO that it was so painful to read which probably made people think that the cultural themes were more difficult than they actually were.
Correction: _commenters_ think of Reddit titles as discussion prompts. I think that's a pretty important distinction to make. It's possible that there is a sizable group of people who actually do click the links, but they don't also go back to comment.
Yes, but getting a spate of RTFA was a badge of honour. Also responding RTFA meant that you didn't get it either. To a flood of RTFA you got to be allowed to be quite pithy in response with outrageous indignation and generally still be onside.
My /. id (JSG) is ~18K but is only so large because I lurked for a few years before signing up. sigh
Even back then I have always used identifiable IDs on forums, those are my initials and here I use surname + initial and do so on everything internets these days.
I feel like a closer approximation of what’s going on is that there are perennial discussion topics that people want to participate in when they see an opportunity (e.g. “battery technology continues to improve, but it’s rare that we see the results trickling down to consumer electronics.”)
But just having a forum with “evergreen threads” where people talk continuously about perennial topics, doesn’t seem to work out very well, as people tend to get bored of topics when nobody’s saying anything new.
People might want to participate in them, but they won’t bother if there’s no expectation that their comment will be seen, let alone replied to. Nobody wants to post to a “stale” thread; it’s a waste of effort. And, in a vicious cycle, nobody wants to read other people’s posts on a “stale” thread either, because “thread necromancy” is almost never done by someone with something of value to contribute.
“Post a link and comment about it” sites have stumbled upon a fix for the problem of perennial discussion topics becoming "stale": by having individual threads focused on news articles relevant to these perennial topics, rallying points are created, giving people an excuse/justification to resume the larger ongoing topic of conversation within the comments of the individual news item, with the expectation that others will also be doing so.
The news itself is important to this process, as it offers a promise that fresh content (i.e. comments with a novel thought backing them) might be injected into the ongoing topic due to the news; thereby giving people a reason to check out this particular resurrection of the topic, even if they’ve read previous threads “about” it before.
But it really only has to be a promise that someone else is going to contribute novel thought to the conversation. Most people don’t want to be the source of the novel thought themselves. They want to participate on one of the existing sides of the topic, using what they already knew about the topic going in. They want to try out a “famous” debate for themselves. (And, if there's something new to know, they seemingly want to learn it by being told off by someone who has read the news, and so now knows something they don't.)
So the news article itself has about the same effect on the volume of commenting on a site like this, as public news regarding a company’s value has on the volume of trading in a market. A dose of “the real thing” certainly causes a surge—but so does the expectation of it, whether you actually end up getting the real thing or not.
And, just like speculating on a stock doesn’t require any insider knowledge, commenting under one of the “traditional” positions on such a perennial topic doesn’t require that you read the news that prompted the resurrection.
You can't have a stock market without real signal; and yet the market will always be composed mostly of traders with no access to (or desire to access) real signal. You can't have a perennial discussion without news; and yet the comments will always be composed mostly of people who have no desire to access the news.
Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.
A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,
1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);
2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;
3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.
(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)
I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.
There is a value in rehashing previous conversations. Imagine if you were at a cafe, having an intellectual conversation with your friend while a GPT-12 butler listened. Every time you rehash a conversation that someone else had, GPT-12 butler interrupts and says "excuuuuse me sir, some permutation of this conversation has happened 2000 times on the internet. I will replay the top 3 of those. Please listen carefully, then proceed to tread new ground." I think that GPT-12 butler would be very annoying.
You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining.
Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement.
All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.
>> Haha, bravo Mr. Timmer. If IE search is working right, then apparently I am the first. I think its well over 90%...
>> "bananas"
> That was added after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Idea credit goes to our editor in chief, Ken Fisher, and it was put in by our managing editor, Eric Bangeman.
From that first comment mentioning bananas onwards, bananas are mentioned very regularly. A quick sample of a few pages suggests somewhere around 40% of the comments mention bananas.
I actually skimmed the comments but missed the one from the author among the massive number of others. Therefore, seeing the surge of bananas a few pages in, I thought once discovered, people kept looking for what those "bananas" were about and then discovered the sentence above themselves.
> I thought once discovered, people kept looking for what those "bananas" were about and then discovered the sentence above themselves.
I suspect that's what really happened. Would have been better if they included that note since publication time. The first comment with "Banana" then would have been the real indicator. Most others would have simply noted the keyword from the comments before reading the article, like you said.
But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article? It's fine if the content is very compelling. I think it has to have something to do with reading online. It's really challenging to get readers glued to the page while traditionally physical books and magz have an easier environment (less distractions).
> If you don’t have the patience to digest the article, what give you the authority to write on the topic?
... your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidey sense to detect BS trained since long time ago, your previous experience, or the fact that you are yet a expert in the topic.
Or just your curiosity and desire to participate in the conversation, that is the correct motivation. To take a chance to improve your knowledge about a topic shouldn't be regulated by a pass.
Everybody wants their paper turning into a breaking new / symbol of authority or just cheat in the citations game, but this is not how it happens most of the time. Most of the time it is just published and nothing happens. Nobody will rush to read your hard work. Is just how it is
My boss is very good at skimming through scientific papers. She's so well trained she will get the gust of a paper in a couple of seconds(maybe exaggerated). I guess there is the expertise in the field at play as well...
>your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidy[sic] sense
Consider how accurate the senses of a person that speaks without observing are. Existing is not license to proliferate otherwise there would be no notion of a cancerous cell, these would simply be another part of the organism. Uninformed opinions are the cancer of public discourse. Uncontrolled growth of irresponsible and subjective thought.
I'm guessing from your username that (like me) you're a fan of Nietzsche. Alas those of us who (like Nietzsche) believe opinions should be informed are a dying breed these days.
This is no longer true is it - everyone wants engagement so they salaciously trail some upcoming new fascinating wonderful surprise until the headline is an outright lie, the body of the article is meaningless and the surprise is a disappointment.
> But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article?
Yes. Personally I don't see a problem with that if you are trying to achieve a certain level of good response.
Maybe an alternative would be to let the presence of the "magic" word/phrase alter the ordering of the comments displayed to other users, or even "shadow delay" responses without it for fifteen minutes.
From my own experience: when I comment on something that I haven't read it's usually because I'm more interested in the conversation around the subject than the subject itself. So, in that case, I have usually read the comments, and if half of them just randomly included the word "bananas" in them, I'm pretty sure that the convesation whould change to be: "wtf are ppl saying bananas all the time?"
Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them.
You can create a comment section, but it needs a barrier like that and tight curation - no comments posted without approval. Which can be a problem because the commenters with "dissenting" opinions will quickly claim censorship and how the outlet doesn't tolerate opposing viewpoints.
> Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool
A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow? I feel like it's chock full of witty jokes, positive vibes, light entertainment, and the occasional weirdo just to balance things out.
It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.
Looking at Facebook I would be willing to say that has literally nothing to do with it.
Facebook insists even more on having "real people" using their real names, often forcing them to vet themselves, yet at times it easily steals the crown in terms of "really bad user interactions" from YouTube comments.
Very likely much more related to the topic under which people are commenting: Non-political feel good fluff does not allow for much friction to be inserted, thus the tone of comments will be much more civilized and friendly.
But anything that goes into controversial, and particularly political, territory is bound to quickly escalate into a complete shit show, on YouTube and Facebook alike.
Which fits neatly into common communication strategies like focusing on similarities rather than on differences.
> It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.
But the migration of YouTube channels and comments to G+ linked identities was reversed[0], wasn't it? Not to mention that G+ has since been shut down.
Shouldn't that make the abortive effort irrelevant for the quality of YouTube comments today?
Nu.nl's comment section has been back for a while, they dumped the social network ambitions and invested in better moderation before turning it back on. It's helped somewhat.
This is a popular opinion - that there are some things that people should just not be allowed to say, anywhere, ever, and while I (sort of) understand the impetus behind it, every proposed cure is worse than the disease.
I had this idea as well. It only solves the low quality comment problem if that is something the site owners want. In some cases they may benefit from low quality comments.
Before the web, the HTTP POST equivalent was an envelope and stamp and maybe some moderation at the receiving side. People should look into ways to limit comments / filter noise now that it is in abundance.
I would assume the questions are of the simple, "What facts did we state?" kind, rather than requiring some deeper understanding or inference. So why would you allow someone who couldn't grok the facts to comment? If my assumption is true then it works as a reasonable anti-bot measure, allowing wrong answers would negate that.
Or how about shadow banning the user on that specific article? Make it appear their comment was posted, only on their logged in account (and maybe IP address). Rest of the world wouldn't see it.
Works very well, but the massive lack of transparency will make it difficult to justify and ultimately creating paranoia and scissors in the heads of people.
I would not want to participate on such a platform forcing me to double check if my contributions were actually published or simply hidden away for some secret reason.
It's these pieces of accountability that go a long way to have users compliant with moderation.
It would be funny if so many didn't already wear their ignorance as a badge of pride.
Imagine an article on vaccinations--many who would be posting exactly the sort of nonsense you'd be hoping to prevent would wear their "understood 0% of the facts in the article" as a badge of pride, and others who agreed with them would interpret it as such.
At least 0% would require more knowledge than guessing. You might even accidentally educate a few anti-vaxxers, who would be forced to learn what they were disagreeing with. (Yes, I know it still wouldn't help.)
Let's go further. Make it a quiz about the general topic too. If you don't have any fundamental knowledge about a topic, your opinion shouldn't get a platform for it to spread.
What it demonstrates is that people have already made up their mind on the topic and aren't genuinely interested in new perspectives. This helps explains the inflammatory nature of Internet debates in general.
Someone is always complaining regardless of the message.
You can state that you like strawberry marmalade and someone on this planet will threaten you and your family for that transgression. Problem is the net isn't as anonymous as before thanks to social media and some people without significant personality try to call your employer, who succinctly distances the whole company from strawberry marmalade to underline how important it is to have values.
Employees will be reprimanded and strawberry marmalade removed from the canteen.
Good information has a long tail. The first time anything is posted, the internet is going to shit on it, regardless of what it is. But good content is sticky, and people doing serious research will be able to dig it up.
I think it also possibly shows that in general we've not learned to be able to tune out or self filter the information overload that's thrown at us via the Internet.
>an article isn't going to convince a political party supporter to switch sides for example //
Why not? Are you suggesting articles can't carry information that changes peoples opinions; that people are wedded too much to Party identity; or perhaps that only one article wouldn't do it?
It should be able to change someone's mind if that person were rational, open minded and the article contained some very revealing information. It should.
...But it won't, not in today's American politics. There's no nuance left, it's us versus _them_, entrenched political warfare. If the article says something bad about my party it's either: _fake news!_ or a smear campaign by _them_! If it says something good about their party it's ____-wing propaganda.
I did a similar thing with recruiting ads, I added a line of "If you are interested in this role, please reach out to me starting with 'Heyyyyyy I am XXX', thanks!" in the middle of the JD.
And I simply ignore 99% of the reach out because they didn't start with that line.
It's just like the brown M&m thing Van Halen did.
Job ads are universally filled with jargon-y HR copy-pasta bullshit, so I’m sure most people never read them on purpose.
Instead of being clever, you’ve simply overestimated the importance of your ad in people’s lives while simultaneously optimizing for inexperienced people who’ve never read a job ad before and don’t know they are BS.
I don’t put PR bullshit in my vacancies and I write a lot of them. I respect my potential hires and expect them to respect me and at least read the damn thing. Unbelievable, right?
Sure, your ads might be the greatest ads ever written. But if you respected your potential hires you’d be mindful of the fact that it’s easy to get job ad fatigue since all the other company ads are filled with bullshit.
Playing king-in-the-castle with people’s lives by rejecting them over some bizarre game where you assume bad intent doesn’t sound like “respect” to me.
The job ad is around 200 words. If someone is serious about a job that they will be working on for 5 days a week, do you think it's too much to ask if I expect them to read through these words?
> Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.
Thats because an awful lot of people are chewing ice.
(epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though)
A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird.
There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes from sitting by a fireside doing chores for hours. It takes effort and vulnerability to make friends with whom you can have 2-hours-long chats. It requires planning and intentionally-directing attention to maintain those relationships. Those who fail to plan and execute those actions will reach out in weird ways to try to meet that need. These will disproportionately be people who:
A. Struggle to sustain attention long enough to plan and execute what they really intend.
B. Fear that interactions with new people will end up with them assaulted, infected, or dead.
C. Feel trapped in some situation and unable to plan a way out.
D. Struggle to form an intellectual connection during opportunities for deep social interaction.
E. Have been in a situation where A-D was true and are falling into old habits.
I posit that the intellectual masturbation of people on twitter or other forums is a symptom of an unmet hunger for real intellectual connection with other humans.
No ^^
Your source says the chewing ice is a known symptom of anemia, but does not say how prevalent this symptom is in anemia-affected people.
So from that source you can't conclude that anemia "often" leads to chewing ice, it may very well be quite rare.
Abstractly, "A is often a consequence B" does not logically goes to "B often leads to A".
To use an extreme exemple, crossing paths with polar bears (chewing ice) is generally linked with dieing (anemia), but death is quite rarely caused by crossing paths with polar bears.
I've noticed that when i'm bored or switched off at work, i'm more likely to go on Twitter and start arguments with people i don't know. That usually makes me unhappy, which makes me more switched off at work!
Even lower effort/risk - make a comment in response to a wrong-headed comment from another commenter that hasn't read the citation. All you have to know is that their comment is wrong, whether or not it has any relation to the new information.
Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.
no, the journalists do not love misinform. If that was the case they wouldnt be journalists by definition. It may be 1:1 as 'no true scotsman' but this is what it is
I'm certain that social networks have played a large role, if not the sole reason for this behaviour by encouraging limited attention, FOMO, OCD-scrolling etc. But, I guess we wouldn't able to prove that more people read the content before commenting before social networks without a proper control and besides many visitors of these sites are from social networks.
All major News organisations know that only small fraction of their audience on social networks even click the link anymore and rest of them just make up what they wanted from the title and description. At least now I think, Facebook doesn't allow one to alter the title, description of the website they're sharing; for years someone who shares could change those as well!
> I'm certain that social networks have played a large role, if not the sole reason for this behaviour
I don’t think that’s correct, depending upon your definition of "social networks". People were complaining about people not RTFAing on Slashdot in the 90s.
The sheep in Animal Farm (who repeat talking points independently of applicability or even consistency with the past) were probably a complaint about people not RTFAing in 1945.
If one squints enough, Plato's Cave could be a complaint (circa -375) about opinions via pale shadows of secondary and tertiary sources.
First 3 to come reads the title, skim read TFA, write corrections or complements.
Next 30 reads the title, read comments, and write some pretend skepticism.
Next 300 reads the title, view comments, upvote the strongest opinions, and share.
Next 3000 reads the title and immediately decide whether to share.
Somewhere from here and above, 3-4 people tries to plagiarize something in it just to get votes and/or because they have personal issues in forming opinions.
Rest of the million people after this point just applaud and share what’s being thrown at their faces.
We were given a test like this in school once. The first instruction was to not do anything until you'd read all the questions. The 'questions' were all stuff like poke holes in the corner of the paper, some math problems stuff like that. At the end of the test, the last question was, don't do questions 1-9, simply write your name in the corner and turn the test over.
The test was supposed to be about your ability to read and follow instructions, few people in my class passed the test. As soon as the test started you could see people poking holes and writing things.
Although it's point is good, I hate this test because--at least in most versions I have seen--nothing tells you to skip questions 1-9. The directions say, "Read all the questions first." OK fine. Then question 10 says, "Just write your name on the paper and turn it over."
But why should question 10 be the only one you follow?
"Read all the questions" is the only direction you have. There is never a "skip 1-9", except in number 10, but why would you start with that one?
The instruction is very clear and precise. It says to read all the questions. Not to answer them (or answer them right away).
Therefore, if you follow the instruction, you end up reading question #10 following the process, within the time it takes to read all the questions.
Now, that instruction might seem controversial, but it really isn't. If you have the time, its a good idea to read content well, before dealing with it further.
So, after you have read all of the instructions, why follow the instruction in question 10 instead of starting at the beginning?
I suppose you are saying that no one ever told you to actually take the quiz, but that is pretty stupid if you follow that in every other situation. It's a set up, designed to make people look stupid.
The lesson is that sometimes patience pays off. If I have the time (and I don't like to stress myself), I always have an overview of the whole picture, in this case the questions. For example, if I have to sign a document, I first read it through once, and then another time to act. It might seem like lost time, but actually you have a much better understanding of the content.
I had something similar and failed and thought it was the dumbest thing ever.
I'm not an automaton. You didn't tell me at the beginning that the point was to follow every single thing exactly to the letter. Of course I could play that game, but you spend my entire career as a student telling me to happily skip problems and go on the next and then you want to act as if it's a problem with me that I engaged in the test in good faith.
Ha, brilliant. Kind of the equivalent of how sometimes students put in random sentences in essays submitted for classes, to demonstrate that their teachers don't fully read their work. Or how surveys can have nonsense questions/answer options to weed out people not reading the questions.
In college I used to take psychological studies for extra beer money. The tests would have the standard scale (rate from 1-5 your agreement with statement x), except a random page of each test would have instructions to ignore the prompt, and just to mark all of the answers a certain way. Same concept, weed out the people who ignore the instructions and just fill in random answers.
I always wondered what would happen if I incorrectly answered those questions - would they still pay me? But I prefer cash to the truth
I put swearwords in an assessment once, just to see if anyone noticed. I presume they didn't, because nobody commented - but maybe they did, and didn't care enough to comment.
Reminds me of this software that, like all softwares, had a miles long Terms of Use. Buried in the middle the developer said something to the effect of "Contact us at this address and receive USD XX,000".
Most users clicked the "I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions" and only a handful actually contacted the developer. They did receive the money though.
It’s a standard quality measurement tactic in Internet based surveys. In the list of survey questions, you post a few question which have clear black or white answers. The answers from the survey takers will let you know to further investigate the the survey response. You can then decide to take actions accordingly. Most of the times, you discard.
Google had a surveys program where you could earn credits for the google play store and every now and then you would get a trap question usually formatted something like "Have you used x product" or "how well do you know x" where x does not exist. Anyone who answers incorrectly will see limited surveys in the future.
> Google had a surveys program where you could earn credits for the google play store and every now and then you would get a trap question usually formatted something like "Have you used x product" or "how well do you know x" where x does not exist. Anyone who answers incorrectly will see limited surveys in the future.
Google Rewards still exists, and as recently as a couple of weeks ago had a question in that format (though I am not sure if it was actually a nonexistent brand, and I don't recall enough about the question to look it up now).
Not sure if they stopped using the trick questions or not but they still have the program. You can Download it in your phone from Play Store, it's called Google Rewards.
It really made me much more conscious about seeking out and reading original sources, rather than relying on interpretations and summaries from journalists, bloggers, etc.
I did something similar once with an essay I wrote in high school to see if the teacher actually read the whole thing. It turns out that he did read it and I got docked a mark for that.
This reminds me of a prank I tried in high school.
There was a rumor that one teacher didn’t read submitted essays. I decided to test this by applying the jargon translator from Dilbert’s Desktop Games (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert%27s_Desktop_Games) to my essay. The translator output was painful to read: for example, it replaces “mother” with “female parental unit”. I added a paragraph on the third page asking him to call me if he was still reading the essay. I never received a call but he later said that he had lost the essay so the results were inconclusive.
From that story's author, they added it after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Doesn't change your point for later ones.
I had something like "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in title of your Message" in the middle of my linkedIn profile to know which recruiters would read through the whole profile.
I've done similar with online groups like freecycle when selling or giving away things. Include "to prove you've actually read this post, mention the word elephant in your response" in the advert and have my mail agent delete everything to that address[1] which doesn't include the word.
Massively reduces the number of messages you get from time wasters who just mash "can I have this?" or "is this still available?" to get in first, who will then ghost you because they've taken an extra half second to decide they don't want the item after all[2] so you spend time writing replies that achieve nothing.
Probably means some genuinely interested people get redirected to trash too, but if the item is worth having there will be enough responders to make this not matter. If you see no responses after a time, maybe then check your trash to see if there are any there worth responding to.
[1] those services attract much spam, always have a specific address for each that you can turn off once the junk starts flowing in
[2] as it isn't the right colour, or the right size, or you can't deliver, or will deliver but can't conveniently offer collection, or they completely misread the subject line, ...
About halfway through a one-page article was this quote.
"If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first."
Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas.
Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article