Long form content in magazines still used to have limited pages. So there needed to be a balance between information and prose. So even in long prose, the content was well edited, every sentence brought something important to the table.
Nowadays, on the web, an article could have infinite length without any limits. Less editing skills required and more importantly, the longer you stay on page, the better their metrics.
So the content tends to be way longer with more passages that do not really add anything to the central message. Most of them are approaching novellas in length.
At one point in time, this became such a big time sink for me, I wrote a firefox extension to warn me how long the page was and how long I spent on it. I am a moderately good reader and still some of these articles would typically take 45 mins to finish.
One heuristic I follow nowadays: Before reading, I think about what my purpose of this article is, what I hope to learn from this exercise: (It could just even be entertainment)
A few mins in, I see if this purpose is being fulfilled. If yes, I continue. If not, I just bail out.
The author reads voraciously and follows common threads across many works, compiling her thoughts into articles which often contain beautiful prose in their own right. I often pickup book recs from here that get me into reading about art, poetry, love, spirituality, and more, which I never would otherwise.
And, while I'm commenting, some of my favorite Substacks who tend to write long content are:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/
- https://moretothat.com/ by Lawrence Yeo
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/
I didn't realise till now, I read at least 2-3 articles a week from the above list. Well written long form content.
Archive.org tends to have out-of-copyright stuff, LibGen newer stuff, but stuff in between (mid to late 20th C) you can often get by "borrowing" the ebook from archive.org for a short time (free, requires sign-up.) LibGen also has the vast majority of scientific papers/journal articles I look for, no matter how old or obscure.
formerly known as Slate Star Codex prior to doxxing by Cade Metz at the New York Times.
I have seven library cards and I can read almost anything for free. If none have what I want, they will often order it and notify me when it arrives. All from my sweet Gesture chair. Also Kanopy has wonderful classes for free.
https://www.instapaper.com/daily (contains some automated spamming, flooding submissions to trick the popularity scoring I guess)
I'm getting tired of long-form content that wanders around the point. That's just taking a small subject and adding words. I like long form when the subject demands it and its complexity makes the long form useful.
- https://fasterthanli.me, already quite popular on HN. Amos articles are often really long and have lot of details, they read like adventures and I love that.
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing, Old New Thing by Raymond Chen at Microsoft. He’s writing articles since ~20 years and has a lot of really cool anecdotes regarding low level Windows stuff.
I stopped trying to find platforms with long form content, personal blogs is the only thing that works for me (and HN, but that’s an addiction more than anything else :p).
TRIGGERnometry: https://audioboom.com/channels/4991237.rss
Lex Fridman Podcast: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:23460834...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/ADV2256857693
Arts and Letters Daily: https://www.aldaily.com/
Lit mags: LRB, NYRB, Paris Review, McSweeneys
Lit-adjacent mags: Harpers, Laphams Quarterly
I usually follow a lot of these via RSS, and subscribe to some.
Beyond that, several newsletters. Astral códex ten (as already mentioned) and tomas pueyo’s uncharted territories come to mind.
The Browser is easily the best reading money I’ve spent in a long time. $5/mo and it finds such good articles.
Texas Monthly
Its not sensational, but just well researched and put together. A good example is bootstrapping buyouts: https://neckar.substack.com/p/reginald-lewis-bootstrapping-b...
Cedric's commoncog already mentioned here.
And second these resources:
- https://waitbutwhy.com/ by Tim Urban
- https://moretothat.com/ by Lawrence Yeo
My general preference these days is non-fiction. For discovery methods see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609479
Generally my problem is far too much content and not enough time, rather than the reverse.
Online content seems to have rapidly diminishing quality. Search and discovery tools are increasingly disappointing.
More on general "finding stuff" here: https://tildes.net/~misc/szx/what_tips_or_tricks_do_you_use_...
XXX Review of Books are good, but they're basically convoluted essays. Good for anybody else, not for my time though
Aeon focuses much on philosophy. I no longer read this though because it's too academic for my taste
Brain Pickings, Arts & Daily, 3 Quarks Daily focuses much on classics, mostly - I'd rather read classics that reading writings about classics, nowadays
Meaning quantity =/= quality. That being said, a lot of short content today has near zero quality.
When TikTok reached first place on the DNS thingy, I decided to try it, so as to not feel like I'm out of touch. My findings were that TikTok works on disappointment, it's going to show you low quality content for so long that you drop your expectations to almost zero, which means that when you do eventually see some content with at least a bit of effort put into it, it gives you a dopamine hit and you feel like it was all worth it. I personally have not been able to find any usefulness from the app except consuming time, which it's great at. But if you've got a lot of time to waste you might as well be reading a book or something, not sure. I haven't really been able to fit TikTok into my life, but I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.
Also food for thought: "YouTube used to have much more short form content, but then the algorithm forced many to making videos that are at least 10 min long. Doing that YouTube removed enough creators for a platform like TikTok to be viable and successful. Now YouTube introduced YouTube Shorts. Think..." (https://twitter.com/LoveMortuus/status/1485258235137429507?t...)
Also popular substack Newsletters. It totally depends though, some are just hot air even in the paid versions and others really have good content also for free subscribers.
If there is more need for content I will go through my list of 100+ blogs and just grab some random old article about compiling gtk on gentoo or similar… haha
This is on Telegram and will require admin approval. I had to keep this as a private channel. I read a lot; if I find (and come across) good book recommendations, I post them too (including the books). You can save content locally, but the channel is restricted to disallow forwarding.
This is intentional, because once I plan for comments and group discussions, I need something more substantial than fluff.
Medium is more popular but they constantly bug youto subscribe and have too much tracking.
Worked with this company for building their Newsroom Workflow solution.
Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
As of now I try to limit the time I spend on HN. I skim through articles very quickly. OTOH I recently reorganized my collection of research papers, most of them obtained thanks to that Kazakhstani heroïcal woman. I pick one and read it from start to finish, over the course of a week, a month, whatever. I often do not understand what I read. Little by little, reading again after a few months the same article, I understand one paragraph more :)
The two golden rules:
- stick to the most important, breakthrough papers
- read a paper from start to finish, even if you do not understand it. Do not block, just keep reading.
www.perell.com
But I'll repeat what others said, that long form != high quality, especially netflix documentaries are so bad that I simply will not watch them, they seem to be optimized only to waste your time, and somehow always manage to avoid leaking any information at all.