[HN Gopher] A note on estimated reading times
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       A note on estimated reading times
        
       Author : saeedesmaili
       Score  : 3 points
       Date   : 2024-09-21 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
        
       | naming_the_user wrote:
       | > Matt Campbell pointed out that estimated reading times are
       | often ableist.
       | 
       | No more so than a navigation app telling you that it's 10 minutes
       | walk to the corner shop.
       | 
       | A lot of people just never learned emotional control - they feel
       | a trigger and rather than learning to deal with that momentarily
       | heightened state, they externalise it, assume that it's someone
       | else's fault and that something has to change.
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | I think they would say the same thing about navigation apps as
         | well. People even joke about it-- walking: 20 minutes, walking
         | (gay): 10 minutes. But it's bringing up a good point where the
         | software's design assumes something about the user.
         | 
         | A better design would just ask the user choose their waking
         | speed and ability. If you're in a wheelchair no sidewalks will
         | likely be a problem. If you walk with a cane you probably would
         | prefer fewer elevation changes. It's one of those accessibility
         | features that able bodied people probably get a lot of use out
         | of.
         | 
         | In this case a word count doesn't assume anything about the
         | user but reading time does. I think the emotional response is
         | the one to having ableism pointed out. It doesn't make you a
         | bad person or anything, it's just pointing out a design that
         | perhaps isn't what you intended. If you were a slow reader
         | would you like to be constantly be reminded that you're "below
         | average?"
        
       | echoangle wrote:
       | The ,,reading time is ableist" thing is a bit weird, isn't it a
       | bit like walking time prediction with navigation apps? Is that
       | also ableist because it assumes a ,,normal" walking speed? In my
       | opinion, you should always assume an average human by default.
       | 
       | Also, I really disagree with the post. A word count doesn't help
       | me if I want to know how long a read is, because i don't now how
       | fast i read as a numerical value. If I have a meeting in 10
       | minutes and want to read posts until then, should I start an
       | article with 4000 words? I have no idea... if I see ,,5 minutes
       | read", I'm probably fine, 12 minutes is fine because I might be a
       | bit faster than average and 20 minutes will be too much. You
       | don't have to take the given reading time as a literal time
       | prediction but as a ,,an average reader will roughly take this
       | time", which you can then adjust based on your reading speed
       | relative to average readers.
        
       | f33d5173 wrote:
       | A better system would need to estimate how much of the article is
       | bullshit that people will just skim over.
       | 
       | Seriously what an incomprehensibly dumb set of arguments. First
       | that reading times might be "ableist", and second that they
       | aren't useful because they're crude estimates. I cannot imagine
       | what would bring someone to waste their time worrying about such
       | things.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-21 23:02 UTC)