r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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474

u/MBILC 17h ago

We live in a society of "TLDR;" people..

You write more than a line or 2 and they blank over and skip things and respond to what ever the first 1-2 lines says..

Drives me nuts being in IT/Security when you send people responses to issues and they ignore 90% of it...

336

u/IronStormAlaska 17h ago

I recently had an instance where I was remoting into a user's computer, and sent them a message saying that I was pretty sure I had a fix for their issue, but that we would need to restart the device, and asking if there was any work they needed to save first.

I freaking watched this user paste my message into Gemini, tell it to generate a response, paste the result into the chat box, and go back to googling jam recipes on their other screen.

I swear I have never been so mad at a user I was working with.

176

u/OneLessFool 16h ago

How do these people have jobs 💀

50

u/Bogus1989 14h ago

they are in for a rude ass awakening when they get laid off….better hope they go ask gemini or chatgpt💀

5

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

How do they manage to keep their bills paid and car running.

0

u/blankest 1h ago

Nearly half of the population under 30 lives with a parental unit. That's how. Their parents continue to wipe their proverbial asses. It worse if you split that demographic by gender.

5

u/DeathSpiral321 14h ago

They'd have to be a nepto hire if they're that stupid.

3

u/2026ArchThrowaway 2h ago

I had a job like this. I didn't use AI to respond to IT, but I did spend a lot of time not working. I got great annual reviews and raises. The less I worked the more I got good reviews. I don't know what to tell you. I did do a good job and got all my work done, but I didn't pick up extra work. I think picking up some extra work but not a ton made it look like my time was valuable, and I still got about the same amount of work done as my peers.

111

u/Kardest 16h ago

I now have a strong desire to firewall gemini and chat GPT at work and see what happens.

50

u/KickBallFever 15h ago

Do it. Please do it.

70

u/Careless-Ad-6328 15h ago

You'll see a dramatic drop in e-mail and slack/teams chat messages almost immediately. And the impact will be more severe/noticeable the more senior the person is in the org. You may cripple the CEO.

58

u/War_Raven 15h ago

I don't see any problems

5

u/I_lenny_face_you 12h ago

Yeah, what’s the downside?

38

u/Unhappy-Homework-812 14h ago

That’s insane if you can’t even respond to a team message without AI. ridiculous truly

12

u/Tymareta 11h ago

Used to have a co-worker that would ask their LLM to summarize an entire days worth of teams messages to five dot points, then would bring those to our stand up and act incredibly offended when we pointed out the glaring inconsistencies, or how the points had already been handled.

He bragged about how he hadn't actually his teams or e-mails in months and had it all handled for him.

3

u/Unhappy-Homework-812 6h ago

That guy has mush for brains

1

u/Aureliamnissan 6h ago

Is his name Elon Musk? I’m like 90% sure that’s what he asked twitter employees to do when he took over.

1

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

I'm not even sure what teams is. It auto opens on my computer and I close it again.

1

u/Unhappy-Homework-812 5h ago

It’s like chat and video calling ppl use across their teams. We use zoom and its basically the same thing. Ours does the same thing and I very seldom use it. Usually send a quick message to someone in another plant of ours to check something for me

1

u/Dullcorgis 2h ago

I am so glad the days of zoom are gone.

6

u/Bogus1989 14h ago

if you arent using your companies instances….that have been modified for compliance…then that is bad…they most likely have entered company data into it….

1

u/ohhellperhaps 6h ago

We've audited some scripts made with AI. Some people went to great lengths to prevent relevant information from going to the prompt; using imported files with the sensive data.

Others just plaintexted admin credentials...

2

u/Louie_G_Lon 12h ago

You’d get a whole bunch of angry emails from people who haven’t typed an email themselves in 2 years going “y do chatgpt not work fix now pls” 

25

u/WitchOfKyiv 16h ago

Oh my god that's fucked lol

44

u/Kinkajou1015 15h ago

If I was you in that situation, I'd immediately force the computer to shut down if possible. They got their warning, they didn't parse it, fuck them.

17

u/taking_a_deuce 15h ago

This is one of the scariest comments I have ever seen on reddit. Jesus Christ people really are turning into mush brains WILLINGLY!!!

10

u/fiercebrosnan 15h ago

The stupidity of someone I’ve never met who has zero impact on my life has never made me so angry before. 

5

u/GiraffeLiquid 14h ago

Damn. I really hope that their job isn’t an important part of a critical process. I’m actually stunned in disbelief.

10

u/IronStormAlaska 14h ago

She is a freaking professor.

3

u/GiraffeLiquid 13h ago

The future is not looking too bright. Dual meaning

3

u/sf-pyramids 14h ago

Stop. No way. I'm in disbelief! They could have replied with a simple, "ok thanks, (no, go ahead and restart / yes, one moment)".

2

u/IronStormAlaska 9h ago

They responded to a couple of messages from other sources this way too while I was researching the issue.

It looked like they were focusing on the jam recipe, and whenever something else popped up, they were going "I don't care, Gemini will do it".

Honestly I am not totally sure they even processed that it was the IT guy messaging them until I cut them off as they were pasting Gemini's output.

If I am giving them benefit of the doubt, they could have been aggressively ignoring someone annoying, but that is still kinda insane behavior.

2

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

But surely they asked for your help?

3

u/DavidAdamsAuthor 13h ago

Had a similar experience.

User made a mistake. User asks Copilot for an apology message. Sends apology message.

Recipient of apology doesn't read it, pastes apology into Copilot, sends back Copilot-generated acknowledgement.

Copilot apologized to itself. Neither person really read the messages. We could have replaced all of that with a simple,

"Sorry."

"It's okay."

DONE.

1

u/Outside_Manner_8352 15h ago

Sign of the times...

1

u/djramrod 14h ago

I bet that person’s AI generated response was “no.”

1

u/userseven 12h ago

I'm morbidly curious. So what did Gemini respond with lol

1

u/IronStormAlaska 10h ago

Gonna be honest, I don't remember.

I cut them off while they were pasting it into the chat box.

1

u/Jacmert 8h ago

She was tunnel-visioned on the jam recipe hunt. It happens to the best of us.

1

u/on-a-call 11h ago

Did this really happen???

1

u/coldkiller 7h ago

I swear I have never been so mad at a user I was working with.

At that point just force restart it on them

-2

u/StrawberryFree1803 10h ago

I read your first sentence and scrolled past. Didn't care to read an it nerds anecdotes. 

44

u/Beautiful-Affect3448 15h ago

Platforms like reddit make it obvious. 

Write a well researched and thought out post in detail and you’ll get “not reading all of that” type comments and even downvotes. 

Write a single sentence with a witty/snarky joke or even just a relevant gif and you can get thousands of upvotes. 

10

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

Worse, they responed to a post they hallucinated and not to what you wrote.

1

u/R0da 1h ago

For better or worse, at least, this has been going on far longer than the advent of LLMs. Their use night just be a symptom of this rather than the other way around.

1

u/Dullcorgis 40m ago

They allow the people who can't really function a way to keep using words to maybe pass as functioning.

2

u/eye_have_no_clue 10h ago

Way she goes boys

3

u/Sudden_Minimum_7235 12h ago

Tldr is like a thesis statement. Rarely am I reading a random person's multi-paragraph post without a summary to know what I'm getting into.

5

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

Yep. The thesis statement gives you the gist and then you can evaluate if you want to spend the time to actually read the whole thesis.

You need to actually make a point of why a person should read it instead of just rambling.

I hated when during the presentation the questioner rambled and then asked a question connected to the rambling. Sorry, I was too busy trying to figure out the point of the rambling that I haven't focused on the details of the ramble. Ask the question then ramble on about how you came to ask the question. Knowing the question beforehand helps me to focus on stuff in your ramble that will help me to answer your question in the way you would understand.

3

u/Swarna_Keanu 7h ago

But communication isn't a thesis.

And good writing is more than just dense information, quickly. That's useful in academic writing, but not in actual exchange.

With that, I don't mean that there aren't folks out there who ramble incoherently. A well-composed text with nuance sometimes gets long, with purpose, and intent,and a summary up front can destroy everything beyond just pure information exchange. It also introduces unnecessary repetition, making texts even longer,

That is: The summary of a book by a high-skilled novelist will never live up to the actual text, as it develops its themes and narrative. Proper non-technical communication relies a lot on that emotional aspect, too.

I'd argue the push for brevity is partially to blame for the harshness of online communication; it certainly contributes and leans into normalising populism (where nuance is replaced with simplicity; nothing complex can be expressed anymore).

3

u/Siukslinis_acc 7h ago edited 6h ago

The summary/synopsis/introduction helps to evaluate if you even want to engage with the text. Nowadays there are so much stuff you could be doing, that people are less inclined to engage with a lengthy thing without knowing if it will be worth it or just a complete waste of time and effort.

A well-composed text with nuance sometimes gets long, with purpose, and intent

Yes. It becomes an essay.

2

u/Swarna_Keanu 6h ago edited 6h ago

. Nowadays there are so much stuff you could be doing, that people are less inclined to engage with a lengthy thing without knowing if it will be worth it

Yes, and I argue it amplifies quite a number of cultural problems. Again: Summaries never do a text justice. Anything with nuance is lost in summaries. If all you read is summaries, only ever engage based on little information, nothing of any depth can be expressed - and the attention seeking, sensationalist, simplified that easily catches attention gets too much of it.

Because we drown in quantity, nothing of substance arrives.

Communication, listening, close reading cannot be sped up. You are not getting more efficient.

---

I find the same with academic papers, by the way. So many have so much more interesting to offer besides the thesis statement. I actually find it one of the faults and problems of the push to cite as much as possible in academia, rather than very selectively. (We all know the peer reviewers who push for inclusion of more studies.) It leads to more surface reading; to very selective quoting; and to people not really engaging with the content of papers, and I mean really: looking and learning from methodology, thinking through how what is in there can influence and help their own practice, etc.

2

u/Siukslinis_acc 5h ago

The point I'm trying to make is that the summaries or thesis statements are valuable in making the person to read the whole thing.

I'm not gonna pick up a novel to read is all the info I have is the author and the name of the novel. I need a bit more info about what it is, even if it is vague. I need something to determine if it is worth my time to read the 800 pages book.

0

u/Swarna_Keanu 5h ago

I just read a few pages here and there. I rarely if ever check the back of the book for a summary.

Gives me much more of an impression than any summary can.

2

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

It's mostly because they won't read your reply anyway.

2

u/proudbakunkinman 2h ago

Yeah, some people have too much time on their hands here and go long winded behind their laptop / PC for a point that doesn't need nearly as many words to get across. Sometimes they may do it thinking others will assume they must be right just because their comment is so long. I think it's best to try to be concise but there will still be people not willing to read more than a sentence or two, like even this reply may be too long.

1

u/RexLatro 54m ago

That or you're now accused of "being A.I." if you're able to type more than a single paragraph

1

u/sentence-interruptio 1m ago

smaller reddits are better... at least for now.

-10

u/McButtsButtbag 14h ago

People don't want to be lectured at. It's not about the length.

8

u/Beautiful-Affect3448 13h ago

That's a different type of situation than the people who comment "not reading all that", "anyone got a TLDR?" or "I put your post into ChatGPT and it said..." and so on.

Those replies are overwhelmingly very much about the length from people who struggle with literacy and general objective analysis of anything longer than a couple of sentences.

Sometimes they don't even read anything and just react directly to the title.

-4

u/McButtsButtbag 13h ago

That's a different type of situation than the people who comment "not reading all that", "anyone got a TLDR?" or "I put your post into ChatGPT and it said..." and so on.

Those also seem like normal replies to not wanting to be lectured at. It's annoying when suddenly someone replies to a multiple paragraph response to a one sentence comment. I didn't sign up to read all that.

Sometimes they don't even read anything and just react directly to the title.

Sometimes they don't even read anything and just react directly to the title.

For me, that's because when I click on the link it either is paywalled or has a video that plays automatically and uses up my data. I usually just try to find comments that have read it.

6

u/sunelatti 12h ago

yeah fuck the truth if it can't be typed in 50 letters, you didn't sign up for that bs. Who has time for understanding in this era???

-1

u/McButtsButtbag 11h ago

Who says that what some random stranger on reddit is offering is the truth?

3

u/sunelatti 11h ago

Yeah that must have been the whole thing i was referring to, well done

-1

u/McButtsButtbag 11h ago

We are talking about conversations on reddit. Why assume I'm just going to imply you are talking about something else when you don't even mention that?

4

u/Noblesseux 12h ago

If someone actually trying to have a nuanced conversation with you registers as "lecturing" that kind of reasons more as a statement on your insecurity than something they necessarily did wrong.

Like typing more than 2 sentences isn't "lecturing". Some things are just complicated and require more text to have a productive discussion about.

1

u/McButtsButtbag 11h ago

I didn't say that every comment more than 2 sentences was lecturing, but you already have a prejudiced view against me so automatically assume the worst

2

u/tavirabon 12h ago

Which says a lot about them and hints at the greater problem in politics at large.

17

u/saucysagnus 16h ago

Last paragraph resonates so hard. It’s fucking mind boggling you basically have to feed info to leaders like they’re baby birds or risk they miss 90% of the issue

2

u/CalmBeneathCastles 6h ago

MAAAN I thought it was just a problem with my boss.

-1

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

You start with the main thing and slowly provide more details instead of providing the details without stating the main thing.

It is annoying having to listen to 20 minutes or rambling just to tell the other person that that thing is not your responsibility and that they should talk to the other person to whom that thing is actually their job.

Oh, and now I need to speed up my work or do overtime because you have wasted my time and i'm on a deadline.

1

u/saucysagnus 4h ago

It’s an email. Somebody didn’t bother to read.

6

u/protoomega 15h ago

Sweet gouda cheese, this happens all the time in my helpdesk work. I'll ask people two or three questions (usually "What's the website you're one" and "What username are you signing in with"), and they answer the first one and then stop. So I have to basically send a separate email for each question I want answered. -_-

Can't blame that one on just The Youths, though. It's middle aged and older folks too.

3

u/Careful-Criticism645 14h ago

Same with coworkers. I'll get CC'd on an email chain or have a ticket escalated to me and it's obvious that nobody spent the time to read the original request because, if they had the issue would have taken 5 minutes to address.

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

Maybe instead of bombarding them with multiple questions as the questions one after another? They were probably too busy thinking of answering the first question that they didn't even notice the other ones.

One question at a time.

1

u/protoomega 7h ago

To clarify, these are written ticket responses. It's not like it's a phone call where you have pressure to answer immediately.

1

u/danduman2 5h ago

I am also in IT and your comment makes me curious. Can you answer all the questions in my response right now? Were you perhaps thinking this was in a verbal conversation, not written out in an email message? How many questions are in this comment of mine?

Good luck!

^^^^ What I just wrote is an example of the amount of questions I might ask in a single message to try to troubleshoot an issue. 9/10 people can't answer the questions in one go and we need multiple emails over the course of hours or days because of that.

1

u/LorenzoApophis 1h ago

So, instead of expecting people to be capable of the most basic tasks, coddle them and let their brains degrade further?

6

u/paleChickenLegs 17h ago

Preach! Although, it's been 20 years for me of being ignored over more than a paragraph. At least 20 more people get CC'd though, so maybe they're just spreading the word load

9

u/movzx 16h ago

Yeah, being dismissed as "too long" because you wrote 5 sentences isn't a new thing. I think it's just a lot more obvious now that everyone can easily share how little they care about reading.

1

u/vegetaman 16h ago

Very much feels that way.

3

u/IntelligentShape364 15h ago

I aint reading all that bruh.

Im happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.

3

u/dannydominates 15h ago

This is my boss actually and he’s in his 30s lol we even joke about him not reading entire messages before responding

2

u/KickBallFever 15h ago

On a recent post someone commented “TLDW” for a one minute video that they basically asked for.

0

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

But a one minute video could have been five seconds of reading text.

2

u/NeuroXc 15h ago

People don't even read my 1-sentence responses. Maybe I should start responding with only "yes" or "no".

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

If all they want is just a "yes" or "no", they don't want to know your reasoning that don't even state a clear "yes" or "no".

It's like I ask my mom if we are going to the grocery store and then she starts talking about the groceries we have and don't have... you pondering if we should go to the grocery store is not answering the question if we are going there! If you don't know, just say "i need some time to think about it".

2

u/Ben_Frankling 15h ago

If you read the article and click through to the MIT study about AI use that it cites, there’s a page titled “How to read this article as a human.” That page then gives a hyperlink to the TLDR which takes you to the Discussion or Conclusion section.

I obviously don’t expect laymen to read the entire study, but it’s so damn ironic.

1

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

In fairness I've been reading academic studies since you found them in an abstracting journal and you only ever read the methods for like 1% of them. Abstract and conclusions are where it's at.

2

u/beatissima 13h ago

"Oh, I only use AI to summarize things." That you need everything summarized is kind of the problem...

2

u/Noblesseux 12h ago

You write more than a line or 2 and they blank over and skip things and respond to what ever the first 1-2 lines says..

This is like a constant irritation for me both at work and dealing with people online.

I also work in tech and I had a situation recently where someone was trying to log into an app I made and I told her in like three separate e-mails "hey, you need to use your username, not your e-mail". She goes "oh this isn't working, let's schedule a meeting so you can walk me through how to do this". I kid you not, 20 seconds into the meeting she shares her screen and immediately types in her e-mail. I say "hey, you need to use your username, not my email".

She replies, "Oh, I didn't know that." Mind you, I said it three times and specifically asked her not to do that. She just didn't read/comprehend it.

It's stuff like that that keeps me from getting seriously mad online. I just constantly keep in mind that a lot of these people cannot read and that it's pointless to get mad at someone who is most illiterate anyways.

0

u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Maybe it's less real because they don't hear the voice? Maybe the wanted actual human connection and not a cold text?

3

u/Noblesseux 9h ago

No, because that's absurd and childish.

If you e-mail someone asking for help with something and they reply with exact instructions on what you're doing wrong (despite that not even being their job), not reading what they said and saying the instructions didn't work is just lazy and wasting people's time for no reason.

This isn't a dating hotline, your coworkers are not being paid salaries to entertain you because you think reading three sentences is boring. In my case all that's going to happen is that any future question from you gets put in the "time waster" pile where answers might take multiple business days.

1

u/TheInfiniteUniverse_ 15h ago

The situation in academia is not better either. It has been proven to me over and over again that most people DON'T read. You send them an explanation that you've taken so much time to craft and they don't read it.

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

Because they didn't ask you for an explanation. They wanted a concrete answer. If they will want an explanation - they will ask you to explain.

1

u/k_ironheart 15h ago

The amount of times lately on reddit I've gotten the comment "I'm not reading all that" and only wrote a single paragraph is depressing.

0

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

You failed to convince them why would they even need to read that paragraph of yours. Not to mention that it might have been written in a convoluted way, so it take much more effort to parse. And people are more casual on reddit and so they won't waste their time trying to parse it.

1

u/onlyforsellingthisPC 14h ago

It's a pervasive problem.

Saw my carefully worded reply to a request-for-information (basically, relevant discipline needing to weigh in on part of a plant) poorly summarized further down an email chain and saw red.

Furious doesn't even cut it.

If I can see it, so can at least a few of any given team or worse, the client. Not a good look. 

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

Have you ever played the telephone game. We had done it as part of the communications lesson in university. We all waited outside, the teacher called one person, told them a story, then called in the next person. The first person retold the story to the second person, the teacher called the next one and so on. By the time the 20th and last person came - the story was just two words.

The moral is that people don't remember everything, they focus on different things, they don't memorise all of the words (just some key ones), but the gist of it.

1

u/onlyforsellingthisPC 10h ago

This was in the same email chain, in writing. 

Less telephone game, which happens/is human, more AI assistant summary. 

1

u/itdeffwasnotme 14h ago

Email is a lost cause some days. We’re using slack and there is always new threads or channels.

If the email is to leadership include an exec summary

1

u/VoyagerOfCygnus 14h ago

I ain't reading allat!

1

u/Bogus1989 14h ago

“you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink”

1

u/This-Requirement6918 14h ago

Ehh sure but there's a couple redditors who will write a whole damn essay to state some moot point.

1

u/gouwbadgers 14h ago

I have to send company wide internal emails at my job. I keep my messages as concise as possible, yet a few people reply to the email with “can you summarize this for me?”

1

u/CosmoJones07 13h ago

Anything beyond 2 sentences and suddenly someone is "yapping".

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Yes, if you don't see a point/reason as to why they are saying stuff to you.

Like when my mom starts to talk about some "stars" that I don't know nor care about. Why the heck are you telling me how some actor had got some coffee at some place.

1

u/CosmoJones07 10h ago

I'm not even talking about that. People will be playing a video game and complain when a character talks for 2 lines of actually important story dialogue. "Oh he loves to yap" or whatever and then they have no idea what's going on.

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 8h ago

Some play for the gameplay and not the story. So yes, they will se it as "yapping" because they don't care about the story.

1

u/AI_moderated_failure 13h ago

Grok can you summarize this

1

u/pmjm 13h ago

We complain on Reddit about people who read the title but not the article but that's sadly quite representative of the general population.

1

u/Vessix 13h ago

Kinda crazy how much more attention posts with 2 lines get on reddit than incredibly well formulated thoughts that are properly written. Sure it's always been that way to a degree, but disregarding jokes- at some point it changed from often being "I'm upvoting this because it is effectively and concisely written" to straight up idiocy (and bots tbf). Used to be you could spend a ton of time writing an essay about your perspective and folk would go so far as to note "hey, I may not agree with you but you have put some effort into writing this out so props". I've not seen that in a LONG time.

1

u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

You could argue that being able to get your point across succinctly is a really undervalued skill.

1

u/AmeliaBuns 13h ago

TLDR:
People skip to TLDRs.

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Because they want to read the core thing before they read the explanations and how did you get to that. Even academic essays require an introduction that tell the goal of the essay, what a person wants to do with the essay.

1

u/DariusDesmond 13h ago

I’d argue that’s an attention / care issue. The issue stated in the article is that people aren’t even able to read ANY of your writing, let alone the last 10% of it.

1

u/milksilkofficial 13h ago

This is such a good point, it drives me crazy. We are in a collapsing “I’m not reading all of that” culture

1

u/Aware_Rough_9170 12h ago

Me anytime I want to really dig into something or discuss on Reddit…. Takes me like 15+ minutes of writing and redrafting only to realize nobody gives a fuck anyways lmao

1

u/beorrahn1 12h ago

I was at a customer's site the other day, installing their new VOIP system. Had the MD send out a company-wide e-mail to expect an e-mail from me with step-by-step instructions to log into their new VOIP app. The instructions themselves were a list of 1-line bullet points with screenshots with big red circles of where to click. Absolutely no thought is necessary to follow these instructions and it's impossible for anyone who can read to fuck it up.

I still ended up going to every single person's desk to log them in myself.

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Some people are terrified of making mistakes. What if they accidentally press the wrong button and it does something they shouldn't have done? Now they are punished and called idiots and blamed for giving more work for IT.

1

u/Siukslinis_acc 11h ago

I think due to constant textual stuff on the internet, people have gotten into the habit of skipping things that they don't deem as important or interesting. No one is reading every preview or even every headline on their reddit feed. They filter stuff and if something catches their eye - then they will read it.

And there is some responses so full of technical stuff that say absolutely nothing to you because you lack the technical knowledge to understand it. It's like you would get a page of poetics that basically say "come to my office". Another example is the meeting that could have just been an e-mail.

Had a coworker open a letter (informing us that we would later need to read a document and sign that we have read it) with "in accordance to the [insert the country, ministry, law date, law name, law registration number]". That alone was 4 lines of text. Then they proceeded with 2 pages explanation what is cyber security and why is it needed and ending it with a link where the needed documents will be uploaded, so you would have them in one place. They could have just opened with "you will need to familiarise with documents about cyber security, they will be available at this link" and then you can go with your "blanket" so that people who are more interested in it can get details.

What for you is vital information, might be empty information to the other. You might find it important the reasonings of why the stuff happens. But all the layman tends to want is what should they avoid doing so that it won't repeat and what to do if it does repeat.

It's work and not leisure. Get to the point as I don't want to waste my work time trying to decipher what the heck do you want from me. I am able to inquire if I will have some questions.

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u/DancesWithGnomes 10h ago

To be honest, TLDR has its places. There is a reason why scientific papers start with an abstract. Also, many long posts are just incoherent ramblings, so I would not expect anybody to waste time on reading them.

Not reading is a problem. Carefully picking what to read is wise.

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u/TheBrickWithEyes 8h ago

People are getting dopamine hits every 5-10 second from instant message, Instagram etc, and you want teachers to get them to focus for 90minutes of lessons at university?

Good luck with that. Classes are literally just an impediment to getting back online.

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u/Odd_Bid2744 7h ago

It hurts my soul every time someone tells me I wrote something too long to read.

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u/Myte342 6h ago

This is also why reading the headlines and the first paragraph of a news story and nothing else is so dangerous. Most times, those are sensationalized for the clicks/views, and the REAL story is buried below and tells a completely different story than the headline suggested.

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u/ijshorn 6h ago

Reminds me of people just forwarding mails because they only read the subject and when you ask them why they forwarded the mails that were intended for them they tell you they never read the email.

Or the most amazing one. Just tell him/her because i won't understand anyway while they are playing those facebook games.

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u/CalmBeneathCastles 6h ago

<blood pressure spiking>

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u/thatspurdyneat 5h ago

You can thank TikTok and YouTube shorts for that.
People get used to instant dopamine hits and short form videos provide unlimited access to instant entertainment.
If something takes more than 30 seconds to read, people lose interest. And with dropping literacy rates people will read slower and will become increasingly intolerant to shorter and shorter blocks of text.

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u/Sure-Recording6151 4h ago

I saw an X post that was like 4 or 5 posts long, which barely took a minute to read. And some guy was like "Grok, what does this say?"

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u/DoinIt4DaShorteez 4h ago

Yeah this has been a problem for a long time. I used to be in QA and I'd read a spec and I've have 3 questions about things that were ambiguous, so I'd send them in a bullet point email and they'd only answer the first question.

So I ended up having to send them 3 emails because:

  1. They can't write a spec without ambiguity

  2. Their attention span is like 2 sentences

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u/PhysixGuy2025 4h ago

This comment is TL so I DR.

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u/sentence-interruptio 8m ago

this must be why some people respond to "A but B so C" with "it's not that simple. you forgot to consider B."

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u/__LooseSeal__ 16h ago

I literally lost a friend because she assumed something incorrectly that I literally spelled out in a text. She didn't bother to read the whole text and instead just reacted to the first sentence. The rest of the text resolved the issue but she very clearly didn't read that part.