Open question

[marcmagus]

Am I the only person who is more likely to read a long post if it's behind a cut tag?

Further discussion on how I read my friends page, and other issues of kind formatting follow.


When I'm reading my friends page and get to an entry longer than the screen, I'm likely to decide I don't have the time/energy to read it and move on, possibly skimming it to see if anything jumps out at me. If I see a paragraph or two followed by a cut tag, I'll read the couple paragraphs. Most of the time, whatever's in them hooks me enough that I want to read th erest of the entry.

Also, my monitor is 800x600 pixels. I lose about 20 pixels from the right side of the screen for the scrollbar and a little bit of margin. I lose about 240 pixels from the left side for margin, user icons, time, and unnecessary whitespace. That leaves me with approximately 540 pixels of horizontal space. If something is forced to be wider than this (such as an embedded image in a post), Firebird sizes the table used to format all the entries wide enough to accomodate it, and gives me a horizontal scrollbar. It then helpfully flows all text to the full width of the table, which is wider than my screen. I then have to play with the scrollbar setting so entries fit on the screen.

Usually, this results in my being able to read entries, but having to scroll left to find out who wrote them if I can't tell by the style -- annoying, but not the end of the world. Occasionally, somebody will post an image or other fixed-width component which is at least 800 pixels wide. Then I get really annoyed. At this width, the text is wider than my screen, and I have to scroll back and forth to read each line anywhere on my friends page! This makes me contemplate removing people from my friends list. The worst is if it's not an image, because then I can't even suppress offsite images to make everything readable again.

Ok, enough ranting. Please be kind to my friends page. It makes me happier, and more likely to read what you have to say.

Comments

Actually...

[bluemilker.livejournal.com]

I conducted an impromptu study a while ago, and learned that there's a huge drop-off rate for long entries, AND for cut tags... but it seems to be slightly worse for cut tags, so I lean away from them.

[halflingmerry.livejournal.com]

I hate cut tags for various reasons (though I actually cut-tagged my latest post before reading this ;-) but that's 'cause it's 12 pages long in Word—I didn't write it alone, incidentally) and am perfectly resigned to and acceptant of the probability of being unfriended for my lengthy posts. wylddelirium has done it, and that's fine. Especially since she gave me fair (if indirect) warning beforehand. ;-) In any case, I do try to avoid the kind of fixed-width components you mention (ever since you informed me that I'd done so last year), 'cause I hate it when my friends page is screwed with as well.

So I disagree with one point (the one for which I'm a prime offender, of course) and very much agree with another.

P.S. ...Oh yes. I don't expect my friends to actually read the entirety of my huge posts. Perhaps it's cluttering up their friends pages... but that's how I choose to use LJ: I've friended myself so that I can only look at my friends page to see everything at once rather than bring my "Recent Entries" page into it.

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

Well, you're not the only one. I open 90% of all cut tags on my flist, while I skim or just scroll past most of my friends longer, uncut entries. I do recognize halflingmerry's point about it being her journal to do with as she wishes, and so I'd probably never defriend someone for that. Multiple, uncut, large image quizes, on the other hand...

[marcmagus]

*shrug* I don't see my friends list as an exhaustive declaration of who my friends are, but rather as a convenience for me to be able to track the LJs I want to keep up on on a regular basis easily.

Although, since it also impacts restricted-view posts, and it's possible I might make another of those at some point in my life, I'm probably more likely to filter someone out than to actually remove them from my friends list if I'm merely uninteresting in looking at their posts on a regular basis, but still consider them a close enough friend to want them to be able to read what I have to say.

[cut tag] OR [/cut tag]

[gaerfindel.livejournal.com]

From marcmagus: I don't see my friends list as an exhaustive declaration of who my friends are, but rather as a convenience for me to be able to track the LJs I want to keep up on on a regular basis easily.

Ditto that. As to cut tags, I'd say the best model would be how Del uses them. If your not interested in what's behind them, or the message doesn't really apply to you, you needn't click on them. Simple as that. That said, I thoroughly enjoy Merry's long posts, both for their pithy insights and for the fact that I prefer to scroll through entries rather than click through them. The [Back] button is nice, but sometimes annoying.

[wylddelirium.livejournal.com]

I think cut tags are a tool. Used correctly, they have several uses - sometimes I use mine specifically to say, "If you don't wanna know about XYZ, don't click here" and sometimes I use them for the more traditional "and I'll ramble some more about this here, but it's not really salient to the point I'm trying to make."

And yes, I have unfriended people whose posts continually are so long that I stop even skimming them and flat out skip them. I could do filters, sure, but that's work. And I agree, the flist on my lj is not an exhaustive list of people I consider to be my friends at all - not even a list of all of my friends who have LJs.

But as for my opinion, I'm 110% more likely to click a cut tag than to read an excessively long post uncut. I find myself devolving from skimming to skipping to ignoring the entire entry.

Re: [cut tag] OR ![cut tag]

[marcmagus]

I enjoy Merry's long posts as well.

When I wake up and check over whether my friends have posted anything interesting, I'd prefer to note, "Oh, that friend posted a 100+ line survey. I'll come back to it later." and continue looking for highlights than to scroll past the whole 100+ line survey trying to find where the next entry starts.

*shrug* People can post 500 line entries in their LJs all they want, but I reserve the right to whine about it in mine when they do so.

And I never use the back button for reading LJ. When I hit a cut-tag or an entry with comments, I center-click on the link, causing it to open in a new tab. I like my Firebird.

(Geeky aside, shouldn't it be ![cut tag] rather than [/cut tag]? I can't think of a common markup off the top of my head where / indicates Boolean NOT)

[wylddelirium.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting to note that livejournal changed "Friend of" to "Read/Trusted by" for about a week, and then went back to "Friend of".

::goes to look at various proprietary LJs to find explanation::

I think we removing the word "friend" from it might help some of the controversy, there.

Ah.

[wylddelirium.livejournal.com]

the reason for the language is because of an upcoming development in LJ.

"That is, in the future there will most likely be:

Friend: -- unchanged from now
Read (public): -- you'll read the person, and they'll know, but they won't be in your friends-only security group
Read (private): -- you'll read the person, just like using a normal RSS aggregator, but they won't know.

But that comes later. Immediately the issue is solving the display system under the existing relationship system."

I think I'm like this too.

[(Anonymous)]

It's hard for me to be certain, but I think I'm more likely to read a cut in depth than a long post in depth. For me, it's partially because I continue to not have a lj list of my own and therefore borrow the friends lists of others. This leads to me having a list largely populated with entries I care about, a few entries I know I care about because I clearly know the writer IRL, but have no idea who they are, and a few entries from people I don't know. So, I have to skim anyway.

-Dana the LJ Slacker

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

Oh, agreed. Friendslist =/= list of friends, but I do post locked things fairly reagularly, and on the occasions that people don't make massivly long posts, or thoes long posts look interesting, I find it handy to have them available. *shrug*

Re: [cut tag] OR ![cut tag]

[gaerfindel.livejournal.com]

(Geeky aside, shouldn't it be ![cut tag] rather than [/cut tag]? I can't think of a common markup off the top of my head where / indicates Boolean NOT)

That's a good question, and I don't know for sure. I was going by analogy with html tags.