[significant snippage ahead] On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Azalais Aranxta <[email protected]> wrote:
> > [snip] > > Even if this [an automatic cut] is a reader option? If I cared about my readers, yes. Even if an auto-inserted cut is only an option, I need to write to that, because that's how some of my readers are going to see the post. Which is why I'm in favor of the collapse option over the auto-cut option. > Because readers who want this > option are less likely to read your post if there is no cut, and > readers who want this option will likely not read long uncut > rambling nonfiction posts, anyway. I know that if I'm reading > nonfiction posts that aren't also personal posts, I'm not going > to read past the first three paragraphs if I haven't seen any > sign of what the eventual point of all that text is going to be. > It's on me as a writer to manually add a cut to long posts, because that's the social norm. If I don't, it's on my readers to 1) scroll, 2) ask me to add a cut, 3) filter me off their reading page, or 4) unsubscribe. Or, hopefully, click a "collapse" button. To be clear -- I do post entries with cuts, and I have asked others to add cuts to their entries for a variety of reasons. I'm not against the cut tag itself. I am, however, against its automatic addition to a post with more than x-many characters. > And I imagine it'd give fiction writers even *less* space in > > which to draw readers into the story. > > Most fic writers use summaries or warnings or something like > that. I know Denise doesn't warn, but most people do, and > generally there are pairings and other information. I actually > don't think any of the fiction writers on my lists *don't* cut > stories; most people I know who read fiction on journalling sites > read their flist to get all the personal stuff about their > friends and note where the stories are, then go back to the > stories when they have time. So the people on your flist who don't cut their fiction are violating existing social norms -- which don't extend to all users of the service. Not to mention the fact that a paragraph limit or a character limit might auto-cut a post with outside-the-cut descriptions earlier than the writer hirself actually added a cut! More reasons why a per-post "collapse" button would be more beneficial to *everyone* than to a certain subset of people who post looooooong entries without a cut. [snip] > > > Readers decide in different places whether to stop reading a news article > or > > a novella. It'd be hard as hell to insert an automatic cutoff that would > be > > kind to both writers. > > So, encouraging writers to place the lj-cut themselves if they > want to control where I find it sounds like a good thing to me. I agree with you here ... > > If their choice is 'not at all' they are not likely to stay on a > lot of the reading lists out there. ... but you lost me here. Again, I'm not against the cut tag itself. I just think it should be the writer's choice whether to add a cut, and the reader's choice how to deal with the resulting wall-o-text. > > > Particularly if people know it. I also don't think anyone was > > > proposing a 140 character limit. > > > > It came up as an example upthread (sorry, I lost who used it), but not as > a > > serious suggestion. It was a takeoff on LJ's April Fool's post, which > *did* > > pretend that LJ would be instituting an automatic cut after 140 > characters: > > > Yah, that was a joke though. What makes a 140-character limit a joke and not a 3-paragraph limit? > [snip] > > I also think that discouraging antisocial behaviour and reducing > its impact on people without censoring people are good goals. > By allowing people to say "I'm only going to see the first five > paragraphs" or whatever, you're taking a burden off people with > accessibility issues and reducing the impact of people who want > to force their issues down other people's throats, trolls, and > the like without actually stopping anyone from putting the > content they want up in their journal. > Again, I agree that readers should have options in how they read the content that arrives on their reading page, and I think a "collapse" button does what you suggest -- makes reading the page easier for people with accessibility issues (which includes scrolling) and reduces the impact of unsavory-to-the-reader posts, without limiting the writer. However, an automatic cut wouldn't do this anywhere near as cleanly as a collapse. ~ Rachel -- http://www.lastsyllable.net http://bohemianeditor.dreamwidth.org This is not the sig you're looking for.
_______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
