1. you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin.
2. the fact that you consider this a long article says a lot more about you than the article or the author. I read the whole thing (with ublock origin active) and I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context.
I'm not victim blaming you. Anyone who reads HN understands that a huge chunk of the contemporary web provides a fucked up experience for readers and viewers because of ad placement. I consider that complaining about any particular instance of ads doing that is essentially redundant at this point. The web is screwed up by ads, use an ad blocker or complain about online ads in general, not any particular article.
> I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content.
There are 6 paragraphs of introduction before jumping right into the Nolan case. With default font sizing, it's a bit less than 1 page of content in my web browser. How is that "drags on so long before it gets to the actual content"?
I tried to restrict my remarks to the article in question. You closed with the sweeping generalization "Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next."
You and I seem to have different opinions on "dragging on". A full page of introductory fluff before getting to content, to me, is ridiculously long winded, needless bloat in an article.
it's long! 5,440 words 31,008 characters (~20 minutes to read)
And there are no charts. The proposition is simple. (Dialogue got worse.) What's the metric. How it has gotten worse. Where's the data.
Okay, maybe it's not that kind of article, but it's full of fluff. (At least compared to what I expect clicking on a HN link that has an interesting title.)
2. the fact that you consider this a long article says a lot more about you than the article or the author. I read the whole thing (with ublock origin active) and I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context.