pareidolia

I need a word for this

I love wikipedia. I enjoy read­ing an arti­cle, and then read­ing other arti­cles that relate to it. Tonight I watched The Foot Fist Way, a very funny movie about a Taek­wondo instruc­tor. I didn’t know any­thing about Taek­wondo, so I looked it up on wikipedia. Some­how, I ended the night read­ing about sex­ual slav­ery as prac­ticed by the Japan­ese dur­ing the first part of the 20th century.

But I’m not here to talk about the bor­ing ways in which I spend my free time. There is a ten­dency, in wikipedia arti­cles, to be less and less accu­rate when the topic of the arti­cle is less and less gen­eral. For exam­ple, dur­ing my read­ing adven­ture tonight, I was read­ing about break­ing in regards to mar­tial arts demon­stra­tions. At a point, the arti­cle starts to make ques­tion­able statements:

Peo­ple often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically.

In most other wikipedia arti­cles, it would prob­a­bly look like this:

Peo­ple [who?] often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven sci­en­tif­i­cally. [cita­tion needed]

This amuses me. I know I’m pretty much done read­ing wikipedia for the night when I start to encounter these.

I have a the­ory for why this phe­nom­e­non exists. I read a lot of arti­cles tonight about Japan­ese war­crimes dur­ing the 20th cen­tury. Those had plenty of sources and were very clearly writ­ten. I think many peo­ple are inter­ested in these top­ics. They are his­tor­i­cally significant.

But break­ing boards and bricks for mar­tial arts demon­stra­tions is, to say the very least, less sig­nif­i­cant. I imag­ine that far fewer peo­ple read the board break­ing arti­cle than read the war­crimes arti­cle. And the peo­ple that are read­ing the board break­ing arti­cles have no prob­lem with claims of dubi­ous qual­ity. I’ve seen this when­ever I come across an arti­cle that seems to have lit­tle pos­si­bil­ity for gen­eral inter­est. Arti­cles about anime, musi­cal gen­res that I’ve never heard of, and fanboy-​​inspiring top­ics in general.

It’s really easy to imag­ine the guy from The Foot Fist Way read­ing and pos­si­bly con­tribut­ing to the arti­cle on board break­ing. In fact, I can’t imag­ine any­one else read­ing it, really.

I want to come up with a word for this drop in qual­ity. It is the point at which wikipedia stops being use­ful and sim­ply elic­its a cho­rus of “yep, that’s pretty much how it is.” And it will never get any bet­ter for these kinds of arti­cles because nobody who knows any­thing about writ­ing or truth will ever read them.

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Any time I’m read­ing a long arti­cle on a web page, I’ll occa­sion­ally glance over at the right side of my browser win­dow. I’m look­ing for the scroll bar, try­ing to fig­ure out how much longer this thing is. Some­times it’s because it’s bor­ing, some­times it’s because I have to go to the bath­room but I’m really inter­ested in it and want to fin­ish read­ing it before I go.

This behav­ior isn’t lim­ited to the inter­net. I do it when read­ing books, too. When­ever I eat at a restau­rant by myself, I bring a book. Often, I’ll stay much longer than the time it takes to fin­ish the meal, just because I want to fin­ish the chap­ter. Some­times chap­ters are long. If it’s more than 10 pages or so, I’ll usu­ally just call it a loss and leave.

In any case, I often try to assess the length of what­ever it is I’m read­ing. I think it’s use­ful, and you prob­a­bly do it, too.

And now I finally come to my point — any­body who makes a web page with com­ments, please make the com­ments a sep­a­rate page. Or make them hid­den until you click on “reveal.” Or just turn them off. I don’t care how you do it — but they need to not add length to the page.

Like I said, when the arti­cle is long, I’ll look at the scroll­bar. If it looks like I’m halfway through it, I’m usu­ally wrong, because there are com­ments at the bot­tom and some­times they’re as long or longer than the orig­i­nal arti­cle. This is bad.

In my mind, the page does not exist for the sake of leav­ing com­ments — it exists so you can read the words of the orig­i­nal author. Now, let it be said that I think com­ments are are a good idea. I under­stand their rel­e­vance, but they are cer­tainly not as impor­tant as the orig­i­nal arti­cle. News­pa­pers don’t print ever sin­gle let­ter they get. The have a spe­cial page for let­ters and they only print a few.

Unless the pur­pose of the site is dis­cus­sion, com­ments should be de-​​emphasized. And, also, they tend to be poorly writ­ten. So I make it a point not to read them. Some­times I do, when it’s tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion or it’s a site where the com­ments have a decent rep­u­ta­tion, like Slash­dot or Metafil­ter. But usu­ally they’re bad and not worth reading.

If what I’ve said before hasn’t con­vinced you, think of all the lost pro­duc­tiv­ity. If com­ments on inter­net were mag­i­cally turned off, we’d have entire com­mu­ni­ties look­ing up, blink­ing their eyes and stretch­ing, and going out­side to paint the shed.

Cer­tainly you’re as sick of all those unpainted sheds as I am.

Chicagoist Redesign Critique

I tried to post some of these com­ments on the forums, but their instal­la­tion of Move­able Type seems to be run­ning like frozen but­ter since the upgrade. So I’ll write it here instead.

Chicago­ist imple­mented a new design recently. Chicago­ist is part of a net­work of sites cen­tered around cities, Lon­don­ist, SFist, etc. Com­men­tary about what’s going on in the city. The redesign affects every site in the net­work, so these com­ments should apply to any of the other –ist sites as well.

Let me start off by say­ing that I like it over­all. But I still have some problems.

1. It’s too nar­row. The old design, and I’m bas­ing this on my mem­o­ries, seemed wider. It’s a fixed width design — I mea­sured the width of the con­tent of the site and it’s approx­i­mately 850 pix­els wide. I have no idea if there is any objec­tive rea­son to make a web­site 850 pixels.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, I design web­sites to be 960 pix­els wide. This width is based on the view­able area of a browser when the win­dow is max­i­mized on a 1024 x 768 mon­i­tor. There is research to sup­port that this is the res­o­lu­tion most peo­ple have their com­puter set to. Here’s a good one. I’m sure there is more out there.

So, unless there’s some­thing I don’t know, there’s no real rea­son the site should be this nar­row. Per­haps there’s some pur­pose that the orig­i­nal designer had, but with­out know­ing it, I assume he/​she is just stupid.

The new site has a bor­der around the entire thing. This con­tributes to the boxed-​​in effect. The old design, how­ever wide it was, had no def­i­nite edges. It’s pos­si­ble that the bor­der is part of what’s mak­ing it seem so narrow.

2. Move­able Type. It’s a dying pro­gram. No one should use it any­more. And fur­ther­more, this imple­men­ta­tion is really really slow. Per­haps they need a new server. But if it’s Move­able Type’s fault, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m pretty sure that Kot­tke also uses MT, and his site isn’t unbear­ably slow.

3. Mis­cel­la­neous things. It’s pos­si­ble these are bugs, so they may be fixed soon. But they still need to be mentioned.

a. Near the bot­tom of the page, the “Next” and “Pre­vi­ous” nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments — when I hover my mouse over these but­tons, as well as the “1 2 3..” but­tons, it becomes an opaque brown box. This doesn’t seem like it was intended, and if it is, there’s no rea­son that I shouldn’t see what I might want to click on.

b. Search Results — The space between each of the match­ing arti­cles seemed really nar­row. Too nar­row to be intentional.

c. Mis­cel­la­neous other prob­lems — On this page, the page title is really really big. So big that it pushes all the tags out of the box and they’re cut off. It’s pos­si­ble this is just a Safari thing. I’m not going to bother check­ing it in other browsers, because that’s the job of the web designer. Also, at the bot­tom of every page, the “stats” link seems too close to the footer text. Also, who puts pub­lic links to stats any­more? That’s so 1997.

That’s about it. I was read­ing through the com­ments on their redesign announce­ment page, and so many peo­ple com­plain­ing about the changes as a whole. When­ever a redesign occurs, in any medium, peo­ple tend to com­plain quite loudly. Logos, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, web­sites. Peo­ple are com­i­cally afraid of change. I’ve seen it before, time and time again, so I feel it’s pretty safe to dis­re­gard what these peo­ple are saying.

My crit­i­cisms are all things that I think are errors in design. I don’t really care about things like the head­lines being in a non-​​bold font. That seems like it was inten­tional. The things that I men­tioned could be fixed eas­ily. My crit­i­cisms are con­struc­tive. This redesign isn’t really chang­ing much. The logo is the same. The color is the same. They still use Arial for their main body font. These peo­ple need to shut up.

Pitchfork is full of dumb

This is why I hate pitchfork.

Their edi­to­r­ial style is about two (tiny) steps above myspace. 

I think it goes with­out say­ing that I think a real edi­to­r­ial style is a good thing.

I can Just imag­ine the cre­ation process for this ad. “Should we make it ‘WTF!!!!!!!!111111′ or just ‘WTF!!!!!!!!’?”

At this point I read the damn site just because I don’t want to miss the (some) of the news they report. I have to sift through their cutesy bull­shit and indie-​​posturing crap all because I don’t want to miss bands play­ing near me. I mustn’t for­get to men­tion, in this ad, how they are down­play­ing their influ­ence. “OMG! RADIOHEAD IS PLAYING FOR OUR LITTLE STUPID WEBSITE THAT NOBODY READS!” Fuck you, and also, fuck you. How did you get so impor­tant? How did this hap­pen? I would love you if you didn’t have such an insuf­fer­able atti­tude about everything. 

Also, I think that hip­sters, as we know them in the 00s, wouldn’t exist with­out Pitch­fork. I can’t really back that up, but I would love to be able to prove it some day.

I bet they have meet­ings where they tell writ­ers to sub­mit less pro­fes­sional writ­ing. I just know it’s true. It has to be, or my frag­ile lit­tle world would collapse.

famous bloggers

I’m really sick of hear­ing about your stu­pid kid. Ok?

blogs

I really dis­like see­ing this on a blog:

“Check out the rest of our [what­ever] after the jump.”

This is annoy­ing for at least 5 reasons:

1. This is intended to let peo­ple know that there is more con­tent in the “full” blog post as opposed to the “sum­mary.” The only prob­lem is that I often only read the full blog posts, because I am directed to the blog — not from the front­page — but from another web­site that links to the full post. To me, this is just annoy­ing and makes me want to stop read­ing your worth­less blog.

2. “the jump” — who decided to call it this? It sounds fuck­ing idiotic.

3. This can be done in a much more effec­tive way, and I know it, I’ve seen it in blog soft­ware. You could have a sim­ple “read the full entry” or “read more” or even, god for­bid, “read more after the jump” pro­grammed as the text to the link to the full entry, which would GO AWAY when you get there. The only dif­fer­ence is that you don’t get to cus­tomize it per page. No more “check out more of my stu­pid use­less links to free soft­ware you already know about after the jump” or “see more pic­tures of my stu­pid cat after the jump.” Big fuck­ing loss.

4. One of the advan­tages of a blog/​cms is that your con­tent isn’t nec­es­sar­ily tied to the html — poten­tially, your writ­ing could be for­mat­ted for a new blog­ging sys­tem, or a book, or what­ever the inter­net will become in 30 years. The point is, you’d have to go back in and take that out, because you’re a fuck­ing moron. Look toward the future.

5. I’ve never under­stood why you would want to do this in the first place. What’s so wrong with just hav­ing the full post on the main page? Maybe your stu­pid con­tent aggregator/​evil alien over­lord of a boss forces you to com­ply with some arcane ad place­ment algo­rithm. I don’t care, the point is -

Don’t do it. It’s dumb, and it makes you look dumb.