Isn’t this somewhat solved by tabbed browsing? This has the problem you mention with footnotes, of course (though I find it a bit odd that you read footnotes at the end instead of immediately), but it’s simple.
The question in this post is more: Are Tab-Explody Sites to be Considered Harmful?
It’s a reasonable question to raise and it’s been raised well (and hence I’ve upvoted). Tab-explody sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes and LessWrong may not be a good idea. I like them and you may like them, but Raemon clearly doesn’t.
At this point, the appropriate thing to do, after a certain amount of typical-minding to get a notion of the problem domain, is to do some serious proper usability testing.
I think tab-explosion is the thing that distinguishes the web from other media. If you’re not going to link to relevant material, is the web really the best medium for what you’re doing, or would it be better presented as a journal article, book or similar?
There’s no reason we have to go from “no links” to “tab explosion.” There’s a near infinite amount of tab-possibility-space out there. Most of those possibilities won’t be ideal, and many of them may be worse than traditional print.
I like them and you may like them, but Raemon clearly doesn’t.
It’s worth noting that I actually DO “like” them, insofar as they are fun. I enjoy getting lost in TVtropes for hours. But it’s empty mind-calorie fun. TVtropes is pretty meaningless. It looks like you’re learning and feels like you’re learning, but at the end of the day you haven’t accomplished anything useful.
Now, Wikipedia DOES, theoretically, actually teach you stuff. It’s possible that at the end of the day you have benefitted from your eight-hour-link-foom. But I’m pretty sure that the neural impulses responsible for most of your “yay I learned something!” feeling at Wikipedia are the same ones responsible for TVtropes, and this says to me that these impulses cannot be trusted. How much you actually learned that you will remember a week later that will actually benefit you is not necessarily directly correlated to how much your “yay I learned something” receptors are firing.
Less Wrong is the only website where I viscerally felt like the information was too dense and the links too distracting to actually learn something, which is due in part to overuse of hyperlinks, in part due to the fact that almost everything on this site was new information to me, and in part because that information was all pretty dense.
I agree that Wikipedia is mostly empty mind-calorie.
Typical example for me: yesterday I had a question about hypobaric combustion. I found the answer, and because I had a question in mind before I looked for it, I will probably remember that answer for a very long time. However, by the time I finished my search, I had another four tabs open, and by the time I closed my browser, I had probably read through around a hundred pages. I remember their content pretty well, and will probably remember it decently next week, and probably remember some of it well in a year (the page on Howard Hughes, I expect).
However, I can’t absorb that much information in two hours. If I want to keep it in long-term memory, I need to put it into my Anki decks, but that would probably take more than an entire day. 20 hours is probably an underestimate, actually. That’s a clear sign that I’m running on the “yay I learned something!” impulse rather than actually trying to learn things. Another clear sign is how often I go back to the same pages, still without bothering to put it into Anki. It’s an impulse society is not very judgmental about, so I have difficulty feeling ashamed of it and correcting my behavior.
My previous office mate had Firefox store his tabs from session to session, and had a special tab manager, because he routinely kept between 200 and 1000 tabs open at a time. Some of them were more than a year old, and he still hadn’t gotten to them. He likes it that way!
Of course, he wasn’t spending solid days going through them, but I know of no clearer example of Tab-Foom.
I am your previous office mate :/. I don’t like it that way; I wish I could get the information I want to keep in my head into it, but somehow those tabs just keep sitting there—after you pass a certain amount, the “out of sight, out of mind” effect kicks in, and various other akrasiastic effects—and I only start afresh when I can’t recover a tab-set, which feels mildly catastrophic and mildly cathartic.
You had me quite confused until I looked through your other comments to assure myself you were being metaphorical.
Most tabs he gets through within a week. The ones that stick around longer are mostly references, articles he’s liked, sort of an alternate bookmark space. He actually prefers tabs to bookmarks most of the time, and has treated an unrecoverable tab set as a catastrophic event.
Maybe I’ve gaged his feelings wrong, but we’ve talked about it, and I don’t think he views it the same way you do.
If you don’t like it, what have you tried to do to change it? I’ve felt similar to the way you describe before, and solved it by forcing myself to shut down my computer at night (and not save tabs between sessions). If something is really important, I’ll get it over with before I shut my computer down, or I’ll bookmark it, but it stops plaguing me either way.
Did you read them all? TVTropes takes me a long time, because I generally read through the examples of the trope at the bottom of the page. 700 TVTropes pages would probably take me...a 40 hour week? Doing it in small chunks so as not to get bored...three months? I can’t easily conceive enjoying that much TVTropes.
Isn’t this somewhat solved by tabbed browsing? This has the problem you mention with footnotes, of course (though I find it a bit odd that you read footnotes at the end instead of immediately), but it’s simple.
The question in this post is more: Are Tab-Explody Sites to be Considered Harmful?
It’s a reasonable question to raise and it’s been raised well (and hence I’ve upvoted). Tab-explody sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes and LessWrong may not be a good idea. I like them and you may like them, but Raemon clearly doesn’t.
At this point, the appropriate thing to do, after a certain amount of typical-minding to get a notion of the problem domain, is to do some serious proper usability testing.
I think tab-explosion is the thing that distinguishes the web from other media. If you’re not going to link to relevant material, is the web really the best medium for what you’re doing, or would it be better presented as a journal article, book or similar?
There’s no reason we have to go from “no links” to “tab explosion.” There’s a near infinite amount of tab-possibility-space out there. Most of those possibilities won’t be ideal, and many of them may be worse than traditional print.
It’s worth noting that I actually DO “like” them, insofar as they are fun. I enjoy getting lost in TVtropes for hours. But it’s empty mind-calorie fun. TVtropes is pretty meaningless. It looks like you’re learning and feels like you’re learning, but at the end of the day you haven’t accomplished anything useful.
Now, Wikipedia DOES, theoretically, actually teach you stuff. It’s possible that at the end of the day you have benefitted from your eight-hour-link-foom. But I’m pretty sure that the neural impulses responsible for most of your “yay I learned something!” feeling at Wikipedia are the same ones responsible for TVtropes, and this says to me that these impulses cannot be trusted. How much you actually learned that you will remember a week later that will actually benefit you is not necessarily directly correlated to how much your “yay I learned something” receptors are firing.
Less Wrong is the only website where I viscerally felt like the information was too dense and the links too distracting to actually learn something, which is due in part to overuse of hyperlinks, in part due to the fact that almost everything on this site was new information to me, and in part because that information was all pretty dense.
I agree that Wikipedia is mostly empty mind-calorie.
Typical example for me: yesterday I had a question about hypobaric combustion. I found the answer, and because I had a question in mind before I looked for it, I will probably remember that answer for a very long time. However, by the time I finished my search, I had another four tabs open, and by the time I closed my browser, I had probably read through around a hundred pages. I remember their content pretty well, and will probably remember it decently next week, and probably remember some of it well in a year (the page on Howard Hughes, I expect).
However, I can’t absorb that much information in two hours. If I want to keep it in long-term memory, I need to put it into my Anki decks, but that would probably take more than an entire day. 20 hours is probably an underestimate, actually. That’s a clear sign that I’m running on the “yay I learned something!” impulse rather than actually trying to learn things. Another clear sign is how often I go back to the same pages, still without bothering to put it into Anki. It’s an impulse society is not very judgmental about, so I have difficulty feeling ashamed of it and correcting my behavior.
When you put it that way, I could see how many people wouldn’t be interested in spending a good three months of eight-hour days inside a Tab-Foom.
My previous office mate had Firefox store his tabs from session to session, and had a special tab manager, because he routinely kept between 200 and 1000 tabs open at a time. Some of them were more than a year old, and he still hadn’t gotten to them. He likes it that way!
Of course, he wasn’t spending solid days going through them, but I know of no clearer example of Tab-Foom.
I am your previous office mate :/. I don’t like it that way; I wish I could get the information I want to keep in my head into it, but somehow those tabs just keep sitting there—after you pass a certain amount, the “out of sight, out of mind” effect kicks in, and various other akrasiastic effects—and I only start afresh when I can’t recover a tab-set, which feels mildly catastrophic and mildly cathartic.
You had me quite confused until I looked through your other comments to assure myself you were being metaphorical.
Most tabs he gets through within a week. The ones that stick around longer are mostly references, articles he’s liked, sort of an alternate bookmark space. He actually prefers tabs to bookmarks most of the time, and has treated an unrecoverable tab set as a catastrophic event.
Maybe I’ve gaged his feelings wrong, but we’ve talked about it, and I don’t think he views it the same way you do.
If you don’t like it, what have you tried to do to change it? I’ve felt similar to the way you describe before, and solved it by forcing myself to shut down my computer at night (and not save tabs between sessions). If something is really important, I’ll get it over with before I shut my computer down, or I’ll bookmark it, but it stops plaguing me either way.
I hit something like 700 tabs the first time I fell over TVTropes. A testament to the powers of Firefox 3.0 at the time.
Did you read them all? TVTropes takes me a long time, because I generally read through the examples of the trope at the bottom of the page. 700 TVTropes pages would probably take me...a 40 hour week? Doing it in small chunks so as not to get bored...three months? I can’t easily conceive enjoying that much TVTropes.
I was using it as a spare-time background idle reading thing. A couple of weeks to skim that many pages :-)