Re: - Edit 1
Before modification by Nate at 31/08/2012 02:28:45 AM
I respect that criticism, but implications long=bad prompt rants on people wanting complexity and nuance dumbed down to soundbites. Coming from people smart enough to know better it is especially annoying. If a post demands too much time someone wants to invest elsewhere, fine, but taking that time out from Tolstoy or Gibbon to say a few hundred characters is just inherently too long to read is ridiculous.
Maybe it's fairer to say that it's too long to read for what they feel they'd get out of it. I think that's an important distinction. There are some people who are what you're complaining about, no doubt about it, but there are also people who feel that the opinion of a relatively random person on the Internet is only worth so much of their time and effort. Doubly so when it comes to a point-by-point debate of that opinion.
EDIT: But it's true that there's no real call to take the time to point it out, unless they actually do want to read your opinion but wish it was in a bite-sizier package, and don't know any faster way to tell you so.
It is also fair to say that reading text on a monitor is harder on the eyes than reading text on a page, though how much that contributes to the Internet's relative brevity I can't guess.
TL;DR summary: shit be exhausting, yo.