These things are nothing new. First time I saw them was on Medium com, if I remember correctly.
Honestly I never understood why they were useful in the first place. Why would it even matter how long do I spend reading things? And how would such a guess even make sense in the first place? I mean, define “reading” – is it just skimming the text with your eyes and not even thinking about it? Or somehow thinking at the exact same rate & speed for all parts of the article, from intro to any novel ideas to unclear parts to conclusion?
Also, doesn’t putting a “minute price tag” on a body of text kind of devalue it?
Disclaimer: I’m probably heavily biased here, all I can think of is some sort of a pseudo book nerd who wants to be as efficient at “reading” as many things as possible with no pauses for thinking, but there has to be a real serious reason why these guesstimates are ever really useful?
(A more honest disclaimer: I actually find them distracting, to say the least. I am prone to problems with managing focus, as well as expectations, so sometimes when I open an article with curiosity, having this thing whisper to my ear “you must spend about 14 minutes and go away” is not helping. On bad days it sort of hurts even if I know it’s BS.)
Again, this is not anything new but I wonder about it recently, since it’s been my feeling that I’ve been seeing them pop up more and more, even in places they make no sense (like programmer’s guides or API references). This suggests to me that they are getting incorporated into publishing platforms, and it’s more about turning them off than deliberately including them.
What’s the deal?
It gives a rough idea of article length without needing to scroll down. Like remaining time on a video.
If it is a topic I’m interested with a two minute read time there probably isn’t anything of value beyond the headline. If I don’t really care and it is a 30 minute read time, there is a high likelihood that I will lose interest before finishing.
Since I read pretty fast, the estimates tend to be higher than it actually takes, but it still gives me something to use to determine whether I want to start reading.