Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service
longform.orgI am sorry to see them go, but more for the principle than for the site itself.
I gave up on the site when I realized that I was spending more time scrolling for something interesting than actually reading articles. Even now, out of their top 10 "best of 2021" I find only 3 of those even remotely interesting, and IMHO one of them is garbage (I read it when it came out).
The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane. The Guardian's article on what will happen when the Queen dies [1] is my go-to example of long form journalism done right. longform.org articles always felt more like "here's a sad story about some global issue", which is not the type of article I want to read during my commute.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
When I was seven years old, I had an uncle with a grey beard and an eye-patch that would take me out on walks and tell long stories about his history as a sailor in the merchant marines. He had been at sea for fourteen years and visited just about every country, even the landlocked ones he would say with his signature smoker's laugh. Uncle Robert tapped his pipe on the heel of his boot as we stopped. Not that his tale stopped, it would go on and on, but on this particularly vibrant autumn day I didn't mind that the old man didn't quite seem to make any point in his meandering story with endless fractal-like asides as the dappled sun played teased the pile of pipe-ash on the ground. I sometimes wonder if he talked just because he couldn't stand the silence and the memories of what really happened out at sea.
I think a lot of long form content sadly is long in order to be long, not because it has particularly much to say. Instead you get an overlong mess of barely relevant anecdotes and flourish that don't add to anything other than the length of the piece.
The problem with quality writing is that it takes time to think through and time to produce, and time is not something that is afforded journalists and writers today.
This is my pet peeve on long-form writing. I'll get all excited about, eg, a 20-page article on a new discovery about black holes, but then bounce pretty quickly when the first 9 paragraphs are meaningless descriptive details about the reporter's first visit with the scientist who made the discovery. I realize the need to add human interest throughout a long read, but I get annoyed when it turns out it's just a 2-page article's worth of content spread out over 20 pages.
This is very similar to documentary series today on streaming services. There's not a whole lot of story to fill 4-5 episodes, but they need to pad it, so they have meandering narratives and asides that don't really add to the overall story but give the viewer just enough "hooks" to keep going.
In some ways, this is not too dissimilar to articles on the web where articles that could be very short are padded out with extra paragraphs to help with SEO, though in this case the "searcher" is the reader looking for long, meaty articles.
> The problem with quality writing is that it takes time to think through and time to produce, and time is not something that is afforded journalists and writers today.
Right, and that's why longform.org was a great resource, because they curated long form content.
FWIW, one of the long form articles I've most returned to in my mind, discovered via longform.org: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-s.... See also https://longform.org/archive/tags/lost-at-sea, though I can't vouch for any of those added over the past 5 or so years, and that tag is missing some related stories, like the story of the father and his autistic son swept out into the Gulf of Mexico.
I almost zoned out there, reading about your uncle. Limited attention span.
I was looking for the recipe for some maritime dish that I was sure would appear at the bottom of that comment.
and time is not something that is afforded journalists and writers today.
This seems intuitive, and also provably false.
Joe Rogan is currently running the most famous and successful podcast in the world, and those conversations routinely go over three hours.
Dan Carlin is on a lower tier, but still highly successful, and his podcasts are far more polished and produced and integrate huge amounts of research, and the runtimes are even longer than Rogan's.
Maybe written content doesn't afford the detail you're looking for, which kind of makes sense, because you can listen to a podcast while commuting, exercising, showering or doing various chores, but you can't read doing almost any of them. But I'd argue almost anything done in an article can be done in a podcast or audiobook, so maybe the current failure of long-form journalism is not realizing that the medium has moved on.
When I want all the details, I look for a full book. When I want the summary, I check Wikipedia. Articles are somewhere between. Either something is too new or obscure/niche or not quite worth the time investment of a book.
So I think you’re right but it isn’t the medium that’s dead. More like, it takes up a weird spot on the ROI curve to read through that’s rarely worth the time.
Journalists usually don't have the luxury of 3 hours with their interview subjects.
Since time is of the essence, they also don't go off on diatribes about California divorce laws, or posit personal theories about alien life forms, before getting to their question.
Agreed; majority of long-form doesn't actually necessarily have a lot to say, and is not written as cleverly or engagingly as hoped/needed. There are however exceptions and those are real jewels :)
I've noticed that this is something that also happened in YouTube video essays. I remember at the dawn of them when I thought it was so cool that there was people out there making these super in-depth videos on all sorts of topics.
But over the past few years it drew in the attention of people who really don't have much to say, and stretch these videos on, talking in circles, as if longer video = better/more interesting.
I recently saw YouTube recommend me a video essay on the Nickelodeon TV show, Victorious, that was literally more than 5 and a half hours long. Admittedly I haven't watched it (for obvious reasons) but I just can't imagine it really justifies that entire runtime.
i think videos that arent about 10 minutes get downranked. thas why when you want to see which wire to connect to on your cars wiring harness you gotta learn about the whole history of the car first.
totaly sucks and something i really miss about having evwryone put these little tidbits in writing on a personal blog is that you can skim. even as annoying as recipe sites are, you can at least scroll down to the ingredients.
I absolutely hate video tutorials, it's a waste of so much time.
Longform - where we bury the lede and you get to find it, for fun!
Love your sense of humor and great writing.
I have to say my own impression is similar.
I'm a fan of high-quality, significant, long-form, content.
I'm ... not really seeing that here. A few good pieces, but that's from their own self-admitted "best of".
If not necessarily an outright failure, then a mismatch of goals and attainment.
And as has been frequently noted on HN (occasionally by myself), length itself is not a marke of quality in writing. Requisite complexity is, that is, the structure of the piece itself should be suited and fitted to what it is it addresses. Longform wouldn't be the only place the false equivalence that "long" == "good" seems asserted. The New Yorker, which likewise has both a long legacy and recent history of producing good high-quality long pieces, also seems to fall far too frequently into the trap of mistaking length for quality.
I appreciate the effort and intent. I'm sorry to see the attempt failed. But execution was in fact lacking.
How is this a failure? They are evolving with the times. Longform served their users with article recommendations for nearly 12 years, but times have changed. Services like Instapaper, Pocket, etc. are no longer popular, and so they’re focusing on podcasting — which is basically the future of longform journalism. Kudos to them.
There are successful long-form text sites. Longform.org ... hasn't delivered.
Switching formats without improving content won't address the core problem.
> The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane.
May I humbly suggest this long-but-interesting 2008 New Yorker article about elevators, if you haven’t already read this seminal work in the genre?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-do...
May I also suggest "Going Down the Pipes" by Darcy Frey. Written in 1996 about the strange and stressful world of air traffic controllers at Newark airport. Well-written long form journalism on display. https://www.topic.com/going-down-the-pipes
This is one of those articles I think about constantly. Especially when I get on the elevator. I wish we had more articles like this.
What a great read, thank you for sharing!
Your point applies to much more than long-form articles. We spend so much time subscribing and scrolling through information sources just to be "aware" things exist (it's the worst for news). If we'd really want to read something great or understand a topic deeply, everyone has huge read-it-later lists and bookmark collections.
But filtering and discovering new things is somehow much more rewarding than reading or understanding itself.
Much of my leasure time is spent working with my hands when I'd rather be reading thinking and learning. I burn through audio books at a good clip but I still haven't found a good way to get random articles read to me. And in the mean time, they stack up for true pleasure time which is rare for me.
When I get a chance, I might make myself a pocket to Amazon Polly pipeline or something. The difficulty is that to make this a commercial product would almost certainly be a copyright violation and not ethical to the actual writers anyway.
I'd love to do the same for a lot of my email but I don't know if I want to upload that and I'd have to do quite a bit of parsing to get the meat and skip the re: re: re: re: so that's out there a bit.
I think you will thoroughly enjoy Adam Savage's (of Mythbusters fame) recent video on measurement.
> The type of articles I like the most are those when someone takes a ridiculous amount of time to explain something mundane.
I have been thinking about this for a while and it now just clicks.
What an outstanding article! Thanks so much for posting it.
That Guardian article is part of a series called "The Long Read" which seems apropos: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read
(I subscribe to the Guardian, so I don't know if there's a paywall in front of those articles, my apologies if there is)
The Guardian doesn't use paywalls, anywhere... but you might have to create a free account and log in.
Thinking About Things [0] is fantastic. They're also great for discovery because they link to many other sites - they've feature a lot of little-known blogs that are quite interesting.
URL fix, bare domain doesn't redirect to www: https://www.thinking-about-things.com/
Alternatives:
Arts & Letters Daily : https://aldaily.com/
Aeon: https://aeon.co/
Nautilus: https://nautil.us/
Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/
I might have to try out that Hacker News thing. Sounds interesting.
Be careful, it's slightly addictive.
I can quit anytime man =_=
Longreads is also great. https://longreads.com/
Longreads is great... I actually thought that was the one shutting down and just breathed a sigh of relief
Same here! I had an article on Longreads [0] open in another tab when I saw this headline and felt like I'd better hurry to finish it!
Longreads seemed to have an editorial shift a few years ago. Among other things, it no longer commissions much (if any) original stories. And the linked stories mostly fall into the personal essay camp which I'm personally less interested in. I generally liked the longform.org mix better. Sad to see them shut down.
Undark: https://undark.org
The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/global
There are a bunch of Substack newsletters that are basically collections of links to longer pieces. The one that most matches my interests is "Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends": https://linksiwouldgchatyou.substack.com/. The only downside is that it doesn't publish that frequently.
Literary Hub's weekly roundup is another good source of essays that take maybe 10 minutes to read. I find the meat of the newsletter is the bottom where they link out to excerpts from new books. https://lithub.com/. One good example: "Did the Russian Wizard of Oz Subvert Soviet Propaganda?" https://lithub.com/did-the-russian-wizard-of-oz-subvert-sovi...
Lapham's Quarterly: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Sadly, they appear to have stopped publishing. Last issue was Spring 2021.
Has the new management of Nautilus managed to keep up with paying writers?
https://undark.org/2017/12/13/freelance-writers-nautilus-pay...
http://marginalrevolution.com/
I used to write more essays but now often post links to http://jakeseliger.com
Honorable mention for project Words Worth? It's still up, but I think they stopped updating ...
Thinking About Things https://thinking-about-things.com/
The Browser rules, though.
Seems expensive for just curation even though I don't discount the work required for top quality curation.
Thinking About Things is free https://thinking-about-things.com/
plus it would be trapped in my email. Is there a backlog to review? seems like a downgrade from longform which is a normal functional website.
Not having an archive of links may be a feature -- relieving you of the responsibility to decide what to read.
That's a shame. Fortunately, it looks like the archive will stay up: https://twitter.com/aaronlammer/status/1478749874053169154
For me, the archive seems by far the most valuable part of longform.org. I'd guess no-one has even approximately read most of the best articles they recommended in the past.
This is now the chance to get to them and re-read the best ones, without being distracted by new things.
It's a bunch of links to Wired and GQ. Maybe they wouldn't have needed to shut down if only Yahoo hadn't killed del.icio.us which used to be the social media platform for bookmarks. I'm still crying on the inside over that.
Did Yahoo kill Delicious? They bought it, didn't do much with it, and sold it to YouTube's founders.
But would it have survived as anything more than a personal bookmark organiser (ie pinboard) anyway?
The killer feature of delicious was popular links, which has since been used as the main structure for forums such as Digg (originally), Reddit, and Hacker News. Curated feeds on Twitter/FB/etc also work to share popular links.
For example, you can use r/longform to find the same kind of links delicious would have provided. https://www.reddit.com/r/longform/top/?t=year.
I think people tend to underestimate the effort involved in curating content. Reading and assessing all of that stuff is time consuming. And there are a lot of complainers and axe-grinders out there who harass you when your curation does not exactly match their interests and values. People assume you linked to a thing because you 100% agree with it. People respond flippantly to the titles without reading the articles. People get mad because they hit a "you've read X articles" paywall. It can be a lot to deflect.
The other pain point in curation is the relentless poaching. If you find any success doing it right--by keeping tabs on creators directly--soon other lazy (often more popular) "curators" will be using your hard work as a major source of their own links, without giving any credit.
Thanks for the great articles, and I hope no poaching of them ends up here. We do switch URLs and ban sites when we see that kind of thing, but we don't always catch it.
Thanks for the kind words!
I wouldn't consider it poaching for content I curate to appear here; to the contrary, I sometimes share relevant links on HN myself. I am mostly put off by sites that claim to be hand curated by a few people, and then a significant fraction of their links are clearly based on my efforts. I don't want to name names, but there was a very popular curated site/newsletter that was leaning heavily on my work for a few years. Fortunately someone there seems to have realized it was uncool, and they backed off.
Edit: To be clear, here I am discussing my site's curation of third-party links. We also create our own content, but I don't share those articles on HN myself, I would consider that gross.
Reading articles I found on Longform used to be part of my Sunday morning ritual, the same way reading the NYT is for some people. However, at some point I found myself looking elsewhere: the quality of their selections went downhill, or rather changed focus toward politics during a time when I wanted an escape from that on a Sunday morning, so it no longer really fit my needs.
I feel bad, I tried it but if I'm honest I couldn't focus on long form
Not a good thing
TBH, a lot of "long form" articles are just shitty. Randomly interrupting a current event story with unrelated biographic episodes of the protagonists does not magically result in a more valuable, high-brow form of reporting.
I love the scheme of repeatedly building up towards the answer to one of the central questions of the subject and then yanking the rug, digressing into some backstory of a minor personage or historic aside to pad out another page.
And by love I mean absolutely despise.
What really gets me is how, in narrative fiction, the author knows what's going to happen in the plot at the very beginning, but they only gradually reveal it to the reader throughout the story.
If the entire value of an item of writing hinges on the revelation of a single fact, then the writing is flawed.
State the fact and be done with it.
(As I've just done here.)
If the writing has value, the fact will be immaterial to that value, and the true reward for the reader is in the telling of the story, the narrative developed, the introduction and interrelation of facts, concepts, characters, strengths, and flaws. And yes, telling those, where they are material to the story, takes time, but also is its own constant reward.
We have classics of literature and mythology. The stories are well known. The boy loses the girl, then wins her back. The dog dies. We all die. A tree grows in Brooklyn. George slays the dragon. Cinderella wins the prince. The Wicked Witch is overcome. Jesus dies, then returns. Buddha is enlightened.
Those facts don't matter to the value of the story. It's the details built up along the way, the morals and principles exposed, which do.
Build your stories around those, then pull away all that truly does not matter.
(This sounds simple. It's much harder than it seems.)
Composing narrative fiction by ending every chapter in a cliffhanger is an excellent way to get your readers to skip to the end and then throw it away.
I think some of the value of long articles is simply that they are long -- if you can get into them, they get you away from news feeds long enough so that the effect feels calming. Regardless of actual content.
Yes, the loss of ability to focus is truly one of the most... oh look! A kitten!
A lot of long-form writing is lazy and designed to pad out the word count/page count.
I have never finished a single Cal Newport book because of this, and they're only about 250-300 pages as it is. All the value can be found in the first 50-75 pages. It's pure fluff after that.
I'm surprised "book summarization" services like Blinkist haven't become more popular.
I am tracking the best reads on Internet and have a private Telegram channel. You can access it here:
https://t.me/+pwdYcfBiV1I3Njll
Users clicking on it will need Telegram. I plan to have a private group to share/discover and amplify other best finds. Each of the links posted here is personally vetted. Long form links are encouraged. Reactions are switched on by default (you can react to the posts). Forwarding is restricted.
I've been using longform.org with the Send To Kindle Chrome extension. That way, I've always had a library of articles on my Kindle. Sad to see them go.
Longform was a respected service and I wish them the best focusing on the podcast.
My use of Longform declined as long, intricate articles became something nearly any publication could pull off, but I think that Longform deserves some credit for bringing about that change in journalism.
There are new forms of journalism emerging and new curators will appear to popularize them.
Do you have any recommendations for similar services that aggregate quality long form articles?
There are so many ways to collect them now, e.g., there are hundreds of twitter accounts that reliably share 'interesting articles' and nearly all are long form anymore.
What made nearly any publication able to pull of long, intricate, articles?
Multiple factors, but I think the biggest are the format becoming more imitable over time, better baseline design tools and CMSes for multi-section content, and automation/semi-automation of short form articles to make room to focus on big hits. There is also some survivorship bias as search engine improvements and changed tastes through sharing have diminished or forced sale of content mills.
Really recommend longreads.com
Mostly they curate other's long form journalism, but also have some of their own and usually quite good. They'll link out to eater, ny magazine, aeon, nautilus, outsideonline, nytimes, propublica (super recommend these) and anyone else producing good content.
Sad to see them go, but at least the archive will be there.
Eater has quite a good collection of long form articles on food and culture, if that's your thing.
Huge shame to see them go. My usage of them dropped off in recent years, but I still greatly enjoyed the curated service. I always had five or six longform articles saved to Pocket and loaded onto my Kobo if I needed a quick distraction.
I sense in myself a disconnect between my desire to read longform journalism and my willingness to actually spend the time to do it.
It's as if I have a guilty, deep-down feeling that the longform stuff is the really good, nourishing stuff, and anything else is basically fast food.
But perhaps this is just not true anymore. Maybe it never was. I always come back to the adage “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
When I think of a garden-variety longform piece, it is often one or more narrative components bolted onto lots of historical and background material. There is some new stuff, some reporting, some original thought -- but always laced with flourish and narrative.
Occasionally this is fun to read, but more often I just don't have the time. There is a time and a place, but as a matter of course, it's not practical anymore. One must carefully choose which long pieces to devote time to, whether they be longform articles, books, or otherwise. There is just so, so, so much to read.
I wonder why authors of this kind of thing don't put more energy into providing TL;DR executive summaries. Is it because it obviates their job? Or is a summary somehow less than the real thing?
See prior post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29810046
Never heard of this site before, but if I could hazard a guess to why they're shutting down, who nowadays has the time to read a long text for leisure? Not many people I guess.
My opinion is that the information loop has entered hyper velocity and anything long form cannot be mainstream anymore.
If I take my case as an example, the only activity where I focus for more than 5 minutes is coding. I skim news just reading the titles, occasionally reading an article, I can't watch a full length movie without opening a browser on the second screen, I listen to audio books while driving.
Really?
The short story is now a dead artform. Even 'trilogies' aren't a thing anymore - anything less than five thick tomes doesn't sell.
Movies are now three hours long, but even that seems to be a half-measure and the cinematic form is now being replaced by miniseries.
(I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.)
> (I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.)
I think we all still agree on that!
Yep. The fact most of my friends binged the Beatles 9 hour documentary in one or two days still surprises me. I also did the same. People do have time.
> (I remember when a 90 hour movie was considered long.)
Thank you very much I needed a good laugh this morning!
90 minutes?
The unit is called "1 Woody Allen".
The recreational consumption of content of all sorts is, I suspect, at a historic high. We watch hundreds of hours of movies and limited series and shows, watch YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, and browse Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News for hours a day. Even the most active programmer -- if they're being honest and not just preening for hopeful bosses to nod in praise -- spends a significant amount of time not programming.
Yes, most people have enormous amounts of discretionary time. Long form content has a pretty large base that enjoys the content, and it's some of the best content that appears on HN.
To condense, I find the notion that no one has time simply ludicrous. As otabdeveloper4 mention, it's remarkable how content has grown and grown rather than the opposite.
Having said that, I don't understand the site. By appearances some people post some links of some content that they enjoyed? What is there to "shut down"? Are we to believe this was some sort of business or something?
I get what you're saying, but long form podcast type of content seems to be somewhat mainstream?
Personally, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks at 2X. Otherwise I’d be swallowed by the torrential wave of content. I still am at that, to some extent.
If I’m not mistaken they didn’t honor their email “unsubscribe”. I unsubscribed several times only to continue receiving their newsletters :-(
I’m just discovering this site even exists and it’s shutting down… Are there similar sites out there people recommend?
Alternative: neologism.substack.com
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
Refs: https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-woul...