Slicereader displays online text one paragraph at a time

Mutahhir Ali Hayat wrote on his blog: I probably have ADHD, but I don’t want to get checked. I’m afraid the doctor will confirm that I’m a serial procrastinator. Don’t get me wrong, I usually get my work done, but I would like to go about it better and get more work done than I… READ THE REST

I just tried it because I have the same problems reading things, and it’s pretty great. It’s not necessarily useful for a lot of things, though - I’m not sure how good you’d actually find this for reading technical articles and the like despite him saying that’s part of what inspired it. I will keep it though, and try it on different things.

One of my biggest complaints when reading stuff on the internet is not knowing how long an article is. Every visual cue that’s meant to inform me (primarily the scroll bar) tells me the article is long, and as I read through the beginning I realize “oh, I’ll get back to this later, I don’t want to read something really long right now” - then I get back to it later and realize there were actually only a few more paragraphs, and then a huge space below the article filled with comments (and, often, inexplicable white space). It’s somehow disconcerting to not know how long something is, and it distracts me.

I think a concept like Slicereader built into the browser would be great - I like the pie chart indicator used here to show how far through an article you are, it’s much better than the unreliable scrollbar. Something that can reliably detect which part of the page is actual article, stick it in a box you can scroll through paragraph by paragraph as with slicereader, and which can tell you exactly how far through the article you are at a glance. The paid version of Slicereader will import web articles automatically with a button, but I’m not sure if it knows not to include the comments etc.

I always grab the scroll bar with my mouse, scroll down to see how long a seemingly “long” article is, and then I quickly drag my mouse to the left (while still holding down the mouse button), which then brings me right back to where I initially grabbed the mouse. This gives me an idea of what to expect. :slight_smile:

When I read LOTR back then, the introduction was far too verbose for my capabilities. I noticed that I wasn’t able to pay attention to the content and had to read pages over and over again.

Reading the book upside down solved the problem for me. I still do that today whenever I feel distracted.

Very useful for text work together with someone sitting vis a vis.

I’ve noticed that it’s easier to read books on a small reader, or on my 10 inch tablet with fonts set large so that there’s less text on each page. I read much faster that way. This idea of showing just one paragraph at a time is very interesting.

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