A cautionary message from someone who used to think long form content equals quality and indepth coverage:<p>Long form content in magazines still used to have limited pages. So there needed to be a balance between information and prose. So even in long prose, the content was well edited, every sentence brought something important to the table.<p>Nowadays, on the web, an article could have infinite length without any limits. Less editing skills required and more importantly, the longer you stay on page, the better their metrics.<p>So the content tends to be way longer with more passages that do not really add anything to the central message. Most of them are approaching novellas in length.<p>At one point in time, this became such a big time sink for me, I wrote a firefox extension to warn me how long the page was and how long I spent on it. I am a moderately good reader and still some of these articles would typically take 45 mins to finish.<p>One heuristic I follow nowadays:
Before reading, I think about what my purpose of this article is, what I hope to learn from this exercise: (It could just even be entertainment)<p>A few mins in, I see if this purpose is being fulfilled. If yes, I continue. If not, I just bail out.