Am I the only one who is annoyed by those? It's a minor thing but it's just another little piece of annoying hand-holding distraction that web designers seem to like.<p>I think part or what bothers me is the idea that you can assign a read time to something. Reminds be a bit of the part in Snow Crash where YT's mom is judged by how long she takes to read government memos.
It is an interesting idea. But how quickly does the average person read? What about someone learning English? What about someone who has had an espresso. What about someone who stops in the middle to think about the author's point.<p>I've added a (rough) word count to my blog posts' titles. That gives an indication of length without be prescriptive.<p>Of course, it doesn't include how long it takes to understand a diagram or watch an inline video.
Tildes (I still have a few invites left) doesn’t have a read time estimator but it does use embedly to get word counts and some other metadata for each submission.