longcat post is long
[Full Disclosure: there are no longcats in this post. I'm sorry.]
Since recovering most of my attention span from social media, I've started reading much longer pieces on the Internet. Things like Josh Collinsworth's exhaustive discussion of what's happening at Wordpress (21,608 words including sidebars, per Microsoft Word) and the Project Gemini FAQ (26,955 words, same estimator).
Marketing Brain haaates these, precious. Over 20,000 words? That's far too long for Marketing Brain's comfort. Like ten times too long. Internet content should not be so long, precious. Longness on Internet is for cats. "Longform content" should only be 1,500 to 2,000 words, precious. Anything longer is Content That Has No Name and Must Be Banished.
As a reader, though, I love reading these things. So much so, in fact, that I recently removed the encycloReadia project from Mataroa in favor of putting it on my own website as a single page with anchor links for navigation.
Marketing Brain haaaaates this. Haaaaates. Marketing Brain hates this so much, Marketing Brain gave me anxiety about it over lunch.
"You're not breaking up the content enough for reader's attention spans-" readers can do what I do - leave and come back later. Breaking stuff up into "snackable content" (god how I hate that term!) only contributes to the breakdown of attention spans, and that feels increasingly like a sin.
"You're not giving people a choice whether or not to keep reading-" the back and home buttons are right there. How am I stopping them?
"You're not encouraging engagement with other content on the site-" this site does not exist to "foster engagement," "drive traffic," or anything else. This site exists for me to write stuff on the Web. If other people like it, that's cool, but I don't want or need to know about it.
If anything, I'm saving people from having to reload the header, footer, and CSS every 500 words - a task that has a real (if tiny) financial cost in bandwidth. You're welcome.
"No one will read that-" people already read the whole thing when it was on Mataroa, chopped up into one page per post plus the home page/site index. Are you seriously arguing that doing less work is what will cause people to stop reading? Are you, Marketing Brain?? Have you melted down that badly???
Tl;dr the encycloReadia project has moved, read it if you like, if you don't then look at something else, either way I hope you maximize your own enjoyment of the Web but I am done presuming that I know how to "optimize" others' online experiences.