I don’t understand why so many sites have an “x minutes to read” datum in their article headers. Everyone reads at different rates, and every plugin for it makes different assumptions; the result is pure noise. I’ve seen “45 minute reads” that take me like three minutes to read carefully in full, and I’ve seen a two hundred page comic book be marked as 5 seconds to read because it counts images as zero seconds.

@0xabad1dea i guess it’s to let people gauge how long an article is but like

you can see it by how short the scroller is and number of words is probably a better metric for that too

@0xabad1dea The most useless feature in Reader Mode -_-

@0xabad1dea wait, that's not something that Reader Mode is enfigulating itself?

@rotopenguin if your reader mode has one, then it is only one of many. thousands of websites do it themselves

@charlotte @0xabad1dea The algorithm is usually simple word count times a reading speed of words per minute.

For example, the @gohugoio CMS’ PAGE.ReadingTime method uses a default reading speed of 212 wpm or 500 wpm for CJK languages. You can customize those values per language.

As far as scroll bars are concerned, many browsers/OSes don’t display them except when the user is actively scrolling, especially on mobile.

To mitigate that, my stories and essays at The Beautiful Prison overlay a discreet progress bar at the top of the window while reading.

@mjg @charlotte @0xabad1dea @gohugoio

and the scroll bar is often wrong because of how much stuff appears after the article

@0xabad1dea I wouldn't be surprised if that was another SEO thing (like those "who's the author" section at the end of articles).