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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

Hate to be the whiny HN poster with an off-topic complaint about scrolling or whatever, but:

Pull quotes do not belong on the web. They are out-of-place anachronisms from print publications, intended to entice a reader flipping through pages of a magazine, which does not translate to how people read on a browser. There should be stronger stigmatization of pull quotes in digital design than of using Papyrus and Comic Sans, on the same level as pop-up ads and auto-playing video.

Pull quotes _demand_ that the reader draw their eyes away from the article text just to re-read something they just read seconds ago, or are just about to read. These quotes scream with font size increased +10pt, and random words capitalized. They slow down reading, break concentration, and destroy the flow and pacing of the writer's craft.

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"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We all find such annoyances annoying, but having a subthread like this upvoted to the top of a thread (which happens routinely) is like an invasive species taking over an ecosystem. That's why the guideline exists.

I completely agree. They've always felt unwieldy and annoying, emphasizing some bit of text from a few paragraphs ago that I had just read and was no longer related to what I'm reading now.

I find that the same issue is made worse when using a service like Instapaper to store content for reading on other devices later. The pull quotes read like an emphasized point, when in fact they're just text I'm about to re-read or have already read. This breaks the flow of reading by pulling me away from the author's intended order and pushes me to some other part of the article.

Removal of pull quotes entirely would be a Quality of Life improvement in such a case.

The work well in dryer sections like historical background or technical explanations to indicate "Hey! More Exciting Stuff Below".

Technical sections seem like precisely the place where concentration is important and the reader doesn’t want to be distracted.

If you feel the reader doesn’t want to read technical content, omit it. Make it collapsible or give a link to jump over it. Or just put it on a different page. The web permits things that print does not.

It’s weird to be apologizing for your content and your choice of document structure by scrambling it up with pull quotes because “it gets better, I swear.”

Sure it would be great if the whole piece could be exciting, but sometimes a bit of background knowledge is necessary to understand the remaining content. A great writer could no doubt make it exciting on its own, but most of these articles are written by run of the mill journalists and copywriters on a very limited time budget.

I know I've continued reading because of these callouts so it definitely does work on some people.

How strong your antipathy! Many people think pull quotes look good and serve a purpose, print or digital. I agree with them.

Here's a screenshot from one of your articles: https://i.imgur.com/5AJ5mut.png (Crudely made on iOS, sorry.)

When am I supposed to read the highlighted text? Is it when it was pulled out and strongly emphasized? Or when it appears again, separated by a single paragraph, in the flow of how you originally composed the article?

Or in this one: https://i.imgur.com/DnhsI8n.jpg -- the pull quote comes after what I've just read, instead of before it, so I may have the pleasure of reading it twice. Both copies of the text are on my screen at the same time. Can you imagine if a podcast every few minutes repeated a sentence that was just spoken seconds ago, only at 4x volume, and then just resumed as if nothing happened?

(A comment about this second example: The paragraph directly after the pull quote starts, "The FCC took on this question..." Which "question" am I supposed to interpret this as? The one in the pull quote or the one in the previous body paragraph? The pull quote has not only screwed up the ordering of the text, but added ambiguity merely through its presence.)

If your intent is to appeal to readers who just flick through the page to read the headlines, why not write in bulleted form like Axios? If your intent is to look attractive, a text-heavy format is not ideal.

Can you state the purpose? It's really not clear to me in digital.

As a reader that actually likes to read, they are distracting, they are frustrating to accidentally read and reread, and pull me out of the story.

In digital formats, if these are much past the fold say maybe one to two screen lengths down, what purpose could they possibly be serving to the reader? I can't figure them out at all.

You should reward the reader, not distract and waste their time with duplicate content.

I imagine they're used for SEO now as search engines may weight that text more heavily. This is achieving the same end goal you pointed out of the original pull quotes.

I doubt it has anything to do with SEO. Some crawlers might try to extract section headings from content based on font size, but in this case the pull quote may even confuse this.

Vanity Fair didn’t want to optimize search rankings based on “The crime boss was ‘A CRIMINAL STAR in Romania,’ going by a variety of nicknames, among them ‘PIG HEAD’ and ‘GODFATHER.’” My bet is that they long ago told the web design team to make a theme that captures the feeling of their print magazine. The designers thoughtlessly included pull quotes in this theme. The CMS was adapted to allow insertion of said quotes. The person who prepared this article for publication added them hastily, scrolled 30% of the way down, picked two sentences that are near each other and are both about the same thing (Romanian criminals, not rare books), and moved on to the next assignment.

It’s probably just something the journalists of today learned from their bosses, who learned from their bosses, or learned in journalism school.

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