Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?

ThatWeirdGuy1001@sh.itjust.works to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 721 points –

Just as the title asks I've noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they're reading.

They'll read it and despite all the information being there, if it's even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it's complete gibberish or indecipherable.

Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it's making me lose my fucking mind.

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I'll generalize and say there are many my age in their 20s that watch things like TikTok and shorts that are conditioned for the fastest intake of media. This means ignoring the written word outside of texts.

Even myself, if I see a wall of text in an article, I know to skip the fluffer ad-reads down to paragraph three, then skim. To be fair most articles could be wrapped up to maybe two paragraphs but get extended for ad spots. Outside the context of reading articles on say lemmy, especially online, there is a largely missed hear mean not what I'm saying operating in good faith that often gets missed online. For example if someone posts an article about how smoking kills you, and I post a comment that "yes but its a creature comfort" I am not refuting it kills you - I'm merely suggesting that its a rough world and that people have vices to cope.

Nuance and assumption that we're acknowledging it is often lost on people.

What’s interesting is that articles are longer to keep you on the page for ad revenue. Videos are shorter to feed you a lot of different content quickly to keep you around for ad revenue.

Really, we’re all being programmed by advertising strategies and that’s why we’re fucked.

Lol instinctively I read your first sentence then skipped the rest, but my brain said "NO, that's what they want you to do!" So I made myself come back and read it. Good content