Singing to the Choir (Targeted Individuals online)
Books published by Targeted Individuals categorized ,filed and promoted as "Conspiracy Theory"
One wonders why Targeted Individuals bother writing at all*. In fact many TIs soon give up documenting the crimes against humanity being done to them as their accounts are relegated on line and in published books to the realm of Big Foot sightings, ESP memoirs and Reincarnation - the equivalent of a book about the Holocaust being placed in book stores with books about camping .... Furthermore victims of Neurotronic Human Testing who attempt to tell their stories in the hope that they may get to main stream media at best get heard on the already maligned late night radio programs .Their horrific accounts of being human test subjects irradiated by direct energy meant to study physical and mental pain thresholds are interrupted inevitably when the "topic of tonight's program" now switches to other so called "similar themes" .Of course the radio host already has cued up a tape of eerie Theremin music to welcome the next guest who speaks about The Greys , alien abduction and paranormal "events" absolutely negating the seriousness of the genuine horrific topic (Human Experimentation) discussed only minutes before. The rage a Targeted Individual feels swells with each passing day not only at being used as human subject but as their family , friends, doctors ,lawyers do not believe their account of what is happening to them . The feeling is akin to being raped, going to hospital and being told "you were not...or that you have brought it upon yourself".
*You Won’t Finish This Article Why people online don’t read to the end.
I’m going to keep this brief, because you’re not going to stick around for long. I’ve already lost a bunch of you. For every 161 people who landed on this page, about 61 of you—38 percent—are already gone. You “bounced” in Web traffic jargon, meaning you spent no time “engaging” with this page at all.
So now there are 100 of you left. Nice round number. But not for long! We’re at the point in the page where you have to scroll to see more. Of the 100 of you who didn’t bounce, five are never going to scroll. Bye!
OK, fine, good riddance. So we’re 95 now. A friendly, intimate crowd, just the people who want to be here. Thanks for reading, folks! I was beginning to worry about your attention span, even your intellig … wait a second, where are you guys going? You’re tweeting a link to this article already? You haven’t even read it yet! What if I go on to advocate something truly awful, like a constitutional amendment requiring that we all type two spaces after a period?
I asked Josh Schwartz, a data scientist at the traffic analysis firm Chartbeat, to look at how people scroll through Slate articles. Schwartz also did a similar analysis for other sites that use Chartbeat and have allowed the firm to include their traffic in its aggregate analyses.
Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don’t even make it halfway. Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing.
OK, we’re a few hundred words into the story now. According to the data, for every 100 readers who didn’t bounce up at the top, there are about 50 who’ve stuck around. Only one-half!
Take a look at the following graph created by Schwartz, a histogram showing where people stopped scrolling in Slate articles. Chartbeat can track this information because it analyzes reader behavior in real time—every time a Web browser is on a Slate page, Chartbeat’s software records what that browser is doing on a second-by-second basis, including which portion of the page the browser is currently viewing.
A typical Web article is about 2000 pixels long. In the graph below, each bar represents the share of readers who got to a particular depth in the story. There’s a spike at 0 percent—i.e., the very top pixel on the page—because 5 percent of readers never scrolled deeper than that spot.
Courtesy of Chartbeat
Chartbeat’s data shows that most readers scroll to about the 50 percent mark, or the 1,000th pixel, in Slate stories. That’s not very far at all. I looked at a number of recent pieces to see how much you’d get out of a story if you only made it to the 1,000th pixel.
Courtesy of Chartbeat
On these sites, the median scroll depth is slightly greater—most people get to 60 percent of the article rather than the 50 percent they reach on Slate pages. On the other hand, on these pages a higher share of people—10 percent—never scroll. In general, though, the story across the Web is similar to the story at Slate: Few people are making it to the end, and a surprisingly large number aren’t giving articles any chance at all.
We’re getting deep on the page here, so basically only my mom is still reading this. (Thanks, Mom!) But let’s talk about how scroll depth relates to sharing. I asked Schwartz if he could tell me whether people who are sharing links to articles on social networks are likely to have read the pieces they’re sharing.
He told me that Chartbeat can’t directly track when individual readers tweet out links, so it can’t definitively say that people are sharing stories before they’ve read the whole thing. But Chartbeat can look at the overall tweets to an article, and then compare that number to how many people scrolled through the article. Here’s Schwartz’s analysis of the relationship between scrolling and sharing on Slate pages:
Courtesy of Chartbeat
Courtesy of Chartbeat
And here’s a similar look at the relationship between scrolling and sharing across sites monitored by Chartbeat:
Courtesy of Chartbeat
They each show the same thing: There’s a very weak relationship between scroll depth and sharing. Both at Slate and across the Web, articles that get a lot of tweets don’t necessarily get read very deeply. Articles that get read deeply aren’t necessarily generating a lot of tweets.
As a writer, all this data annoys me. It may not be obvious—especially to you guys who’ve already left to watch Arrested Development—but I spend a lot of time and energy writing these stories. I’m even careful about the stuff at the very end; like right now, I’m wondering about what I should say next, and whether I should include these two other interesting graphs I got from Schwartz, or perhaps I should skip them because they would cause folks to tune out, and maybe it’s time to wrap things up anyway …
But what’s the point of all that? Schwartz tells me that on a typical Slate page, only 25 percent of readers make it past the 1,600th pixel of the page, and we’re way beyond that now. Sure, like every other writer on the Web, I want my articles to be widely read, which means I want you to Like and Tweet and email this piece to everyone you know. But if you had any inkling of doing that, you’d have done it already. You’d probably have done it just after reading the headline and seeing the picture at the top. Nothing I say at this point matters at all.
So, what the hey, here are a couple more graphs, after which I promise I’ll wrap things up for the handful of folks who are still left around here. (What losers you are! Don’t you have anything else to do?)
This heatmap shows where readers spend most of their time on Slate pages:
Courtesy of Chartbeat
And this one shows where people spend time across Chartbeat sites:
Try to remember: How much time did you spend on Facebook in the last week? How much time laughing at cat memes? How much time liking pictures of your friends’ children? How much time linking to articles you found elsewhere?
I couldn’t say, and I suspect you couldn’t, either. But Facebook itself can, and now it’s using that information to reshape what you see when you log on. The site has long relied on user engagement to decide what to show visitors. If you like a post, for example, it’ll show you more content of that kind, and it’ll be more likely to show that post to your friends. And because we sometimes want to see things that we’re uncomfortable liking, it also emphasizes posts that inspire us to leave comments.
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In a blog post published last week, Facebook software engineers Ansha Yu and Sami Tas explained that the company had recently updated “News Feed’s ranking to factor in a new signal—how much time you spend viewing a story in your News Feed.” Yu and Tas say that this update comes in response to user requests, writing that those they surveyed had said that “just because someone didn’t like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful to them.” These changes, the engineers repeatedly make clear, come in response to the demands of users. If Facebook is paying more attention to what we’re doing when we visit the site, they propose, it’s because we wanted them to.
Almost all coverage of this development takes Yu and Tas’ claims at face value, basically accepting the implicit assertion that Facebook began accumulating this information only when the people demanded it. Online attention tracking is hardly new, however. It has long been a component of user-experience design processes; heat mapping—through which Web developers trace the movement of mouse cursors across a Web page—and other similar techniques inform development decisions at every level. Netflix, for example, examines everything from how fast visitors scroll through recommendations to which colors they’re most inclined to click on. It seems unlikely that Facebook hasn’t been doing the same.
But maybe this is the first time Facebook has put that information to work. In their blog post, Yu and Tas suggest that this change gives users greater control over their time, making it at once more pleasant and more personal.
![This "heatmap" shows where readers spend time on Slate pages. The "hot" red spots represent more time on that part of the page; the "cooler" blue spots represent less time.](http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/images_nobody_reads_full_articles_online/130606_TECH_SlateHeatmap.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg "This "heatmap" shows where readers spend time on Slate pages. The "hot" red spots represent more time on that part of the page; the "cooler" blue spots represent less time.")
