The approximate reading time for a post on DEV is now displayed on feed pages as well as at the top of the post.
Feed
Post Page
It will likely also be added in places like liquid tags in the future, and anywhere else it could be contextually helpful.
Happy coding!
Top comments (26)
Doing a quick regex on my Reading List (670+ right now), 40 were caught with a quick
[0-24-9] min read
while 500 were caught with3 min read
. This is fallible for multidigit things like 13 min read, but apparently I don't tend to save long form posts for later. 😅Thanks for the extra data points!
We actually still have some older posts which have not yet been indexed and are defaulting to 3 mins. This should be rectified soon. It’s a known issue but I figured people wouldn’t notice this before it was ironed out. Leave it to devs to quickly uncover the problems.
QA is my day job ;)
I love that someone (Kayla) bothered to investigate this. Awesome.
I actually typed up a comment originally like "Uhhhh this feels buggy" but given how much I've read on this site, having a ton of stuff in the 3-minute range wasn't that unheard of. Occasional long-form posts, sure, and occasional discussion questions without context, but for the most part, people tend to succulently say their piece.
Cool! How is it calculated?
Contributions welcome 😄
Ben, just wondering, why 275 WPM?
This question came up to my mind and I decided to read a bit about it and found the following reference which recomends 200 WPM: marketingland.com/estimated-readin...
There is also this from Wikipedia where there is a nice graph with several different studies correlating WPM / age.
As I mentioned I'm just curious about the magic number (where you've found it).
From your Wikipedia link, this caught my eye:
I'd think most here are reading for learning, to an extent. 200 WPM sounds like it'd be a good middle between learning and comprehending, though I could just be slow since I tend to read at work while I'm watching tests run.
Hmm all good food for thought. We settled on this a while back and I sort of forget the exact reasoning.
We’ll make this smarter over time.
Just a tip (don’t wanna bother you with that) but usually when I get those magic numbers on my code I try to add comments linking to it. It might help future contributors to understand and think twice before updating it to another magic number hehehe
As I mentioned I was just curious about it!
Nevertheless I think it is a great feature and it might help engagement ✌️
Haven't worked with Ruby a lot, but would you be open to a PR that takes images into account?
Great feature!
Althoug this is a great metric, I personally would find more useful to see the word count directly. Would you consider something like this?
Great Feature ! Love the progress so far of dev.to
When I saw that feature I didn't like it because:
1) it's clogging space. (less is more kinda thing).
2) what if the article is technical? I'm sure to read it more thoroughly so the time is so relative that the purpose of the feature is counter productive. It doesn't tell me any REAL information.
But, as with everything, there will be two camps. The one that liked it and the one that didn't.
Ohh fancy!
This is a very useful feature. Thanks for adding it!
Was just wishing we had this feature the other day, nice!
Collapsable comments and this were two of my most anticipated features! You guys are awesome! Big ups to the whole Dev crew 👍
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