Incident Record: Read Later Fiction

PROGRESS REPORT Subject: Read Later Queue Reporting Period: Cumulative

Progress on the read-later queue has been assessed at the end of this reporting period. The assessment finds that progress has been made in one direction only: the queue has grown.

The read-later application contains between 200 and 1,400 items, depending on the user. The items were saved because they appeared interesting at the moment of saving and time was not available to read them at that moment. The time that was not available then has not become available since.

The progress report documents the following.

The first finding is archival. Items saved more than eighteen months ago are no longer available at their original URLs in approximately thirty percent of cases. The read-later application has preserved the text. The text has been preserved from deletion into a personal archive of things that will not be read before they are individually curated or bulk-deleted.

The second finding concerns the nature of the save action. Saving an article to read later produces a sense of completion that is similar to the sense of completion produced by reading the article. The information feels handled. It is not handled. The save action has been documented as a cognitive receipt.

The third finding is optimistic. A small percentage of items, approximately five to eight percent, are read within seventy-two hours of saving. These items were going to be read regardless. They were saved as a tab management strategy rather than a deferral strategy.

The absurd rule that governs read-later behavior is that the mechanism for managing reading volume accumulates reading volume at the same rate as unmanaged reading volume, with the addition of an organizational layer.

The contradiction is that the queue was created to reduce the feeling of missing things, and it now contains so many things that the feeling is structural rather than incidental.

Progress continues. Slowly, and in the wrong direction.