In forums, what do you consider a more important measurement of engagement: the number of posts per topic or its estimated reading time?

One day I suddenly caught myself reading more than usual at Medium.com just because it displays a tiny number for every single post. The number indicates how much time I’ll spend reading the post. That brought a whole new reflection to my brain. Why do forums show the number of messages in a topic and not the time that would be spent reading it?

Obviously, this idea is controversial, so I went straight to the meta.discourse.org (the discussion about my favorite discussion platform) and asked a question:

“Is there any way to show approximate reading time in the topics list?”

The idea behind this tiny number is that it could make it clear to readers that this topic or that topic or that other topic would not take long to read, so go ahead and read it now! At least this worked well on me. So I suppose there must be other people just like me.

Reflecting on the dilemma, one could say there is no big difference between 20 and 30 messages. But there is some between 7 and 15 minutes.
We can feel time better than the number of messages.
In the first case, I have to calculate and estimate it in my mind and sometimes end up projecting it to the timeline.
In the second case, I just get it explicitly right in front of my eyes.

What is more, it would be interesting to hide the number of posts entirely and show reading time instead, which could make more sense in some cases. I.e. when it comes to 50+ messages, chances are the reader doesn’t care anymore how many more — 60, 70, 120? Does it matter? But when it says 30 minutes or 50 minutes — that could make some more sense for the reader.

Would you try a different profession if it took you only one week to set up and be paid?

So, just because Medium informs explicitly that a particular article is only 5 minutes reading or so, I ended up reading many more articles. It just worked. Even though some topics may sound not so interesting, why not to give them a try — it will only eat my 5 minutes. Then in the middle of the text you find out it was worth starting to read. And as a result you’re more engaged.

After all, it seems that some topics can have little messages but containing really long reflections written by word addicts, while others can have plenty messages that are one to two paragraphs (if not sentences) per each.

Eventually, a Discourse co-founder, who has obviously spent years eagerly learning theory about discussion platforms, agreed that there is “a little disconnect between 60 posts that are 2 lines each and 10 posts that are 3,000 lines each. But it’s negligible in practice; most posts are small to extra small, and those that are not are extreme outliers.”

That said, the next time you open the index page of your favorite board, try taking a closer look at the number of posts and say whether it really matters to you how many messages are there in every topic. Then ask yourself — what if it showed the estimated reading time?