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> habitual selectors

Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.

HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment and the next.




Great, we have our first theoretician. Now we do need some sort of organizational structure for advocacy.


We do. I can smell allowances and tax exemptions. Maybe even an annual fun run.

I don't much mind about the structure, but it'd be really nice if it all lined up perfectly straight.


New recruit reporting for duty. I've never seen anyone else read webpages the same way I do - by selecting to scroll - so it's a surprise to finally find my kin. I guess it was more likely to happen on a place like HN?

Scrolling without selecting is just disorienting when I'm reading.


"Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other reason?"

Sometimes unconscious compulsion, otherwise to put together a quote in the context of an existing thread.

I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards :)


Scrolling. Selected text or word is just a marker when scrolling fast. It is much easier to follow visually fast moving selected part of the text than to keep track about sentence that I'm currently reading.

When using keyboard it's not that important, since one quickly learn how much PgDn scrolls, but when using mouse it is good to have a selection marker to quickly continue to read from there after scrolling.


I'm waiting for a bug in incognito to be fixed before I start promotion but I built a chrome extension that specifically solves this problem if you'd like to try it out.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magicscroll-web-re...


>I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards

the same here.


Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other reason?


No legitimate reason. Part habit, part compulsion, part tic. It's basically doodling with the selection highlight.

Edit: don't need to share all that, I think.


To me it has become a sign that i am bored of what i am reading and should just skip to the story's punchline. Or sometimes abandon it altogether.


I often select text so that I have an easy visual reference when I'm scrolling down. I don't want to scroll too far!


I do exactly the same. For me it's not really selection reading, but selection marking, when scrolling.




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