I witnessed this first-hand when my post about food insurance vs. health insurance got picked up on Reddit. It was obvious from some of the earliest comments that folks hadn’t bothered to read the article, because they were like “Well… he didn’t bring up X” when, in fact, I did bring up X. So, not a surprising article from Slate, but they do have lots of specific data to back up the reality that folks just don’t finish reading articles. Often even if they share them!
I wonder how many people finished reading that article, though…
Ah, I remember this well during my days as an editor. It was just a given that whatever you posted would not be fully read. At editorial meetings we’d have contests to come up with the funniest (but sadly, realistic) comments based solely on the headline of such-and-such article. We’d even entertain ourselves by making up fake headlines packed with as many of the key words that inspire lengthy, impassioned, uninformed comments as we could.