A great tool to speed read Steemit posts

While reorganizing my bookmarks, after nearly a year, I found some nice gems. Past-me really knows what I like, I love that guy, even if he is thinner than me.

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Spreeder

One of the gems was Spreeder an online tool that helps you to speed read.

You can copy and paste steemit posts and it will display it like this.

While reading a post like this is not perfect, it is great you getting an overview of the post and whether it is worth your time to read it more carefully.

edit: crap I got a typo in here that is also in my gif, I am sorry but it is way too difficult to fix both, so I will leave the error

How it works

The web app allows you to increase and decrease the speed of the playback. The idea is trick the brain into not trying to internally vocalize every word. Once you go fast enough that becomes impossible and you start to comprehend the word without the vocalization.

You start off at 300 words a minute and if you are not comfortable at that pace you should decrease the speed until you are.
Then you increase it until it is a struggle and then once again decrease until you can comprehend.

Continue in this fashion until your comprehension pace has risen to where you are happy.

How I use it

The obvious use case is to use it to speed read posts. When I first joined steemit it would of been a struggle to read everything now it is down right impossible. With over 25,000 posts a day you are not going to be able to do that even using this tool. But you can make a dent in your personal feed.

As I said above this is mainly used to 'separate the wheat from the chaff', meaning see what is worth reading a bit more closely and what isn't.

Another thing I use it for is to read over my own posts. My main reason for this is to see how well my writing flows. When I first started to play around with spreeder I was amazed at the difference between a professionally written piece and the ones on steemit. At the pace spreeder throws words at you there is no forgiveness for bad writing. Even doing this I can't get my posts up to professional standards but I like to think it is helping me improve.

The other thing I get out of speed reading my own posts is it helps me find those times that my mind thought of words but my pesky fingers decided not type them. And then when reading slowly, my mind then betrays me occasionally, by filling in the gap with the words it knew should be there. At the speed of spreeder it can't get up to those tricks.

Not for everyone

I hope one or two of you get as much out of it as I am getting. Although I recognise that many of you will hate the idea of not relishing what you read. And I can see their point I would hate to see someone reading one of my favourite books using this method, but I think for how I am using it, it is fine.

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Let me know what you think in the comments below and if you liked it please consider following, upvoting or resteeming, or you could go crazy and even do all 3.

Thanks for reading,
FiveBoringGames