If you’re reading this you’ve probably noticed the ‘Attention Conservation Notices’ on the top of my posts, and wondered what that’s about.

An Attention Conservation Notice is best thought of as the opposite of a clickbait title. It’s a short message at the top of each post which will seek to explain why you should not bother reading what follows.

This is not a gimmick or a reverse psychology trick or anything like that, but rather borne out of a sincere respect for your limited time and attention. The fact is that not all content on the Internet is worth reading for everyone, and that extends to this blog. If the notice on a page convinces you that the post that follows isn’t worth your time, move on. I don’t make any money from advertising here, and you won’t get a special achievement for reading every post. Focus your attention on content that deserves it, not content that happens to be in front of you.

The origin of the Attention Conservation Notice is canonically traced to one of the exemplars of odd 90s internet culture, the Viridian Design Movement mailing list, though Cervantes appears to offer something similar in the preface of Don Quixote, managing to predate the Viridians by nearly four centuries. It seems to have been supplanted across large parts of the internet by the now-trendy Epistemic Status Disclaimer, which I think has been a loss for all of us.