Well, isn't it perhaps a bit of a chicken and egg problem? What came first? The bad habit of skimming a lot of low quality nonsense news or the fact that it meant so little to you that you can't really remember what you read later?

When I look at the traffic even from Hacker News you can kind of tell that most people who click on links even here, just spend a few seconds looking at your content and then disengage. Especially if you don't provide people with lots of pictures and "hooks" that allow people to engage more in some way. Give people a wall of text and they'll barely skim what you write.