Not impossible, mind - the author posted this on Substack which is a way that one can monetize writing (blogpost style articles anyway).
Pre-printing press typically only the very wealthy had access to paper and ink, the process of copying a book was a huge undertaking.
Printing press opened things up, but paper was still rather expensive for quite some time. It wasn't until the 1900s that the book-splosion really took off.
With the take off of cheap paper products we switched from what you could write, to what could you get published and mass printed as the main gatekeeper. This paradigm stood for around 100 years.
With the rapid growth of both the internet and digital technology as a whole, anyone could write and 'publish online'. For a time this was lucrative as content was king and brought eyeballs. The internet was still slow enough for most that other forms of high bandwidth content were still luxury goods.
By 2010 the internet and smartphones were to the place that non-text media was where all the money was going. With the rise of the influencer a company could give a moderate amount of advertising dollars to an individual and get an oversized return on it. At the same time social media was gating off large amounts of text and people from the internet at large. Add to this the copying of text content in order to steal advertising dollars and clicks (think stack overflow copies and the like). Google and the other large social media companies with the advertising platforms greatly reduced the payout for text content and things moved to multi-media/video for the advertising dollar. The latest rage is shorts to keep ones ADHD addled mind locked to the screen for hours without moving.
With LLMs crapping out text who knows what our future of earning money with words looks like. Also, it's likely that AI driving virtual world will grab the attention of the masses, much like a personalized video game with the ability to be as addictive as our most dangerous drugs.
It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)
It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)
It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.
It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.
It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.
I could continue..
On that note, a big thank you to whoever added "read this page" to Safari on iOS! Being able to turn long form articles into ad-hoc podcasts has been a game changer for me.
That's just a very long way of saying it's difficult to monetise; it's why audio and video are preferred by producers of content.
Few people are interested in disseminating an idea, a concept, anything... they are interested in levelling up their fame and followers. Text is typically no good for that.
So one can use the thousand words of pictures while most content is textual, whereas the other way is significantly worse, since it of course lacks all the searchability et al.
I think that today’s video influencers have gotten really good at “one take and done” recording.
I couldn’t do that. I’m way too much of a perfectionist. I always edit my text, and I’ve been writing all my life. I don’t think that I’ve ever written something perfectly, the first time (including HN comments. I tend to go back and edit for correctness and clarity).
A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed for a podcast. The process was fascinating, and the woman that did it, obviously does a great deal of editing and refinement. I don’t know if I have that much patience.
Writing is not dying and is not going to die anytime soon, people use it more than they ever have for communication in this texting and emailing world and writing will be continued to be used for those areas where it is undeniable king. What can explore the inner world of people better than the written word? what can develop and explore idea to the extent and depth of the written word? All those unfilmable books that keep being read are works which exploit the strengths of the written word to express things which no other medium can without a great deal of abstraction and becoming so experimental that only a tiny niche can appreciate them and a much smaller niche than the niche that is literature.
It's also very flexible in that I can immediately return to a previous sentence without needing intermediate steps like rewinding a video or audio format. I can copy parts into another document for reasons. It's easier to search. This is also what makes learning from a book so much better than video (besides not needing batteries for it).
> besides not needing batteries for it
Let us say that you want to analyze, say, drinking culture in Ireland. You could write documentary on it, or do a fictional character study. However, those require actors, camera equipment, editing tools and time, and it generally extremely expensive and time consuming. A quick TikTok video may be a bit cheaper than a full-scale film, but still needs some of that equipment and cinematography skills.
Music is not much better. You need skills in singing, translating ideas of rhythmic lyrics, as well as supplies for instruments.
Writing, however, is simple. At minimum, all you need is paper and skill in articulating ideas. Almost anyone worthy to rationally ponder a topic already has the skills to put it to paper (assuming that they have gone through a proper First-World education and know reading and writing).
Text is also one of the easiest to share. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that poses problems in sending all that information. Plain text, however (or even most rich-text formats) can be transferred to anyone over almost any protocol, even rudimentary ones such as word-of-mouth. Ideas shared through text can be sent at an unrivaled pace.
You can't expect anyone to view 20 million videos a day to find trends in current day video discourse. In theory machines could do it, but it costs a fortune. But 20 million text transcripts? That's doable on someone's local machine.
Google has this all for themselves, but they don't seem to give anyone else the ability to access the data easily so the last two points are a yes for them and a no for you.
Talking has always been superior to text, and most of the problems of industrialized society is that the majority of people have become psychotic brained by thinking that the written word is higher than the spoken word. The spoken word is of course superior, and has always been.
Sure, LLMs can understand images and video, but when you make your program spit debug text you make it easier and faster for Claude Code to iterate on it and fix any problems.
See how much value does a text UI program like Claude Code provide, it really doesn't need anything else than cannot be done in a terminal.
I strongly disagree with this.
Claude-code would be super-powered if it had a better grasp of running processes without logging output. Imagine if it could somehow directly trace running programs, spotting exceptions and gauging performance in real-time.
It would be super-powered if it could actually navigate around a code-base and refactor through language servers without having to edit files through search & replace.
Imagine if instead of code, the program was first compiled to an Abstract Syntax Tree and claude worked directly on that AST instead of code.
Never a misplaced semi-colon* or forgotten import directive.
It needs a fundamentally different model to an LLM to operate it, but I'm convinced that thinking that Text is the endgame is a form of blub.
It's where we are now, and it's working very well, but it shouldn't be considered the long term goal. We can do better.
* To be fair, this one hasn't been an issue for a while now.
In short, the article focuses only on the amount of reading, but the content is also important. This should be part of the equation.
As we're referencing young adults here, they already have a degree of understanding of the world today. Reading of the past, gives historical context to how the world is today, to why the world is as it is today. I'd have hoped they'd been well exposed to such things in school, and you can be absolutely sure they've been exposed to such things in movies, or music (have you heard some rap music?), or.. you know, this thing called the Internet.
In 12 seconds I can find more untoward content on the Internet, than I could in an entire library or book store.
So this isn’t new and I don’t see the problem.
As for the “views,” by this standard kids shouldn’t read A Tale of Two Cities because it encourages beheadings.
are they? maybe it's a cultural thing or maybe the author's perspective is from 1st world countries. here where I live ppl can't stand reading books on digital devices (not counting tech bros in my N)