alt Hacker NewsYet the most popular platforms on the planet have people pointing a finger (or several) at a picture.
And the most popular media format on the planet is and will be (for the foreseeable future), video. Video is only limited by our capacity to produce enough of it at a decent quality, otherwise humanity is definitely not looking back fondly at BBSes and internet forums (and I say this as someone who loves forums).
GenAI will definitely need better UIs for the kind of universal adoption (think smartphone - 8/9 billion people).
Replies
Al-Khwarizmi • yesterday at 11:50 PM
WhatsApp is primarily a text-based chat interface and it has pretty much universal adoption in the countries where it's popular.
> Video is only limited by our capacity to produce enough of it at a decent quality, otherwise humanity is definitely not looking back fondly at BBSes and internet forums
Video is limited by playback speed. It is a time-dependent format. Efforts can be made to enable video to be viewable at a range of speeds, but they are always somewhat constrained. Controlling video playback to slow down and rewatch certain parts is just not as nice as dealing with the same thing in text (or static images), where it’s much easier to linger and closely inspect parts that you care more about or are struggling to understand. Likewise, it’s easier to skim text than video.
This is why many people prefer transcripts, or articles, or books over videos.
I seriously doubt that people would want to switch text-based forums to video if only video were easier to make. People enjoy writing for the way it inspires a different kind of communication and thought. People like text so much that they write in journals that nobody will ever see, just because it helps them organize their thoughts.