alt Hacker NewsI like Cal Newport and own all of his books, but this sort of commentary is ultimately just pretentious. Aristocrats back in the day had similar thoughts about peasants even being literate.
I assure you, by sheer virtue of quantity, no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.
It's true there's more garbage out there than ever before, but this is an artifact of democratization of creation and this is good imho. I also reject the premise that time to creation is an indication of quality.
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That reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.
Time alone doesn't equate to quality, but you can't deny that creating something really good doesn't take a long while.
> no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.
Could you provide some examples that match the best literary works? I'd love to see them. Edit: Here are some proposed examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46388246
Nothing prevents the video medium from matching literature - full-length films, for example, are on that level. I think there are two drawbacks to short video: First, the amount of content - their length - limits what they can accomplish, like short stories are limited. Second, the medium hasn't had time to mature as an artform; novels and film, for example, were both around for a long time before there was much great art.