Text Is King

The reason video is winning is because you can make a living on video advertising. It's not really possible in this day to make a living on writing, outside of specific niches. So people who are good at writing use that skill to make video scripts, not blogs or books.

Text is searchable, skippable, scrollable, compact, transmissible, and accessible in a way that audio and video have never managed to be.

I would do more video, but video editing is really difficult.

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.

Text is my favourite minimalistic medium. I keep a minimum eye on regular news through teletext and tech news via Slashdot and here because there are barely any distractions from the core content.

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).

In an LLM world text will also be is king.

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.

Not all reading is the same. In other words, I wish this article had differentiated between different types of reading. For example, I read that many young adults have picked up reading "new adult" genre books. They enjoy the physical experience of an analog medium and consume one edition after another of popular series. This sounds fine at first, but the content is problematic. These books are not literature, and they may convey problematic views of behavior. For example, they may perpetuate outdated views of relationships between men and women, portraying them as unequal and reproducing clichéd stereotypes from the last millennium.

In short, the article focuses only on the amount of reading, but the content is also important. This should be part of the equation.

Another advantage of text over the long-term: it is accessible for discussion.

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.

As I counter claim to the one that today is more recorded than ever, one could suggest that these recordings are not guaranteed to last long, not even the span of one lifetime.

>> Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought.

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)