Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The Metaverse will be programmed with text.
The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
When journalists ultimately write its obituary, they will write text.
> Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well.
> We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
> News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
No, they do not? Some do, not all. If anything, the people reading tweets are the one you should trust the least. But that's for reasons of twitter, not text.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience. And on the other side, pictures also demands more work to let them shine. This would be an actual valid argument which will make metaverse problematic. There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash.
> The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
I'm waiting for the day I can Ctrl-F on a Youtube video, say a key phrase, then the video jumps to the point where someone says the key phrase (or the video is about the key phrase).
Meanwhile, text is so much more easily consumable. (Youtube Premium junkie here, BTW.)
Technically, you can already do that today, as many youtube-videos have now autogenerated subtitles. Someone just need to build a tool utilizing them for this. Though, to be fair, the quality of those subtitles is sometimes a bit questionable. And they are not available in all languages. Especially if you want a different language then what is spoken in the video.
But yes, of course this is another case in which text can shine because of its weakness. Simplicity can be beneficial.
They do this already. Some google search results will present a snippet of a Youtube video most relevant. Here's an example of a search query with such a snippet.
There are coursera lectures that actually work like this with full transcripts where you can search the text and clicking on the text takes you to the correct part of the video.
Sometimes when I search for an exercise on google, it will link me to a segment of a video with the appropriate exercise. So I guess google is on this.
Not directly related to YouTube, but I found a site called playphrase.me that will let you search for text able show your clips on movies where that text is said. I love it and this comment reminded me.
>>Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well.
It is indeed async & persistent, but those are not it's only strengths.
Text is ALSO highly searchable, and skim-able. I can search and jump right to the point I want, I can rapidly skim through parts I'm not so interested in and then focus and examine deeply and repeatedly the part that is of interest. Or, I can read it sequentially like a video/audio stream. In contrast, searching vid/audio is cumbersome, frustrating, and time-wasting at best.
Text is ALSO has a much higher information density than video, except for situations where moving pictures actually add to the information, as in video of a specifi event, mechanism working, etc. Most of the time, just listening to a talking head is far slower, and harder to remember than reading (where I can read rapidly forward, then back and re-read key bits, often without even thinking about it; w/ video, I'd need to interrupt the train of thought, hit [back], try to go back just the right number of seconds, then re-view, etc. - useful ONLY when the vid id of an event, not of just reading info.)
Moreover, text is more direct. To make a really good video usually requires a well-thought out script written in advance, from which one reads - I'd rather just read the script. And when it is something like an interview with a noted expert, I'd usually rather just read the transcript, for the above reasons.
You actually highlight the problem with video:
>>There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash.
Absolutely correct - most of it will be rushed out without the solid base of a test-based script and screenplay, which would in most cases be preferable...
Text really is —still— one of the key defining inventions of humanity, and I have no expectations that a "metaverse" will beat it soon. (Now if it can start reading text directly out of my brain without typing/dictating, and I can edit it on the fly — THAT will be really something...)
Text is far superior to video for conveying (most types of) information. It's not so great for building individual relationships. An ideal VR metaverse would be focused on the latter.
Often, people's considered thoughts will give a better connection than their offhand comments. Many a great romance or friendship has grown and been preserved by handwritten letters sent via the post.
In thinking about my last comment, what I'd really want in a metaverse is the ability for the participants' thoughts to be scanned, textualized, and edited via thought transfer, then displayed above/beside them, so we can both read and speak about things in real-time, at the speed of thought/reading, instead of speech. It could get really interesting...
It is sooo common to feel that we can't communicate nearly as fast as we think, even when the lot of us are very fast talkers...
If I give you a thousand word essay, good luck crating an image that conveys the same information. I mean you could photograph the essay, but then we're back to text again.
Text is mightiest; but you should use "video" instead of "image". Video is the natural visual medium to convey an essay, not a still image.
Let's consider a philosophical essay as something highly abstract, then its video counterpart would be mostly audio (transcript of the essay). In other cases, e.g. a scientific report, video might be easier content to consume but producing a proper video for that take much more time than writing a 6-page text. The video as the visual medium counterpart has lot more complexity and not always worth it.
Consider a presentation: text+visual+audio, it's more capable to convey the essence of the material. So all these boils down to what is the perfect combination for a particular use case. From short to long image/video, from Instagram, TikTok to YouTube, each multimedia choice lead to different use cases.
And text is the mightiest not because that it necessarily convey better, but because it can:
1. produced/maintained/transferred with the least complexity than others, it's much more efficient representation in this regard.
2. It can represent with most rigorous detail (e.g. consider a math paper)
3. It has the easiest retrieval and mining
4. BUT It usually needs more effort to consume
It's always nice to choose the proper combination of text+visual+audio+interaction. AR/VR only add one ingredient (if you consider it a new one) to this whole toolbox we as humankind are building. It makes our communication much more complex, and much more powerful. However, at the end, the most basic one which is text will remain the mightiest. We may need to wait for some bizarre telepathy technology between brains to change the status quo.
Your point ironically works directly against you here. Your point is basically "describe an image without using images", it demonstrates how constrained the utility of images is, basically only useful for their own sake.
I don't consider text a weak medium, but would contend that the strength of the medium is its efficacy in conveying a portrayed concept.
In that sense, text is a strong medium for certain things (like a dataset) and bad for others (like conveying the beauty of a camera pan within a movie that conveys a miniature story).
I've noticed that fanboyism of old AND new technologies is often only grabbing half of the story. We still use "obsolete" technologies, since none of them ever become completely bereft of potential purpose with the development of new technologies, even when they become hipster-niche-chic. Horses or tape storage, for example.
One bit: “the book was better” crowd are a small vocal minority of the people who watch the book inspired movie. Most moviegoers will never have read the book.
Can you name some works first conceived as books where the movie adaptation was superior?
Reading for pleasure requires an individual with a greater degree of imagination and intelligence vs staring at a screen and often takes a much greater time investment and yet often offers a broader set of experiences because one needn't convince someone to invest 100s of millions animating fantastic scenes if one author sitting at a typewriter or a keyboard can produce as vivid an experience in the mind of the reader.
Movies financial and runtime constraints often rob the source material of much of its richness and the description of the players emotions, thoughts, and state of mind is harder to communicate aptly without seeming clunky and expositional.
I’m saying yes, we hear lots of people say “the book was better” and in most cases that’s true. However, most people will never have read the books movies based on books were based on, so it’s kind of a pointless Pyrrhic argument.
That said, many will claim that The Godfather movie was better than the book -I never read the book, so I cannot offer an opinion.
But, yes, normally, in order to capture the nuance and details of a book you’d need a multi part series.
One of those two is bullshit (and always has been)... And it's not the first one.
> > We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
> I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
And yet, here you are discussing this -- not on youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
> > Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
> Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience.
This was, by my count, the third time in your comment you claimed that "text is the weaker medium" -- each time in response to an example illustrating how text is superior. So basically, your definition of "weaker" is... What the rest of the world would call stronger, right?
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.
I could not find much data but it seems that the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1], while the books sold 90 million copies [2]. Since I guess the latter are cumulative over all the five books, it looks like books and series have a similar performance.
Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.
While this data is interesting, it doesn't say how many people watched or read something, only those who paid to watch/read something, which is very different.
I've purchased all of the books you've mentioned, but watched the films/series via other means that won't show up in the statistics, and I'm not alone in doing so or vice-versa.
Books like Lord of the Rings gets passed through generations and loaned around as well, so I'm sure the number of people who've read LotR is a lot higher than the number of people who bought the books.
Uh, no? A library lends out books/media to people at no cost. How is Netflix, a publicly traded for-profit company, anything like a non-profit, usually government-owned library?
Again, no. Try writing Netflix and ask if they can add something to their "library", they won't. Libraries adds stuff based on user requests all the time, and even have 3rd party loans so you can borrow books from another library via the one you have access to.
All Netflix cares about is profits. All libraries care about is sharing. They are two very different entities except for the fact that they deal with media. They are more different than they are similar.
The library costs you money too, in the form of taxes. At least Netflix only charges its actual users. I'm forced to pay for the two public libraries in my town even though I've never been in them.
Your taxes also maintain roads you never drive on. And yet you still benefit because the trucks that supply your grocery store or the plumber coming to fix your sink might use those roads. That’s the point of taxes: we all pay in, and we all reap the rewards.
Sure, it meets the technical definition, but not the colloquial usage of the word. No one says let's check out the library and means Netflix. You may hear the “Netflix library” mentioned from time to time, but it has a different connotation as far as use.
On the contrary, edanm's premise is that the number of viewers cited in the parent comment was the number of viewers on the day of release, and the number of book sales mentioned was cumulative. If that premise holds, then probabilistically speaking it'd be very safe to say that more people have consumed the visual media than the literary media.
> the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1], while the books sold 90 million copies [2]
Isn't this viewers in one country (USA), versus books sold worldwide?
> Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.
Viewerships in Box-Office are limited to a specific timeframe and location. They do not include television, private viewing on streaming-services/DVD/etc., later screenings in cinemas around the world. And the movies only exist for 20 years, while the booksales are from 3x that timeframe.
And finally, those are exceptional successful books and franchises. What about an average book? How many people have seen Forest Gump and how many actually read the book even decades later after the initial hype?
Books tap directly into the imagination in a way that films (very) rarely do.
The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine.
I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined.
It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.
If you see Dune in a theatre with good enough sound and screen (ex. IMAX), it’s an incredible experience in a way a book could not be. Not saying it’s “better”, it’s just different in a fundamentally incomparable way.
The best adaptations are short stories, like Predestination, from All you zombies. They also didn't meddle with the logic there, since the writers already found it perfect.
But I think that's the point. In a book you don't "see" the visual effects, you just know that they happened.
When you watch a movie, your eyes and ears has to collect the information, and some part of your brain has to turn that into a log of events. You have to do a lot of work to do to keep up with whats going on.
When you are reading, you don't need to do all that work, the author has already decided what is important.
I think the two mediums aren't really comparable, they both just happen to be good ways to tell stories.
Not that I loved how it landed I think it’s more that GoT was about as close as we get to a cultural touchstone as you get these days. Which is a far smaller audience than prime time used to be. A hit show on HBO would probably be canceled on network TV with similar audience numbers.
But the moment is over and now it’s just another show in a vast universe of streaming options.
I think that happens to just about all Dramatic shows. Same for Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other popular shows. Without the scarcity of yore, we have a constant buffet of alternatives, so who has time to rewatch (or catch up). In contrast, The Office, Friends and Seinfeld are apparently still bringing people back, perhaps because it is comforting to spend time with those characters and the viewer doesn’t need to make a big commitment.
its like Disney Star Wars - even if you like star wars, knowing how badly it's been bungled makes putting the time into watching it again or being excited about it seem like waste of effort. The payoff isn't there.
The books took one person a lifetime to create.
The series took billions of dollars and hundreds of lifetimes, even though the story was already there.
The books were extremely effective.
Text is definitely a more versatile, low-effort, high-value and ubiquitous medium that will never be beaten for human information exchange. It's perhaps not the best medium for all context but it is the best generic medium for interoperable information exchange (unix was right all along!).
Entertainment is often more enjoyable with rich sensory experiences and some amount of novelty. People with great imaginations are probably the folk who experience books that way but, for everyone else, rich media provides more entertainment value than text alone.
The Metaverse is entertainment. It might be great for parties, games and other virtual interactions/experiences but it's definitely more a medium for novelty and sensory excitement than for pure information exchange alone (obviously).
I wouldn't describe it as low-effort / high-value, or at least I'd put the emphasis on density of information. We can embed concepts in a very few words, visual information adds a ton of data but not much information.
I often like to compare the post web 2.0 era (ubiquitous, high bandwidth, highly lubricated UIs) with mailing lists (limited, slow, bare). People think more before chatting on MLs, their messages can be short but mean a lot, or can be long and tell even more. Video feels a bit like the former.. you get more data, it's more pleasing for a while, but it doesn't give much more. Sometimes visual / geometric media add some value (when balanced and tuned to massage viewers mental model) but often its just redundant fat.
So much this. That effect is why I cringe every time I'm presented with an instructional video instead of text -- videos waste a lot of time to give me the information that could usually have been done in a page or two of text.
> Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The reason: the movie is often the worse copy of the book. Very often, movies get made of successful and often well-written books. So, the movie has a high hurdle to overcome to be even better than the book.
(if movies were made of "average" books, this would likely be different, but this typically makes no commercial sense)
On the other hand, literary offsprings (books based on and book spin-offs) are created from movie. These are, by the same reason, also typically worse than the movie.
I have a much younger cousin who's in their teens. Teens of today prefer text messaging because they don't have to show their face. Even when my cousins video chat they don't like to show their face and will aim the camera in other directions despite being in video chat.
This is because while we chat with people in-person, we're not as aware that people are looking at us. We feel more free to react with body language, or expression. We can interrupt without the awkward, "Oh, I'm sorry, you go first". The communication via Zoom/Google is very synchronous. It's so unnatural to the point that most hate it. I agree, my mom loves seeing my kids on video though.
I like them for doctor appointments and basically hate them for absolutely everything else. Job interviews, meetings, family things. They are all a terrible experiences
Virtual medicine is the one thing that is really useful because the majority are of doctor visits are a waste of time and I go to the doctor a lot, if not once a week sometimes 3 in a single week. That doesn't even count the 2 times a week I usually have to go for a blood draw. Outside of the lab I honestly can't recall the last time in person part being necessary
That wouldn't necessarily be easy in the long run. Look at how many people hate Facebook but use it anyway because they're essentially socially forced to.
Now here is free startup idea:
Instant messaging of vines or tiktoks. Just send videos of your messages to your friends or groups. Maybe even try to replace twitter... Probably 3 different apps really...
That honestly sounds incredibly awful. I would block those messages from even coming through. Ugh. I can't overemphasize how terrible that would be if it becomes standard
clubhouse has some unique market niches. Japanese ex-pat community, not really young ladies talking too each other around the world.
Source: mrs wife, she has some "friends" around, listens it a lot, sometimes chats, sometimes gets little parcels sent from somewhere (Germany, Israel, Russia), some biscuits or local snacks inside.
Along those lines, I don't care how interesting the title, I don't click links to YouTube vlogs posted on HN. If you can't be bothered to write down your thoughts, they must not be worth very much.
That is odd. A well made video takes orders of magnitude more effort than writing it down. Already the first step of making a video is writing the script down and iterating over it.
But the initial investment required to watch a new video seems much higher: it feels like you'd have to watch it for a minute or so to really tell if it's any good and interesting to you, but I can make the same decision for text articles typically in much less than that. (And as a bonus, I don't have to sit through ads or hear "hey everyone", "don't forget to like and subscribe", "thanks to so and so for sponsoring this video".
But I agree with your comment, while also agreeing with part of the spirit of the parent comment. Of course videos can be high quality, and making a high quality video probably takes much more effort than making the same thing into an article.
sure, for information density, text is always king.
But real-time chatting is not dense, it s in fact very reduntant with lots of information being discarded left and right, and avatats can still text each other. The idea of 3d stuff is just an evolution of that imho, a messenger with extra stuff
We have this stuff already btw, second life users do that every day, but Zuck didnt even mention it.
Because acknowledging Second Life would mean acknowledging the appeal of the most established virtual reality is that you can be someone/something different, and that goes against Facebook's real name identification.
Also, they probably want to keep the nsfw aspect synonymous with Second Life out of the discussion.
I am a huge fan of text. As someone who has a master of arts I like pictures as well, obviously but there lies a certain genius within the expressiveness, clarity, composability, transformability, movability that comes with any text based process.
Sure it shifts parts of the cognitive load to those writing or reading it, but in my eyes if there is any meaningful societal future text would play a central role.
This is why I am no friend of the direction IT is taking nowadays. Although I didn't grew up with it myself, I wished people would have to learn working with a unix shell and programming languages just like you learn how to read and write.
Learning to read and write is certainly not easy, but it really pays off if a society teaches its members how to do it no theless. In my eyes learning text based computing is just the same
> News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Try prefixing text with 15 lines of advertising text that you must read, and people will prefer video quickly. In the current world, I don’t click on 30s video quotes because it is prefixed by 30s of ads.
Most young people who I know use snapchat use the texting feature on it pretty heavily. It's usually one or two photos to initiate the communication and then texting to continue it.
Whole aspect these forums have flourished without the need for GIF's, emotions and all other forms of media encapsulation, is textament(sic) too content over packaging.
Books as art take on the order of 10-100 hours, that is 1-2 orders of magnitude longer than the movies.
This is why longer series are so popular, see: the Mandalorian
It’s possible that as digital tools make it easier to make hundreds of hours of high quality content the ‘metaverse’ experience will become on par with the books.
Suggesting that a metaverse in VR is plausible has nothing to do with eradicating text. There will be plenty of it in there. People will not be welded into headsets and have their books torched, as the Nostradamuses want us to think.
While ultimately text content will always have a place, I do worry that video content could become way more popular, and text content much less so: simply because advertisers have a big incentive to push video content (bigger ads, more front and centre), and content producers are usually going to cater to the advertisers (unless people start paying for content more often).
I don't see the appeal of TikTok (though I haven't tried it), I much prefer skimming text than skimming through videos (let alone with sound). But it is incredibly popular, and a ton of people find video content addictive. To my surprise it isn't just popular among youth, but I have older smart senior software engineer friends (who didn't grow up surrounded by optimally addictive apps) who say it's amazing, at least once you let the algorithm converge.
So we shouldn't just assume that text will always prevail. Look at other seemingly amazing technologies/mediums that largely died or were at least hidden from the mainstream due to business reasons. These may be weak examples (I just woke up) but hopefully the gist of it is clear:
* RSS?
* I remember hearing that the alternatives to VHS and maybe blu-ray were technically superior but lost due to business reasons.
* Maybe Windows too, beat out technically superior alternatives because of business reasons
* Google+ apparently had a number of innovative features (like "circles"), but I barely know anyone who used it over facebook back in the day)
Now of course text content couldn't just "die", but perhaps the main companies hosting content could give strong incentives to produce video content instead of text, and control what the vast majority of people see. From what I understand: content producing companies (like CollegeHumor) that were super popular before Facebook were basically screwed when Facebook was the main way that people discovered content. Even though it was still possible to visit their website, the majority (or at least many) people would just watch whatever videos showed up on their facebook feed, so CollegeHumor took a huge hit. (I think that was what I read a while ago, anyway. I forget a lot of details so please correct me or add more information)
That scares the hell out of me: if a few tech companies ultimately control what the majority of people see, the content producers are basically chosen by the tech companies' algorithms. And the algorithms are ultimately going to optimize for profit, and not "quality content" or even "content that isn't harmful". (And more relevant to the comment I'm responding to: favouring ad heavy video over text). Potential up side: maybe it will be easier to filter out crap content if it all goes to video.
To clarify my comment: obviously text will never be "obsolete". But I worry that some day when you search for something like "how do you reverse a linked list", the most popular results will no longer be well thought out articles, perhaps with good use of pictures, and maybe animations when necessary. Perhaps in the future the most popular results could be a video, perhaps also well done, but advertised with clickbait and constant "like and subscribe" and "sponsored by <some product>".
>And the algorithms are ultimately going to optimize for profit, and not "quality content" or even "content that isn't harmful".
If people value quality content, quality content will be rewarded. If people don't care it won't. Some people just want to have a laugh and don't care about the production value of the video.
I hope so, and perhaps to some extent quality content always will be rewarded in some circles of the internet. But I worry about the vast majority just falling prey to whatever is most convenient. Maybe it will always be possible to have "traditional" websites, but if only something like 0.1% of the population visits them, and the rest just mindlessly scroll through their Facebook feed or whatever the "metaverse" is supposed to be, then that seems like a problem.
I have never tried to make money producing content on the internet. But I have found a few good content producers who make podcasts and post them to YouTube. I wish that they would also post transcripts and have an RSS feed, but they don't really have any incentive to do that. And I can't blame them: I don't think I would really pay any extra for it. And unless there are better content producers who show up and do those things, I'll probably still keep watching the same podcasts on YouTube.
So I am concerned that all the best content producers just doing whatever will make them money, and:
* ultimately they will probably produce content and host it with a big company.
* And that big company will probably do whatever it can to maximize profits
* (and presumably content providers will typically favour the company that pays them the best).
* And I worry that video content can make way, way more money than text, at least for certain content types.
Certainly I'm probably overstating the issues, but I think there's some truth to this. Look at what happens when you look up cooking recipes on the internet: you almost always get a big article and a bunch of garbage that no one wants. I think I read somewhere that they do that because a recipe can't be copyrighted without an article. If that's true, why isn't there a nice clean recipe site that doesn't have all the garbage in it? Perhaps even with a nifty database where I can filter based on ingredients and stuff that I have? I think the answer is that (#1) I don't look for new recipes that often, and (#2) I am willing to tolerate skimming through some garbage on the rare occasions that I do.
Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The Metaverse will be programmed with text.
The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
When journalists ultimately write its obituary, they will write text.