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Comment by MHordecki | Hacker News Reader

This is why text articles are superior to videos - or at least an accompanying transcript. Text is very hard to mess up.

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U+1F928 FACE WITH ONE EYEBROW RAISED

(Interpretation of that raised eyebrow: text isn’t hard to mess up. It is nonetheless more accessible in general, I just couldn’t leave the “text is very hard to mess up” unremarked on.)

Your counterpoint example to the proposition that text is hard to mess up is... a picture?

Edit: or have I completely missed the point of what you're saying!

It's a picture as much as any particular character in a font is, which is to say, it is. We're just very used to recognizing particular variations and combinations. There's one problem here that can be expressed in two ways, one is a proliferation of many new characters which people may not know the idiomatic usage of until they've encountered it in more context, the other is new combinations of known characters and words into a new idiomatic usage that has the same problem.

Consider that there was a time not so long ago where the vast majority of people didn't know what LOL meant and would be confused when encountering it. On the other end you could probably copy some heavy British slang in here right now and I would be very confused.

My response was simply a raised eyebrow. It wasn’t a counterpoint.

The fact that it was open to several additional interpretations merely suited my sense of humour.

I would disagree for research - text is usually in the form of papers. When you're writing a paper there's a strong incentive to make sound it as complicated as possible so very few papers are easy to follow.

Giving a presentation though there isn't such an incentive and the goal is more explicitly to explain your idea rather than to prove how clever it is. So I find presentations easier to follow in general (unless they are a bad speaker, of which there are unfortunately many).

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