Comment by tetek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetek | Hacker News Reader

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The first comment is interesting:

"Send me a link to a news story that turns out to be a video, or an audio file, and I’ll close it unconsumed: I haven’t got that kind of time. Send me a transcript: I’ll finish reading in half the time it would take me to passively sit there while it played, and I’ll more clearly remember it."

The author is ok with sitting and staring at the article because it's faster. What he misses is that it forces you to actually be in a position / context where you can read from the screen.

Personally I have been giving a lot of though about balancing how I consume content. Text vs audio. Walking / exercising or whatever instead of reading.

I don't believe we should optimise on "time to consume" but rather "healthiness of consume".

>Personally I have been giving a lot of though about balancing how I consume content.

Depending on the content I think text can still be a pretty good bet. Using a screen reader or assistive features on devices can allow you to have an article written in text read aloud to you. I've seen lots of setups too where people will save articles and have them processed to create audio files that they listen to on their runs or whatever.

I agree. Text-to-speech falls into my category of audio, as it frees your eyes.

Actually I've wrote about couple days ago: https://audiobased.app/articles/screen-time-and-headphones-t...

btw. I would be happy to learn what setups have you seen

The balanced information diet is interesting.

It's frustrating that although so much more content is publicly accessible for free today, I find on the whole that information density has decreased, probably due to advertising as monetization.

I prefer text because I can skim to the important parts and jump through links. Audio and Video need better methods for this.

If we could summarize information better, in text, audio, video, etc. I think the internet would be more useful and people would be able to communicate more effectively. We need publicly accessible channels of higher information density.

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