Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

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This and the most recent hbomberguy video (4 hrs about plagiarism) is a perfect microcosm of the issue, actually: The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to.

You can spend a year and some change writing a book and it will die in obscurity, then some youtuber will read your book word for word into a camera in a weekend and make millions of dollars. A text article that takes 20 minutes to read will make all of $30 in ad revenue. A podcast episode will have a $300 sponsor spot at the front and back. A youtube video can make tens of thousands of dollars in that runtime. If you publish to a paywalled site, hold on, dont you know that information needs to be free? Here's an archive link.

You can browse a website for some tech product and learn absolutely nothing about it. They aren't capable of describing it in text, and most of their customers aren't able to read anyways. Contact us so we can read the written script at you.

I'm in IT consulting.... every new batch of noobs has someone who tries to do everything in chat and email. If you start booking meetings and making phone calls, you will be three times as productive. Your tasks will not be [pending customer] EVER, all your deadlines will be clean, the clients will praise your communications, and you'll get promoted at your year 1 review instead of year 2.

support your favorite writers, friends.

It's all very frustrating if you're a very pragmatic and detail oriented person, but I guess it makes sense.

Humans have only been reading and writing for about 6000 years (and mass literacy has only existed for a few hundred years).

Compare that to a 200k+ year evolutionary history of verbal and face-to-face communication.

So maybe it's understandable if most people prefer the latter.

I never thought about it like that... And to think, I learned this by...reading.

> This and the most recent hbomberguy video (4 hrs about plagiarism) is a perfect microcosm of the issue, actually: The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to.

I think long form essays are better done as a video, actually.

If I'm going to absorb 4 hours of content, then 4 hours is a lot of time to dedicate. A video playing while I do the laundry is a lot more doable than trying to read at the same time.

And if you're doing some sort of in-deep analysis, then a video allows for very seamless diagrams, screenshots, and video excerpts.

Different mediums have different tradeoffs. Not everything is best as a webpage.

> I think long form essays are better done as a video, actually. If I'm going to absorb 4 hours of content, then 4 hours is a lot of time to dedicate. A video playing while I do the laundry is a lot more doable than trying to read at the same time.

Yeah, but the difference is that it takes me 15 minutes tops to read the essay, versus 4 hours for that video. Give me text any day of the week - I don't want to spend hours listening to someone talk when I can absorb the same communication 10x faster in text form.

10x faster is a huge exaggeration. Average speaking speed is 150 WPM, while average reading speed is 300 WPM. If you watch/listen at 1.5-2x speed, which many people do these days, we're only talking ~10-20% slower on average.

I would agree that reading is better for things that I know I will want to read. But there is a finite amount of attention in a human lifespan. There are many things I know I wouldn't want to spend my reading time on, but which I would happily throw on at times when reading would be impossible, like doing chores, exercising, or driving. Audio makes it possible to learn more things in the same amount of time.

It's not a huge exaggeration. I'm speaking from experience of how quickly I can process the written word versus a video.

For that to be true you'd have to be reading text at 2000 WPM and retaining as much information as you would from watching a video at 200 WPM. That would imply reading the average New Yorker article (~6000 words) in 3 minutes. Count me skeptical.

Generally anything over 700 WPM is considered skimming, not reading. There's very little evidence that anyone can read above 1000 WPM without severe loss of comprehension, except in the top percentiles of competitive speed readers. Even they are only achieving 50-60% comprehension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

Shouldn't there be reading avatars that do this? Do those not exist? Seems like there's a huge market being missed - in both designing avatars with accents, inflections, and personalities, and the writers being able to make money by providing those avatars - which they themselves may have created - content to read.

EDIT: has anyone looked into doing something like this?

There are definitely AI-narrated ebooks on the market right now. There is definitely an initial ick factor, but if you can make it through the first ten minutes you will acclimate to it.

I actually don't think there is a technology constraint at play. Kindles can already TTS anything and good AI narration is just a step up from that. 'reading avatars' will surely appear, but for now the sellers benefit from audiobooks being a separate product category.

> The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to.

Says a ton about the infantilization of adults.

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