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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

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

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It also fits in a handful of bytes or kilobytes what would take half a gigabyte to communicate in a video - sometimes making the difference if you have limited bandwidth or a cap on monthly traffic.

It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)

It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)

It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.

It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.

It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.

I could continue..

It's also the only medium where semantic reasoning and indexing at scale makes financial sense. I can run RAG over millions of text rows in Postgres for pennies, but the compute costs to process and embed video content are still prohibitive if you care about margins.

Amen. It's one real "downside" in this day and age is that it requires fairly undivided attention to be used... that aside, it's without question my favorite way to interact with information.

On that note, a big thank you to whoever added "read this page" to Safari on iOS! Being able to turn long form articles into ad-hoc podcasts has been a game changer for me.

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

That's just a very long way of saying it's difficult to monetise; it's why audio and video are preferred by producers of content.

Few people are interested in disseminating an idea, a concept, anything... they are interested in levelling up their fame and followers. Text is typically no good for that.

Video keeps blowing up because people want to connect with humans, and life is making that harder than it needs to be, so people are settling for these weird parasocial echo chambers. With the rise of AI, all text is suspect, and authenticity is king.

With the rise of AI, all audio, images and video is now also suspect.

True, but it's a lot harder to sneak those things than text. I've seen convincing Yanis Varifakis and Neil DeGrasse Tyson fakes, but even those don't survive any scrutiny. I'm sure that will change, and people will find new ways to signal authenticity in videos (leaving in fuckups is already in style).

Video to a lot of people is way more engaging than text. Also video is much more information dense. You can’t teach people to do things over purely text but show them a video and a 1000 different indescribables become instantly apparent.

That being said I love a good book over its movie version anyway. Because text is cheap there is so much more detail you can include. There is no way text can compete with the information density of a video.

Same thing if you swap "text" and "video". That's the point of different media - they differ along those dimensions. For example, "a picture is worth a thousand words" means that for some information it will be less compact to describe all the details of a video with words

While this is our course a good point, one extremely good part about text is that unless there given text is quite literally just plain text data, it's a lot easier to embed things like videos, pictures, audio, etc. into a textual medium especially when compared the other way around -- that is the fact that text in videos and pictures and so on tends to be quite limited when compared with the kind of "rich text" with the more audiovisual content added between blocks of text.

So one can use the thousand words of pictures while most content is textual, whereas the other way is significantly worse, since it of course lacks all the searchability et al.

You're discussing a mixed content document format, the original point was about some mythical benefits of text, explicitly vs video, which removes all the embeds from your document

I think it's a fair point. Text is easier to inject into other media.

Obviously there are some pieces of information that can be conveyed better with a picture or diagram - network connections, block graphs, etc. But as a general rule text is far more efficient for knowledge transfer.

If I have a text file and an audio file of the Great Gatsby, and I want do any of the following, then I'm going to use the text file:

* Find a particular quote

* Determine the number of times the word "Gatsby" is used

* Go back a few pages to remember exactly how something/someone was described

* Intermittently stop and compare with a supplementary file and/or write notes

* Find exactly where I was just before I fell asleep

* Get through it in 3 hours without rushing or missing bits

* Store it on a portable device along with thousands of other books

There is no such general rule, and humanity has always used various media, and for every biased test you come up with (frequency of a word in a text) you can just as well come up with a test that benefits the other medium (frequency of some sound in the audio book)

* Go back a few pages to remember exactly how something/someone was described

Or you don't forget how someone looks because a visual illustration is easier to remember

* Find exactly where I was just before I fell asleep

You can't, the book closed when you fell asleep and you forgot the bookmark . But when the phone fell it disconnected your headphones which stopped the playback.

It also the most portable - no codecs, no formats and standards; most English texts are just ASCII :)

How is ASCII not a standard?

And writing system don't fall out of nowhere, especially something as baroque as English which is all but phonetic.

ACII is a standard, but it's also standard. To a really high degree. 99% of webpages are UTF-8.

You could make a similar argument about, say, H.264, but the dominance is not as compelling and drops massively if you account for different container formats.

It’s also runnable (scripts), clickable (urls), and context-dependent, which makes it a nice UI.

Text has a bunch of second-order properties that only become obvious once you try to replace it

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