> reading more than a few paragraphs is rapidly becoming something akin to a chore for the majority of the population
I agree with that part. Some people will do anything to avoid reading articles: they watch shallow videos with 10 minutes of advertisement-friendly padding, they ask ChatGPT to hallucinate something. But I don't see that those people become better informed as a result of those tools. It's not working, it's only a simulation of knowledge acquisition.
> text-first platforms don't have a mass-market future
They never had. High-information media have always been a niche. It's when economic effects cause them to die out completely that we get a problem as a civilization.
> High-information media have always been a niche.
I don't doubt that, but how much of the text one reads daily can honestly be described as "high information"? In the normal course of reading things, one encounters a dozen ways in which long-form text can have abysmal information density.
Think of the stereotypical 5 paragraph article retelling a 1 paragraph press release. The official document containing pages of magical incantations designed to protect the writer from lawsuits. The "thinker" who has a single, simple idea, but is under contract to publish a book, not an article. The novel where nothing happens at all.
I agree with that part. Some people will do anything to avoid reading articles: they watch shallow videos with 10 minutes of advertisement-friendly padding, they ask ChatGPT to hallucinate something. But I don't see that those people become better informed as a result of those tools. It's not working, it's only a simulation of knowledge acquisition.
> text-first platforms don't have a mass-market future
They never had. High-information media have always been a niche. It's when economic effects cause them to die out completely that we get a problem as a civilization.