Don’t get me wrong, I like me some illustrations, photos, movies and music.

But text wins by a mile. Text is everything. My thoughts on this are quite absolute: text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.

Source: always bet on text

Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else. It is not a coincidence that all of literature and poetry, history and philosophy, mathematics, logic, programming and engineering rely on textual encodings for their ideas.

Source: graydon2 - always bet on text

Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

So this is my stance on text: always pick text first. As my old boss might have said: always bet on text. If you can use text for something, use it. It will very seldom let you down.

Source: graydon2 - always bet on text

I mostly agree with graydon2. However, I must acknowledge my bias as someone who fundamentally engages with text. It’s also prescient given how LLMs are currently bringing a resurgence of text.

That said, I want to call out that text while powerful and maybe even efficient is not the most engaging. It has a fundamentally limited audience. The case in point is how much more popular instagram, podcasts, youtube, netflix and tiktok are compared to any text based network.

There’s something to be said that text is malleable and precise. However, it’s not nearly as engaging as audio / video.