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Text is mightier than the Metaverse. Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat b
by dandotway 5y ago
Text is mightier than the Metaverse.
Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The Metaverse will be programmed with text.
The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
When journalists ultimately write its obituary, they will write text.
- laurent92 5y ago> News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. Try prefixing text with 15 lines of advertising text that you must read, and people will prefer video quickly. In the current world, I don’t click on 30s video quotes because it is prefixed by 30s of ads.
- fredophile 5y ago> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear. How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.
- kingkawn 5y agoAfter how it ended I’d argue that they are way less popular now than any of the books
- finebalance 5y agoIt's kind of astounding how rapidly the series has disappeared from the mainstream. Couldn't have bungled it up worse had they tried.
- stuart78 5y agoI think that happens to just about all Dramatic shows. Same for Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other popular shows. Without the scarcity of yore, we have a constant buffet of alternatives, so who has time to rewatch (or catch up). In contrast, The Office, Friends and Seinfeld are apparently still bringing people back, perhaps because it is comforting to spend time with those characters and the viewer doesn’t need to make a big commitment.
- ghaff 5y agoNot that I loved how it landed I think it’s more that GoT was about as close as we get to a cultural touchstone as you get these days. Which is a far smaller audience than prime time used to be. A hit show on HBO would probably be canceled on network TV with similar audience numbers. But the moment is over and now it’s just another show in a vast universe of streaming options.
- LegitShady 5y agoits like Disney Star Wars - even if you like star wars, knowing how badly it's been bungled makes putting the time into watching it again or being excited about it seem like waste of effort. The payoff isn't there.
- pezezin 5y agoThey recently started shooting the prequel... in my home town! I hope it's good, but in any case my friends and I will watch it for the lulz.
- DeusExMachina 5y agoI could not find much data but it seems that the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1], while the books sold 90 million copies [2]. Since I guess the latter are cumulative over all the five books, it looks like books and series have a similar performance. Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episod... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#cite_note-independent-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#cite_no... [3] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=bo_tt_tab#tabs https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=bo_tt_ta... [4] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arts-tolkien-novel-idUSL1626402420070416 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arts-tolkien-novel-idUSL1...
- capableweb 5y agoWhile this data is interesting, it doesn't say how many people watched or read something, only those who paid to watch/read something, which is very different. I've purchased all of the books you've mentioned, but watched the films/series via other means that won't show up in the statistics, and I'm not alone in doing so or vice-versa. Books like Lord of the Rings gets passed through generations and loaned around as well, so I'm sure the number of people who've read LotR is a lot higher than the number of people who bought the books.
- another_story 5y agoNot to mention libraries.
- hansel_der 5y agonot to dispute your point, but netflix is a library
- capableweb 5y ago
- snovv_crash 5y agoHow expensive was it to produce the movies compared to the books? What was the ROI as a ratio?
- unglaublich 5y agoThe books took one person a lifetime to create. The series took billions of dollars and hundreds of lifetimes, even though the story was already there. The books were extremely effective.
- noir_lord 5y agoBooks tap directly into the imagination in a way that films (very) rarely do. The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine. I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined. It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.
- MattRix 5y agoIf you see Dune in a theatre with good enough sound and screen (ex. IMAX), it’s an incredible experience in a way a book could not be. Not saying it’s “better”, it’s just different in a fundamentally incomparable way.
- abakker 5y agoThe movie is missing so much of the detail that made the book great, though. I agree, incomparable, really. IMO, the best movies are NOT adaptations.
- alternatetwo 5y agoThe best adaptations are short stories, like Predestination, from All you zombies. They also didn't meddle with the logic there, since the writers already found it perfect.
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoYeah, it's a lot easier to do a faithful 100-minute adaptation of a 50-page story than a 300-page book.
- imbnwa 5y agoThe Mist comes to mind, a novella originally IIRC
- 5y ago
- cblconfederate 5y agosure, for information density, text is always king. But real-time chatting is not dense, it s in fact very reduntant with lots of information being discarded left and right, and avatats can still text each other. The idea of 3d stuff is just an evolution of that imho, a messenger with extra stuff We have this stuff already btw, second life users do that every day, but Zuck didnt even mention it.
- ikr678 5y agoBecause acknowledging Second Life would mean acknowledging the appeal of the most established virtual reality is that you can be someone/something different, and that goes against Facebook's real name identification. Also, they probably want to keep the nsfw aspect synonymous with Second Life out of the discussion.
- tsimionescu 5y agoYou would have to be mad to associate your benad new vision of the future of computing with a failed 10 year old game.
- cblconfederate 5y ago20 year old. And hardly a failure, considering that most of the stuff he announced was created and tested there first. He s just copying concepts.
- Zanni 5y agoKids prefer messaging because it's asynchronous, not because they prefer text.
- veltas 5y agoAnd because they can do it discretely, i.e. in class or bed.
- Ekaros 5y agoNow here is free startup idea: Instant messaging of vines or tiktoks. Just send videos of your messages to your friends or groups. Maybe even try to replace twitter... Probably 3 different apps really...
- trthomps 5y agoYou mean Snapchat?
- mmmmmbop 5y agoSo, Snapchat?
- infinitezest 5y agoThis exists and it's called Marco Polo
- short12 5y agoThat honestly sounds incredibly awful. I would block those messages from even coming through. Ugh. I can't overemphasize how terrible that would be if it becomes standard
- mlindner 5y agoI have a much younger cousin who's in their teens. Teens of today prefer text messaging because they don't have to show their face. Even when my cousins video chat they don't like to show their face and will aim the camera in other directions despite being in video chat.
- makeitdouble 5y ago> Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. Kids massively play and pay for games, games are the core of the appstores. They also listen to music and watch crazy hours of youtube. Text won't die, but it's not the prime interface. Even texting is more and more sending gifs and stickers around.
- benjaminjosephw 5y agoText is definitely a more versatile, low-effort, high-value and ubiquitous medium that will never be beaten for human information exchange. It's perhaps not the best medium for all context but it is the best generic medium for interoperable information exchange (unix was right all along!). Entertainment is often more enjoyable with rich sensory experiences and some amount of novelty. People with great imaginations are probably the folk who experience books that way but, for everyone else, rich media provides more entertainment value than text alone. The Metaverse is entertainment. It might be great for parties, games and other virtual interactions/experiences but it's definitely more a medium for novelty and sensory excitement than for pure information exchange alone (obviously).
- agumonkey 5y agoI wouldn't describe it as low-effort / high-value, or at least I'd put the emphasis on density of information. We can embed concepts in a very few words, visual information adds a ton of data but not much information. I often like to compare the post web 2.0 era (ubiquitous, high bandwidth, highly lubricated UIs) with mailing lists (limited, slow, bare). People think more before chatting on MLs, their messages can be short but mean a lot, or can be long and tell even more. Video feels a bit like the former.. you get more data, it's more pleasing for a while, but it doesn't give much more. Sometimes visual / geometric media add some value (when balanced and tuned to massage viewers mental model) but often its just redundant fat.
- JohnFen 5y ago> I'd put the emphasis on density of information. So much this. That effect is why I cringe every time I'm presented with an instructional video instead of text -- videos waste a lot of time to give me the information that could usually have been done in a page or two of text.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rizky05 5y agoDon't worry, we will also use text in the metaverse
- Zenst 5y agoWhole aspect these forums have flourished without the need for GIF's, emotions and all other forms of media encapsulation, is textament(sic) too content over packaging.
- sneak 5y ago> Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. Well, there is that whole snapchat thing.
- typon 5y agoMost young people who I know use snapchat use the texting feature on it pretty heavily. It's usually one or two photos to initiate the communication and then texting to continue it.
- ianai 5y ago“News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.” I’m not sold on this. Twitter is more of a mechanism for group totalitarianism than productive conversation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dandotway 5y agoPerhaps because politics is more of a mechanism for group totalitarianism than productive governance.
- Snickety-Snake 5y agoRelevant: "Always Bet on Text (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001
- justapassenger 5y agoAnd that’s why text based games dominated the world and no one is playing 3D games?
- Dangeranger 5y agoCommunication and entertainment are fundamentally different things.
- MisterTea 5y agoHow did you conflate communication between people with entertainment?
- ncallaway 5y ago> Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups. > Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Applejinx 5y agoTwitter is a text based game, in a way.
- CRConrad 5y agoNo, lots more people want to drown out their thoughts than think any. What else is new?
- reaperducer 5y agoAlong those lines, I don't care how interesting the title, I don't click links to YouTube vlogs posted on HN. If you can't be bothered to write down your thoughts, they must not be worth very much.
- yoz-y 5y agoThat is odd. A well made video takes orders of magnitude more effort than writing it down. Already the first step of making a video is writing the script down and iterating over it.
- axby 5y agoBut the initial investment required to watch a new video seems much higher: it feels like you'd have to watch it for a minute or so to really tell if it's any good and interesting to you, but I can make the same decision for text articles typically in much less than that. (And as a bonus, I don't have to sit through ads or hear "hey everyone", "don't forget to like and subscribe", "thanks to so and so for sponsoring this video". But I agree with your comment, while also agreeing with part of the spirit of the parent comment. Of course videos can be high quality, and making a high quality video probably takes much more effort than making the same thing into an article.
- q-big 5y ago> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear. The reason: the movie is often the worse copy of the book. Very often, movies get made of successful and often well-written books. So, the movie has a high hurdle to overcome to be even better than the book. (if movies were made of "average" books, this would likely be different, but this typically makes no commercial sense) On the other hand, literary offsprings (books based on and book spin-offs) are created from movie. These are, by the same reason, also typically worse than the movie.
- melomal 5y agoRemember Clubhouse? The $1bn Unicorn? Basically defunct now because people just defaulted back to passive aggressive typing.
- tjpnz 5y agoOr people just tired of all the snobs and pseudo intellectuals that had infested the platform and went back to their podcasts?
- am_lu 5y agoclubhouse has some unique market niches. Japanese ex-pat community, not really young ladies talking too each other around the world. Source: mrs wife, she has some "friends" around, listens it a lot, sometimes chats, sometimes gets little parcels sent from somewhere (Germany, Israel, Russia), some biscuits or local snacks inside.
- nsa_magic 5y agoYou ignore Youtube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, the entire gaming industry, the entire entertainment industry, the entire sports industry, I can go on.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoBooks as art take on the order of 10-100 hours, that is 1-2 orders of magnitude longer than the movies. This is why longer series are so popular, see: the Mandalorian It’s possible that as digital tools make it easier to make hundreds of hours of high quality content the ‘metaverse’ experience will become on par with the books.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- axby 5y agoWhile ultimately text content will always have a place, I do worry that video content could become way more popular, and text content much less so: simply because advertisers have a big incentive to push video content (bigger ads, more front and centre), and content producers are usually going to cater to the advertisers (unless people start paying for content more often). I don't see the appeal of TikTok (though I haven't tried it), I much prefer skimming text than skimming through videos (let alone with sound). But it is incredibly popular, and a ton of people find video content addictive. To my surprise it isn't just popular among youth, but I have older smart senior software engineer friends (who didn't grow up surrounded by optimally addictive apps) who say it's amazing, at least once you let the algorithm converge. So we shouldn't just assume that text will always prevail. Look at other seemingly amazing technologies/mediums that largely died or were at least hidden from the mainstream due to business reasons. These may be weak examples (I just woke up) but hopefully the gist of it is clear: * RSS? * I remember hearing that the alternatives to VHS and maybe blu-ray were technically superior but lost due to business reasons. * Maybe Windows too, beat out technically superior alternatives because of business reasons * Google+ apparently had a number of innovative features (like "circles"), but I barely know anyone who used it over facebook back in the day) Now of course text content couldn't just "die", but perhaps the main companies hosting content could give strong incentives to produce video content instead of text, and control what the vast majority of people see. From what I understand: content producing companies (like CollegeHumor) that were super popular before Facebook were basically screwed when Facebook was the main way that people discovered content. Even though it was still possible to visit their website, the majority (or at least many) people would just watch whatever videos showed up on their facebook feed, so CollegeHumor took a huge hit. (I think that was what I read a while ago, anyway. I forget a lot of details so please correct me or add more information) That scares the hell out of me: if a few tech companies ultimately control what the majority of people see, the content producers are basically chosen by the tech companies' algorithms. And the algorithms are ultimately going to optimize for profit, and not "quality content" or even "content that isn't harmful". (And more relevant to the comment I'm responding to: favouring ad heavy video over text). Potential up side: maybe it will be easier to filter out crap content if it all goes to video.
- charcircuit 5y ago
- atoav 5y agoI am a huge fan of text. As someone who has a master of arts I like pictures as well, obviously but there lies a certain genius within the expressiveness, clarity, composability, transformability, movability that comes with any text based process. Sure it shifts parts of the cognitive load to those writing or reading it, but in my eyes if there is any meaningful societal future text would play a central role. This is why I am no friend of the direction IT is taking nowadays. Although I didn't grew up with it myself, I wished people would have to learn working with a unix shell and programming languages just like you learn how to read and write. Learning to read and write is certainly not easy, but it really pays off if a society teaches its members how to do it no theless. In my eyes learning text based computing is just the same
- polio 5y ago> The Metaverse will be programmed with text. Suggesting that a metaverse in VR is plausible has nothing to do with eradicating text. There will be plenty of it in there. People will not be welded into headsets and have their books torched, as the Nostradamuses want us to think.
- slightwinder 5y ago> Text is mightier than the Metaverse. "A Picture says more than a thousand words." > Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well. > We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok... > News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. No, they do not? Some do, not all. If anything, the people reading tweets are the one you should trust the least. But that's for reasons of twitter, not text. > Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear. Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience. And on the other side, pictures also demands more work to let them shine. This would be an actual valid argument which will make metaverse problematic. There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash. > The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text. More like diagrams.
- opyate 5y agoI'm waiting for the day I can Ctrl-F on a Youtube video, say a key phrase, then the video jumps to the point where someone says the key phrase (or the video is about the key phrase). Meanwhile, text is so much more easily consumable. (Youtube Premium junkie here, BTW.)
- THATthereguy 5y agoNot directly related to YouTube, but I found a site called playphrase.me that will let you search for text able show your clips on movies where that text is said. I love it and this comment reminded me.
- slightwinder 5y agoTechnically, you can already do that today, as many youtube-videos have now autogenerated subtitles. Someone just need to build a tool utilizing them for this. Though, to be fair, the quality of those subtitles is sometimes a bit questionable. And they are not available in all languages. Especially if you want a different language then what is spoken in the video. But yes, of course this is another case in which text can shine because of its weakness. Simplicity can be beneficial.
- caddybox 5y agoThis feels like something that would come out of GPT-3!
- amelius 5y agoPerhaps because we don't have the right filters or avatars yet.
- go_elmo 5y agoHave you tried a vr headset? The sense of presence is powerful and might be the base of something big. Try before you judge.
- tim333 5y agoIn the beginning was the word.