8 ms·
Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
- Fraterkes 1y agoThey are called Medium posts because they are neither rare nor well-done.
- k0ngalion 1y ago[dead]
- spatley 1y agosavage
- mystraline 1y agoSoo.. Are you Stadtler or Waldorf? :D
- xnx 1y agoFor anyone unfamiliar with the quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/192273-television-is-often-called-a-medium-because-it-s-neither-rare https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/192273-television-is-often-...
- Scaevolus 1y agothe permutations are older than that https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/24/tv/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/24/tv/
- cowlby 1y agoNailed it
- dangus 1y agoI totally get the sentiment but I also see the flip side of it. I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary. I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes. I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
- Liftyee 1y agoI wonder if there is some conservation of effort / "vibe matching" at play. The classic books which another commenter mentioned probably had a lot of thought put into the choices made in each sentence, while shows/YouTube videos/cooking articles etc. today definitely have less effort per second given the amount of filler. If the creator has "diluted" the amount of thought and information per unit content I don't see why it shouldn't be compressed to reach previous "densities".
- nluken 1y agoThe author doesn't touch upon it here, but you can compress experiences along two axes: time, or what I'll call depth. This second type of compression drives the proliferation of overly long TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts. Most of these works are not meant to be watched or listened to alone, but instead present information of limited depth so people can digest them (or at least grasp them at surface level) using only a portion of their attention while they spend the other portion on something else. You may be spending more time on these kinds of things, but I would argue you're really not much better off than the person reading the headline, and at least giving it their full attention for a tiny bit of time.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago> I just…don’t have the time What super important thing would you be doing instead? People say they don't have time yet they blow tons of time aimlessly, myself included.
- lbrito 1y agoWow, that seems dreamy. Do you have kids, plural?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoIf you can spend time here on HN then you have free time?
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- pfisch 1y agoIts kind of ironic that I realized I was scrolling through this article for 30 seconds and just picking up the highlights.
- S11D336B 1y agoSo true
- stanleykm 1y agoI have never heard the term “compression culture” before, but speaking as a human experiencing the world in 2025 the tendency to compress things is certainly understandable. There is a contradiction or a tension betweem me as a worker and me as a consumer. Both of which have an insatiable apetite for my time. I don’t see how anyone can blame people for demanding brevity when time is the most precious resource we have any autonomy over.
- arnejenssen 1y agoThanks. I came to the a similar realization after trying Blinkist (book summaries) a few years ago. The summaries is no real substitute for reading the whole book.
- Liftyee 1y agoAlthough I thought the writer put forward an interesting point, ironically it felt like parts of the writing were overly flowery and repetitive. The paragraphs of similar metaphors got old quickly and started to feel GPT-like. I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
- colechristensen 1y agoOn one hand there's the lack of ability to process nuance, on the other there's nearly content free blathering for length. Most everything these days is 5 times as long as it needs to be because there's only that much actual information, not for lack of attention. >And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression. Here's the example: * the productive confusion... * the generative power ... * the transformative potential ... The author did not add anything, they just said the same thing three different ways instead of one. It continues throughout the essay. The reason everything is tl;dr is that it's too long and not worth reading, it's never worth reading. Write properly. Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth. If it's worth reading people will read it, if it's not they won't.
- brokencode 1y agoMost popular business books are like this. They have an idea that could fit in like a single chapter, but have to write a whole book about it to get paid, so they pad it with numerous anecdotes and their entire life’s story. I wish there were more reliable ways to monetize for authors between clickbait and published book. I know there are many paid Substacks and newsletters out there, some of which are really great. But I feel like you need a lot of luck or self promotion skills for this to work.
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- S11D336B 1y agoIt's a symptom of too much information. Each individual has to determine how to spend their time. A summary is one of the best tools we have now for doing that. Also, people are just lazy. We need better ways to filter. AI will be able to do this. Probably already can, someone just needs to build it and let people fine tune it to their tastes.
- raincole 1y ago> We've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency. The opposite is also true though. I'd argue it's even truer: we treat verbosity as depth, or at least as substance.
- badgersnake 1y agoFortunately, this isn't sustainable. It's now so trivial to generate as much verbosity as you want with an LLM, verbosity is no longer going to be seen as in indicator of quality or time spent.
- pasquinelli 1y agowhy not? because it's easy to doesn't mean it'll be seen a certain way, and "because it's easy to do" isn't actually an argument that it'll likely be seen a certain way.
- badgersnake 1y agoNobody is impressed by doing something easy, that's the point.
- pasquinelli 1y agosure they are, happens all the time
- raincole 1y agoPeople are very bad at judging what's easy and what's not. I've been programming for more than a decade. But if you show me a small tool/library and ask me whether it can be vibe coded, in one shot, by the publicly available LLM on the market, I genuinely can't tell.
- tinyhouse 1y agoI'd say it depends. If someone writes a research paper that can be 2 pages long but make it 8 pages cause that's the requirement, then I rather not spend my time reading all 8 pages and compress it just for the interesting bits. (this is true for almost every prompt engineering paper I've came across).
- daft_pink 1y ago[flagged]
- swyx 1y agoHere’s a quick rundown of Maalvika’s “Compression Culture Is Making You Stupid and Uninteresting”: - *The frustration with “TL;DR” mentality* Asking for summaries of profound experiences (like a life‑changing book) feels absurd—akin to bullet‑pointing a kiss or grief. - *Depth used to be unavoidable* - Pre‑print: people sat for oral sagas, religious services, apprenticeships—no fast‑forward - Medieval scribes literally meditated by copying texts by hand - Early universities thrived on communal, hours‑long disputations - *Modern shift: from wisdom to “takeaways”* Industrial efficiency and attention capitalism taught us that depth is “inefficient.” We’ve come to expect instant transformation and hacks in all areas—fitness, music, friendship—skipping the messy real work of mastery and character. - *Brain and body rewired* - We skim headlines and TikToks, mistaking sugar‑rush “knowledge” for real understanding - Continuous partial attention erodes our capacity for sustained focus and deep thinking - Neuroscience (e.g., Adam Gazzaley) shows heavy multitasking impairs high‑resolution thought circuits - *Attention economy fuels compression* Social platforms reward bite‑sized content; creators chase clicks with “5 key takeaways” instead of nuance. - *The sacrificial silencing of the pause* - “Um” and hesitation mark genuine struggle to articulate complex thought—but podcast tech strips them out - Heidegger’s “calculative” vs. “meditative” thinking: we’ve become calculation machines, not dwellers - *Bottom line* True growth—love, wisdom, skill—resists being Amazon‑Prime’d. You can’t shortcut the slow alchemy of becoming. —Personally, I can’t help but agree that our culture’s obsession with compression is making genuine insight a rare treat.
- jackbriody 1y ago[flagged]
- lbrito 1y agoThese "that seems like AI" comments are extremely interesting. Seems like the "singularity" crap is overhyped; we should be talking about ai-powered solipsism.
- ashwinsundar 1y agoAre comments like this productive? What is the point of just vaguely guessing that someone used AI to write something, with 0 proof other than some dim pattern-recognition comment? Is it possible that the opposite is true, ChatGPT was trained on writing (like this) and now mimics how good writers speak?
- catapart 1y agoThis seems far more likely than anything else. Every technique in the article is practically textbook "writing". Very little personality, but a whole lot of "academic phraseology". Comments like these are like hearing a baroque harpsichord and thinking "gee, that sounds just like my synthesizer..." Sweet, bro! Seems like a nice synth!
- cormorant 1y agoIt would be astonishingly hypocritical if the author (https://www.maalvikabhat.com/ https://www.maalvikabhat.com/ who btw does academic research on societal influences of AI) wrote the following using AI (a quote from beyond the paywall follows). If anything I wonder whether she picked up a ChatGPT speech pattern herself from so much exposure to it. "This is why AI can write but cannot create. It can remix existing patterns with mechanical precision, but it cannot sit in the fertile void where genuinely new ideas are born. It cannot endure the months of terrible drafts that make you question your sanity, the years of failure that feel like slow starvation, the decades of practice that transform a human into an artist through accumulated scar tissue and hard-won wisdom. AI has never stared at a blank page at 3 AM, coffee cold, wondering if anything will ever come. It has never had to choose between the easy metaphor and the one that makes your chest tight with recognition. It has never experienced the moment when disparate ideas suddenly fuse into something that didn't exist before, something that surprises even its creator. It can simulate the surface of creativity (the clever turns of phrase, the familiar structures), but it cannot access the underground rivers of human experience that feed genuine innovation. It writes like someone who has read about love but never been heartbroken, someone who can describe the ocean but has never tasted salt water."
- lbrito 1y agoIsn't the diminishing attention span the more conventional term to express the authors point, rather than "compression"? I think it was in culture of narcissism, a book from the late 1970s, that the author (Christopher Lasch) showed some research that the American attention span was rapidly diminishing since the 1960s or something. Its an old phenomenon and has predictably gone much worse the more attention-sucking tech we get. I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing. PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?
- unstatusthequo 1y agotldr summary of the article for those who need compression: - Compression culture reduces rich experience to bullet points, treating depth as inefficiency. It ignores how oral traditions, medieval manuscript copying and university disputations built understanding through immersion, repetition and shared struggle. - Today’s attention economy rewards fast consumption and skimming, reshaping our brains for distraction. True growth—skill, wisdom, character—emerges only through patient repetition, sitting with complexity and the struggle that resists compression.
- dosinga 1y agoI think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a summary before committing to reading a book. There are just too many books. In fact this article mentions a bunch of books and summarizes them inline. Good. Gives me more information on whether I should read those books
- Veen 1y agoBut the summary rarely captures what makes the book worth reading in the first place, so your decision is based on inadequate information.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago"A little person and his friends go for a walk to return a piece of jewellery where it belongs."
- nobody9999 1y ago>"A little person and his friends go for a walk to return a piece of jewellery where it belongs." "Fat old man creeps on his girlfriend's teen-aged daughter." "Rich guy parties with his friends on Long Island." "Angsty Teenagers kill themselves."
- wredcoll 1y agoWhat's the alternative? Reading every single book humanity has produced so you can decide which ones to.. actually read? Maybe there's some kind of a world this is feasible, but in the modern world, just talking about books, there are literally millions published every year. Hell, just trying to decide which movie to watch, there are probably several thousand "Real" movies produced every year, how do you decide which one to spend your precious 3 hours on?
- Veen 1y agoThe alternative is to find people you trust, or who are widely considered trustworthy, and read what they recommend. The canon was invented to solve this problem.
- ksec 1y agoThere are books and post that we should sit down and read for hours and hours, and even reread it from time to time. There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort. Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
- eluded7 1y agoHonestly I read the first couple paragraphs and then clicked away because that's just the attention span I have for reading online.
- jdeibele 1y agohttps://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/summary https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/summary
- Kuinox 1y agoThere are two kind of person who ask for a tldr: Someone who doesn't understand or care about the depths of works and only want the information because of this. And people who appreciate it but lacks time. If I see the markers of something I judge bad, or if I dont have enough time right now, I wont consume this content in depth.
- bee_rider 1y agoMaybe it is a subset of people who lack time. But, I think there’s also sometimes an attack built into the tldr: “you don’t know this material very well, here’s how you could express it better.” Like any attack it is sometimes wrong, sometimes right.
- jasonthorsness 1y agoThere’s too much low-quality information. Compression/summarizing is a defense against getting mired in slop. The challenge is to switch out of skim/compression mode when truly meaningful content is found.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI don't think that it's that big a deal. It's something that has been said for many generations. Each generation complains that our art has been "lost," by folks without the patience to learn it, etc. In my day, we complained about Cliffs' Notes, and calculators in the classroom. I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff. I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well. She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart. I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
- skibidiboopbop8 1y agoYou mildly disagree with a point that a woman you've never met is making, or just how she phrased it, so you sarcastically question her ability to function in a relationship and "wish her luck"? Perhaps reflect on why you immediately jump to a personal attack to make your argument.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoYou have a point. It was too personal (for me -it got my goat, and I shouldn't have let that come out, here). I’ve already amended it. I can definitely make the point without being snotty (which was my complaint -mote/plank). But…I didn’t “immediately jump,” as you have … er … compressed from what I wrote. It was the last thing I wrote, and it was pretty mild (my personal feelings about that type of attitude are quite strong -I have reasons). But I have compressed it, if that makes you happy. Have a great day! [EDITED TO ADD] Oof. I turned on showdead, to see what others had to say. My comment was nothing, compared to some. I must have hit a nerve. Especially, considering that a throwaway was registered just to swipe at me. I guess I'm "honored"? Wasn't my goal to hurt -sincerely apologize.
- alphazard 1y agoI'm not convinced that we started with the right amount of information and then compressed it lossily and now we are missing nuance. We started out with an expansion culture. It wasn't enough to have a succinct idea. You needed to have enough to fill a book or an essay, or something that took up enough physical paper that other people felt like they got something when they bought it. We started from there, with the economics of book selling dictating how long an idea was supposed to be, and we have moved smaller and smaller, as the economics have changed. Substack actually increased the expected length of writing. If people are paying for a newsletter, they want to feel like they got something. I haven't found any substacks that reliably contain more substance than shorter blog posts by the same author.
- ashwinsundar 1y agoI think this can be worse than ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge coupled with the confidence that comes from thinking you understand something you've never actually encountered. These people walk around armed with headlines masquerading as insights, ready to deploy half-digested talking points in conversations that require actual thought. They've become human echo chambers, amplifying signals they never bothered to decode. This is such a good summary of what I feel like I've been observing (including in myself) for the last 15 years or so
- darkwater 1y agoAgreed. And with AI, this is going to be even worse.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoI disagree. Most articles on the web are very shallow and kind of tend to terminate searches for more knowledge while LLMs are fantastic at pointing you to more nuance on subjects you're unfamiliar with if you know how to ask them.
- emptyfile 1y ago[dead]
- wredcoll 1y agoExcept so far the LLMs are completely terrible at saying "No". It's a lot easier to turn it into a personal echo chamber.
- ryeats 1y agoHowever since it doesn't actually reason you have to be familiar enough with the subject that you can tell when it is and isn't hallucinating since it's extrapolating from those same shallow articles.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAnd if they can't find the nuance, they'll make it up!
- skybrian 1y agoI think it's okay if not taken to extreme. There's a difference between writing a book review and writing a tweet. It's hard to say much in a tweet, but I'm in favor of people writing book reviews. Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest. A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
- defrost 1y agoIn a related headline: ‘No long sermons’: how influencer Catholic priests are spreading the word of God online Vatican invites 1,000 social media missionaries to digital jubilee conference https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/22/its-like-going-to-mass-how-influencer-catholic-priests-are-spreading-the-word-of-god https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/22/its-like-going...
- hshshshshsh 1y ago> Because it felt like asking someone to summarize a kiss. Like requesting the bullet points of grief. This is dumb. No matter how many thousands of pages you write you cannot convey the feeling of these without experiencing it. So might as well as summarize it.
- cogman10 1y agoI completely disagree with this article. It's romanticizing the past and ignoring obvious benefits of summarizing. In fact, I'd argue that the entire world is built on abstraction and summarization. It has been ever since humans started to specialize. What good does it do a baker to understand the entire supply chain of wheat berries? To know the fertilization procedures? To know the kreb cycle? Certainly all of these specific details go into the process of making bread yet none of them are useful for a baker. It's why we could bake bread long before we knew exactly what made plants grow. It's why we've been able to do selective breeding long before we understood exactly what DNA was. The power of specialization and "compression" is that rather that you the learner can choose what to spend your days learning. That has even caused a rise in symbiotic specializations. For example, a biologist can find a new bone and compare it's structure to the structure of other bones in similar species building out the family tree. A geologist can work with the biologist if they say "I want to look for bones roughly from roughly 600,000CE, where should I be looking?". They have a compressed understanding of what the geologist is capable of just like the geologies has a compressed understanding of what the biologist is doing. What this article fails to understand is there is simply too much information for any one individual person to know. Compression is a natural outcome of that. The modern world works because we compress our understanding on topics that don't interest us while expanding and decompressing the topics that do. And, if you want someone to decompress your specific article. To dive in and truly engage with it. Then it's your job to write a good summary that hooks people. You need to give people a reason to want to decompress. If that seems burdensome, maybe it's because you yourself have not taken the time to decompress knowledge of how to write good summaries. That is, you put low value on a summary. "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"
- mystraline 1y agoI never saw tl;dr. as this made-up compression culture. It was almost always used as an insult to someone writing a paragraph block of drivel.
- roywiggins 1y agoIt's a little weird that, on the one hand, nobody much wants to read anything long, and on the other, hours long podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and one-person YouTube videos on esoteric subjects are all quite popular. There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing. > Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue. Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
- floren 1y agoYou can have the podcast or documentary or video playing while work... or scroll on your phone. And then when you're done, you can say, "Oh my god, I listened to this podcast series about this guy who murdered his wife... I'm pretty sure it was his wife, anyway"
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoA lot of articles are not even written by a journalist, they're copy pasted press releases I think people like podcasts and long videos because we are desperately alone and want an interaction where someone friendly talks at us and we can just listen without being challenged much or taking risks
- roywiggins 1y agoI mean, I live alone, there's only so many hours you can go without having another voice in the background, so I love a longform podcast.
- keiferski 1y agoOne of the most rewarding genres for me is the diary / journal, which I think is essentially the exact opposite of the “give me the Wikipedia summary of facts” approach. The typical journal is filled with a ton of information about what the author ate, whom he met, what various activities he did that day, etc. - and for this reason I find it infinitely more historically insightful than a nonfiction summary of facts book. Writing a journal used to be more of a common thing that educated people did, but nowadays I guess social media is too big of a distraction…not the mention the question of whether anyone would read a journal as opposed to the simplified sloganeered book public figures typically put out today. For some specific recommendations: I am about halfway through Harry Kessler’s 1890-1915 journals, and I just started George H. W. Bush’s journal on his time in China. Both are pretty insightful so far. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_von_Kessler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_von_Kessler 2. https://www.amazon.com/China-Diary-George-Bush-President/dp/069113006X https://www.amazon.com/China-Diary-George-Bush-President/dp/...
- stnmtn 1y agoI would recommend Samuel Pepys' diary as well, a figure involved in England's Navy in the 1600s. He wrote a diary entry every day with a lot of candor, and there's a site I've been following that posts his diary entry for that day - so every day you can follow along with his life over the span of his ~10 year diary. I find it endlessly fascinating, even when his diary summary is basically "I woke up, worked, then had dinner with my cousins". The way he writes and the details he chooses to include I've found to be very fun Follow along with us at https://www.pepysdiary.com/ https://www.pepysdiary.com/
- keiferski 1y agoYep this is the “Ur-Journal” if there ever was one. It’s been on my reading list for too long.
- stnmtn 1y agoI find it very fun to follow along daily using the site, We're only at year 2 of his diary on this trip around so it's a great time to join. People comment on every entry and there's a nice little community
- freecodyx 1y agomaybe we are delegating knowledge, we feel we don't need to remember everything, we just need the headlines ?
- 4star3star 1y agoThe writing felt like it was deliberately long-winded as though being so would complement the point it was trying to make. IMO, the author did not make a compelling case that their wordiness was worth the time spent reading it.
- cormorant 1y agoThe second half of this post is behind paywall, in case you didn't notice.
- xnorswap 1y agoI have definitely felt a dramatic downturn in reading comprehension and the ability to deal with nuance in the past few years. I have learned to be extremely explicit in my communication to ward off getting sucked into an argument with someone who didn't understand the point I was trying to make. This isn't just needing to be better at "effective communication", which I accept is something I'm not great at. What has surprised me instead is the level at which I feel I have to aim has been consistently lowered. There has always been a risk on the internet of getting dragged into an argument of semantics, but what feels new and fresh, is the risk of getting dragged into an argument with someone who couldn't comprehend the point at all. I also despair at the crowd who desire to absorb all knowledge (often via summary), rather than enjoy the journey. The crowd who think a novel like "Consider Phlebas" is better handled by reading, > A shape-shifting agent allied with the Idirans, is sent on a mission to retrieve a fugitive AI Mind that has gone missing on a forbidden, war-ravaged planet. His journey takes him through a series of perilous encounters—including space battles, cannibal cults, and a doomed mercenary crew—as he races against time and enemies to complete his objective in the midst of a vast interstellar war. Than reading the novel itself. Content with their summary they move on to devour the next knowledge-goal. I do kind of get it. I get that it's easier to get along in life having a wide basis of knowledge-hooks with a few niches of real interest. It's easier to feel smart if you feel you have context for conversations, rather than risk appearing "ignorant" by asking the conversation partner to themselves expand and inform you. I also look at my own impatience. My own diminishing attention span, and my ever decreasing ability to juggle work without distraction and constant consumption of the HN news ticker. I recently got a new laptop. Firefox informs me I've visited HN 7,765 times. That's not healthy. Many of those is simply opening and immediately closing it, or navigating to and from comments, but it's a very unhealthy habit, born of a desire to constantly consume information without actually putting in what would be hard work and effort of fully reading all the articles. Including this one. I managed a few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.
- praash 1y ago> -- eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification. I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents. Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text. HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me. This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoI've been thinking about physically printing out my articles for the day and reading them in some sort of lounge chair situation. For me it's something to do with the screen. The more "skim reading" I do on screens, the more the practice becomes habitually embedded and hard to break away from, like my mind is set up to do that when I'm working with a monitor. Maybe meeting half-way will work, like having a big e-paper e-reader where I (batch-export to PDF) all of the long-form content I want to process that day.
- ruined 1y agoironically, this reads like it was written with assistance from an LLM
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pasquinelli 1y agohaven't noticed compression culture to be honest, but if i may take a second to be stupid and uninteresting myself: i find nothing more stupid and uninteresting than the enormous volume of talking about talking that's done. this is a post about replies to a post about talking about a book, which is probably talking about talking, too. in and of itself that's fine, the problem is that feels like ninety percent of writing.
- aeon_ai 1y ago>`We want the wisdom without the patient work of becoming wise.` This is how most people use LLMs. But I'll go one step further. We've optimized these systems towards people believing they have learned, rather than measuring loss against actually delivering on that promise.
- wredcoll 1y agoThere's too much information in the modern world to function without some degree of compression. Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved. If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward? Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way. Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.
- nradov 1y agoUp until maybe the 17th century it was at least possible for a single brilliant, educated person to know the entirety of knowledge in Western civilization. We're way past that now.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI think it was possible for someone from then to think they knew all the knowledge in Western civilization. Even at that point though, it was far too much to keep all in one person's head. They'd only have a surface level familiarity with most topics at best. I mean even one topic like architecture would've been impossible. You'd have to go back a lot further IMO to get it to fit. Somewhere around the development of agriculture, maybe.
- barrkel 1y agoThere's a lot of tacit knowledge in trades that was not documented, and in many ways can't be easily documented. You can't really document how to swim or play an instrument; you need to practice and train your body. Would you brilliant person from the 17th century be competent as a member of a tribe in South America or as part of a steppe clan in Asia?
- james_a_craig 1y agoThis article is literally the reason why people crave summary, because it was so content-free that it was a waste of my time to have read it all. It was a lecture extolling the virtues of repetition while simultaneously displaying none of them.
- tsunamifury 1y agoIts very likely that you're entire existence of cognitive thought is the result of layered compression of the recorded learnings of all life before us, from instinct all the way up to the complex topics this author is somewhat ironically... compressing. So, uh... caveat emptor.
- totisjosema 1y agoIts definitely part of everyday… I have noticed it a lot at work especially with the younger generations, that have 0 patience for any conversation that is less than a couple of seconds, it feels like they are not able to concentrate or engage. And you can tell by the empty look, where they are clearly already on the next topic before it has even started.
- rnxrx 1y agoThe other side of this argument is that we're constantly fed lots of extraneous information along with the actual interesting content. The point about listening to the storyteller is completely valid, but that story teller wasn't full of advertisements, links to other stories or entreaties to smash a like button. To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.
- cowlby 1y agoI personally "feel" the same way, but at least some mental models suggest otherwise. As one example, this implies that everything has a high signal-to-noise ratio and we are now bad at paying attention to the signal. But the base rate of SnR I think is much worse. I think there has to be value in being able to skip a lot of the noise with better and better technology. On "um"s and "uh"s, I read a good article recently how humans are good at turn taking (while AIs struggle) and that ums/uhs/like help signal we are not done with our turn. There is no turn taking when watching a video so I personally value removing these and providing a higher SnR. So I'm stuck feeling and agreeing with these articles, yet rationally also finding good counter points.
- mmsc 1y agoMost people are already uninteresting. They're not trying to be interesting; that simply isn't their goal (nor need it be). Most people follow trends and shudder at the thought or creating trends themselves. It's always been like that and always will be.
- benjaminclauss 1y agoSee also "Is Rushing Making Us Dumber?" by LindyMan. https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/rushing-making-us-dumber https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/rushing-making-us-dumb...
- wwarner 1y agoopposite :)
- hnthrow90348765 1y ago>compression culture I don't think it's "%s culture" but just 'culture', a culture which has embraced social media apps prioritizing short forms of communication which lack the nuance as explained in the article. A culture that needs to go faster and faster either for dopamine[0] or profits. Number go up and number go up faster. It's pretty hard to break this when many of our social signals for success and survival are now wired up like this. It's also why you need to memorize a bunch of leetcode to get a job as a developer now. Who cares about the nuance that most jobs won't need it? Google is doing it, and so should we. [0] replace with whatever neurological process that gives instant gratification
- _9ptr 1y agowow, rude
- jp57 1y agoThe reason I want summaries is so that I can decide whether to invest time in reading the whole thing. This may seem insulting to the writer, but sorry, I'm inundated with articles asking me to read them. If they don't begin with some kind of summary of what the point is and why it's important, I just move on. There is a reason why scientific papers have abstracts at the beginning: because in order to have time to do deep thinking, scientists need to be able to triage the always-enormous pile of papers that have come across their desks and decide if they're worth reading. I want this now for basically every link in HN. If I open an a link and after a paragraph I'm still asking WTF is this about?, then I ask Safari to summarize it for me and decide from that point whether I want to read the rest or not. Sorry, but HN's curation is not good enough to determine that for me, and almost every other automated or crowdsourced system is worse. Of course, I would not have commented to the author that I wanted him to provide a tl;dr. I would have just moved on silently. This is probably good for him, because it provides a selection bias in his readers that they are (somehow) interested in what he has to say.
- asciimov 1y agoOur world is burdened with SEO filler, AI slop, writers who shouldn't or worse can't, the summary is all you have to see if something is worth going further than the title. tl;dr- Write better, stop abusing the privilege of our time.
- MattGrommes 1y ago"Everybody wants to have written, nobody wants to write". Attributed to Mark Twain. I also use this quote for books and movies. Everybody wants to have read the book, people just don't want to actually read.
- daemonk 1y agoI think this sentiment has probably been echoed through the ages. It feels like there's an assumption that we've reached some kind of a complexity ceiling and compressing complexity below us will just make us dumb? What if we've black-boxed complexity below us so we can explore more complexity above us? Maybe the argument is that the rate of compressing complexity below us is faster than expanding the complexity space above us? And the result is that it makes us run out of knowledge of digest and explore? Perhaps the answer to that is to make people more curious to go out and explore the complexity above us so we can generate that knowledge.
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- Barrin92 1y agoIt's honestly depressing how many of the comments seem to completely miss the point of the post and respond with something along the lines of "there is too little signal and too much noise in stuff". The entire point of the article is that you're not a humanoid robot whose entire purpose is to process signals for some utilitarian purpose in the borg collective, it's that you're a human being who engages with culture to develop your own mind. If you're being spoonfed information at the highest rate you can handle, when do you actively engage with what is happening in front of you? The reason why a priest in a mass is giving you ample silence and not the "tldr" version of the sermon is because that silence is productive, it's when you use the active part of your mind, rather than just absorbing information like a machine. The fact that people can't even comprehend this any more and just want things to be fed to them, completely passive recipients, not engaged in any contemplation, which requires there to be "little signal" at times so there's space is what the author is getting at.
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- Night_Thastus 1y agoI agree with most of this post, especially the last 2 paragraphs. I would say I think our weaknesses have always been there, modern information transmission just makes the flaws in us more obvious. Hot take alert: Humans are stupid. We've always been stupid. Our brains simply do not have the capacity - in either long term memory or in throughput - to deal with real life. To deal with this we have always simplified as much as we can. Sometimes that means putting things into boxes: "Good" or "Bad", "Left" or "Right", "Rich" or "Poor", "Healthy" or "Unhealthy". Reality is always very murky, but simple boxes like this help us to make decisions quickly. If we did not do this, you could spend a century deciding what to have for breakfast! Thinking about all the aspects - the companies involved and the way they treat their employees, the effect of various industries on the environment and economy, the various nutrients and how they interact with the rest of your diet, the long-term cost, whether it is sufficient variety, how long it takes to eat and whether time is a factor, how hard it is to clean up after, etc, etc. Just eating breakfast could turn into nearly endless debate and back and forth if you really explored it. The reality is, humans are not equipped to deal with reality's level of nuance. So, we take mental shortcuts. We place things into boxes. We make assumptions. We build simple hierarchies so we only need to know about what's below and above. (Part of what governments and companies are structured the way they are) This is not a modern phenomenon - it has always been true about us. However, now there is much more information blasted at us constantly. Our very limited mental resources are more taxed, so we need to start making more assumptions, taking more shortcuts, simplifying things down more. A lot of people would point to our technology as evidence otherwise, but I think that's a bit false. We only make real technological progress by having large groups of people slam their head against one tiny aspect of a problem for nearly their entire lives. Sometimes we get lucky and get breakthroughs, but that's the exception and not the rule IMO. These days it can take a good third of our lifetimes just to get familiar with the problem we're trying to solve. It's just not sustainable. Our brains are too weak.
- jalev 1y agoIf you want a more philosophical version of some of the ideas posited by the blog post, I can't recommend Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' enough. He puts forward the position that the medium controls how we interact with information. When the information is scarce (and as a consequence: dense) like books, you have to spend a lot more time interacting with said information to understand it. When it's overwhelmingly abundant and easily accessible (TV, internet) information is entirely discardable. We see the effects of this more intensely in the current internet age where traditional teaching methods (book learning) seems to be oft complained about because we raise a generation to expect education to be packaged in a similar format as what they see on the internet: as entertainment.
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoI take my phone when going to the toilet and just scroll hackernews because it is easy to come here click a couple articles, read comments etc. I would much rather search personal blogs of people to find really interesting and informative content but I just don’t have the will power and time to do it properly. It is much easier to open hackernews, reddit, youtube or even worse, youtube shorts. There is an obvious conflict of interest between social media and the consumer. The platform sees the consumer as cattle, they just want the consumer to click/watch more ads, buy more stuff etc. They measure success by engagement only. For example if I want to learn some new thing, it would be nice to be able to tell youtube to occasionally recommend a certain kind of video relating to that thing. Instead of trying to “train the algorithm” by creating artificial engagement. This seems very backwards and practically not many people will have time for this kind of thing. It could be better if every person had time and power to search the full web and find content that not only is reasonably fun to consume but also leaves a good taste after consuming.
- JohnKemeny 1y agoIf you want to learn something new, don't bring your phone up the toilet. Sit with your own thoughts. (Or: shit with your own thoughts, as my auto-correct wanted it.)
- cryzinger 1y agoIf you're sitting for more than ~10 minutes you should really get up and try again later, anyway... unless you want hemorrhoids, which I promise you do not :)
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- soorya3 1y agoWriter has a point that we have evolved into compressing lot of the information, and the problem is not people it's "abundance". This raises the issue, how do you consume it? compress the it so it's quicker to digest otherwise. Example, how many tabs are open on your browser? why?
- jondlm 1y agoI loved this article. Thank you for sharing it. I felt it put words to an experience I wrote about learning to "play" the piano: https://jondlm.github.io/website/blog/the_joy_of_discovery/ https://jondlm.github.io/website/blog/the_joy_of_discovery/ Cheers to all of you out there trying to slow down.
- j7ake 1y agoCompression is fine for consuming information. But people need to be both consuming and generating knowledge in order to understand concepts beyond summary points. Generating knowledge is an exercise in compression. It is helpful to deliver insights to readers. Consuming knowledge is important to keep your pulse in your field. Only consuming leads can create an illusion of understanding but no real usable knowledge that can provide value to the community. The issue is that we live in an information glut and one can now live a life spending all their time consuming, but never creating for themselves.
- Havoc 1y ago> We began to believe that the value of an experience could be separated from the experience itself I think requires some differentiation between type of value. Some you can certainly separate and condense while others need the lived experience. Perhaps the split is knowledge vs wisdom…
- anal_reactor 1y agoThat's ok because most people are stupid and uninteresting so I'm going to be more successful socially by being closer to the mean <mic drop, flies away>
- Herring 1y agoI think it's just a symptom of too much stress/work and too little time. If you want people to slow down, you need to back the usual suspects: work-life balance, 4-day work week, affordable housing, unions, high taxes (countering inequality), sustainability, basic income, etc etc European-style socialism.
- hintymad 1y agoI also noticed that increasingly more people opted to watch movie/show walk-throughs instead of the original work. That baffles me to no end.
- chiwilliams 1y ago> For centuries, communities gathered around the fire to hear the same saga recited for the hundredth time. The listeners didn't grow impatient with the familiar opening formulas, the elaborate genealogies, the detailed descriptions of weapons and weather. I generally agree with the broad strokes of this post, but this description gives me pause. How do we know that listeners didn't grow impatient? Though I suppose it would take a good deal of compression to answer this :)
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y agoNo. Although I appreciate the spotlight being put on slow experiences like storytelling, this article is fundamentally wrong. > We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless. This is a reduction. Consider the opposite statement: We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can *never* be whittled down, that difficulty can *never be avoided*, that transformation *must be slow and painful*. Now you see the monster that is being fought when one is learning to summarize, learning to distill, learning to quicken the pace of understanding. > It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized. Yet another cheap jab at social media. > Podcasters are celebrated for "actionable insights" while wandering conversations that might actually lead somewhere unexpected are dismissed as waste. Thank you for bringing up podcasts. Are they not a counter example to the point of this article? We've gone from quick-hit interviews on news programs and late night talk shows, to slow meditative discussions in the form of podcasts. "Compression culture" is a deliberate pushback against the gatekeepers. They sit in their coffee shops discussing new ways to create barriers between the peasants and themselves. *Read more books on the subject.* | *Read longer books on the subject.* | *Get certified.* | *Reach tenure.* ... And on and on. Many works of non-fiction are largely fluff. They take a simple concept and dress it up as elaborately as possible until the reader is completely intimidated and regretful. Sometimes this is done for word count, sometimes this is done because the author lacks the ability to be concise, and sometimes this is done deliberately, to make the author's small insights seem bigger and more important. Rarely is it justified. Compression culture to the rescue. Compression culture is optimistic. It's inclusive. It's there to overcome problems we were told were impossible. If that's "the transformation without the time" then so be it.
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- evilscript 1y agoI relate to this article but I find that for a moment it confused verbosity with narrative depth. A piece of text can be very small, almost “compressed”, but doesn’t lose narrative power. This is why I feel like we are not losing verbosity, we are losing narrative efficacy!
- TYPE_FASTER 1y agoThere a couple different ways of learning calculus. I was lucky enough to have a high school calculus teacher that introduced us to calculus by showing us how it worked. Buoyed by that experience, I took math for math majors as a college freshman. I spent the semester being either extremely enlightened or completely lost. I ended up re-taking the second semester of calculus, but I took calculus for engineers instead of math majors. Not super enlightening, but enough to understand what to do when prompted for a derivative or integral. Honestly, I think a big part of the difference is simply how concepts are communicated. Richard Feynman really was that good at explaining physics concepts using every day examples. It's also not always obvious when you need to stop and go into detail, and when a general grasp of a concept will be enough.
- guybedo 1y agocompression culture at its best: here's a summary of this discussion about summarization: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/compression-culture-and-its-impact-on-understanding https://extraakt.com/extraakts/compression-culture-and-its-i...
- anotherevan 1y agoRan this through Kagi's Summariser for you: The author argues that modern "compression culture" undermines deep, meaningful experiences by prioritizing efficiency and instant gratification. This culture treats depth as inefficiency, leading to a loss of valuable human experiences like confusion, difficulty, and transformation. The text highlights how historical practices, such as oral traditions and early universities, valued immersion and communal struggle for knowledge. The author criticizes the illusion of knowledge created by consuming compressed information, which leads to superficial understanding and a lack of true wisdom. The document emphasizes that meaningful growth, whether in skills, relationships, or personal development, requires patience, repetition, and engagement with complexity, which cannot be achieved through compression. Time saved reading: 10min /s
- simo779987 1y agotldr