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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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The 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.

I 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".

> 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.

Wow, that seems dreamy. Do you have kids, plural?

If you can spend time here on HN then you have free time?

I work on a computer. Right now I'm waiting for a spec suite to finish running, which takes around 1:30min, more than enough to type this answer. Hardly qualifies as free time.

5 minutes writing a comment with one hand while you’re bottle feeding a baby is not the same as time dedication to something that requires undivided attention.

Yes, they blow tons of time endlessly scrolling through bullshit to find something worth spending any time on. They don't have the time for your thing, because your thing is not worth making time for, over the 99999999 other things that are worth about 0.4 microseconds each.

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