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Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

YouTube I'd grant you, not Shorts/Reels/TikTok - the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced. To me that reads akin to "there are so many tweets that for any criteria a [set of tweets] demonstrate quality similar to any long-form written piece."

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> the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced

why not? seems like a tautology. what's a robust set of criteria we can use the evaluate this objectively. I bet you TikTok will win. mind you I am not saying the average TikTok is good, just that there's probably some set of videos that that are of comparable quality than something put together over a longer period of time like a novel.

But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.

Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.

Even movies won’t capture the nuances of a somewhat decent novels. I have no hope to see something really complex like “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” in any other form.

I understand what you're saying and that you're not talking about the average. The problem is specifically that short form things are short. It's like the monkeys on typewriters - you'll get some beautifully crafted sentences, but you're never going to get a number of sentences that add up to an actual work of Shakespeare - they're aren't enough atoms in the universe for the number of monkeys and typewriters you'd need.

If a quote can be profound, so can a short.

Nobody's making the claim that a quote or a short can't be profound. Simply that longer-form works have emergent properties.

That's fair. I misinterpreted your comment, perhaps because I skimmed it too lightly because shorts have taught me to skim through information.

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