I find this list fascinating, because it seems counterintuitive. I expected to find generally lower illiteracy in countries with simpler/fewer languages, but Romance languages (Italian, Spanish) top the list, while countries with multiple official languages (Switzerland, Canada) are in the middle, and at the bottom are countries with multiple languages and which are generally thought to be difficult to learn (Danish, Finnish). That seems almost backwards.
What I get from this is that when it comes to success in language learning, technical difficulty is mere rounding error compared to other factors.
More likely is that Netflix realized most people, including myself, aren't on Netflix to consume text content.
In fact, the text is more likely to spoil the show. "A space freighter has to take refuge on a desolate planet. Little does its crew know that their temporary shelter is infested with horrific parasites. But you do!"
I might as well be picking my next viewing from a selection of pictures and illustrations.
It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to go to an on-demand video delivery service and want to see a lot of text though, no? People didn't go to Blockbuster to go read a description of the movie on white note card. I see this mentality a lot on HN and it seems like there's a large population of "get off my lawn" techies who only want the WWW to be text and nothing else, ever. Not trying to criticize your opinion, which I know I probably am, but I just find that is a very vocal and common trend on here. Maybe me having grown up mostly with Web 2.0 and on I just have a different set of expectations of what the WWW can provide me.
Bear in mind that in 1999 they could not have done a modern-looking website even if their designers had crystal balls and could see what the web would evolve into. The browsers did not support the fonts and styling, and most people were on dial-up so anything image-heavy would have been unusable.
For the public at large? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy#Prevalen...