| > I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Most of these many more people are mobile users, where creating long-style text content can be quite bothersome. What ain't bothersome, with a smartphone, is taking pictures and videos to slap filters over them, alas that's why we are where we are with TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web. It's even noticeable in a lot of online discussions with text outside of these communities; The average length of forum posts feels like it's gotten way shorter over the decades. People have less attention to read anything that looks longer than a few sentences, often declaring it a "wall of text" based on quantity of text alone. Imho it's a big part of what drives misinformation; Doing any kind of online research on a small phone screen is extremely bothersome compared to the workspace an actual computer/laptop, particularly with multi-monitor, gives. There's also the difference in attention; When I sit down at my laptop/desktop, I actively decide to spend and focus my attention on that task and device. While smartphone usage is mostly dominated by short bursts of "can't do anything else right now", I don't chose to take out my phone and surf the web, it's something I do when I'm stuck in some place with nothing else to do and no access to an actual computer. But for the majority of web-users [0], that smartphone access to the web is all they know, which then ends up heavily shaping the ways they consume and contribute to it. [0] https://techjury.net/blog/what-percentage-of-internet-traffi... |
For my part, I'm glad these fora aren't indexed well; I don't want my search results dominated by single-sentence posts and photos. In particular, I don't have accounts on any of these services.
I'd be happy if search engines would decline to index sites behind paywalls. Links to Medium, Substack and Washpo are very common, and if the first thing I see is a popup demand for payment, that browser-tab gets closed.