[askvictor]

Having been a school teacher until a year ago, it's worth considering that a decent proportion of the population is functionally illiterate (well, it's a sliding scale). This kind of verbosity is probably excluding a lot of them from using this. Similarly I wonder if Google's rank preference for longer articles (i.e. why every recipe on the internet is now prefaced with the author's life story) has unintentionally excluded large portions of the population.

[nickfromseattle]

I was surprised to learn that 54% of Americans have below a 6th grade reading level. [0]

[0] https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/

[BizarroLand]

WTF. I can't quite say that this information makes the world make a little more sense but it does let some light in. I figured that it would be much less than that.

Looks like near-complete or complete illiteracy is ~12%, so that means 42% of the population can read words but may have difficulty understanding the context of a short story or the meaning of a phrase.