[muratsu]

In my experience people don't read these large documents because they are not personalized/relevant. When you're writing to a large audience, you naturally assume people know the least amount possible about the subject and start from there. In a corporate setting this comes off as irrelevant or boring. I'm sure rebranding initiatives like One Microsoft, Copilot, or Office 365 makes things simpler for executives but employees are left confused. The memo usually mentions future efficiency gains or synergies but will omit why this brand change is needed. Surely if you're sending a memo to 100k people, it makes sense to not talk about negatives (a good example of this is politicians) but at that point the value of memo is also very low. This may come off as odd but short format videos seem to work much better at large scale. Perhaps the future of communication is really just lots of easy to consume/repeated content.

[jillesvangurp]

Reading long form text is a big commitment in time. In a business context that's simply not appropriate. I always joke about documentation as write only content. It's the type of thing you are asked to write that then doesn't get used or read. I've more than once gotten the question whether I could produce a diagram or some sort of documentation only to realize later that after the thumbs up I got on delivery, nobody was actually doing anything with the document.

Here on HN, short comments are more appreciated than longer comments. People are skimming, not reading. The ability to say a lot with very few words is what is appreciated the most.

That's nothing new btw. As Mark Twain once wrote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Using LLMs to rephrase things more efficiently is a good use of LLMs. People are getting used to better signal to noise ratios in written text and higher standards of writing. And they'll mercilessly use LLMs to deal with long form drivel produced by their colleagues.

[p_v_doom]

Its also not just business text. People dont read period. Sometimes they dont even watch. Sometimes I feel that reading the docs is a super power. Reading an article, watching the occasional talk? Its enough to take over the world... or get to a point where you can exactly predict what is going to happen, know how to fix it, but dont have the power to do it, so you are doomed to watch as it all crumbles down yet again, just like you foretold last time, and the time before that and the one before that...

[voidhorse]

> I always joke about documentation as write only content. It's the type of thing you are asked to write that then doesn't get used or read.

That's not actually true. It may be true now when everyone still has context, but if you built a sound system that will outlast your own contributions to it, the documentation becomes invaluable.

> People are skimming, not reading.

Yes. The cause of much suffering and misery in the modern world.

> And they'll mercilessly use LLMs to deal with long form drivel produced by their colleagues.

otoh, they also use them to generate more noise and drivel than we ever imagined possible. When it took human effort to pump out boring corp-speak, that at least put a cap on the amount of useless documentation and verbiage being emitted. Now the ceiling has been completely blown off. People who have been incapable of even crafting a single sentence their entire lives can now shovel volumes of AI-generated garbage down our throats.