Since its launch in 2008, I've been an avid user of the read-it-later app Instapaper^[1]. In 18 years' time, the app has saved some 47k articles, which comes out to around 7.2 articles read per day. The time span here encompasses a full spectrum of digital content: the initial phase with blogs and news articles; the subsequent evolution into bite-sized text on social media platforms; the eventual shift to videos in both long- and short-forms. Throughout, I insisted on saving and reading the internet's lingua franca—text.

Of course, I'm of the old school, a dying breed of text-first internet users. This article from the Atlantic spells out the precise problem:

The End of Reading is Here

Here is an exercise in irony, a 40-minute article that identifies and laments the decline in reading skill in contemporary society. In 2026, the reality of such a written piece of prose is that most of its points will be summarized with AI, its headline clipped for commentary, or key phrases snipped out and used as background in 10-second short video reactions. When ChatGPT launched, there were predictions about how outsourcing writing to AI will lead to lazier thinking, and four years later, we are realizing much of that loss.

The second-order effects are playing out now. With fewer readers of long-form text, the incentives and rewards for producing it have shrunk; there's just a much smaller audience of readers compared to consumers of other forms of media, be they social or visual. Reach is now firmly controlled by YouTube and TikTok, with other forms of social media lagging behind, and blogs/substacks bringing up the rear as a niche that doesn't even register.

My experience running and keeping this blog is a microcosm of this evolution.

Back in 2011, when I started writing consistently on this blog on technical topics (most of the time), I felt it was easier to share authentic thoughts and garner an audience. There weren't yet other mediums seriously competing with blogs and articles on many topics, while each subtopic was also covered by fewer authors. Some of my first posts—on Google interviews, on my fondness for JavaScript—made the front pages of Hacker News and Slashdot, despite my undeveloped writing style and technique.

By the mid-to-late 2010s, I noticed that most of my web referrers migrated to Twitter and Reddit, and that much of the discussion also happened on those platforms as well. I had been trying out various commenting plugins on the site—the latest one was Disqus—but ended up shutting it down due to lack of activity.

Now in the 2020s, it feels like the majority of eyeballs are pointed squarely at online video sites, a different format altogether. When I wrote one of the first reviews for an anticipated ergonomic keyboard, one of the first comments was asking for a video review instead of reading what I wrote. The primary bit of progress for text, perhaps in reaction to the strong control exercised by those social platforms, was Substack and its renewed emphasis on the newsletter; hence, my migration to Ghost and its subscription capabilities.

On top of these intrinsic challenges with the text format, the widespread use of LLMs further obfuscates the effort, and hence value, of writing. Much like my worry of AI decimating the senior engineer pipeline, the technology here threatens to lessen our level of literacy as a society. It is now trivial to generate overwhelming amounts of prose, and just as easily truncate carefully composed text into a few lines of summary. If we are better thinkers by engaging in literature—both in its reading and writing—then we are dulling our faculties by association.

The counterargument here is that good writing still requires human intuition to navigate the complexities of communication. But, if extrinsic incentives are shrinking by the day, how much of that writing will still be produced based on increasingly intrinsic motivations? That is, we're leaning increasingly on writing's own accord, on the platonic ideal of composing for yourself, with publishing rendered as afterthought. If a blog post gets written but no one is around to read it, does it make a difference?

I still save around 10 articles a day on Instapaper: nowadays, a combination of newsletters, posts written by professional media sites behind paywalls, and occasionally a techie article featured on Hacker News. But the app has changed with the times as well; over the years, it's had to support logged-in sites, as well as revamp integrations with YouTube and Twitter precisely due to their popularity. Its developer is simply responding to users' consumption patterns.

The bigger question is what the long-term impact of society's collective apathy towards literacy will be. Perhaps it's fine that video takes over as the de facto format of communication; between YouTube and TikTok, smartphones and AI, we have lowered the barriers of entry for capturing, generating, sharing, and consuming videos. And if communication is a precursor to thought, this generation, and generations thereafter, are training themselves to think in a completely new way.