Morgan Housel: People Aren't Losing Attention Spans, But Their Tolerance for Bad Writing is Decreasing
Author and investor Morgan Housel believes that the decrease in reading is not due to shorter attention spans, but rather a significant drop in tolerance for poor content.
He points out that the most popular podcasts are still three-hour-long conversations that people can listen to in full, indicating that attention still exists, but tolerance for "BS" has decreased.
In the past, people would persist in finishing bad books due to a lack of alternatives; now, with many competing options, bad content is quickly discarded.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Morgan Housel, author of "The Psychology of Money," has previously analyzed behavior and attention, and this viewpoint continues his observations on content quality and choice overload, similar to the phenomenon of long videos still being popular in the Netflix era. The explosion of choices in the digital age forces creators to improve quality. Housel believes that attention allocation is shifting towards high-value content, motivated by explaining the deeper mechanisms behind the apparent "short video trend." Current content consumption is transitioning from an era of scarcity to one of abundance, enhancing users' filtering abilities. Essentially, this is about capital concentration: attention is concentrating on high-quality content, with the mechanism being that as competitive options increase, the decrease in tolerance creates a natural filter, forcing creators and platforms to raise standards and direct resources towards the winners. ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Attention hasn't changed, but tolerance has decreased; bad content exits quickly.
In an era of choice explosion, quality is competitiveness.
Long content is still popular; only garbage is discarded.