Stuff going on in the kitchen at this party, once again.. 🙄

text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.

I feel this disregards all of our data visualization efforts. I don't think we have a saying "A picture speaks a thousand words" for nothing.

This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes

This comparison is so hard to make. Do we need to add the bytes fetched for all glyphs? Doesn't that bird take just a couple hundred bytes when encoded as svg? Comparing information like this seems weird to me. Also: It's not even the same information he is comparing! He compares his blog post with an image of a bird. It is now up to the reader to gauge the amount of information in both. I feel like that one is just a hard argument to follow. More abstractly, I don't buy the argument in the context of about node-based graphical interfaces: The article argues not replacing text with something graphical, but I almost every visual interface includes text. Few people try to replace text. Most people try to augment it. Whether that augmentation adds something or not is an entirely different argument, that I don't feel is talked about in the article.

Anyone planning to reply here, please note that the link Duncan shared is to a thread in #C5U3SEW6A that already has a lot of replies. While it might be time consuming, you'd do us all a favour by reviewing the replies there and adding any new thoughts at the end. Thanks :)

Whoops! There's me thinking that was a twitter reference for some reason. My bad ✌️