A text renaissance

There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are:

• Roam, a hypertext publishing platform best understood as a medium for composing conspiracy theories and extended universes.
• Substack, a careful and thorough ground-up neoclassical reconstruction of the age-old email newsletter.
• Static websites, built out of frameworks like Jekyll or Gatsby (full disclosure: a consulting client).
• And finally, Threaded Twitter, a user-pioneered hack-turned-supported feature that has wonderfully revitalized the platform.

—via A Text Renaissance

The main enablers are technology (React, Closure, Graph databases, automated transcription, machine-generated text e.g. deep learning algorithm known as GPT-2), economics (easier to pay and get paid as a creator, powered mostly by Stripe), culture (back to intimate Internet, craving for more authentic relationships).

(it doesn't mean podcasting, VR, etc. are not important as well, they may thrive alongside the text renaissance)