Social media seems to be moving to images and now even (ultra) short-form video content. Does a hypothetic 40% increase in social media engagement offset a 40% decline in reading in any meaningful way?

There is the fundamental question of how much that number matters (if someone spends more time fly fishing than reading fanfics, should it be "fixed" ?).

But even setting that aside, while YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are the mainstream, Threads and Bluesky came up as new platforms and are text first. They could have let the Twitter paradigm die but chose to heavily invest in that market instead, and it seems to be working, so at least the idea still has legs ?

Interestingly, with current LLM limitations I'd assume text in - text out usage will keep being the focus for a while as well.