I agree with you, but the younger generations are going to be the "leaders" of the world and they love short form content. Everything points towards short form content being the biggest thing while long form content and text content becomes niche.
I don't agree. It's not young people as such, it's the mainstream that love shallow short form content.
However the more intelligent, curious and thoughtful people that hopefully become our leaders, are more into long form content which simply has much more to offer than cheap one-liners.
Unfortunately selecting those leaders is where we are going wrong right now. Referring to a lot of leaders (politics and industry alike) that just love blasting cheap shots on short form services like Twitter.
This sounds like terribly "old-fashioned" thinking... at the same time, not everything new is good. I'm afraid you're right though. Seems short form is destroying attention spans across the board. I even notice it in myself.
If you read one long article you may see three ads.
But each short article could have the same three ads, multiplied by however many short articles you read.
Long term I think the future is going to be more along the line of direct patronage - if I want to write I can say that at $Xk a month from supporters I’ll quit my day job and just make content for everyone.