ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

I think he's abbreviating "internet protocols" to "IPs".

He's asking why we have human-readable/text based protocols vs a binary protocol.

text-based vs binary. So most of the characters used in the IP are between 0x20 (space) and 0x7E (~), opposed to transmitting binary over the connection.

I was looking at this from more of an 'efficiency' perspective actually. Text-based protocols have a bit of an overhead as they require sending more data to transmit the same amount of information. So what benefits outweigh this?

After a bit of digging, it does appear my question itself was incorrectly phrased. But it seems to be that the majority of internet traffic use text based protocols. There are many more binary protocols than text but more text traffic than binary. Thus most of the successful protocols on the internet are text based. Except for a small number of applications (bittorrent is one example) binary protocols tend to die.