As you can see clearly from the 5 previous answers, the reason why is obvious.

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.

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

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

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

aren't they mostly/all binary? as far as i can tell most protos I see just use bits for anything featureful, and text is just text

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.

Only HTTP is text based. TCP, IP, and link-layer protocols are binary.

HTTP is text based because it is a protocol for transferring (hyper)text and so was intended to be human readable like hypertext is.

what do you mean IP?