7 ms·

I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be".

I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be". Think of kids around age <12. If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's basically where they're getting all the "current affairs" from. Microtransaction is probably one of the easiest example as well. 15 years ago, anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. Right now? Well, kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm.

mjr00 2y ago
The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!! and hook people. GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.
- tehkadz 2y ago
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- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    The videos are longer in total length, but you've never seen the average TikTok/Insta user if you think people are letting videos play for more than a few seconds before scrolling onto the next one. This is why movie trailer videos now have a "trailer for the trailer" in the opening seconds with like "THE TRAILER FOR SONIC 3... STARTS NOW" with all of the most attention-grabbing scenes frontloaded.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    > Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to... blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.
    - tokioyoyo 2y ago
      Depends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.
      - frigidnonce 2y ago
        https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
      - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        the counterpoint is since then we've killed all the easy ways to scale. the datasets can't get bigger because it's already the whole Internet. model sizes can't grow that much because you start running into RAM constraints. efficiency definitely can be improved, but probably not more than 100x on our current architectures.
    - staunton 2y ago
      I'm also pretty aure you'll see it eventually... Consider the possibility that this is both a bubble waiting to pop, as well as the stuff that will shape the future. Kind of like the Internet around the year 2000.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Counterpoint, GenAI is great at copying styles and typically works best with shorter content. For example, I could very easily see GenAI being able to produce 1 million TikTok dance challenges.
  - AstralStorm 2y ago
    Which will make them completely worthless by dilution and not stand out. Oops.
    - namaria 2y ago
      Novelty grabs people's attention. A system based on the statistical analysis of past content won't do novelty. This seems like a very basic issue to me.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Novelty itself is easy, the hard part is the kind of novelty that is familiar enough to be engaging while also unusual enough to attract all the people bored by the mainstream. Worse, as people attempt to automate novelty, they will be (and have been) repeatedly thwarted by the fact that the implicit patterns of the automation system themselves become patterns to be learned and recognised… which is why all modern popular music sounds so similar that this video got made 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I (This is already a thing with GenAI images made by people who just prompt-and-go, though artists using it as a tool can easily do much better). But go too soon, be too novel, and you're in something like uncanny valley: When Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre was first performed, it was poorly received by violating then-current expectations, now it's considered a masterpiece.
      - AnthonBerg 2y ago
        A system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says it’s already been, that would do it though.
- ljsprague 2y ago
  I ... don't think there's a time limit on TikToks unless you mean that 60 minutes is a time limit. Are you thinking of Vine?
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    That's a pretty new thing though, in 2020 it was 1 min I believe, and most people skipped after 15-30s Then it got increased to 3 min and now 10/60 min
    - NemoNobody 2y ago
      Seconds - that's all the time I give something. If it looks draggy I will skip ahead to like halfway thru the video and if the person isn't in the middle of explaining something that they have clearly spent half the time extrapolating, that's it. They get no more time. I often turn on subtitles and watch at 2x speed. I prefer the transcript 100% of the time to video.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    If you want people to watch your content there's definitely a time limit. I don't mean anything imposed by the platform; I just mean if people aren't interested within 3 seconds, they're scrolling to the next video in their feed.
  - StableAlkyne 2y ago
    I miss Vine
- davkan 2y ago
  Is that true of tiktoks in general? I feel like a lot of the short form videos out there purposefully bait the watcher and drag on for 3/4 of their runtime.
- simplyluke 2y ago
  What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.
  - jerf 2y ago
    "Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      I never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”
      - bluGill 2y ago
        X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
      - desdenova 2y ago
        When I was a lazy kid, and there was a requirement to fill a number of lines/pages, I'd just write with bigger letters.
      - QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
        I eventually flipped from moaning about word count minimums to whining about conference page limits but it took a long, long time- well into grad school. The change came when I finally had something to say.
    - eszed 2y ago
      The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.
- fragmede 2y ago
  > If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it does about TikTok) https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ 1.2 M views or for some more niche stuff which isn't "BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!!" level of intro: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ 54.6 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/ 36.3 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/ 416 k views This voice-over definitely isn't going for attention grabbing https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ 16 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ 64 k views okay finally found something that's 5 mins long https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ 270 k views
  - neom 2y ago
    I've never used tiktok and this post was... enlightening. The ClickUP HR guys are actually pretty funny... but wtf is this from that first channel you posted... lol? https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/7439577511953993003 https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/74395775119539... - I mean, she's not wrong.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    All of those immediately have something attention-grabbing within the first few seconds: picture of Mars' surface, run map showing funny human shape, text with "Gen Z programmers are crazy" prefacing the anecdote, going immediately into the IT-related rap, guy holding a big and cool-looking stick, "dealing with your 10x coworker" immediately showing the point of the video. The only one that doesn't is the SQL one I guess but that's a very low view count (relatively) on a niche channel. So thanks for providing a bunch of examples that prove my point, I guess?
    - fragmede 2y ago
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Short form video content is absolutely terrible, every time I watch one I have an extremely strong urge to verify whatever I heard in the video, so I just avoid watching them altogether. I’m not sure how anything of value can be 45 seconds long with absolutely no context, outside of comedy.
- illusive4080 2y ago
  GenAI is obnoxiously verbose
- dopfk09320k 2y ago
  I don't think this is entirely true. Have you seen these "Internet Story told by TTS Voice-over a Minecraft parkour Video" ( which are what my niblings watching ) ? I noticed a lot of the story is dragged on for over minutes. These are the stories that I read in text in about 5 second. Short form videos are often hyper focus and to the point, but there are a lot of vertical video contents that are just ( to use the GenZ term ) brain rot like these as well.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  The younger generation has had their brain's development hacked by corporate advertising and can't help themselves but prefer the content they have been all but brainwashed to prefer - this was done deliberately and intentionally and obviously to much detriment to the young of today. Nobody cares tho bc "they can't pay attention" like it's somehow an entire generation's individual faults they are like that... Clearly a societal failure there.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  > The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan et al. have 3+ hour long podcasts…
  - HKH2 2y ago
    And they have a clips channel for the younger generations.
- noobermin 2y ago
  When I was a kid, I loved having breakfast made for me by other people as I couldnt cook. As a small child, one would say I expected it. It doesn't mean when I become an adult that would continue to be the case.
meta_x_ai 2y ago
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jprete 2y ago
The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up. Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  I totally agree, but it’s just easier for people to accept something if they grew up with it. Sure there will always be people from older generations dabbling with new stuff. But quite a few people refuse to change their behaviour as the age. I wrote them as examples, because it is the biggest contrast I can see in online behaviour between myself and my nephews/nieces plus their circles.
- whtsthmttrmn 2y ago
  I think the main difference is digital vs physical goods. I know it's minor since a card is just a cheap piece of cardboard, but it's still something tangible (unless the game cosmetics also include a physical item, in which case...I'm dumb).
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    If something isn't digital today it isn't as real. A physical photo in my hand is sooo limited compared to the same photo in my hand via the screen on my smartphone. Same with a DVD or CD or Disc - all antiquated tech.
  - thom 2y ago
    When WotC first offered digital cards, they had a system whereby you could redeem a complete set for its physical equivalent. At the time this helped convince naysayers they weren’t giving money for nothing. Twenty years later, with their latest online offerings, nobody really cares. I’ve certainly spent more money and had more fun with online Magic, and when I wanted to build my own cube I just got proxies printed anyway. I think the “collectible” part fell away a long time ago and now you’re happy just paying for an experience.
krisoft 2y ago
> anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. > kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm. How so? Fortnite and Roblox don’t cost $80, they are free to play with in game purchases.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  They’re F2P, but the social pressure from your friends to buy the next skin, mini game and etc. completely normalizes the behaviour as you grow up. Then you take it as a “usual thing” and don’t bat an eye when a game you buy also has different skins in the game. At least that was my perception when I played Call of Duty with my younger family members.
ljsprague 2y ago
I regularly watch 10 minute or longer TikToks and I'm sure you've turned off a YouTube video in the first 10 seconds.
geon 2y ago
Fortnite and roblox are f2p though.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  Honestly sometimes i doubt there's a more damagingly, intentionally overloaded term in modern lexicon than "free to play". Many, many things claim that title while placing if not game play, then socially necessary events, items, costumes, locations, quests, game modes, etc behind a paywall. We need a different term to describe the incredibly predatory behavior and psychology behind most of the current space of "free to play" games. (I'm not saying your favorite game is a lie, just that many games claiming this title effectively are)
jerf 2y ago
"If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years." There is a sense in which that is true. However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed. The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get. Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.
- PrismCrystal 2y ago
  "eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.
harrall 2y ago
Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with normalcy. I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good. I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.
jimjimjim 2y ago
Blipverts are probably the future and not just for ads but for content as well
jdougan 2y ago
On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter) videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much not young. Buff/Franklin for 2028!
godelski 2y ago
> they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. This is in part my worry, but the other part is that there just won't be much other of an option. I can't be the only one that feels like a lot of information is just... shit. Yeah, there's still YouTube channels I find that are brilliant but they definitely are not fitting to the algorithm and it's clear they're "punished" for this. I think we can say the same about blogs and other places. It is just getting much harder to actually discover the gems. The result of this is that I watch more and read garbage and have less joy. Maybe I'm just addicted to the routine, but I definitely consume less. I just think it is the problem when you try to make something for everyone; you just end up making things with no substance, no soul. As they say, diversity is the spice of life, and good god, could I go for some actual flavor.
ANewFormation 2y ago
Slightly tangential but TikTok isn't just short-form stuff. It also has normal length content, which is where most current-affairs/analyses would fall, outside of clips. Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.

mjr00 2y ago

The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!! and hook people. GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.

tehkadz 2y ago
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tokioyoyo 2y ago
Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.
- mjr00 2y ago
  The videos are longer in total length, but you've never seen the average TikTok/Insta user if you think people are letting videos play for more than a few seconds before scrolling onto the next one. This is why movie trailer videos now have a "trailer for the trailer" in the opening seconds with like "THE TRAILER FOR SONIC 3... STARTS NOW" with all of the most attention-grabbing scenes frontloaded.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  > Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to... blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    Depends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.
    - frigidnonce 2y ago
      https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      the counterpoint is since then we've killed all the easy ways to scale. the datasets can't get bigger because it's already the whole Internet. model sizes can't grow that much because you start running into RAM constraints. efficiency definitely can be improved, but probably not more than 100x on our current architectures.
  - staunton 2y ago
    I'm also pretty aure you'll see it eventually... Consider the possibility that this is both a bubble waiting to pop, as well as the stuff that will shape the future. Kind of like the Internet around the year 2000.
cogman10 2y ago
Counterpoint, GenAI is great at copying styles and typically works best with shorter content. For example, I could very easily see GenAI being able to produce 1 million TikTok dance challenges.
- AstralStorm 2y ago
  Which will make them completely worthless by dilution and not stand out. Oops.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Novelty grabs people's attention. A system based on the statistical analysis of past content won't do novelty. This seems like a very basic issue to me.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Novelty itself is easy, the hard part is the kind of novelty that is familiar enough to be engaging while also unusual enough to attract all the people bored by the mainstream. Worse, as people attempt to automate novelty, they will be (and have been) repeatedly thwarted by the fact that the implicit patterns of the automation system themselves become patterns to be learned and recognised… which is why all modern popular music sounds so similar that this video got made 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I (This is already a thing with GenAI images made by people who just prompt-and-go, though artists using it as a tool can easily do much better). But go too soon, be too novel, and you're in something like uncanny valley: When Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre was first performed, it was poorly received by violating then-current expectations, now it's considered a masterpiece.
    - AnthonBerg 2y ago
      A system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says it’s already been, that would do it though.
ljsprague 2y ago
I ... don't think there's a time limit on TikToks unless you mean that 60 minutes is a time limit. Are you thinking of Vine?
- ffsm8 2y ago
  That's a pretty new thing though, in 2020 it was 1 min I believe, and most people skipped after 15-30s Then it got increased to 3 min and now 10/60 min
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    Seconds - that's all the time I give something. If it looks draggy I will skip ahead to like halfway thru the video and if the person isn't in the middle of explaining something that they have clearly spent half the time extrapolating, that's it. They get no more time. I often turn on subtitles and watch at 2x speed. I prefer the transcript 100% of the time to video.
- mjr00 2y ago
  If you want people to watch your content there's definitely a time limit. I don't mean anything imposed by the platform; I just mean if people aren't interested within 3 seconds, they're scrolling to the next video in their feed.
- StableAlkyne 2y ago
  I miss Vine
davkan 2y ago
Is that true of tiktoks in general? I feel like a lot of the short form videos out there purposefully bait the watcher and drag on for 3/4 of their runtime.
simplyluke 2y ago
What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.
- jerf 2y ago
  "Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    I never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”
    - bluGill 2y ago
      X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
    - desdenova 2y ago
      When I was a lazy kid, and there was a requirement to fill a number of lines/pages, I'd just write with bigger letters.
    - QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
      I eventually flipped from moaning about word count minimums to whining about conference page limits but it took a long, long time- well into grad school. The change came when I finally had something to say.
  - eszed 2y ago
    The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.
fragmede 2y ago
> If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it does about TikTok) https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ 1.2 M views or for some more niche stuff which isn't "BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!!" level of intro: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ 54.6 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/ 36.3 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/ 416 k views This voice-over definitely isn't going for attention grabbing https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ 16 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ 64 k views okay finally found something that's 5 mins long https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ 270 k views
- neom 2y ago
  I've never used tiktok and this post was... enlightening. The ClickUP HR guys are actually pretty funny... but wtf is this from that first channel you posted... lol? https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/7439577511953993003 https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/74395775119539... - I mean, she's not wrong.
- mjr00 2y ago
  All of those immediately have something attention-grabbing within the first few seconds: picture of Mars' surface, run map showing funny human shape, text with "Gen Z programmers are crazy" prefacing the anecdote, going immediately into the IT-related rap, guy holding a big and cool-looking stick, "dealing with your 10x coworker" immediately showing the point of the video. The only one that doesn't is the SQL one I guess but that's a very low view count (relatively) on a niche channel. So thanks for providing a bunch of examples that prove my point, I guess?
  - fragmede 2y ago
quickthrowman 2y ago
Short form video content is absolutely terrible, every time I watch one I have an extremely strong urge to verify whatever I heard in the video, so I just avoid watching them altogether. I’m not sure how anything of value can be 45 seconds long with absolutely no context, outside of comedy.
illusive4080 2y ago
GenAI is obnoxiously verbose
dopfk09320k 2y ago
I don't think this is entirely true. Have you seen these "Internet Story told by TTS Voice-over a Minecraft parkour Video" ( which are what my niblings watching ) ? I noticed a lot of the story is dragged on for over minutes. These are the stories that I read in text in about 5 second. Short form videos are often hyper focus and to the point, but there are a lot of vertical video contents that are just ( to use the GenZ term ) brain rot like these as well.
NemoNobody 2y ago
The younger generation has had their brain's development hacked by corporate advertising and can't help themselves but prefer the content they have been all but brainwashed to prefer - this was done deliberately and intentionally and obviously to much detriment to the young of today. Nobody cares tho bc "they can't pay attention" like it's somehow an entire generation's individual faults they are like that... Clearly a societal failure there.
xanderlewis 2y ago
> The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan et al. have 3+ hour long podcasts…
- HKH2 2y ago
  And they have a clips channel for the younger generations.
noobermin 2y ago
When I was a kid, I loved having breakfast made for me by other people as I couldnt cook. As a small child, one would say I expected it. It doesn't mean when I become an adult that would continue to be the case.

meta_x_ai 2y ago

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jprete 2y ago

The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up. Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.

tokioyoyo 2y ago
I totally agree, but it’s just easier for people to accept something if they grew up with it. Sure there will always be people from older generations dabbling with new stuff. But quite a few people refuse to change their behaviour as the age. I wrote them as examples, because it is the biggest contrast I can see in online behaviour between myself and my nephews/nieces plus their circles.
whtsthmttrmn 2y ago
I think the main difference is digital vs physical goods. I know it's minor since a card is just a cheap piece of cardboard, but it's still something tangible (unless the game cosmetics also include a physical item, in which case...I'm dumb).
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  If something isn't digital today it isn't as real. A physical photo in my hand is sooo limited compared to the same photo in my hand via the screen on my smartphone. Same with a DVD or CD or Disc - all antiquated tech.
- thom 2y ago
  When WotC first offered digital cards, they had a system whereby you could redeem a complete set for its physical equivalent. At the time this helped convince naysayers they weren’t giving money for nothing. Twenty years later, with their latest online offerings, nobody really cares. I’ve certainly spent more money and had more fun with online Magic, and when I wanted to build my own cube I just got proxies printed anyway. I think the “collectible” part fell away a long time ago and now you’re happy just paying for an experience.

krisoft 2y ago

> anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. > kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm. How so? Fortnite and Roblox don’t cost $80, they are free to play with in game purchases.

tokioyoyo 2y ago
They’re F2P, but the social pressure from your friends to buy the next skin, mini game and etc. completely normalizes the behaviour as you grow up. Then you take it as a “usual thing” and don’t bat an eye when a game you buy also has different skins in the game. At least that was my perception when I played Call of Duty with my younger family members.

ljsprague 2y ago

I regularly watch 10 minute or longer TikToks and I'm sure you've turned off a YouTube video in the first 10 seconds.

geon 2y ago

Fortnite and roblox are f2p though.

wholinator2 2y ago
Honestly sometimes i doubt there's a more damagingly, intentionally overloaded term in modern lexicon than "free to play". Many, many things claim that title while placing if not game play, then socially necessary events, items, costumes, locations, quests, game modes, etc behind a paywall. We need a different term to describe the incredibly predatory behavior and psychology behind most of the current space of "free to play" games. (I'm not saying your favorite game is a lie, just that many games claiming this title effectively are)

jerf 2y ago

"If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years." There is a sense in which that is true. However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed. The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get. Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.

PrismCrystal 2y ago
"eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.

harrall 2y ago

Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with normalcy. I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good. I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.

jimjimjim 2y ago

Blipverts are probably the future and not just for ads but for content as well

jdougan 2y ago

On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter) videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much not young. Buff/Franklin for 2028!

godelski 2y ago

> they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. This is in part my worry, but the other part is that there just won't be much other of an option. I can't be the only one that feels like a lot of information is just... shit. Yeah, there's still YouTube channels I find that are brilliant but they definitely are not fitting to the algorithm and it's clear they're "punished" for this. I think we can say the same about blogs and other places. It is just getting much harder to actually discover the gems. The result of this is that I watch more and read garbage and have less joy. Maybe I'm just addicted to the routine, but I definitely consume less. I just think it is the problem when you try to make something for everyone; you just end up making things with no substance, no soul. As they say, diversity is the spice of life, and good god, could I go for some actual flavor.

ANewFormation 2y ago

Slightly tangential but TikTok isn't just short-form stuff. It also has normal length content, which is where most current-affairs/analyses would fall, outside of clips. Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.