8 ms·

Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

319 points by smartmic 11mo ago

ge96 11mo ago
yeah I'm trying to watch less YT, hard for me to just sit in silence and think trying to be more of a producer than consumer, not saying this to look down I'm socially/financially a failure, trying to change my habits
- pcthrowaway 11mo ago
  The paper is specifically studying short-form videos like on TikTok or Youtube Shorts, so there would be no implication for videos longer than 3 minutes (the maximum for YT shorts)
  - righthand 11mo ago
    I don’t think it’s correct to say there are no implications. The only discernable difference between a short and long videos effects is that one of the videos is capped at 3 minutes. There could be plenty of implication and correlation to high intake watching videos of any length.
    - the_af 11mo ago
      I don't know if that's the only discernible difference. While 3 minutes is indeed an arbitrary limit, the difference between short and long form videos is very noticeable. Long form requires another form of attention, focusing more, more commitment, less distraction; there's even a form of "delayed gratification" (a form of attention that only grownups can provide) in that the payoff isn't always immediate and can sometimes be very delayed. Short form is like junk food, zero friction, instantly addictive and doesn't require you to really pay attention. Surely the immediacy of attention it needs is completely different to long form video. I also disagree with your other comment that maybe long form can promote similar consumption habits (you call it "overconsumption"); I don't think anyone can get "addicted" to long form video, it's simply too time-demanding, you don't get a "fix" and the "zapping" effect of quickly moving from one video to the next.
      - pcthrowaway 11mo ago
        I probably spend 1-2 hours per day watching content on youtube (and much of that is at ~1.5-1.75X speed) I don't know what qualifies as "addiction", but it is typically where I get my news, where a web-series I watch is released, and where I learn about social justice issues important to me, through video essays. I'm sure my consumption is very different from that of someone who watches 100 1-minute Tiktok videos per day, but I think it's worth at least questioning how this might also contribute to cognitive performance and mental health. Though I think a big difference with short-form content is the autoplay functionality (as your sibling commenter mentions). I watch videos which are released by channels I subscribe to, and occasionally (maybe once a week) watch something Youtube recommends to me. So I retain some agency over my viewing habits compared to someone whose decisions are dictated by the algorithm, which also has an incentive to keep people watching as long as possible.
        the_af 11mo ago
        Are your habits typical though? Playing long form videos at 1.75 speed? I suppose once you start engaging at hyperspeeds, you're making it closer to short form compulsive consumption. It'd be like speed reading a book instead of letting ideas and thoughts form.
        pcthrowaway 11mo ago
        When you consider that people have different speaking cadences and one person might speak twice as fast as another, I'm not sure why you'd assume 1.75X speed necessarily leads to reduced engagement. Actually, I've encountered the argument that speeding video up when the speaker is too slow for the listener can be useful for staying focused on what they're saying. I don't think watching a 40 minute video essay on 1.5X speed is comparable to watching 25 1-minute videos
        the_af 11mo ago
        Fair enough. To be clear, I do remember watching long videos at 1.75X: Coursera's. By extension, I see myself watching "instructional" (tech) long-winded videos this way, but to be honest this is not the type of videos I usually watch on YouTube, and I watch them on 1X.
    - Chabsff 11mo ago
      There is a HUGE difference in that the combined short length with the fact that the video starts playing before you even have a chance to make a decision on whether to watch it or not leads you to a "heh! I'm here already, might as well just watch the thing".
      - righthand 11mo ago
        This is a response to you and the other Y people that confuse short videos with autoplay and user engagement techniques. There are people that autoplay long videos, in fact people stream random Simpson’s (or other favorite tv show, podcast, music, books on tape, etc) episodes in the background while they work. Classic TV has autoplay with no opportunity to decide. Autoplay is not an exclusive short form video feature. I can make a short video on my computer and it will not autoplay other content.
        Chabsff 11mo ago
        There's no confusion here. It's pretty easy to make the argument that the combination of auto play and short form is orders of magnitude more problematic than the sum of their parts.
        righthand 11mo ago
        Yes but then we’re not talking about short form video being addictive but rather the hunt for a good short form video is addictive. This same idea can be applied to long form and any other medium you enjoy, finish, and immediately want more of. Now if you have only 30 mins before your next task to watch a long form video then you may skip starting the video, but that doesn’t mean there is anything inherently bad about short form video but rather the tools for viewing it. So yes you are confusing and you’re intentionally confusing the two so that your point stands about short form video, but it doesn’t because your points are about the viewing tools. If you continue to push this point, people will only think that short videos under 3 minutes are some how the devil and TikTok et al will continue on making whatever length of video is next in line, more addictive.
    - unethical_ban 11mo ago
      Sure, but that's beside the point. The discussion here is about the unique qualities of SFV and its affects on attention span and thinking. It's about the instant-reward feedback mechanism of swiping quickly and the ability to ingest a larger narrative. It's about the super-short cuts of video and audio that beg for attention, versus longer, more static content that requires patience, doesn't constantly dump dopamine, and stays on one topic longer. In short: There are a lot of differences in how long and short videos affect a person, in my opinion.
- thanhhaimai 11mo ago
  Long form educational YT videos are amazing. It makes my brain work hard, and I feel like I learn more. Short form pop content like TikTok doesn't give my brain enough time to engage the thinking muscle. I think it's better to identify the characteristics of the media we consume, rather than lumping all of them together.
  - righthand 11mo ago
    There could be overconsumption effects of short form media that exist in long form certainly. You’re hand waving it away because you prefer long videos. What about all the people using TikTok as a search engine?
    - oceansky 11mo ago
      May God help them
    - godelski 11mo ago
      I don't think you're wrong but I think you're being too quick to attack the gp. They're not wrong either. The point you brought up doesn't contradict theirs but adds nuance. I'm all for nuance. Its also why I'm biased towards long form media as it's more likely to contain nuance, but not guaranteed. The gps specific example of lectures is quite narrow and more likely to have depth. Which is the entire problem of short form media, that we live in a complex world where we can't distill everything into 1-2 minute segments. Hell, even a lecture series, which will be over 10hrs of content is not enough to make one an expert on all but the most trivial of topics. You're right that we need nuance but you're not right in arguing for it while demonstrating a lack of it. A major issue is we need to communicate, something we're becoming worse at. We should do our best to speak and write as clearly as possible but at the end of the day language is so imprecise that a listener or reader will be able to construct many, and even opposing, narratives. It is more important to be a good listener than a good speaker. I'd hope programmers, of all people, could understand this as we've invented overly pedantic languages with the explicit purpose of minimizing ambiguity[0] [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI
- SlightlyLeftPad 11mo ago
  I hate that I can’t use youtube at all without being forced to fed short form video content. Or kids schools referencing youtube content for educational purposes and they are then force fed short form video content.
  - Chabsff 11mo ago
    Honestly, I don't mind the format in principle, and the process that goes from YT's homepage to watching a single one of them is not that bad to me. As long as I get to make a decision that I want to watch something, consciously go "I will click on this thing and watch it" and only then proceed to watch it, then it's _fine_. It's the algorithmic loop that starts the moment you scroll to the next video that starts playing before you even have a chance to decide whether or not it's something that you want to watch that's abhorrent to me.
  - mrandish 11mo ago
    On Firefox you can block short form content from YouTube as easily as adding one extension or a few uBlock Origin filter lines. With a bit more work it's possible to fix a lot of other stuff using various browser extensions and userscripts on desktop/laptop. On mobile (Android) I use an app that patches the YT executable called "Revanced Extended" (https://github.com/inotia00/ReVanced_Extended https://github.com/inotia00/ReVanced_Extended). On set top (Android TV sticks) I use an app called SmartTube (https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ https://smarttubeapp.github.io/). On desktop/laptop I decided to go deeper into YT customization. My current mod stack for YT completely re-imagines the YT interface to be focused and space efficient, replaces spammy, inaccurate thumbnails with actual video stills, re-formats spammy ALL CAPS AtTentIoN SeEKiNG headlines, shows enough of the expanded description to be useful and outright blocks a bunch of stuff I never want to see (channel promos, upcoming, shorts, live streams, algorithm recommendations, etc). It takes me straight to a grid of only new videos posted by the niche channels I subscribe to, so I never even see the Youtube home page. Warning: I cobbled together this stack over time out of disparate unrelated components by just experimenting until I found a combination which "fixes" YT in exactly the ways I want. Even though it heavily customizes YT, it's all been working great with no changes for over two years - but YT could break it any time. If you're okay with that, this should get you started: 1. A UserScript YouTube 'mod platform' called [Nova YouTube](https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension). This does the thumbnail, description and other reformatting as well as most of the content blocking by type (with a couple uBO filters found in the uBO subreddit). 2. A Stylus userstyles (CSS) mod called [AdashimaaTube](https://github.com/sapondanaisriwan/AdashimaaTube https://github.com/sapondanaisriwan/AdashimaaTube). This mostly handles reformatting the interface like number of rows and columns in grids and selectively removing YT's dark-pattern UI cruft. 3. "Youtube Enhancer" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-enhancer-vc/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-enhan...) is a Firefox add-on which I mostly use for one feature it does perfectly (auto-expanding videos to fill the browser viewport but not in 'full-screen'). I also like the way Enhanced YouTube's configurable player interface buttons work and look. My YT account was created in 2008 and until I did this I didn't even realize just how awful YT had become because it was done so gradually over the years. There are a lot of different add-ons and userscripts out there and the ones I happened to land on may not suit you, so just try different options to see what's possible and then experiment until you find a stack which works for you.
- kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
  Learn to watch at 2x speed (or faster with an extension). Then use the saved time for productive activities.
  - junglistguy 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - godelski 11mo ago
    I think you should watch at whatever speed you best ingest the material. Don't get me wrong, some lectures I watch at 2x but it isn't about optimizing speed. It's about optimizing attention. I go faster if the speaker is too slow and/or too monotone so my mind starts drifting. Speeding up can force me to concentrate and not drift but the right speed is dependent in many factors that it can't be a hard rule. Regardless of the speed, in a lecture video I'll pause and rewind. That's the large benefit to them, though at the cost of being unable to engage and interact. There's no deficit of time in the day, the deficit is in energy and attention. I'm worried we conflate speed and productivity (I'm unsure if you do or don't) but these are original. Speed gives the illusion of productivity but it is ignorant of quality and efficiency. It's only a first order approximation of productivity and a noisy one at best. Velocity is more important, as it requires direction but even velocity is ignorant of momentum, acceleration, force, and many other factors that go into making one productive. Speed is only important if everything else is held constant. Let's not confuse speed for productivity. I'd argue that is a major contributing factor that has gotten us to this point. Where everything appears to move fast but in reality moves slower than ever
- chickensong 11mo ago
  > hard for me to just sit in silence and think Maybe practice slowing down by reading a book. Any book, hard copy. > trying to be more of a producer than consumer Thank you!
foofoo12 11mo ago
Totally my feeling too. The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
- andrepd 11mo ago
  Whenever I search anything in my native language, and I mean literally any topic, one of the top recommendations (if not the top one, which autoplays by default) is the local far-right party. It's crazy. We've become used to this but it's crazy.
  - nxor 11mo ago
    People have beliefs you don't share?
    - foofoo12 11mo ago
      No, he's referring to politics. Far-right politics[a] encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, radical anti-communism, ethnonationalism, and nativism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
      - 86769928329709 11mo ago
        [dead]
      - nxor 11mo ago
        You misunderstood me. I'm saying it's wrong to act like people can't believe different things than yourself.
        andrepd 11mo ago
        Lord on high help me. When on earth did I say that?? I open any video unrelated to politics and I have shoved down my throat a rant about immigrants or about how everyone is corrupt except $far_right_guy, or clips of a "debate" that shows them "DEMOLISHING THE COMMUNIST ATHEIST LEFT", cropping all the opponent's responses. Curiously I'm never shown any video from the boring centre party talking about the execution of the budget for 2022-2026 (yawn), or the left wing parties talking about labour law for shift workers (yawn), sensible cycling infrastructure to decrease automobile congestion (yawn), or tax incentives to ameliorate the teacher shortage in certain regions (yaaaaaaawn), despite the fact that those parties have a comparable or much greater voting base, publish videos at the same rate, etc. I don't think even the most obtuse person can deny, in the year 2025, that algorithmic social media and its relentless peddling of whatever it deems "most engaging" is not a problem.
goldemerald 11mo ago
Algorithmically served short form videos is clearly the smoking of our time. I cannot stand the conservative view of "well we don't know the videos cause mental health decline, or if it's simply those with a genetic inclination who seek out short form content.", exactly mirroring the skeptics about smoking causing cancer. I'm hopeful that in 5-10 years (but more likely 20) people will view this AI served, maximally engaging, content in the same way we view smoking now: disgusting and horrible, but adults should be allowed to do what they want. I can easily imagine kids/teens sharing their illicit access to shorts much in the same way they share vapes/cigarettes, which would be a much more preferable situation than the unlimited use we see today.
- ge96 11mo ago
  Oh man, they take random people's clips, stitch them together with a voice over and include false information eg. an incorrect fact about an animal
- nxor 11mo ago
  I hope you don't mean conservative in the usual political sense. I know more conservatives worried about this than not.
baxtr 11mo ago
We have one clear rule at home for the kids: YouTube long format is ok. But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok. Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
- gblargg 11mo ago
  I'd also ban autoplay of the next video. You have to be involved in choosing the next video to watch (or none).
  - grvdrm 11mo ago
    This makes the bigger difference imo. Long enough time in front of autoplay sends a kid down some very strange rabbit holes. Not acceptable to me. Less worried about the format and more the endless doom watching that the algorithm is happy to allow.
    - gblargg 11mo ago
      The automatic play is what bothers me. When I'm done with a video, I reflect on it, and think what I want to do next, not necessarily watching another video the moment the first ends.
- derefr 11mo ago
  I would suggest you make an exception for YouTube shorts from channels / creators that also put out YouTube long-form content. You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no! The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long. Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical. For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now. --- Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos? Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.) And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content. YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.
gblargg 11mo ago
Anyone who's able to stomach those short videos has to have cognitive deficits or mental issues. I'd rather watch an advertisement than those (and I can't stand watching advertisements).
cadamsdotcom 11mo ago
Short form is no good to consume anyway. The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts! Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
Boogie_Man 11mo ago
I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening. I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".
NedF 11mo ago
[dead]
taw1285 11mo ago
This tracks for me. I have deleted TikTok and Instagram but now I find myself browsing X short videos!! Addiction is a crazy thing. I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.
- mrDmrTmrJ 11mo ago
  I have YouTube.com and X.com IP blocked on this computer for exactly that reason. Because I noticed I have zero self-control with the short-term video format. So now I don't touch it and consider it similar to cigarettes.
- apsurd 11mo ago
  Information for its own sake to obtain doesn't have any lasting effect, it makes sense why you forget. Try to intake the information and have it cue a relation to your life, have it spark some internal thought. I'm struggling to articulate this, I've always been "a thinker", just think about things all day. I rarely finish books because whatever I read I think about it for so long. It's my own personal reflection on information, knowledge, and learning, I hesitated to write this comment but I did at the chance it helps. Information is basically a commodity these days. The leverage is in how the info informs your thoughts.
- nxor 11mo ago
  You don't. This is where taking public transport to work shines.
- drekipus 11mo ago
  are you watching talks while driving? One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts. It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself. But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do. something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"
nverba 11mo ago
As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?
- itake 11mo ago
  they want your time
  - sturza 11mo ago
    attention is all they want
    - eptcyka 11mo ago
      Attention is all they need.
      - dylan604 11mo ago
        Can't we just give them a hug instead if they're that lonely?
- OGWhales 11mo ago
  Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.
  - nxor 11mo ago
    Funny enough, last I saw, shorts of course are less profitable than videos, because they can't carry as many ads, and supposedly advertisers would rather put their ads on longer videos anyway. This would imply they just want to stay relevant. After all, if they didn't make short form videos, someone somewhere would be convinced they are missing out (personally I find shorts a lot worse than long videos).
autonomousErwin 11mo ago
Great ad for Grayscale on your phone and chrome extensions that get rid of shorts
junglistguy 11mo ago
[dead]
SunshineTheCat 11mo ago
I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element. It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water. That key variable seems to matter more than the format. For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die. Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.
- tartuffe78 11mo ago
  I don't think getting addicted to constant serotonin boosts from enjoyable videos is that much better to be honest.
  - nxor 11mo ago
    Not for me. It's also about the kind of thinking this behavior engages. If you only think superficially about kittens for 30 minutes ... personally I would find that similarly awful. Whether the videos are rage inducing or not, it's only passive consumption. And I would rather spend that time using my brain.
- GloamingNiblets 11mo ago
  The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention. From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".
  - 11mo ago
j2kun 11mo ago
Nobody is using this thread to actually talk about what's in the paper, just as a place to rant about short form videos... One question that comes to mind to me is: r=-.034 a reasonable effect size? Having seen many scatter plots of r values, 0.3 seems basically like random noise. Is this just falling into the same problem as all huge meta-studies, that there's way too much variability to get any kind of clear signal? And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?
occupant 11mo ago
I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.
- acid__ 11mo ago
  I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.
- ddtaylor 11mo ago
  What's the problem with that? I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad." You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
- vacuity 11mo ago
  In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research. On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
lbrito 11mo ago
Its been a long time since I took statistics courses, but aren't those r values rather low to conclude anything? "Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"
moduspol 11mo ago
I know it's probably offensive but I do suspect SFV use also correlates with lower intelligence. This study suggests it leads to poorer cognition, which is in the same ballpark, but I am curious if in the next five or ten years, we'll find out that this stuff disproportionately targets vulnerable people, even if not explicitly intended.
- squigz 11mo ago
  Why would you think it's not explicitly intended?
tormeh 11mo ago
These correlations are not good, obviously, but in which direction does the causality go? As someone with attention issues, I've had to remove these apps from my home screen and disable notifications because I can't handle them well. I suspect I might be more susceptible to SFV due to attention issues, rather than SFVs causing any change. It's a lousy way to spend time, though.
SirHumphrey 11mo ago
I would caution against reading too much at this stage, even though the researchers were very careful to talk about only correlation, a lot of people here seem to read causation. This are population studies so the variables are not independent. The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people. This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
- jancsika 11mo ago
  > This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise. Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    > Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day. If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more. People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it. I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.
ModernMech 11mo ago
My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.
hodgehog11 11mo ago
I think it really is important to stress that these are correlations only. Something I've noticed: those with poor attention spans or generally low engagement with deeper material tend to be attracted to SFV. Likewise, those in a state of depression or have ADHD can easily get into the quick satisfaction coming from SFV. It may exacerbate existing issues, but not necessarily be the cause.
- markeroon 11mo ago
  Is it important to stress that though? This feels like a personal responsibility argument while also acknowledging that it disproportionately affects people who don't have a ton of control over their response to it.
  - hodgehog11 11mo ago
    It is important; if SFV cause these symptoms, that could be grounds (long-term) to ban them. Not so if they only exacerbate preexisting conditions.
    - markeroon 11mo ago
      I think that this is an opinion. For instance, one might think online gambling should be illegal, regardless of whether it causes addictive behavior or exacerbates some genetic predisposition to it.
Aurornis 11mo ago
I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim. This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout: > Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024). Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve. It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.
nxor 11mo ago
I try to tell my parents to watch less short form videos. They don't care. Thank you Meta and Alphabet. :(
btilly 11mo ago
I absolutely see the correlation myself, but which way does causation go? I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok. But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem. The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?
montag 11mo ago
If anyone from APA.org is listening, this website is really bad on mobile
andai 11mo ago
I wonder about the cognitive and mental health correlates of living in a world that no longer makes any sense. I remember 10 years ago watching a documentary about the previous ten years explaining how we we had moved into a post meaning world, and how this was being weaponized by various interests. That time seems positively quaint to me now! I was reading a book from the 1960s, and it was talking about how the world is too complicated now and moving too fast. And of course if you read books from the late 19th century they say the exact same thing... https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/
- tclancy 11mo ago
  Yeah, I remember reading an issue of Planetary from about (GOD HELP US!) two decades ago where the plot involved baddies who had invaded a fictional universe. In the time since then, I went from thinking "What a crazy idea for a plot" to "Hmm, I can see what inspired that" to "Jesus wept. People can basically choose to do this now. And they vote!"
  - 64718283661 11mo ago
    Can you please elaborate on each I am very interested to know.
    - tclancy 11mo ago
      It was issue #9, https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Planetary_Vol_1_9 https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Planetary_Vol_1_9 -- or did you mean elaborate on why I went through the X stages of Bill and Ted?
zmmmmm 11mo ago
The interesting part here is what they carve out - they don't see impacts on body image or self esteem. These are classic effects identified as negative impacts of social media in general. It it would be really interesting if somehow SFV format prevents their impact. My guess: the SFV they are talking about is generally just fully attention baiting and not from peers or others that people feel are "comparable". If you don't feel the source or the subject of the video is comparable to you, then there's no compulsion to reference it in a judgemental way against your own circumstances. But I bet if you did just focus on SFV from eg: friends or peers, you'd be right back to self esteem and body image impacts again.
westbywest 11mo ago
The "Vintage Space" channel host Amy Shira Teitel recently posted this long form video expressing her frustration with YT so heavily incentivizing SFVs with its creators. She goes into considerable detail about the intentionally addictive nature of the format, and how it clashes with her own publishing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM
xzjis 11mo ago
I have a theory: just like with excessive porn consumption, could it be that depressed people tend to watch more short-form videos? I have a chronically depressed friend who confirms this theory: she can't be bothered to do anything and can only muster the energy to watch Shorts when she's feeling down. Shorts are not the cause, but a symptom of the consequences of her depression.
- bogdanos 11mo ago
  Yes, but consuming and getting addicted to (porn|SFV) might as well induce some apathy and later to depression. In my experience (which is NOT a statistics study) the problems go in spiral.
- HPsquared 11mo ago
  Probably a feedback loop though. Like other addictive behaviours. There are many ways for life to go wrong, and only a few ways for it to go right.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  I have taken three multihour Flixbus journeys in Central Europe this year. Each time, what astounded me was how every woman under 30 in sight from my seat was watching Tiktok for the entire journey. Just one thirty-second clip after another for four or five hours, and apparently mainly content that, even if it is about something else, serves to flog cosmetics brands. Obviously it’s hard to diagnose depression from merely looking at someone. But none of these Tiktok users seemed like sad sacks, indeed some looked like successful professionals. I could only conclude that there is some truth to this platform hijacking even well-balanced people’s brain.
dylan604 11mo ago
So the old saying "I can feel myself getting dumber for watching" has some merit. I used to say that for things like Housewives/Kardashian style tripe, as well as bad sitcoms with laugh tracks like Big Bang Theory that was supposed to be so smart
abixb 11mo ago
Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content. BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0] When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal. Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video. [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remove-shor/oahiolknhkbpcolgnpljehalnhblolkm?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remov... [1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-homepa/lcpclaffcdiihapebmfgcmmplphbkjmd?hl=en-US https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-... [2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-comments/bnbnjkiglooccambmgnmbepaofnjjjpl https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...
- alkh 11mo ago
  Just want to thank you for the comprehensive extension list, this is very useful!
tamimio 11mo ago
People are already calling it “brain rot” so it’s not surprising.
patrickscoleman 11mo ago
If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725
insin 11mo ago
If you want to hide Shorts completely on YouTube, or make watching them a more intentional act by hijacking YouTube's navigation to make them display in the regular video player, Control Panel for YouTube [^0] has options for that, as well as for removing any other sources of algorithmic/recommended videos you don't want, including the new "More videos" in the new video UI (which you can also disable if you don't like it) [^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
correa_brian 11mo ago
I literally feel like I'm doing drugs when I'm watching short-form videos.
- domlebo70 11mo ago
  You need to do more drugs then.
opminion 11mo ago
I was surprised that the podcast Stuff You Should Know now advertises a short firm video provider, but I couldn't explain exactly why. Maybe this sheds some light on my concerns.
- arresin 11mo ago
  They advertise straight up gambling also
danielvaughn 11mo ago
I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus. It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV. If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.
- RestartKernel 11mo ago
  > I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid. I don't think you need any government conspiracy for this. Tiktok is an inevitable product of the attention economy — moreso a capitalist wart than deliberate sabotage.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - NickC25 11mo ago
    China solved this. They deliberately made SFV educational content only. Tiktok had to comply or face the wrath of the CCP. SFV about a math theorem or a physics phenomena or explaining how to use a type of conjugation in English? Cool. SFV thats just a clip of a show or movie with some stupid music overlayed? SFV about a kid doing some stupid dance? Banned.
    - lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
      I've heard this, but I don't think this is actually true (save for some other services that target children). The problem isn't just the content, though. It's also the medium. SFV as a medium cripples cognition and attention span. It feeds bad habits, emotionally and intellectually. How many of Gen Z/Alpha have the attention span to sit through a movie, let alone a book? There's even a joke that if someone says they've binged on a Netflix show, it means they're a millennial: younger generations would find that kind of sustained engagement with a subject boring. SFV is opposed to the kind of engagement you need for deep work.
Grossenstein 11mo ago
I am ready to pay for disabling em feeds.
gomoboo 11mo ago
How I rein in YouTube on all my browsers: - prevent autoplaying video - redirect ‘ youtube.com/shorts/’ to ‘ youtube.com/watch?v=’ The second gets rid of the addictive Shorts UI. I don’t block them entirely because channels I subscribe to create interesting shorts.
mock-possum 11mo ago
It’s so interesting to me that people find these short video clip formats ‘addictive’ when my reaction is the opposite - they repulse me, starting from the vertical video format, carrying through to the snappy cuts and… I don’t know what to call it, kooky sound direction? Anyway, it looks and sounds like something tailor made to annoy me, and even if I occasionally stumble across one clip that’s interesting, the next is sure to turn me off again. You know what’s occurring to me though - is it just the radio all over again? I can’t stand listening to the radio - the experience of being fed content, and switching continuously without ever finding something worth listening to, completely ruins radio for me - gun to my head, I’d rather drive in silence than listen to the radio. Maybe it’s a similar thing?
paffdragon 11mo ago
Are there also similar studies on short-form text like Tweets, HN comments, etc?
thedudeabides5 11mo ago
ban tiktok
DrierCycle 11mo ago
It's just an addiction to cause and effect, short form video, long form video, anything that beguiles us from screens. It was always an addiction to cause and effect. Sometimes there's a protagonist to mindread it from, other times there's villains. But mostly it's eye-of-the beholder cause and effect. These are just magic tricks of another sort that beguile us away from the mysteries of correlation and reality. It's a vacation from the intense complexities and deterministic thrust of chaos.
sharts 11mo ago
Aren’t commercials while watching TV also short-form video? We’ve had those for ages

319 points by smartmic 11mo ago

ge96 11mo ago

yeah I'm trying to watch less YT, hard for me to just sit in silence and think trying to be more of a producer than consumer, not saying this to look down I'm socially/financially a failure, trying to change my habits

pcthrowaway 11mo ago
The paper is specifically studying short-form videos like on TikTok or Youtube Shorts, so there would be no implication for videos longer than 3 minutes (the maximum for YT shorts)
- righthand 11mo ago
  I don’t think it’s correct to say there are no implications. The only discernable difference between a short and long videos effects is that one of the videos is capped at 3 minutes. There could be plenty of implication and correlation to high intake watching videos of any length.
  - the_af 11mo ago
    I don't know if that's the only discernible difference. While 3 minutes is indeed an arbitrary limit, the difference between short and long form videos is very noticeable. Long form requires another form of attention, focusing more, more commitment, less distraction; there's even a form of "delayed gratification" (a form of attention that only grownups can provide) in that the payoff isn't always immediate and can sometimes be very delayed. Short form is like junk food, zero friction, instantly addictive and doesn't require you to really pay attention. Surely the immediacy of attention it needs is completely different to long form video. I also disagree with your other comment that maybe long form can promote similar consumption habits (you call it "overconsumption"); I don't think anyone can get "addicted" to long form video, it's simply too time-demanding, you don't get a "fix" and the "zapping" effect of quickly moving from one video to the next.
    - pcthrowaway 11mo ago
      I probably spend 1-2 hours per day watching content on youtube (and much of that is at ~1.5-1.75X speed) I don't know what qualifies as "addiction", but it is typically where I get my news, where a web-series I watch is released, and where I learn about social justice issues important to me, through video essays. I'm sure my consumption is very different from that of someone who watches 100 1-minute Tiktok videos per day, but I think it's worth at least questioning how this might also contribute to cognitive performance and mental health. Though I think a big difference with short-form content is the autoplay functionality (as your sibling commenter mentions). I watch videos which are released by channels I subscribe to, and occasionally (maybe once a week) watch something Youtube recommends to me. So I retain some agency over my viewing habits compared to someone whose decisions are dictated by the algorithm, which also has an incentive to keep people watching as long as possible.
      - the_af 11mo ago
        Are your habits typical though? Playing long form videos at 1.75 speed? I suppose once you start engaging at hyperspeeds, you're making it closer to short form compulsive consumption. It'd be like speed reading a book instead of letting ideas and thoughts form.
        pcthrowaway 11mo ago
        When you consider that people have different speaking cadences and one person might speak twice as fast as another, I'm not sure why you'd assume 1.75X speed necessarily leads to reduced engagement. Actually, I've encountered the argument that speeding video up when the speaker is too slow for the listener can be useful for staying focused on what they're saying. I don't think watching a 40 minute video essay on 1.5X speed is comparable to watching 25 1-minute videos
        the_af 11mo ago
        Fair enough. To be clear, I do remember watching long videos at 1.75X: Coursera's. By extension, I see myself watching "instructional" (tech) long-winded videos this way, but to be honest this is not the type of videos I usually watch on YouTube, and I watch them on 1X.
  - Chabsff 11mo ago
    There is a HUGE difference in that the combined short length with the fact that the video starts playing before you even have a chance to make a decision on whether to watch it or not leads you to a "heh! I'm here already, might as well just watch the thing".
    - righthand 11mo ago
      This is a response to you and the other Y people that confuse short videos with autoplay and user engagement techniques. There are people that autoplay long videos, in fact people stream random Simpson’s (or other favorite tv show, podcast, music, books on tape, etc) episodes in the background while they work. Classic TV has autoplay with no opportunity to decide. Autoplay is not an exclusive short form video feature. I can make a short video on my computer and it will not autoplay other content.
      - Chabsff 11mo ago
        There's no confusion here. It's pretty easy to make the argument that the combination of auto play and short form is orders of magnitude more problematic than the sum of their parts.
        righthand 11mo ago
        Yes but then we’re not talking about short form video being addictive but rather the hunt for a good short form video is addictive. This same idea can be applied to long form and any other medium you enjoy, finish, and immediately want more of. Now if you have only 30 mins before your next task to watch a long form video then you may skip starting the video, but that doesn’t mean there is anything inherently bad about short form video but rather the tools for viewing it. So yes you are confusing and you’re intentionally confusing the two so that your point stands about short form video, but it doesn’t because your points are about the viewing tools. If you continue to push this point, people will only think that short videos under 3 minutes are some how the devil and TikTok et al will continue on making whatever length of video is next in line, more addictive.
  - unethical_ban 11mo ago
    Sure, but that's beside the point. The discussion here is about the unique qualities of SFV and its affects on attention span and thinking. It's about the instant-reward feedback mechanism of swiping quickly and the ability to ingest a larger narrative. It's about the super-short cuts of video and audio that beg for attention, versus longer, more static content that requires patience, doesn't constantly dump dopamine, and stays on one topic longer. In short: There are a lot of differences in how long and short videos affect a person, in my opinion.
thanhhaimai 11mo ago
Long form educational YT videos are amazing. It makes my brain work hard, and I feel like I learn more. Short form pop content like TikTok doesn't give my brain enough time to engage the thinking muscle. I think it's better to identify the characteristics of the media we consume, rather than lumping all of them together.
- righthand 11mo ago
  There could be overconsumption effects of short form media that exist in long form certainly. You’re hand waving it away because you prefer long videos. What about all the people using TikTok as a search engine?
  - oceansky 11mo ago
    May God help them
  - godelski 11mo ago
    I don't think you're wrong but I think you're being too quick to attack the gp. They're not wrong either. The point you brought up doesn't contradict theirs but adds nuance. I'm all for nuance. Its also why I'm biased towards long form media as it's more likely to contain nuance, but not guaranteed. The gps specific example of lectures is quite narrow and more likely to have depth. Which is the entire problem of short form media, that we live in a complex world where we can't distill everything into 1-2 minute segments. Hell, even a lecture series, which will be over 10hrs of content is not enough to make one an expert on all but the most trivial of topics. You're right that we need nuance but you're not right in arguing for it while demonstrating a lack of it. A major issue is we need to communicate, something we're becoming worse at. We should do our best to speak and write as clearly as possible but at the end of the day language is so imprecise that a listener or reader will be able to construct many, and even opposing, narratives. It is more important to be a good listener than a good speaker. I'd hope programmers, of all people, could understand this as we've invented overly pedantic languages with the explicit purpose of minimizing ambiguity[0] [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI
SlightlyLeftPad 11mo ago
I hate that I can’t use youtube at all without being forced to fed short form video content. Or kids schools referencing youtube content for educational purposes and they are then force fed short form video content.
- Chabsff 11mo ago
  Honestly, I don't mind the format in principle, and the process that goes from YT's homepage to watching a single one of them is not that bad to me. As long as I get to make a decision that I want to watch something, consciously go "I will click on this thing and watch it" and only then proceed to watch it, then it's _fine_. It's the algorithmic loop that starts the moment you scroll to the next video that starts playing before you even have a chance to decide whether or not it's something that you want to watch that's abhorrent to me.
- mrandish 11mo ago
  On Firefox you can block short form content from YouTube as easily as adding one extension or a few uBlock Origin filter lines. With a bit more work it's possible to fix a lot of other stuff using various browser extensions and userscripts on desktop/laptop. On mobile (Android) I use an app that patches the YT executable called "Revanced Extended" (https://github.com/inotia00/ReVanced_Extended https://github.com/inotia00/ReVanced_Extended). On set top (Android TV sticks) I use an app called SmartTube (https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ https://smarttubeapp.github.io/). On desktop/laptop I decided to go deeper into YT customization. My current mod stack for YT completely re-imagines the YT interface to be focused and space efficient, replaces spammy, inaccurate thumbnails with actual video stills, re-formats spammy ALL CAPS AtTentIoN SeEKiNG headlines, shows enough of the expanded description to be useful and outright blocks a bunch of stuff I never want to see (channel promos, upcoming, shorts, live streams, algorithm recommendations, etc). It takes me straight to a grid of only new videos posted by the niche channels I subscribe to, so I never even see the Youtube home page. Warning: I cobbled together this stack over time out of disparate unrelated components by just experimenting until I found a combination which "fixes" YT in exactly the ways I want. Even though it heavily customizes YT, it's all been working great with no changes for over two years - but YT could break it any time. If you're okay with that, this should get you started: 1. A UserScript YouTube 'mod platform' called [Nova YouTube](https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension). This does the thumbnail, description and other reformatting as well as most of the content blocking by type (with a couple uBO filters found in the uBO subreddit). 2. A Stylus userstyles (CSS) mod called [AdashimaaTube](https://github.com/sapondanaisriwan/AdashimaaTube https://github.com/sapondanaisriwan/AdashimaaTube). This mostly handles reformatting the interface like number of rows and columns in grids and selectively removing YT's dark-pattern UI cruft. 3. "Youtube Enhancer" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-enhancer-vc/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-enhan...) is a Firefox add-on which I mostly use for one feature it does perfectly (auto-expanding videos to fill the browser viewport but not in 'full-screen'). I also like the way Enhanced YouTube's configurable player interface buttons work and look. My YT account was created in 2008 and until I did this I didn't even realize just how awful YT had become because it was done so gradually over the years. There are a lot of different add-ons and userscripts out there and the ones I happened to land on may not suit you, so just try different options to see what's possible and then experiment until you find a stack which works for you.
kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
Learn to watch at 2x speed (or faster with an extension). Then use the saved time for productive activities.
- junglistguy 11mo ago
  [dead]
- godelski 11mo ago
  I think you should watch at whatever speed you best ingest the material. Don't get me wrong, some lectures I watch at 2x but it isn't about optimizing speed. It's about optimizing attention. I go faster if the speaker is too slow and/or too monotone so my mind starts drifting. Speeding up can force me to concentrate and not drift but the right speed is dependent in many factors that it can't be a hard rule. Regardless of the speed, in a lecture video I'll pause and rewind. That's the large benefit to them, though at the cost of being unable to engage and interact. There's no deficit of time in the day, the deficit is in energy and attention. I'm worried we conflate speed and productivity (I'm unsure if you do or don't) but these are original. Speed gives the illusion of productivity but it is ignorant of quality and efficiency. It's only a first order approximation of productivity and a noisy one at best. Velocity is more important, as it requires direction but even velocity is ignorant of momentum, acceleration, force, and many other factors that go into making one productive. Speed is only important if everything else is held constant. Let's not confuse speed for productivity. I'd argue that is a major contributing factor that has gotten us to this point. Where everything appears to move fast but in reality moves slower than ever
chickensong 11mo ago
> hard for me to just sit in silence and think Maybe practice slowing down by reading a book. Any book, hard copy. > trying to be more of a producer than consumer Thank you!

foofoo12 11mo ago

Totally my feeling too. The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...

andrepd 11mo ago
Whenever I search anything in my native language, and I mean literally any topic, one of the top recommendations (if not the top one, which autoplays by default) is the local far-right party. It's crazy. We've become used to this but it's crazy.
- nxor 11mo ago
  People have beliefs you don't share?
  - foofoo12 11mo ago
    No, he's referring to politics. Far-right politics[a] encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, radical anti-communism, ethnonationalism, and nativism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
    - 86769928329709 11mo ago
      [dead]
    - nxor 11mo ago
      You misunderstood me. I'm saying it's wrong to act like people can't believe different things than yourself.
      - andrepd 11mo ago
        Lord on high help me. When on earth did I say that?? I open any video unrelated to politics and I have shoved down my throat a rant about immigrants or about how everyone is corrupt except $far_right_guy, or clips of a "debate" that shows them "DEMOLISHING THE COMMUNIST ATHEIST LEFT", cropping all the opponent's responses. Curiously I'm never shown any video from the boring centre party talking about the execution of the budget for 2022-2026 (yawn), or the left wing parties talking about labour law for shift workers (yawn), sensible cycling infrastructure to decrease automobile congestion (yawn), or tax incentives to ameliorate the teacher shortage in certain regions (yaaaaaaawn), despite the fact that those parties have a comparable or much greater voting base, publish videos at the same rate, etc. I don't think even the most obtuse person can deny, in the year 2025, that algorithmic social media and its relentless peddling of whatever it deems "most engaging" is not a problem.

goldemerald 11mo ago

Algorithmically served short form videos is clearly the smoking of our time. I cannot stand the conservative view of "well we don't know the videos cause mental health decline, or if it's simply those with a genetic inclination who seek out short form content.", exactly mirroring the skeptics about smoking causing cancer. I'm hopeful that in 5-10 years (but more likely 20) people will view this AI served, maximally engaging, content in the same way we view smoking now: disgusting and horrible, but adults should be allowed to do what they want. I can easily imagine kids/teens sharing their illicit access to shorts much in the same way they share vapes/cigarettes, which would be a much more preferable situation than the unlimited use we see today.

ge96 11mo ago
Oh man, they take random people's clips, stitch them together with a voice over and include false information eg. an incorrect fact about an animal
nxor 11mo ago
I hope you don't mean conservative in the usual political sense. I know more conservatives worried about this than not.

baxtr 11mo ago

We have one clear rule at home for the kids: YouTube long format is ok. But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok. Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.

gblargg 11mo ago
I'd also ban autoplay of the next video. You have to be involved in choosing the next video to watch (or none).
- grvdrm 11mo ago
  This makes the bigger difference imo. Long enough time in front of autoplay sends a kid down some very strange rabbit holes. Not acceptable to me. Less worried about the format and more the endless doom watching that the algorithm is happy to allow.
  - gblargg 11mo ago
    The automatic play is what bothers me. When I'm done with a video, I reflect on it, and think what I want to do next, not necessarily watching another video the moment the first ends.
derefr 11mo ago
I would suggest you make an exception for YouTube shorts from channels / creators that also put out YouTube long-form content. You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no! The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long. Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical. For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now. --- Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos? Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.) And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content. YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.

gblargg 11mo ago

Anyone who's able to stomach those short videos has to have cognitive deficits or mental issues. I'd rather watch an advertisement than those (and I can't stand watching advertisements).

cadamsdotcom 11mo ago

Short form is no good to consume anyway. The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts! Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

Boogie_Man 11mo ago

I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening. I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".

NedF 11mo ago

[dead]

taw1285 11mo ago

This tracks for me. I have deleted TikTok and Instagram but now I find myself browsing X short videos!! Addiction is a crazy thing. I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.

mrDmrTmrJ 11mo ago
I have YouTube.com and X.com IP blocked on this computer for exactly that reason. Because I noticed I have zero self-control with the short-term video format. So now I don't touch it and consider it similar to cigarettes.
apsurd 11mo ago
Information for its own sake to obtain doesn't have any lasting effect, it makes sense why you forget. Try to intake the information and have it cue a relation to your life, have it spark some internal thought. I'm struggling to articulate this, I've always been "a thinker", just think about things all day. I rarely finish books because whatever I read I think about it for so long. It's my own personal reflection on information, knowledge, and learning, I hesitated to write this comment but I did at the chance it helps. Information is basically a commodity these days. The leverage is in how the info informs your thoughts.
nxor 11mo ago
You don't. This is where taking public transport to work shines.
drekipus 11mo ago
are you watching talks while driving? One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts. It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself. But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do. something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"

nverba 11mo ago

As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?

itake 11mo ago
they want your time
- sturza 11mo ago
  attention is all they want
  - eptcyka 11mo ago
    Attention is all they need.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      Can't we just give them a hug instead if they're that lonely?
OGWhales 11mo ago
Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.
- nxor 11mo ago
  Funny enough, last I saw, shorts of course are less profitable than videos, because they can't carry as many ads, and supposedly advertisers would rather put their ads on longer videos anyway. This would imply they just want to stay relevant. After all, if they didn't make short form videos, someone somewhere would be convinced they are missing out (personally I find shorts a lot worse than long videos).

autonomousErwin 11mo ago

Great ad for Grayscale on your phone and chrome extensions that get rid of shorts

junglistguy 11mo ago

[dead]

SunshineTheCat 11mo ago

I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element. It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water. That key variable seems to matter more than the format. For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die. Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.

tartuffe78 11mo ago
I don't think getting addicted to constant serotonin boosts from enjoyable videos is that much better to be honest.
- nxor 11mo ago
  Not for me. It's also about the kind of thinking this behavior engages. If you only think superficially about kittens for 30 minutes ... personally I would find that similarly awful. Whether the videos are rage inducing or not, it's only passive consumption. And I would rather spend that time using my brain.
GloamingNiblets 11mo ago
The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention. From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".
- 11mo ago

j2kun 11mo ago

Nobody is using this thread to actually talk about what's in the paper, just as a place to rant about short form videos... One question that comes to mind to me is: r=-.034 a reasonable effect size? Having seen many scatter plots of r values, 0.3 seems basically like random noise. Is this just falling into the same problem as all huge meta-studies, that there's way too much variability to get any kind of clear signal? And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?

occupant 11mo ago

I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.

acid__ 11mo ago
I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.
ddtaylor 11mo ago
What's the problem with that? I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad." You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
vacuity 11mo ago
In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research. On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...

lbrito 11mo ago

Its been a long time since I took statistics courses, but aren't those r values rather low to conclude anything? "Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"

moduspol 11mo ago

I know it's probably offensive but I do suspect SFV use also correlates with lower intelligence. This study suggests it leads to poorer cognition, which is in the same ballpark, but I am curious if in the next five or ten years, we'll find out that this stuff disproportionately targets vulnerable people, even if not explicitly intended.

squigz 11mo ago
Why would you think it's not explicitly intended?

tormeh 11mo ago

These correlations are not good, obviously, but in which direction does the causality go? As someone with attention issues, I've had to remove these apps from my home screen and disable notifications because I can't handle them well. I suspect I might be more susceptible to SFV due to attention issues, rather than SFVs causing any change. It's a lousy way to spend time, though.

SirHumphrey 11mo ago

I would caution against reading too much at this stage, even though the researchers were very careful to talk about only correlation, a lot of people here seem to read causation. This are population studies so the variables are not independent. The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people. This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.

jancsika 11mo ago
> This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise. Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day. If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more. People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it. I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.

ModernMech 11mo ago

My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.

hodgehog11 11mo ago

I think it really is important to stress that these are correlations only. Something I've noticed: those with poor attention spans or generally low engagement with deeper material tend to be attracted to SFV. Likewise, those in a state of depression or have ADHD can easily get into the quick satisfaction coming from SFV. It may exacerbate existing issues, but not necessarily be the cause.

markeroon 11mo ago
Is it important to stress that though? This feels like a personal responsibility argument while also acknowledging that it disproportionately affects people who don't have a ton of control over their response to it.
- hodgehog11 11mo ago
  It is important; if SFV cause these symptoms, that could be grounds (long-term) to ban them. Not so if they only exacerbate preexisting conditions.
  - markeroon 11mo ago
    I think that this is an opinion. For instance, one might think online gambling should be illegal, regardless of whether it causes addictive behavior or exacerbates some genetic predisposition to it.

Aurornis 11mo ago

I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim. This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout: > Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024). Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve. It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.

nxor 11mo ago

I try to tell my parents to watch less short form videos. They don't care. Thank you Meta and Alphabet. :(

btilly 11mo ago

I absolutely see the correlation myself, but which way does causation go? I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok. But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem. The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?

montag 11mo ago

If anyone from APA.org is listening, this website is really bad on mobile

andai 11mo ago

I wonder about the cognitive and mental health correlates of living in a world that no longer makes any sense. I remember 10 years ago watching a documentary about the previous ten years explaining how we we had moved into a post meaning world, and how this was being weaponized by various interests. That time seems positively quaint to me now! I was reading a book from the 1960s, and it was talking about how the world is too complicated now and moving too fast. And of course if you read books from the late 19th century they say the exact same thing... https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/

tclancy 11mo ago
Yeah, I remember reading an issue of Planetary from about (GOD HELP US!) two decades ago where the plot involved baddies who had invaded a fictional universe. In the time since then, I went from thinking "What a crazy idea for a plot" to "Hmm, I can see what inspired that" to "Jesus wept. People can basically choose to do this now. And they vote!"
- 64718283661 11mo ago
  Can you please elaborate on each I am very interested to know.
  - tclancy 11mo ago
    It was issue #9, https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Planetary_Vol_1_9 https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Planetary_Vol_1_9 -- or did you mean elaborate on why I went through the X stages of Bill and Ted?

zmmmmm 11mo ago

The interesting part here is what they carve out - they don't see impacts on body image or self esteem. These are classic effects identified as negative impacts of social media in general. It it would be really interesting if somehow SFV format prevents their impact. My guess: the SFV they are talking about is generally just fully attention baiting and not from peers or others that people feel are "comparable". If you don't feel the source or the subject of the video is comparable to you, then there's no compulsion to reference it in a judgemental way against your own circumstances. But I bet if you did just focus on SFV from eg: friends or peers, you'd be right back to self esteem and body image impacts again.

westbywest 11mo ago

The "Vintage Space" channel host Amy Shira Teitel recently posted this long form video expressing her frustration with YT so heavily incentivizing SFVs with its creators. She goes into considerable detail about the intentionally addictive nature of the format, and how it clashes with her own publishing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM

xzjis 11mo ago

I have a theory: just like with excessive porn consumption, could it be that depressed people tend to watch more short-form videos? I have a chronically depressed friend who confirms this theory: she can't be bothered to do anything and can only muster the energy to watch Shorts when she's feeling down. Shorts are not the cause, but a symptom of the consequences of her depression.

bogdanos 11mo ago
Yes, but consuming and getting addicted to (porn|SFV) might as well induce some apathy and later to depression. In my experience (which is NOT a statistics study) the problems go in spiral.
HPsquared 11mo ago
Probably a feedback loop though. Like other addictive behaviours. There are many ways for life to go wrong, and only a few ways for it to go right.
HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
I have taken three multihour Flixbus journeys in Central Europe this year. Each time, what astounded me was how every woman under 30 in sight from my seat was watching Tiktok for the entire journey. Just one thirty-second clip after another for four or five hours, and apparently mainly content that, even if it is about something else, serves to flog cosmetics brands. Obviously it’s hard to diagnose depression from merely looking at someone. But none of these Tiktok users seemed like sad sacks, indeed some looked like successful professionals. I could only conclude that there is some truth to this platform hijacking even well-balanced people’s brain.

dylan604 11mo ago

So the old saying "I can feel myself getting dumber for watching" has some merit. I used to say that for things like Housewives/Kardashian style tripe, as well as bad sitcoms with laugh tracks like Big Bang Theory that was supposed to be so smart

abixb 11mo ago

Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content. BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0] When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal. Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video. [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remove-shor/oahiolknhkbpcolgnpljehalnhblolkm?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remov... [1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-homepa/lcpclaffcdiihapebmfgcmmplphbkjmd?hl=en-US https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-... [2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-comments/bnbnjkiglooccambmgnmbepaofnjjjpl https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...

alkh 11mo ago
Just want to thank you for the comprehensive extension list, this is very useful!

tamimio 11mo ago

People are already calling it “brain rot” so it’s not surprising.

patrickscoleman 11mo ago

If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725

insin 11mo ago

If you want to hide Shorts completely on YouTube, or make watching them a more intentional act by hijacking YouTube's navigation to make them display in the regular video player, Control Panel for YouTube [^0] has options for that, as well as for removing any other sources of algorithmic/recommended videos you don't want, including the new "More videos" in the new video UI (which you can also disable if you don't like it) [^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

correa_brian 11mo ago

I literally feel like I'm doing drugs when I'm watching short-form videos.

domlebo70 11mo ago
You need to do more drugs then.

opminion 11mo ago

I was surprised that the podcast Stuff You Should Know now advertises a short firm video provider, but I couldn't explain exactly why. Maybe this sheds some light on my concerns.

arresin 11mo ago
They advertise straight up gambling also

danielvaughn 11mo ago

I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus. It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV. If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.

RestartKernel 11mo ago
> I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid. I don't think you need any government conspiracy for this. Tiktok is an inevitable product of the attention economy — moreso a capitalist wart than deliberate sabotage.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- NickC25 11mo ago
  China solved this. They deliberately made SFV educational content only. Tiktok had to comply or face the wrath of the CCP. SFV about a math theorem or a physics phenomena or explaining how to use a type of conjugation in English? Cool. SFV thats just a clip of a show or movie with some stupid music overlayed? SFV about a kid doing some stupid dance? Banned.
  - lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
    I've heard this, but I don't think this is actually true (save for some other services that target children). The problem isn't just the content, though. It's also the medium. SFV as a medium cripples cognition and attention span. It feeds bad habits, emotionally and intellectually. How many of Gen Z/Alpha have the attention span to sit through a movie, let alone a book? There's even a joke that if someone says they've binged on a Netflix show, it means they're a millennial: younger generations would find that kind of sustained engagement with a subject boring. SFV is opposed to the kind of engagement you need for deep work.

Grossenstein 11mo ago

I am ready to pay for disabling em feeds.

gomoboo 11mo ago

How I rein in YouTube on all my browsers: - prevent autoplaying video - redirect ‘ youtube.com/shorts/’ to ‘ youtube.com/watch?v=’ The second gets rid of the addictive Shorts UI. I don’t block them entirely because channels I subscribe to create interesting shorts.

mock-possum 11mo ago

It’s so interesting to me that people find these short video clip formats ‘addictive’ when my reaction is the opposite - they repulse me, starting from the vertical video format, carrying through to the snappy cuts and… I don’t know what to call it, kooky sound direction? Anyway, it looks and sounds like something tailor made to annoy me, and even if I occasionally stumble across one clip that’s interesting, the next is sure to turn me off again. You know what’s occurring to me though - is it just the radio all over again? I can’t stand listening to the radio - the experience of being fed content, and switching continuously without ever finding something worth listening to, completely ruins radio for me - gun to my head, I’d rather drive in silence than listen to the radio. Maybe it’s a similar thing?

paffdragon 11mo ago

Are there also similar studies on short-form text like Tweets, HN comments, etc?

thedudeabides5 11mo ago

ban tiktok

DrierCycle 11mo ago

It's just an addiction to cause and effect, short form video, long form video, anything that beguiles us from screens. It was always an addiction to cause and effect. Sometimes there's a protagonist to mindread it from, other times there's villains. But mostly it's eye-of-the beholder cause and effect. These are just magic tricks of another sort that beguile us away from the mysteries of correlation and reality. It's a vacation from the intense complexities and deterministic thrust of chaos.

sharts 11mo ago

Aren’t commercials while watching TV also short-form video? We’ve had those for ages