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Comment by paradoxyl | Hacker News Reader

I was behind a woman today on an escalator. I wasn't shoulder-surfing, she held her phone up so high I couldn't help but see it. She was on Tik-Tok. She watched like twenty videos in one minute. One second, click. One second, click. What good this does anybody at all, anywhere, is beyond me. It was all trash.

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Someone might say the same thing about you if they were looking over your shoulder and you were reading HN comments.

> she held her phone up so high I couldn't help but see it.

Atleast she is using good posture for phone use. Give her that.

She is likely addicted. That's how it is designed

Agreed. She didn't necessarily decide to click through 20 small clips of lazy cheerleading. She was probably hoping to find a good hit but is satisfied with useless crap because it's better than being present.

Trash compared to what? Watching reality tv? Playing videogames? Going to a casino?

More than one thing can be trash simultaneously.

Raises an interesting question: is something only trash if there are better options available? I'd say no, personally. Something can just be bad in isolation, it doesn't have to be worse than something else to qualify.

But at the very least, maybe it was just trash compared to the experience of not watching a short video on your phone while riding on an escalator. Trash compared to just looking around. Would staring at your shoes, or the head of person in front of you, or the environment surrounding you have been a better experience than those short videos.

Yes. I don't know either, but I try and consider what I'm comparing it to even if that is sitting quietly.

The kind of anecdote my grand dad would bring up.

But very relatable and I too am baffled by the appeal of these shorts.

They do sound like a grumpy old man.

As a recovered TikTok addict, I can supply that it was the jokes for me. There was a lot of content that got delivered to me that hit my sense of humor just right. I’m sure you could track increased oxytocin in active users just like with narcotics.

Maybe the fact that I can't grasp why you'd watch your tiktok feed explains why I'd really enjoy my own.

What good does a cigarette do?

I smoke one a day, and the good it does for me is carve out 5 minutes of reflection on the day.

you could take a nicotine gum or a patch instead of getting carcinogens in your body, unless you do it cigar style.

> unless you do it cigar style.

Mouth cancer is no joke, I knew a dude without a lower jaw because of that

Throat cancer, too. Friend of mine smoked cigars regularly for much of his life. Once they diagnosed the cancer in his upper throat, he lived about 10 months.

i'll pile on: my dad had jaw cancer. cut a few chunks of his jaw out, basically lost all of the molars on the bottom left. probably going to have to take more out before too long.

also turned into a few skin cancer issues in there.

don't smoke and wear sunscreen, people

Not inhaling means less carcinogens than doing so, but far more than not smoking.

Anx you can drink non-alchojolic vodka... but what for?

How is that any different from other social media feeds? Users familiar with a content platform will skim through content faster. That has been the case since the TV era.

It's not just the viewers either. I guess they need to be there for someone to bother creating content, but on one short stroll through London I saw multiple "content creators" filming themselves. That wasn't something that one often saw when I was younger, now the whole city is crawling in people who are making videos.

I also noticed the quality of the filters. They really make ordinary people look quite a lot better than they do in real life.

Everyone is so addicted to their phones. It’s just like a poker machine now.

> What good this does anybody at all, anywhere, is beyond me. It was all trash.

It's TV 2.0, but caters to ADHD types or people with borderline ADHD. If you use The Internet in any extreme way, you already have an ADHD brain. It's the only logical way to handle information overload and deal with the vastness of the web IMHO. ADHD as a term is normalized because of The Internet. It's not a scary thing to have anymore. It's the new normal.

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