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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.

I don't know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time. It's a very strong correlation.

(And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we're accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don't have time to adequately question is high).

Developing some skills requires focus and careful study. We're robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.

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    The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.

I see this written so frequently. Is there any studies to back up this claim? Please forgive me: Normally, I abhor the "citation please" type of response, but this claim is misleading to me. It just sounds like grumpy old person complaining about speed of the world and young(er) people.

Example: I tried Googling for "does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?". None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing "it's never been worse" blog posts.

You can try yourself. Use the most short-form content media: either one of HN, reddit and tiktok for 8 hours per day for one week. I can guarantee you won’t be able to concencrate on anything after the one week.

> Is there any studies to back up this claim?

Did you read TFA? It's the entire subject of the piece.

One could analogize attention as a muscle. If you're only lifting 5KG dumbbells, you're not going to be able to lift 25KG.

The articles conclusion is explicitly that there is no valuable literature on the subject

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...

How anyone could read that article, even just skim it, and come out thinking that it was presenting evidence that this is a well researched topic is beyond me. The entire point of the article is that they couldn't fine studies on the topic...

I doubt there are controlled studies, but you can probably make a reasonable hypothesis based on viewing habits at different ages. Old people in 1993 watched Bonanza reruns; in 2023 they’re hooked to the constant crisis of cable news.

Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen a shift in corporate comms as people gravitate to IM and text as opposed to email, driven both by habit and by avoiding accountability as email audit has become common.

Google is a terrible tool to find scientific research. Rather use Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) or some of the fancy new AI-assisted literature survey tools such as Elicit (https://elicit.org). I used both to find these result:

- The effect of daily internet usage on a short attention span and academic performance (https://monami.hs-mittweida.de/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId...)

- Enhancing Cognitive Performance in Children by Decreasing Screen Time and Increasing Art Activities (https://www.proquest.com/openview/8f41dc5ed9fff23842acf88b16...)

- Gen Z and Millennials in the Workplace: How are Leaders Adapting to their Short Attention Span and How Will they Keep them from Leaving a Qualitative Study (https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4800/)

- Does Media Use Have a Short-Term Impact on Cognitive Performance? (https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105%2Fa000038)

- Short-term mindfulness intervention reduces the negative attentional effects associated with heavy media multitasking (https://doi.org/10.1038/srep24542)

- Influence of Short Video Watching Behaviors on Visual Short-Term Memory (https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.314)

- Attention switching and working memory spans (https://doi.org/10.1080/09541440440000014)

- Caught in the Loop: The Effects of The Addictive Nature Of Short-form videos On Users’ Perceived Attention Span And Mood (http://essay.utwente.nl/95551/)

Disclaimer: this is not my field, and I only spent 15 minutes on this, so these may not be the best articles around. On the other hand, the post seems to mention quite a lot of research on this topic, so you could read that, too. To read more, check articles that cite, or were cited by, these. Also, for obvious reasons, there does not seem to be many studies available on long term effects.

Hot stuff. Great reply. Thank you for the scientific search tips!

Well, I can't give you a neurological point of view on it, but if you train an LLM to be great at handling a context size of 512 tokens, when you try to ask it to do a task which requires greater context length (or in this context - attention span), the responses become incoherent, scattered and perplex as hell.

Which I imagine to be what would happen to a human if they trained their brain to process information of a certain context length exclusively.

So yeah, perhaps your brain becomes amazing at processing succinct information that's been engineered to be short, to the point and has none of the subtext or subtlety that you could include in a larger context.

That being said, perhaps that's exactly the kind of mental capacity you need for high context switching professions, I'm not sure which those are yet, but I'm sure there has to be someone in the world that has a use for that.

TL;DR if we keep the direct environment of our child clean and limit distractions she's calm, and focused. If we don't she gets whiny and somewhat unbearable.

I'm raising a child right now and it's pretty simple to observe a few simple patterns:

1. if there is stuff in her visible range during any activity that is even mildly interesting she wants it and it distracts from any activity. be it her own scooter, or her own toys lying around. denying her access to it makes her upset.

2. if there is any food in her visible range, cookies, fruits, anything, while eating dinner, she wants it and it makes feeding harder. denying access to it will make her upset and scream.

3. if there is a screen of any sort or a bright light on she will stare at it. denying her access to it makes her upset unless I turn it off and put my devices away.

4. We don't have a TV so she enjoys books a lot and we have improved our eating habits which makes it A LOT easier to feed her the same her healthy food.

5. Grand parents think they should bring a bunch of gifts every time they visit meaning our place is filled with junk, infinite amounts of clothes and they get upset when they don't get to gift it much like the kids that receive them.

What I'm trying to say it that even taking away all the digital distractions, a lot of these simple things are things I and many people around me did not have in abundance as a child.

It's not just because the digital stuff that attention spans decline. It's because EVERYTHING is noisy. Even the children books and toys are flashy and noisy.

It's not like you wake up one day and have attention or not, it's something that is learned over long periods of time.

How is any one supposed to grow up learning focus with all that junk around? I think a lot of these things are designed to get attention from children. The toy, book, and even children clothing manufacturers compete with each other on attention, ultimately I would argue with the goal of making the biggest profits.

A "neat" thing is that this exact same behavior is present in adults. Numerous studies have demonstrated a negative impact on focus (and other factors) when a person's phone is in their vicinity, even if it's completely inactive. I'd hypothesize it's our bodies becoming somewhat acclimated to the little micro-dopamine bursts you're going to get each time you get a bzzt, brrt, beep, or other sort of "engagement" (read: addiction) optimized notifier letting you know that something has happened. Even just seeing your phone, your body just starts anticipating it, and waiting for its next hit - in the same way your mouth may begin to salivate when looking at a delicious plate of food.

I suspect we'll look back at this era we're living in, the same way we might look back at the 19th century. In the 19th century cocaine started showing up in just about everything. It was used in medicinal tonics, casual drinks like Coca Cola (cocaine + kola nut), and more. People would use it recreationally, employers would give it to their workers, inventors and others (among them, Thomas Edison) would use it to improve their productivity, and more. Given the dramatic side effects of cocaine, people certainly realized there was a problem - but inertia is one hell of a beast.

Small kids struggle with focus, and here it's a good thing: they work to expand their environment and explore.

And, yes, you're totally right: too many toys and other things seem to exist to exploit this in the name of keeping kids quiet for a couple of minutes and extracting money from guardians. Not to mention the excessive use of tablets and screen time for kids under 5.

But I'm talking about something somewhat different: I know quite a few 17-19 year olds that genuinely want to absorb information, but literally cannot hold focus through a 15 second interruption. This is way more prevalent now than a few years ago, and it seems to be the students who are obsessed with short-form video that struggle the most.

I think all the things you're mentioning are relevant, but the big thing is that with mobile devices and short-form content we've created an environment where distraction never lets up. Most of us had to learn to be bored during some of our summer and sit with the feeling: that opportunity doesn't really exist now for youth.

Something I've learned from raising children is that the behaviour patterns the children follow are ultimately the same behaviour patterns us adults follow too. We just like to pretend that we know better or have overcome the childish instincts, but in many cases we have not. We act exactly same way and then come up with some bullshit excuse for it after the fact that makes it seem like we are not exactly the same species of monkeys acting on instincts like our children are.

Regarding your point 5. Gifts are a slow form of cluttering that snuck up on me. Children have multiple occasions per year where they are expected to get gifts, often more than one from more than one individual, which leads to sometimes dozens of gifts per child per year, most of which they rapidly lose interest in, added to an ever growing pile. It is rude to throw away gifts once received, and donating comes with its own caveats and effort. Unless the gifts pile is actively and continuously curated it grows over time and clutters the house. By the time I realized what was happening, we had already lost the fight and old toys were everywhere.

We recently moved and used the occasion to declutter. We flipped the script and took only what we wanted: just the toys the kids still wanted, just the books worth keeping, just the clothes worth wearing, and so on. I would estimate we kept less than a quarter of the stuff in our old house. All that stuff clutters not just the house, but the mind as well.

I think we are on the right of the bell curve with our kids discipline (healthy eating, little screen time) but the picture you paint sounds miserable.

A sparse environment, no TV, simple toys, denying gifts from grandparents isn’t something noble.

Of course don’t let them eat cookies before dinner and sit on iPads all day, but there has to be some balance for everyone’s enjoyment and sanity.

> A sparse environment, no TV, simple toys, denying gifts from grandparents isn’t something noble.

Providing an environment conducive to personal growth IS noble. Of course it's not only a matter of removing damaging attention sinks, but also substituting those with more healthy alternatives, like books, activities, education, quality time with family, etc.

I feel like all of these patterns apply to adults too. I can definitely relate to number 1 and number 3.

> TL;DR

Too perfect.

> when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.

I keep hearing this but is there actual evidence? My anecdata is that I can watch tiktoks and read programming books all day without one impacting the other. I honestly have trouble believing that our attention mechanism is so flawed it can be broken so easily.

I think the more likely explanation is that consumed content is just more efficient these days. In other words, it's not our attention span that's changing but our data culture. I think that's a good thing too.

Well, we're discussing a post that looks at a bunch of moderate-quality evidence in this area. Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to realize that attention span measures would be very important for us to have high quality control evidence before 2000.

So we have some moderate quality measures that say that attention span has become lower over time. And we have higher quality measures that show that low attention span is correlated to consuming short-form video. For example, https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8820

> our attention mechanism is so flawed it can be broken so easily.

In my opinion, our attention mechanism is very weak compared to the demands of academic study and modern knowledge work.

> In my opinion, our attention mechanism is very weak compared to the demands of academic study and modern knowledge work.

Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok.

Maybe the UX of a traditional science paper has to be reviewed instead of trying to fault the end user for not torturing themselves trying to ingest something that has UX from half a century ago.

To me the issue seems pretty clear. We got new information delivery methods that are significantly better and when going back to old methods we naturally get unsatisfied. Does that mean we are getting "dumber" as "attention deficit" memes imply or that certain fields are just failing to catch up?

We can simply accept that ingesting old data types will be more difficult for the new generations or update them to match new expectations. Either way this sounds like whole lot of nothing for most of us.

> Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok.

Some things take time. You don't perfect a painting technique, explore a family of variations in a musical theme, analyze a complicated social issue, or solve non-trivial equations in a 25 second slice.

The students that I'm talking about-- they can ask their peer a question that they're interested in learning the answer to, and then have their attention wander and lose state in the time it takes their friend to finish chewing. This used to be pretty rare; now it's distressingly common.

I'm all for multi-modality and different ways to present information. But most people need to develop the skills to show up and think deeply for >20 minute spans.

That's a very good point. I guess the real new problem here is learning to identify and manage different types of discussions and information exchange formats which can be challenging but totally solvable issue imo once people start working on it instead of pointing fingers and fear mongering.

> We got new information delivery methods that are significantly better and when going back to old methods we naturally get unsatisfied. Does that mean we are getting "dumber" as "attention deficit" memes imply or that certain fields are just failing to catch up?

the new delivery methods are not significantly better at delivering knowledge, but at diverting attention. They are engineered for that outcome, not for the information retention ability after a significant amount of time, or even for the comprehension of that information. So yes, as a result, the society is getting dumber, because our intellectual resources are rerouted to futile bits of nothingness.

Hard disagree with you. New methods are objectively better. One obvious illustration is that online books/websites are better than paper books at information delivery and teaching people in general. The "society is degrading" meme is as old as time itself and frankly it's getting a bit boring.

Most of yt and tiktok are a regression against both books and websites.

What kind of knowledge are all you getting from Tiktok? Technical knowledge? Philosophical? I thought the app was for lip syncing + lazy cheerleading and the occasional Chinese data mining. But I am perfectly happy hopping on the bandwagon if it has substance!

I just use all the various sites as tools, instead of having loyalty anywhere. Search for something you're interested in and see what shows up. YouTube is definitely no longer the central repository of everything that it once was. A good way to demonstrate the average difference between YouTube and TikTok is to show the same video from the same guy, but optimized for different platforms. This is a video on deadlift form (in weight training):

TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyethier/video/71989368081330209...

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWcirHIwVo

No idea what the deal is, but I'm guessing the YouTube algorithm is optimized for longer form videos so a lot of stuff ends up with just a lot of filler. The TikTok video is everything in the YouTube video, but with all the fluff removed. I've also used TikTok for foreign language lessons with excellent results, largely for the same reason. The videos tend to have a lot better information density than what YouTube optimizes for.

----

Also, just watching that YouTube version again. Perhaps one of the best things is no more "If you like this video be sure to like, subscribe, and comment below. It really helps the channel out." An algorithm that relies on such a stupid, gameable, opt-in metric is always going to be inherently dysfunctional.

The “meta game” of optimal length on YouTube has been shifting towards longer videos for quite a while - one of the more important metrics towards monetising is “watch hours”. So you get a lot of filler.

YouTube also has shorts, which it measures somewhat differently (as views as opposed to watch hours).

What are these shorts? It looks like common video that is very narrow vertically.

Great links! Thank you for this comparison. I am a huge fan of spreading content across platforms as to avoid a monolith. I will be looking in to this Tiktok. And I truly cannot stand the "smash the like" whatever every. single. damn. video.

It's a totally under rated platform imo - there are a lot of high quality creators!

In particular I'm following UX (@designertom), CX and design channels as I'm still transitioning from backend to full stack development. Tech news, Producthunt-like content (especially in bleed edge areas like AI), art stuff, technical gardening (@transformativeadventures), science stuff (@hankgreen) and health/workout (@dr_idz).

The initial problem with tiktok is that you need quite a bit of time to train the algorithm to actually give you the stuff you want as the search and other discovery areas are really bad on purpose.

Also worth noting that Tiktok now supports long form content so some video can get pretty long. The player also has 2x video speed and good seeker so it's easy to roll through a lot of information very efficently!

I've come across lots of DIY tips, knots that I can now tie and Photoshop techniques. The algo now knows that I'll watch these.

I use it to figure out AI image techniques. Basically the theory is in papers, the nearly accepted stuff is in blogs, but the people on cutting edge are in youtube and tiktok trying 100 things before they can post 1

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