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Comment by abeisgreat | Hacker News Reader

I never understand why people consume content like this accelerated. For me, I feel like if I felt the need to rush through something then it’s not worth consuming at all.

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Personally it helps me understand it more because it requires more concentration. I've always needed to be doing something while listening or watching things, but the problem is that I can distract myself doing that and not actually pay attention to the actual thing at all. Turning the speed up forces me to concentrate more and it's harder to get distracted

This. I have ADHD. If I watch at normal speed, I get bored and my mind wanders.

For me it’s mostly how slow some people talk. This is especially true for some content when I can understand it at a higher speed, for example Dota replays. I feel like I’ll get more out of the time watching two in the same when I can understand 95% of the nuance. I also have ADHD so wanting it to be faster could easily be part of that.

Honestly, not everyone has the same mental clockspeed. I have friends who seem to quite literally think 7x faster than everyone else. But to be fair, they don't do as much side-band emotional processing and tangential thought as me. I process "off the beaten path" of the recorded narrative, so I like realtime speed, bc it lets me relate other thoughts to what I'm hearing. But that's just my slow relational mind :)

It’s all about time. I can consume, enjoy and take in content like this much faster than it is presented. Speeding it up let’s me enjoy more content

So you don't believe in scientists when they say that the conscious has a low, fairly constant bandwidth? Like what, 50 b/s?

I think it is safe to say we know not all people take in information at the same rate. Also some people process different forms of information at different rates. Some people can read a book and understand it clearly. Others see it once and they learn the skill. So no I do not fully believe what scientist have claimed. That may be an average or the normal but not true in every case. Furthermore how do you actually measure what rate of information that video was presenting information at? It definitely was not at a steady rate as well lots of pauses and dead spots. Speeding the video up removes some of that dead space. Also there is the depth of the information. We are not working out space time curvature equations we are being shown precious stone cutting. If I was trying to learn the skill maybe even normal speed would be too fast and slowing it down or repeating sections may be needed. But as I was just trying to get an idea of the subject a faster speed is fine. I guess what I’m thinking is there are lots of factors to consider.

Sounds like a great reason to watch that 30 b/s video at at least 1.5x speed.

Most of it is pretty long sequences of him cutting the same facets or polishing, so not really much to glean from many of those sequences.

TikTok and YT shorts condition us all to have shorter attention span

10 minutes watching YouTube is 10 minutes of your life you'll never get back. I 2x everything unless it needs to be experienced in realtime.

Boomers complained how Gen X rotted their brain by channel flipping.

What does that prove? They might well both be right.

Every new generation faces some form of peril touted to be the coming of end times by the outgoing generation.

From a 50,000-ft view of the collective, it looks gross and seems like there’s no end in sight. However, individuals can still take responsibility to find a balance between excesses that society provides and complete avoidance of any forms of entertainment.

Each generation saying that the next is having their attention span diminished by new media may seem "gross" to you, but that feeling hardly proves any of them wrong.

what'd you say? i got distracted.

tldr

No, Silent Generation did that about Boomers.

no, Great Generation did that about Silent.

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