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Comment by andrewinardeer | Hacker News Reader

I believe that short form video coupled with infinite scroll mesmerizes humans. It keeps them in a trance by using suspense. The brain absolutely must know how the video plays out whether that be waiting for the punchline, a fight to break our or a fact to be delivered. Once the brain has locked eyes on the video the user must put significant energy into making a conscious decision to look away.

Even OpenAI's latest Sora app leans into this format and the videos there are literally the poorest quality on the Internet. 99.999% of them are eight seconds of unintelligent, unintelligible, low grade digitally created excrement.

There should be a law against it.

Big Tech knows this. They have teams of people with doctorates making apps engaging.

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It's a slot machine. Everything social media and e-commerce is a slot machine. Each scroll is a pull of the arm, hoping that the algorithmic gods will smile kindly on you and give you some sweet content or deal.

Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barret [1] for an exploration of the psychology of this "mesmerizing" effect - at least in general, if not specifically in short-form video and infinite scroll.

Whether the artificial stimulus comes in the form of junk food, entertainment, social connection, sex, we've seen time and time again that trillion-dollar megacorps employing thousands of the greatest minds of our generation have been able to invent substitutes that are more compelling than evolution has prepared the human brain to be able to deal with.

It does seem like video shorts are especially easy to exploit.

[1]: https://www.harvard.com/book/9780393068481

Thank you for this recommendation.

dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.

aka a drug

It’s insane. And once you’ve got a habit for it it’s so hard to stop. Without thinking about it you end up back on there scrolling slop. I’ve started to look at using the Screen Time feature on iOS, but it’s hard when some apps have a dual function like YouTube I use for music but also has Shorts.

Maybe consider getting a different, dedicated program for music (line Spotify)? Sometimes doing thinks just to work around your brain is the right thing to do.

I guess I'm fortunate enough to find shorts unbearable. I occasionally watch some from creators I like, but tbh I find a great majority of them really annoying. The vertical frame, the silly endings after 30s of crap. God. It's so bad.

We need an infinite video scroll tax

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