Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use
psycnet.apa.org
psycnet.apa.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
Idk if I'm built different, but I generally doubt it. I find these statements about brain rot to be either hyperbolic or at very least reminiscent of the "violent video games make you kill people IRL" conversations of the 90s/00s
It was a very addictive sensation. I believe other accounts that mirror this and see them as non-hyperbolic having experienced it myself.
I remember the video game arguments of the 90s; Mortal Kombat never made me violent. I can see how it might seem like history repeating itself, but in this case I'm talking about my own experience.
How much of it is just constantly being told that SFVs are bad for you?
The linked article is a meta analysis with basically 0 controls that finds a statistical correlation barely better than background noise. Yawn
The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
When a pusher gives you some free drugs, they are not taking into account whether you want to be addicted to drugs. Not part of the business model.
My guess is they know exactly what users are doing with the app and website, and know that people use shorts more often than we think.
This is one of their prime products, and they're Google, the biggest surveillance company on the planet. Of course they know how users interact with their service.
They make all sorts of money doing that, but they get upset when people say Google is “selling” the data.
public companies specifically force this kind of capture all possible revenue capture to the point of hurting long term profits.
Take Valve, a private company that understands that its not worth pissing off your customers in the long term and have an incentive structure that supports that.
The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
There are no ads on a sub, this doesn’t make any sense as such to the parents comment.
Whether the user pays for YouTube Premium or not, they still have access to your behavioral data, your interests, they can easily determine your location, and so on. All of these data points contribute to your profile, which is a literal gold mine for their entire business. How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity, the price can only go up.
It's a goddamn racket that needs to be made visible and subject to thorough public and legal scrutiny.
Companies like Google and Meta don't sell your data, on dark markets or otherwise.
They keep it in-house for advertising targeting purposes.
If they sold it to other companies it would reduce their competitive advantage. It's not even worth it for them.
Google doesn't want to sell your data. They want to keep it internal as much as possible so their ad platform is valuable.
It’s indirectly “selling your data”.
They sell your data by any definition of “sell” that existed before they redefined the term so that it excludes their businesses.
If they’re not delivering your data to another party, they’re not selling your data.
The comment above literally claimed they were selling data through “dark data brokers”. It’s a false claim and I called it out.
Besides, even if they're not selling these profiles, they will end up on data broker markets one way or another. Whether their lack of security allows companies to export it, as in Meta's case, or simply by using their tools to gather as much information about people as possible.
The reality is that nobody outside of these companies, and likely only people in executive positions, knows how they operate internally. They have an army of PR and legal people to do their bidding. Whatever practices the public thinks these companies are or aren't involved with is mere guesswork, but one thing is certain: they don't maintain their size and power by keeping their hands clean. But then again, I'm probably on the wrong forum for this line of thinking.
That was literally the point I responded to.
> They're indirectly profiting from the profiles they build by selling access to them via their advertising platform
That’s very different than the “selling your data” line that keeps getting repeated.
There’s a motte and bailey game that gets played every time this topic comes up. The argument starts with claims they’re selling your data, then when that’s revealed as a false claim the argument pivots to something else with strained arguments that it’s equally bad.
Incentive to addict + Ability to addict = outcome
The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.
Why would it be?
Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.
Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.
Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
In terms of content. Very little of what I watch is must-see. It’s just something to kill time. Right now I’m watching some guy jump a bicycle through two moving truck trailers. If this was cable in the 90s, I’d probably be watching How It’s Made. These things are essentially interchangeable for me.
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".
Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.
Your theory of
> just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
is the most likely culprit
YouTube has a whole vast amount of independent production (and some now independent-looking but owned by private equity) which it has cornered into the platform, nowhere else you can find the sort of content that exists in there.
You are just conflating "streaming video" into a single homogeneous market, it's not the case.
When defining a monopoly you can't just say "only this subset of the market is the market we're considering" you have to look at everything it does. As the FTC just learned
* that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you
* that you have disposable income
* that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things
* that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits with you, compared to people they know nothing about
By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.
So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.
In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.
If a paying user want to disable shorts, wouldn't allowing that ability make it more likely they will continue to pay?
The reason I started paying for Youtube premium was to turn off the ads. I hate YT shorts and I get annoyed when I accidentally open one. If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
Because the user thinsk it's a funny penguin and that their friend will laugh. The reality is that for almost all users, the demonstrated and disturbing reality is that they will engage with what you put in front of them if you can tune it right. They may wish you didn't do so, and may idly lament to people about how much they resent you for not giving them more control, but they still engage, and in cases like yours, still subscribe. They're that attached (addicted) and therefore that valuable.
> If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
What modern online media companies learned is that they really don't have to care about that. Individually, you and your subsription don't matter to them at all, and most people just don't get indignant enough to storm off over stuff like that as long you you put the right funny penguins and half-naked women in front of them, so it all works at scale regardless.
And if you were to cancel your subscription, are you ready to go so far as to give up the platform entirely, or would you just fallback to being an ad target who's demonstrated all the appealing targeting characteristics you already have, while still being fed shorts?
Choosing edifying content requires, of course, some caution. Avoid individual “content creators” who might feel pressure to slowly conform their content to the algorithm and sponsors’ demands. Instead, follow e.g. local arts organizations who do their events as part of a whole offline ecosystem, and then just upload video of it to YouTube. Or universities who create teaching content for their own needs but then upload it to YouTube, etc.
Google wants you to be addicted to YouTube. It makes you more likely to renew.
And it helps keep you off competing platforms (TikTok, reels, etc).
They could also make the experience out of the box like SponsorBlock and skip the sponsorship segments, but they don't do that either for their paying users.
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.
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.
But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok.
Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
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.
I sometimes watch shorts when I go directly to a creator's page, but still notice myself sucked into the loop of the next short automatically playing and not being particularly interesting.
Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.
Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
Especially the creators who've "previously made long form but have switched to shorts" — they're not making short-form videos. They're just making long/medium-form videos in portrait now.
IMHO, if something markets itself as a problematic thing, but doesn't actually deliver on the problematic part, then it isn't problematic. (E.g. convincing kids that frozen peas are "pea candy" isn't problematic. You're not making them like "candy." You're making them like peas!)
Kudos to your training of the algorithm if scrolling shorts gives you nothing but interesting informational bits, but you're still supporting the short-form format, which leads to more short-form videos. Like you said, YT is pushing and creators are incentivized, so our clicks make the graphs go up and accelerate our march into ADHD doom scrolling dystopia.
If they want to create a short video, they can create a short video. No need to mark it as a short.
I think this explains why a couple of my long-time favourite creators have gone quiet. (looking at you, NileBlue/Red)
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-remov...
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...
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.
On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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".
The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is further chopped up with cuts and zooms etc, techniques designed to tickle your brain and keep you engaged, more stimulation.
Look at what twitter et al. did to long form reading. Short video is the same.
I've been over-indulging in context switching long before short-form videos ever showed up. The internet itself is all about context switching. But the UX around short-form videos definitely encourages doomscrolling, similar to how microtransaction games encourage neverending grinds.
We definitely need better habits as a collective, but I think a list of "do's" is just as important as a whack-a-mole list of "don'ts".
I feel like things will likely get worse before it gets better, but I have long-term hopes that eventually we'll see some cultural change that promotes doing vs consuming.
Isn't the point of MTX to avoid the grind by i.e., buying levels or gear?
I'll agree that it's stimulating... I guess the question is then: how stimulating it is, vs how stimulating the content itself is? As the initial comment said, we need more data on the specific types of content.
On the content side, I think the content editing can have more of an impact than the subject itself. For example, I can watch something like a fast-paced action movie with a reasonable amount of camera tricks for a couple hours without any noticeable strain, but 30 mins of a modern cooking show can be exhausting just because the average time between camera cuts and zooms is only a few seconds. The latter jams so much stimulation into a small window that baking a cake is on par with a car chase.
On the format side, regardless of content, the loop and video switch gives me similar vibes to the editing tricks, but ofc the short video probably also contains similar editing, so it's a double whammy, and likely spread across different subjects as you scroll every minute or so. Bonus points if the content itself is stimulating.
If the modern cooking show I described is cocaine, doom scrolling shorts is crack cocaine. Harder, faster, more addictive.
Very similar to social media. What is it about social media that's harmful? Is it the connecting with other humans - which seems to me to define social media? Or is it the algorithms? The infinite scrolling? Something else?
(I'm not denying we're facing very serious issues that are certainly being exacerbated if not entirely caused by popular uses of online platforms; I want to solve those issues. I just want to solve them in a productive and non-reductive manner. Taking correlations and running with them is not that, and will not only not solve the problems, but will lead to massive privacy and security issues (see: ID verification))
E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.
wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.
So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.
- 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
In short: There are a lot of differences in how long and short videos affect a person, in my opinion.
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.
You’re hand waving it away because you prefer long videos. What about all the people using TikTok as a search engine?
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]
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.
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). 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). 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-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.
I would mod the YT app to remove 'autoplay next' and algo recommendations but unfortunately my kid is on iOS where modding isn't possible. The best thing we did was not get her a phone until after she turned 13.
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
Maybe practice slowing down by reading a book. Any book, hard copy.
> trying to be more of a producer than consumer
Thank you!
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?
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?
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?
"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)"
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".
The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
Far-right politics[a] encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, radical anti-communism, ethnonationalism, and nativism.
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.
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.
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...