Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus.

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.

View on HN

Couldn't be further from my experience. I enjoy it, watch for a bit, or even for an hour+, and then put it down. No noticable impact to my ability to focus at all: 5 hours flies by while coding still.

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

Anecdotes are anecdotes, but my experience mirrors the above poster except the timelines and platform. I feel like I got vortexed into YouTube shorts in a way that I haven’t ever felt anything close to except maybe the early days of stumbleupon. A very addictive rush hitting all the right synapses. I’d probably watch 2 or more hours a night and I doubt that’s even an honest account. Some furniture refinishing projects thankfully pulled me away long enough to break the cycle.

It was a very addictive sensation. I believe other accounts that mirror this and see them as non-hyperbolic having experienced it myself.

I'm sure everyone is different. I believe alcohol is probably very addictive, but even though I've had periods of my life where I was drinking heavily (mostly in social situations), I've never once felt the sensation of "needing a drink". It's completely foreign to me. Maybe it's a genetic thing, no idea. I just know deep down that I'll never become an alcoholic. But that doesn't mean it doesn't affect other people very differently.

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.

Your experience is at odds with the statistical results of the linked studies covering nearly 100,000 participants.

The linked study r values are all minor to no effect. -0.37 as an r value is barely correlated. Talk to me when they're up above -.5

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

> 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.

China solved this.

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.

I've heard this, but I don't think this is actually true (save for some other services that target children).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com