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Comment by crowbahr | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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