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Comment by kykeonaut | Hacker News Reader

I think what is interesting is that it is not necessarily the content of the brainrot that makes us underperform, but the act of swiping [0] and the context switching [1].

These attempts to make educational short form content still suffer from the same drawbacks, so I wonder how effective they truly are.

[0] https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...

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I think it's "this one is good but if I swipe the next one can be even better", i.e. classic dopamine addiction. Stop digging!

A slot machine affect. Viewing our society as an addicted one clarifies most of our social ills.

This is it. Modern social media is a Skinner box. The context switching is a feature (short term dopamine hit in exchange for deep learning).

i would place my money on the vast gap between effort and reward. you dont even need to think "if i swipe..." because the thought takes longer than the action. So why would you stop to consider what you might have to gain by swiping when you can literally swipe and find out faster than you can think about it?

Then you go about your regular day and suddenly everything feels harder in comparison. You have to think about what youre doing, you have to coordinate or plan your actions, you have to put work in. The swiping rots your ability to maintain and coordinate your chain of actions.

it weakens your ability to have intent.

it starts to sound scarily close to opioid addiction

thankfully it is much more of a daily cycle than a true addiction. if you spike dopamine in the first hour of being awake, you effectively addict yourself for the day. whether you follow through on that addiction or not is less relevant, it kind of shapes your baseline. So you might just have a harder day than usual because it was a dopamine deprived day and instead of having a low baseline you primed your brain for a very stimulating day by having a high-dopamine activity in the morning.

I suppose the idea is that if we're gonna be underperforming due to endless swiping and context switching, might as well get stimulated by educational content instead of brainrot. Similar to a nicotine patch to help quit smoking.

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