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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Might be a generational thing, but I never understood the "shorts" (in any format on any social network).

I can watch a 9 hour video on GTA games without problems (not in one sitting, but in parts), but 3 'shorts' in a row with not enough info and explanation to be interesting makes me close any of the 'shorts' apps (tiktok, youtube shorts, instagram....).

(eg, the 9 hour video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faxpr_3EBDk )

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You likely weren’t wired into it while your brain was developing.

There’s clear scientific evidence that these shorts trigger addiction-like behavior[1]. The detrimental effects on a kid’s brain development can be inferred[2]. A reasonable argument could made that it’s not so different from things like nicotine, alcohol or other drugs when it comes to child brain development. I believe these companies know this and willfully push it on kids anyway.

Edit: And I think it’s really telling that China has some of the strictest state-led anti-addiction and youth protection policies globally[3].

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[3] https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/kids-no-phones-dinne...

actually the study does not show a trigger by shorts, instead they hypothesize the addiction exists based on previous studies done on internet/video game addictions.

I think one of the things that short form videos do really well is that they punish creators who pad their videos with unnecessary filler content. On TikTok for example (Not necessarily a fan of the app but it's a good example) no videos start with all that empty jabbering you often see on YouTube ("Welcome to my channel...", "Today we will...", "Please Like and Subscribe...", "This video is sponsored by...", etc), because if they tried any of that crap the viewers would just swipe the content away. So, instead they always get straight to the point. That part is really refreshing.

Of course, there are other issues instead.

i can't really concentrate well on long video content outside of specific cases, so there's that. honestly though i feel like shorts aren't the solution, there should just be more text content [eg: tutorials] in addition to video things. [every time someone says something is "only communicateable through video/audio" i die a little bit inside...]

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