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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but if we're being very honest I think the reason is just nostalgia. And I think that you can still find what you're looking for, but it's less in-your-face (as in; it's not a url on altavista.com).

We're older now, being young was great, we had infinite time to roam and discover and have nice things (and our first real six-string, and trying different things and not thinking about tomorrow). The youth nowadays also has infinite time, and they fill it in their own way. They like how things are, even though we don't like it and yearn for the days of yore.

It is the way of things.

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Earlier today I saw that Tik Tok has 2 billion monthly active users and the average user uses it for 100 minutes a day. The app is so addictive that I feel it’s not right to say the user using it every day for 100 minutes at a time is enjoying themselves. To me this doesn’t look like an organic expression of the youth’s desire to explore and create in ways different from precious generations.

1/4th of the humans in the world (many of them youth) are mindlessly scrolling short form content for almost 2 hours a day (and this is just Tik Tok). That’s a problem!

That's indeed true, I share your concern, and I think most will call 2 hr/day rookie numbers. But there is also youth out there that do things differently. And (most) laws and understanding of the situation are changing for the better.

Based on that stat, if the average life time is 80 years, Tik tok burns up 4,800 lifetimes a day. (380,000 years) Ouch!

But it's life-spent on what otherwise? I agree it's better spend creating and socializing, but will it be, if there was no tiktok? I guess socializing, yes.

Every generation has its own vilified time waster. Can I truthfully say that time spent on TikTok is worse than the 4+ hours a day I spent playing Skyrim in 2011?

Or reading comics/watching TV in the 80s?

The average viewer only actually watches something like 10 seconds of every video. It’s not like in comics or TV where you actually follow a story, though tv binges did feel to me similar to scrolling short form content. The latter led to binging every time I used it and tv did not, however.

I’d bet it is. Playing Skyrim involves a least some thinking from the player. Have you ever succumbed to a scrolling binge? It’s honestly painful. You just sit there for many hours in a row not feeling fulfilled by anything.

A better comparison in my opinion is to television of the 80s-90s. Though I do think longer form content is better for you.

Pretty sure discord is the PHPbb of today. That seems to be the place where people's congregate and the communities are smaller.

It does have that feeling still but one does get the sense that they are on the path toward aggressive monetization.

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