I'm old. I barely engage with "normal" social media and thus TikTok and its appeal are an absolute mystery to me. All the TikTok trends - the dances, the "icebergs", side-by-side video "responses", and now "sludge" videos - feel like communications from an Alien race. Heck, I still feel slightly annoyed when I see a vertical video of any kind.
I guess this is how my parents felt about the internet and video games.
I dont know. Video games was one thing. It didn't context switch as a 10 second video with flickering content does. Next video. Next video. Next Next Next Next....
I am no brain expert but I know when our kids are over stimulated
> When the Stockton-Darlington Railway opened in 1825, people feared the worst: the human body, surely, wasn't made to travel at incredible speeds of 30 miles per hour. People genuinely believed that going that quickly would kill you in gruesome ways, such as your body melting.
Video games had a time and a place and I could play them all day.
But these Tiktok's and reels are way too over stimulating for something I can watch in my hands. They provide way too much comfort and satisfaction not only when I have nothing to do, but also when I have a lot to do.
And don't think this impacts only a group of people. My father who you could hardly find in front of a TV now loves his iPad.
I'm young and I feel the same. And I have many younger cousins (gen alpha) who don't understand or don't like these new age platforms like TikTok and would never use them.
These videos always seem to be posted by content harvesters and I presumed the side-by-side video was intended to add randomness to avoid content detection.
Or simply to keep users staring at the video, wondering what on earth they're looking at, for long enough to count as a view.
When your only objective as a video creator is to maximize total view time, spewing out a bunch of garbage videos that users will look at for a few seconds each is, unfortunately, locally optimal.
Putting multiple videos together also helps avoid copyright strikes - another reason this kind of content gets more popular. At least until copyright algorithms catch up I guess.
Another doomsayer boomer article that completely fails to understand the topic and instead bashes it with a scary sounding name.
“Sludge” videos most often are primarily audio content mixed with easy to digest visual content. Half the frame is a podcast, interview, etc where the audio matters but the video doesn’t. The other half is easy fun visual content with no audio.
Clearly very different but think about listening to music while doing any task/chore/driving. Music is audio only, the other is visual.
It’s not some evil ploy for engagement, it’s modifying audio content to fit into a visual medium.
I remember seeing a video of someone working on a project that would scrape stories from Reddit, get any random video from Youtube, like Subway surfers or something. The script would then put these together and add a narrator that would read the story and add subtitles.
At the end, you’d have something close to a sludge video. The project is available online and since then, I’ve seen hundreds of new channels pumping out this exact type of content.
Personally, I find this whole thing stupid. Especially sludge videos, it’s overstimulating have two separate videos playing simultaneously.
Youtube shorts is already enough of a challenge to cut out from my life.
Readit News
I guess this is how my parents felt about the internet and video games.
I am no brain expert but I know when our kids are over stimulated
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/12-technologies...
And both can be true, trains have killed people and tiktok can have adverse effects.
So far we’ve kept trains, added safety measures and made them faster. I guess we’ll do the same with tiktok and the like.
Video games had a time and a place and I could play them all day.
But these Tiktok's and reels are way too over stimulating for something I can watch in my hands. They provide way too much comfort and satisfaction not only when I have nothing to do, but also when I have a lot to do.
And don't think this impacts only a group of people. My father who you could hardly find in front of a TV now loves his iPad.
Dances are funny to me, at least the ones I see, they remind me of memes; it’s about 10% of my feed.
I have no idea what are icebergs (please explain).
Video responses (“duets” / “stitches”) can be funny or informative. Also perhaps 10%.
I‘ve seen “sludge” only in a simpler form (minecraft gameplay and an automated voice reading a reddit post), I saw it maybe 2-3 times total.
My point is just like you can tweak your twitter, reddit, etc experience to show you the content you want and enjoy - you can do the same with tiktok.
Although if you don’t like vertical videos then absolutely skip it.
I just assumed they came over from TikTok. But as the saying goes: "When you assume you make an ass out of u and me."
When your only objective as a video creator is to maximize total view time, spewing out a bunch of garbage videos that users will look at for a few seconds each is, unfortunately, locally optimal.
“Sludge” videos most often are primarily audio content mixed with easy to digest visual content. Half the frame is a podcast, interview, etc where the audio matters but the video doesn’t. The other half is easy fun visual content with no audio.
Clearly very different but think about listening to music while doing any task/chore/driving. Music is audio only, the other is visual.
It’s not some evil ploy for engagement, it’s modifying audio content to fit into a visual medium.
At the end, you’d have something close to a sludge video. The project is available online and since then, I’ve seen hundreds of new channels pumping out this exact type of content.
Personally, I find this whole thing stupid. Especially sludge videos, it’s overstimulating have two separate videos playing simultaneously.
Youtube shorts is already enough of a challenge to cut out from my life.
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