I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus.
It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV.
If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.
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
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.
> I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.
I don't think you need any government conspiracy for this. Tiktok is an inevitable product of the attention economy — moreso a capitalist wart than deliberate sabotage.
The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.
The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
That's right, but it's not just products that they can "sell" you. It's all about your data, which is worth much more than any upsell opportunity.
Whether the user pays for YouTube Premium or not, they still have access to your behavioral data, your interests, they can easily determine your location, and so on. All of these data points contribute to your profile, which is a literal gold mine for their entire business. How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity, the price can only go up.
It's a goddamn racket that needs to be made visible and subject to thorough public and legal scrutiny.
> The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet
There are no ads on a sub, this doesn’t make any sense as such to the parents comment.
Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".
Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.
But Youtube isn't a monopoly. It's competing with Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu Instagram, Tiktok and Twitch off the top of my head. So they do have to make Youtube competitive
Your theory of
> just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
They don't make more money from showing you shorts once you've paid to remove the ads.
The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.
The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.
> This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.
Why would it be?
Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.
Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.
Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
Sadly this requires a browser plugin. Happily, those exist. I also pay for YT and use "enhancer for youtube" which can do a plethora of things, one of which is to disable shorts.
Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.
Funny enough, last I saw, shorts of course are less profitable than videos, because they can't carry as many ads, and supposedly advertisers would rather put their ads on longer videos anyway. This would imply they just want to stay relevant. After all, if they didn't make short form videos, someone somewhere would be convinced they are missing out (personally I find shorts a lot worse than long videos).
* that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you
* that you have disposable income
* that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things
* that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits with you, compared to people they know nothing about
By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.
So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.
In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.
Why would a user who hates shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app be sharing links to shorts with their friends?
If a paying user want to disable shorts, wouldn't allowing that ability make it more likely they will continue to pay?
The reason I started paying for Youtube premium was to turn off the ads. I hate YT shorts and I get annoyed when I accidentally open one. If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
YouTube can be used in a healthy way: use NewPipe and subscribe to channels with edifying content and then, when a new video appears that you would want to watch properly, send the direct video link to yt-dlp on your computer. You then avoid the actual website, its algorithm, and its enshittification like short-form videos.
Choosing edifying content requires, of course, some caution. Avoid individual “content creators” who might feel pressure to slowly conform their content to the algorithm and sponsors’ demands. Instead, follow e.g. local arts organizations who do their events as part of a whole offline ecosystem, and then just upload video of it to YouTube. Or universities who create teaching content for their own needs but then upload it to YouTube, etc.
Use the Brave browser and look at the inbuilt filtering (search for "Content Filters" in settings), it allows explicit removal of shorts via enabling of "YouTube Anti-Shorts" filter list. Does the job beautifully.
As a premium paying user, I am also using Vanced-patched Youtube on android and I have a browser extension for desktop to largely remove this shorts bulls*it. It's just Google being evil, I guess...
On pc i use chrome plugins to block all these distractions from me. It work's pretty well. Any idea how to do it on android phone. You can't intercept http requests or edit apps here that easily.
There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)
But users like me who hate shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app aren't addicted to shorts because we refuse to open them. And there's no risk of me going to Tiktok or reels because I hate short-form video.
Despite YouTube's attempts at blocking adblockers, I am still using YouTube successfully without ads. That said, at times I do have to reload the page for the video to load properly.
If YouTube was an independent company, which it'd be nice if it was, then by paying for it you'd be supporting YouTube (in case you decided it was worth it and they treated you nicely). But as it is, you're supporting Google, which is arguably an undesirable thing to do given how "evil" they've become. So a first course of action could be to close the tap and don't give them your money for a service that they've enshittified in the name of profit.
They could also make the experience out of the box like SponsorBlock and skip the sponsorship segments, but they don't do that either for their paying users.
Honestly, I use revanced on my android phone which lets me disable all shorts content appearing. and on browser if i stick to the subscriptions tab and maybe the sidebar on videos, there's no shorts.
companies don't work like people, there is no limit to their desires. Trying to appeal to the good taste of a trillion dollar company is, as the anecdote goes, like letting a tiger swallow you up to the shoulders and then demand that it spare your head.
> companies don't work like people, there is no limit to their desires.
public companies specifically force this kind of capture all possible revenue capture to the point of hurting long term profits.
Take Valve, a private company that understands that its not worth pissing off your customers in the long term and have an incentive structure that supports that.
I wonder what the issue is with shorts? Usually if I look something up on youtube (say a how-to or a product review), I don't want to see a half hour of blithering that could be compressed to a tweet. I generally pick the shortest video I can find about whatever it is. If it's limited to under a minute that's great. I'd really rather have a text post than a video, but those don't seem to exist any more.
Your comment made me see that there are two kinds of "shorts." The best analogy is print magazines. The one you prefer is like when someone tells you that Byte has a short review of a new device - you go to a library, find the issue, and look up the info. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are like glossy magazines often available in waiting rooms, these can be read (or rather consumed) from any page to any page until you're next in the queue. The mere existence and success of such glossy magazines means there will always be demand for this kind of consumption, this time just on another medium.
I would caution against reading too much at this stage, even though the researchers were very careful to talk about only correlation, a lot of people here seem to read causation. This are population studies so the variables are not independent.
The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people.
This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
> This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
> Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more.
People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it.
I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.
I would suggest you make an exception for YouTube shorts from channels / creators that also put out YouTube long-form content.
You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no!
The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long.
Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical.
For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now.
---
Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos?
Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.)
And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content.
YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.
If you're anti-shorts, you could also choose to send a message to the creators by not watching their shorts. If they previously made long form but have switched to shorts, they're concerned with views, so you deny them the views.
Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.
Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
I disagree in principle, but your comment was actually pretty interesting, so I still upvoted it!
I sometimes watch shorts when I go directly to a creator's page, but still notice myself sucked into the loop of the next short automatically playing and not being particularly interesting.
Pretty sure YouTube shorts have a 3min time limit. That's what it was last time I uploaded a video. By the way, it's really annoying that videos a minute or under need to be Shorts and they converted all old short videos to Shorts
I noticed that as well (though I do think there is a time limit), but decided I didn't want to encourage more of it and still avoid any shorts. I usually watch on a TV anyway, so vertical videos are pretty weird...
Nope, a creator that starts making shorts at the expense of normal videos can fuck right off. They are clearly optimising their content for non-subscribers caught in the skinner box loop that is a shorts scroll session. They do not care about their subscribers and they only care about engagement/number go up.
If they want to create a short video, they can create a short video. No need to mark it as a short.
I think this explains why a couple of my long-time favourite creators have gone quiet. (looking at you, NileBlue/Red)
This makes the bigger difference imo. Long enough time in front of autoplay sends a kid down some very strange rabbit holes. Not acceptable to me. Less worried about the format and more the endless doom watching that the algorithm is happy to allow.
Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content.
BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0]
When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal.
Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video.
I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.
I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."
You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.
On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
I have a theory: just like with excessive porn consumption, could it be that depressed people tend to watch more short-form videos? I have a chronically depressed friend who confirms this theory: she can't be bothered to do anything and can only muster the energy to watch Shorts when she's feeling down. Shorts are not the cause, but a symptom of the consequences of her depression.
I have taken three multihour Flixbus journeys in Central Europe this year. Each time, what astounded me was how every woman under 30 in sight from my seat was watching Tiktok for the entire journey. Just one thirty-second clip after another for four or five hours, and apparently mainly content that, even if it is about something else, serves to flog cosmetics brands.
Obviously it’s hard to diagnose depression from merely looking at someone. But none of these Tiktok users seemed like sad sacks, indeed some looked like successful professionals. I could only conclude that there is some truth to this platform hijacking even well-balanced people’s brain.
Yes, but consuming and getting addicted to (porn|SFV) might as well induce some apathy and later to depression. In my experience (which is NOT a statistics study) the problems go in spiral.
This tracks for me. I have deleted TikTok and Instagram but now I find myself browsing X short videos!! Addiction is a crazy thing.
I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.
Information for its own sake to obtain doesn't have any lasting effect, it makes sense why you forget. Try to intake the information and have it cue a relation to your life, have it spark some internal thought. I'm struggling to articulate this, I've always been "a thinker", just think about things all day. I rarely finish books because whatever I read I think about it for so long.
It's my own personal reflection on information, knowledge, and learning, I hesitated to write this comment but I did at the chance it helps.
Information is basically a commodity these days. The leverage is in how the info informs your thoughts.
One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts.
It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself.
But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do.
something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"
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It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV.
If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.
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
It was a very addictive sensation. I believe other accounts that mirror this and see them as non-hyperbolic having experienced it myself.
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.
I don't think you need any government conspiracy for this. Tiktok is an inevitable product of the attention economy — moreso a capitalist wart than deliberate sabotage.
They deliberately made SFV educational content only. Tiktok had to comply or face the wrath of the CCP.
SFV about a math theorem or a physics phenomena or explaining how to use a type of conjugation in English? Cool.
SFV thats just a clip of a show or movie with some stupid music overlayed? SFV about a kid doing some stupid dance? Banned.
Deleted Comment
The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
Whether the user pays for YouTube Premium or not, they still have access to your behavioral data, your interests, they can easily determine your location, and so on. All of these data points contribute to your profile, which is a literal gold mine for their entire business. How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity, the price can only go up.
It's a goddamn racket that needs to be made visible and subject to thorough public and legal scrutiny.
There are no ads on a sub, this doesn’t make any sense as such to the parents comment.
No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".
Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.
Your theory of
> just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
is the most likely culprit
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.
Why would it be?
Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.
Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.
Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
* that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you
* that you have disposable income
* that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things
* that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits with you, compared to people they know nothing about
By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.
So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.
In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.
If a paying user want to disable shorts, wouldn't allowing that ability make it more likely they will continue to pay?
The reason I started paying for Youtube premium was to turn off the ads. I hate YT shorts and I get annoyed when I accidentally open one. If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
Choosing edifying content requires, of course, some caution. Avoid individual “content creators” who might feel pressure to slowly conform their content to the algorithm and sponsors’ demands. Instead, follow e.g. local arts organizations who do their events as part of a whole offline ecosystem, and then just upload video of it to YouTube. Or universities who create teaching content for their own needs but then upload it to YouTube, etc.
Incentive to addict + Ability to addict = outcome
Google wants you to be addicted to YouTube. It makes you more likely to renew.
And it helps keep you off competing platforms (TikTok, reels, etc).
They could also make the experience out of the box like SponsorBlock and skip the sponsorship segments, but they don't do that either for their paying users.
public companies specifically force this kind of capture all possible revenue capture to the point of hurting long term profits.
Take Valve, a private company that understands that its not worth pissing off your customers in the long term and have an incentive structure that supports that.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people.
This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more.
People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it.
I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.
But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok.
Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no!
The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long.
Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical.
For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now.
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Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos?
Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.)
And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content.
YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.
Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.
Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
I sometimes watch shorts when I go directly to a creator's page, but still notice myself sucked into the loop of the next short automatically playing and not being particularly interesting.
If they want to create a short video, they can create a short video. No need to mark it as a short.
I think this explains why a couple of my long-time favourite creators have gone quiet. (looking at you, NileBlue/Red)
BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0]
When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal.
Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video.
[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remov...
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...
I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."
You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
Obviously it’s hard to diagnose depression from merely looking at someone. But none of these Tiktok users seemed like sad sacks, indeed some looked like successful professionals. I could only conclude that there is some truth to this platform hijacking even well-balanced people’s brain.
I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.
It's my own personal reflection on information, knowledge, and learning, I hesitated to write this comment but I did at the chance it helps.
Information is basically a commodity these days. The leverage is in how the info informs your thoughts.
One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts.
It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself.
But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do.
something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"
Because I noticed I have zero self-control with the short-term video format. So now I don't touch it and consider it similar to cigarettes.