I got addicted to YT shorts for a little while, but I've mostly stopped doomscrolling now as, counter-intuitively, it wasn't addictive enough to keep me engaged. Sure, the first few dozen hours the carefully designed feedback loop keeps you engaged, and then... it wore off, at least for me. The algorithm seemed more interested in pushing what was popular than what I was interested in. I tried gaming it by quickly scrolling past things I didn't care about or had already seen a million times (like those retention farming 3-second loops of reddit/twitter screenshots), and hanging around on stuff I liked, but it didn't seem to budge the needle.

I guess it's a lot like real drugs - you build a tolerance and you need a bigger dose to get the same effect. In this case, no bigger dose is available.

Considering that YouTube is still wildly successful and TikTok is now showing me 5+ minute long videos I really don't think this theory holds up.

I would say short-form content found a gap in the market and now exists in addition to long-form content without replacing it.

I deleted TikTok and my Twitter account. Also stopped watching TV. I'm happier and more productive.

Much as many insist they dont and will never use AI, all too many let their entire media feeds, if not their whole personality be defined by `recommendation_watchnext.serve()`

This is terrible to say, but if 170 million people are spending an hour a day watching 60 second videos, aren't they just dumb and easily entertained? Without this, wouldn't they just be consuming other dumb entertainment, or failing to find that dumb entertainment, going outside, and meeting other dumb people in order to do stupid things?

Also, I'm sure I have to subtract a huge number of these people from the dumb list, because they probably just watch a bunch of TikTok to unwind or get summaries of the events of the day, then move on to real content. People spend a lot more than an hour in front of screens, and have for the past 75 years. Plenty of the world was already watching dumb short animal videos, fail videos, success videos, astonishing videos, etc. long before TikTok.

Early youtube absolutely despised and made difficult uploading videos over 10 minutes. The thing was made to share tsunami videos and what were basically animated personal snapshots.

Acting like this is a qualitative change is just easy ragebait, and this story has been written again and again since MTV debuted (which is why it felt the need to refer to it.) That was almost 50 years ago.

edit: Martha Quinn is 66 years old.

I'm not on TikTok and never have been, but I've seen plenty of shortform videos shared elsewhere. Here's the thing about all of them.

They never inform.

The number of video creators I can actually recall and point to who have affected me on any real emotional or intellectual level via shorts I can count on one hand.

"Old-school" longform video (on YouTube and elsewhere) is a medium with real utility and artistic merit. Shorts are mildly entertaining at best and mind-numbing goop at worst. And, as usual, the meme is true: *this could have been a blog post.*

I’ll bet some number of readers here asked an LLM to summarize this article.

Just don’t install the app. I never did that and I want to make sure my son doesn’t whence he gets his own phone. Well he can do whatever when he is an adult but that’s more than a decade away.

Vine had 6 second short form video in 2012.

Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)

Short-form content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content

YouTube still requires disconnecting connected chromecast devices to view YouTube Shorts?

Twitter did this already for the text form. In depth analysis articles and blogposts got replaced with whatever could fit in 40 characters and what mattered more than anything was the impression. It changed how politics is done, so I would say it had an even bigger impact to society.

It is all depressing. As if the spectacle has devoured the whole reality and there is now nothing but it.