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.

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.

But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok.

Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.

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 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.

The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts!

Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.

- prevent autoplaying video

- redirect ‘ youtube.com/shorts/’ to ‘ youtube.com/watch?v=’

The second gets rid of the addictive Shorts UI. I don’t block them entirely because channels I subscribe to create interesting shorts.

My guess: the SFV they are talking about is generally just fully attention baiting and not from peers or others that people feel are "comparable". If you don't feel the source or the subject of the video is comparable to you, then there's no compulsion to reference it in a judgemental way against your own circumstances.

But I bet if you did just focus on SFV from eg: friends or peers, you'd be right back to self esteem and body image impacts again.

It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.

That key variable seems to matter more than the format.

For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.

Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.

And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?

trying to be more of a producer than consumer, not saying this to look down I'm socially/financially a failure, trying to change my habits

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725

[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

"Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"

I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok.

But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem.

The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?

I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".

The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...

This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout:

> Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024).

Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve.

It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.

I remember 10 years ago watching a documentary about the previous ten years explaining how we we had moved into a post meaning world, and how this was being weaponized by various interests.

That time seems positively quaint to me now!

I was reading a book from the 1960s, and it was talking about how the world is too complicated now and moving too fast.

And of course if you read books from the late 19th century they say the exact same thing...

https://xkcd.com/1227/

You know what’s occurring to me though - is it just the radio all over again? I can’t stand listening to the radio - the experience of being fed content, and switching continuously without ever finding something worth listening to, completely ruins radio for me - gun to my head, I’d rather drive in silence than listen to the radio.

Maybe it’s a similar thing?