by danielvaughn
2 subcomments
- 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.
- As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?
by SirHumphrey
1 subcomments
- 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.
- We have one clear rule at home for the kids: YouTube long format is ok.
But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok.
Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
- 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.
[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 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 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.
- 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.
by cadamsdotcom
0 subcomment
- Short form is no good to consume anyway.
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.
by westbywest
0 subcomment
- The "Vintage Space" channel host Amy Shira Teitel recently posted this long form video expressing her frustration with YT so heavily incentivizing SFVs with its creators. She goes into considerable detail about the intentionally addictive nature of the format, and how it clashes with her own publishing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM
- How I rein in YouTube on all my browsers:
- 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.
- The interesting part here is what they carve out - they don't see impacts on body image or self esteem. These are classic effects identified as negative impacts of social media in general. It it would be really interesting if somehow SFV format prevents their impact.
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.
by SunshineTheCat
4 subcomments
- I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element.
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.
- Nobody is using this thread to actually talk about what's in the paper, just as a place to rant about short form videos... One question that comes to mind to me is: r=-.034 a reasonable effect size? Having seen many scatter plots of r values, 0.3 seems basically like random noise. Is this just falling into the same problem as all huge meta-studies, that there's way too much variability to get any kind of clear signal?
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?
- yeah I'm trying to watch less YT, hard for me to just sit in silence and think
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
by correa_brian
1 subcomments
- I literally feel like I'm doing drugs when I'm watching short-form videos.
by paffdragon
0 subcomment
- Are there also similar studies on short-form text like Tweets, HN comments, etc?
by patrickscoleman
0 subcomment
- If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725
- If you want to hide Shorts completely on YouTube, or make watching them a more intentional act by hijacking YouTube's navigation to make them display in the regular video player, Control Panel for YouTube [^0] has options for that, as well as for removing any other sources of algorithmic/recommended videos you don't want, including the new "More videos" in the new video UI (which you can also disable if you don't like it)
[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
by goldemerald
2 subcomments
- Algorithmically served short form videos is clearly the smoking of our time. I cannot stand the conservative view of "well we don't know the videos cause mental health decline, or if it's simply those with a genetic inclination who seek out short form content.", exactly mirroring the skeptics about smoking causing cancer. I'm hopeful that in 5-10 years (but more likely 20) people will view this AI served, maximally engaging, content in the same way we view smoking now: disgusting and horrible, but adults should be allowed to do what they want. I can easily imagine kids/teens sharing their illicit access to shorts much in the same way they share vapes/cigarettes, which would be a much more preferable situation than the unlimited use we see today.
- I was surprised that the podcast Stuff You Should Know now advertises a short firm video provider, but I couldn't explain exactly why. Maybe this sheds some light on my concerns.
- Its been a long time since I took statistics courses, but aren't those r values rather low to conclude anything?
"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)"
by hodgehog11
1 subcomments
- I think it really is important to stress that these are correlations only. Something I've noticed: those with poor attention spans or generally low engagement with deeper material tend to be attracted to SFV. Likewise, those in a state of depression or have ADHD can easily get into the quick satisfaction coming from SFV. It may exacerbate existing issues, but not necessarily be the cause.
- These correlations are not good, obviously, but in which direction does the causality go? As someone with attention issues, I've had to remove these apps from my home screen and disable notifications because I can't handle them well. I suspect I might be more susceptible to SFV due to attention issues, rather than SFVs causing any change. It's a lousy way to spend time, though.
- I absolutely see the correlation myself, but which way does causation go?
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?
- So the old saying "I can feel myself getting dumber for watching" has some merit. I used to say that for things like Housewives/Kardashian style tripe, as well as bad sitcoms with laugh tracks like Big Bang Theory that was supposed to be so smart
- I try to tell my parents to watch less short form videos. They don't care. Thank you Meta and Alphabet. :(
by Boogie_Man
0 subcomment
- I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening.
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".
- I know it's probably offensive but I do suspect SFV use also correlates with lower intelligence. This study suggests it leads to poorer cognition, which is in the same ballpark, but I am curious if in the next five or ten years, we'll find out that this stuff disproportionately targets vulnerable people, even if not explicitly intended.
- Totally my feeling too.
The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
- I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim.
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.
by autonomousErwin
0 subcomment
- Great ad for Grayscale on your phone and chrome extensions that get rid of shorts
- If anyone from APA.org is listening, this website is really bad on mobile
by ModernMech
0 subcomment
- My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.
by Grossenstein
0 subcomment
- I am ready to pay for disabling em feeds.
- I wonder about the cognitive and mental health correlates of living in a world that no longer makes any sense.
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/
by thedudeabides5
0 subcomment
- ban tiktok
by mock-possum
0 subcomment
- It’s so interesting to me that people find these short video clip formats ‘addictive’ when my reaction is the opposite - they repulse me, starting from the vertical video format, carrying through to the snappy cuts and… I don’t know what to call it, kooky sound direction? Anyway, it looks and sounds like something tailor made to annoy me, and even if I occasionally stumble across one clip that’s interesting, the next is sure to turn me off again.
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?
- People are already calling it “brain rot” so it’s not surprising.
by junglistguy
0 subcomment
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- Anyone who's able to stomach those short videos has to have cognitive deficits or mental issues. I'd rather watch an advertisement than those (and I can't stand watching advertisements).