They miss the fundamental issue with social media that was never true before.

The answer is data. No other media before ever had so much information about every individual that consumed it. No media before could tailor their content at an individual level. About the most you could tailor your content to was a zip code.

This is the problem with TikTok. It’s not that the quality of content is low. It’s that TikTok knows exactly what you like and when you like it, and can give you the exact content to scratch that itch at the time.

There are several problems with this.

- It sucks up all your time. - You’re never uncomfortable and/or consuming content that isn’t what you already want at the time. That means you are rarely exposed to anything that isn’t releasing dopamine all the time and it means you’re rarely challenged.

Most people are never choosing between Being and Time and an HN thread. But if they were forced to choose, we already know which one would dominate sheer engagement.

That doesn’t mean HN replaces philosophy — it just means that attention has its own economics. And any medium that captures attention will inevitably show qualities (good and bad) that heavyweight works simply can’t compete with.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

Paperbacks will now only be sold in the larger trade paperback format.

Paperbacks required authors to spend the same amount of time/effort to create content with a vastly expanded market and distribution mechanism.

TikTok and Insta created N creators to M consumers where N is nearly the same as M. Making the distribution channels bigger but effortless to create content doesn’t magically equate quality paperbacks with short form hummingbird-attention videos.

Sometimes a friend would show me their feed and I'd be shocked at how different the content they are presented by their version of the algorithm.

There are a lot of people putting a lot of effort to create very interesting content and we should not belittle their work just to fein intellectual superiority.

There's really nothing inherently wrong about the format.

Well said. Articles like these bring a sort of relief to me from the constant chaos of short-form media and the like. Very refreshing.

I think the main concern with short form video isn't taste or appetite, but just the ability to digest.[0]

Though the effects on attention might be more acute than we think. A friend of mine found that he's able to read books just fine, if he just switches off his electronics first. Suddenly his brain comes back online...

[0] See also: The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance [even when switched off]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

I assure you, by sheer virtue of quantity, no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.

It's true there's more garbage out there than ever before, but this is an artifact of democratization of creation and this is good imho. I also reject the premise that time to creation is an indication of quality.

High quality -> You can attend to a few things with high degree of complexity. Low quality -> You can attend to a lot of easy stuff.

EOD - Dopamine regulation now is based on how you train your attention.

So the problem is more sinister than the "time sink". What you don't use, you lose. So once we spend enough time in low quality, it takes a lot of effort to get back to higher levels.

When reading for long hours, or for a short time over days and weeks- it teaches you to concentrate, to have some kind of discipline. It helps you focus and develop empathy. Reading is fundamentally different for the reader, and it makes them do other things well. Reading trash trains you to graduate to serious books- this is true for many.

But consuming TikTok readies you for more TikTok. More Shorts and Reels and Snaps. Wathing short form stuff damages one's ability to do other things as well.

And from the creators' perspective, I think trying to keep up with short form media for engagement's sake actually impedes their ability to create more serious stuff.

I don't totally miss his point, though. When smartphones and "internet places" spread as media, those already ready for serious stuff will graduate to those. And yes, these places will have a small role to play.

But they are definitely more negative than positive.

> A closer look reveals that by vastly increasing the market for the published word, paperbacks also vastly increased the opportunities to make a living writing serious books

We can grant that this is true and yet it doesn't seem to provide encouragement. The equivalent today would be slop TikTok demand vastly increasing the opportunity for "serious" TikToks, whatever those may be.

A 'serious TikTok' is not a film. To think a film and a TikTok are alike is to make an elementary mistake in media analysis.

I can buy that we're going to get an explosion in fantastic short-form content. I'd say that the _Almost Friday TV_ group, who started a few years ago, are an example.

But this remains terrible news for predecessor mediums, who will suffer diminished demand and a general decline in the competency of audiences to enjoy those mediums ("great writers need great readers").

The paperback vs hardback is more like Netflix vs cinema. Tiktok / short form video is like newsreels in Roger Rabbit, where the 'toons make the content.

tikok/YT shorts/IG reels is many orders of magnitude higher supply of slop than Simon Schuster paperbacks