171–180 of 213 posts
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?
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On Firefox you can block short form content from YouTube as easily as adding one extension or a few uBlock Origin filter lines. With a bit more work it's possible to fix a lot of other stuff using various browser extensions and userscripts on desktop/laptop. On mobile (Android) I use an app that patches the YT executable called "Revanced Extended" ( https://github.com/inotia00/ReVanced_Extended ). On set top (Android…
I appreciate the knowledge share. Fixing it for me is one thing, I can be relatively disciplined to watch how I spend my time on it. The huge issue for me is that it’s on every kids device. It’s super predatory and these companies know the damage they’re causing children at this point.
I would mod the YT app to remove 'autoplay next' and algo recommendations but unfortunately my kid is on iOS where modding isn't possible. The best thing we did was not get her a phone until after she turned 13.
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I probably spend 1-2 hours per day watching content on youtube (and much of that is at ~1.5-1.75X speed) I don't know what qualifies as "addiction", but it is typically where I get my news, where a web-series I watch is released, and where I learn about social justice issues important to me, through video essays. I'm sure my consumption is very different from that of someone who watches 100 1-minute Tiktok videos per…
Are your habits typical though? Playing long form videos at 1.75 speed? I suppose once you start engaging at hyperspeeds, you're making it closer to short form compulsive consumption. It'd be like speed reading a book instead of letting ideas and thoughts form.
Actually, I've encountered the argument that speeding video up when the speaker is too slow for the listener can be useful for staying focused on what they're saying.
I don't think watching a 40 minute video essay on 1.5X speed is comparable to watching 25 1-minute videos
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The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I suspect it has similar mental effects to constant interruptions, like a bad day at work where slack and email prevent you from getting into flow state/real work. The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is…
> The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I've been over-indulging in context switching long before short-form videos ever showed up. The internet itself is all about context switching. But the UX around short-form videos definitely encourages doomscrolling, similar to how microtransactio…
Isn't the point of MTX to avoid the grind by i.e., buying levels or gear?
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Is all short form video "highly stimulating" and/or "fast-paced" though? I can see the argument for the format being inherently stimulating/fast-paced, but I think that it still comes down more to the content than the format.
The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I suspect it has similar mental effects to constant interruptions, like a bad day at work where slack and email prevent you from getting into flow state/real work. The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is…
I'll agree that it's stimulating... I guess the question is then: how stimulating it is, vs how stimulating the content itself is? As the initial comment said, we need more data on the specific types of content.
- 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.
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?
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 i…
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.
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 worl…
Yeah, I remember reading an issue of Planetary from about (GOD HELP US!) two decades ago where the plot involved baddies who had invaded a fictional universe. In the time since then, I went from thinking "What a crazy idea for a plot" to "Hmm, I can see what inspired that" to "Jesus wept. People can basically choose to do this now. And they vote!"