181–190 of 213 posts
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They mean the premium subscription, not channel subscriptions.
You don’t get ads with the premium subscription. Have I misunderstood the intent of this correction?
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Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion. No matter what…
But Youtube isn't a monopoly. It's competing with Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu Instagram, Tiktok and Twitch off the top of my head. So they do have to make Youtube competitive Your theory of > just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion. is the most likely culprit
YouTube has a whole vast amount of independent production (and some now independent-looking but owned by private equity) which it has cornered into the platform, nowhere else you can find the sort of content that exists in there.
You are just conflating "streaming video" into a single homogeneous market, it's not the case.
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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…
> 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'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.
On the content side, I think the content editing can have more of an impact than the subject itself. For example, I can watch something like a fast-paced action movie with a reasonable amount of camera tricks for a couple hours without any noticeable strain, but 30 mins of a modern cooking show can be exhausting just because the average time between camera cuts and zooms is only a few seconds. The latter jams so much stimulation into a small window that baking a cake is on par with a car chase.
On the format side, regardless of content, the loop and video switch gives me similar vibes to the editing tricks, but ofc the short video probably also contains similar editing, so it's a double whammy, and likely spread across different subjects as you scroll every minute or so. Bonus points if the content itself is stimulating.
If the modern cooking show I described is cocaine, doom scrolling shorts is crack cocaine. Harder, faster, more addictive.
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.
I would suggest you make an exception for YouTube shorts from channels / creators that also put out YouTube long-form content. You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no! The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any…
If they want to create a short video, they can create a short video. No need to mark it as a short.
I think this explains why a couple of my long-time favourite creators have gone quiet. (looking at you, NileBlue/Red)
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> 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'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.
It's an interesting question. Personally, I feel like it's a combination of factors. On the content side, I think the content editing can have more of an impact than the subject itself. For example, I can watch something like a fast-paced action movie with a reasonable amount of camera tricks for a couple hours without any noticeable strain, but 30 mins of a modern cooking show can be exhausting just because the aver…
Very similar to social media. What is it about social media that's harmful? Is it the connecting with other humans - which seems to me to define social media? Or is it the algorithms? The infinite scrolling? Something else?
(I'm not denying we're facing very serious issues that are certainly being exacerbated if not entirely caused by popular uses of online platforms; I want to solve those issues. I just want to solve them in a productive and non-reductive manner. Taking correlations and running with them is not that, and will not only not solve the problems, but will lead to massive privacy and security issues (see: ID verification))
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 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. 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 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.
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People have beliefs you don't share?
No, he's referring to politics. Far-right politics[a] encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, radical anti-communism, ethnonationalism, and nativism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
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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.
When you consider that people have different speaking cadences and one person might speak twice as fast as another, I'm not sure why you'd assume 1.75X speed necessarily leads to reduced engagement. 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…
To be clear, I do remember watching long videos at 1.75X: Coursera's. By extension, I see myself watching "instructional" (tech) long-winded videos this way, but to be honest this is not the type of videos I usually watch on YouTube, and I watch them on 1X.
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> How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity, Companies like Google and Meta don't sell your data, on dark markets or otherwise. They keep it in-house for advertising targeting purposes. If they sold it to other companies it would reduce their competitive advantage. It's not even worth it for them.…
They won’t sell your raw data, but they will use your data to charge a premium for their ads. It’s indirectly “selling your data”.
If they’re not delivering your data to another party, they’re not selling your data.
The comment above literally claimed they were selling data through “dark data brokers”. It’s a false claim and I called it out.