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TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

thenexus.media

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Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#211

Post by akk0 »

What a shockingly vacuous article, I don't think it says much other than dressing up the idea of people watching 60 second videos in the most cartoonishly alarmist language conceivable. If there actually is a reason to believe that "attention spans" are getting "damaged" by watching silly videos, TFA doesn't show any -- I always just see this stated as fact, but a priori in the absence of evidence I find it a very extraordinary claim.

Then again, if it's effective enough at maximizing psychological grip to hold people's attention for a full hour every day, maybe we should be getting worried... /s

>Song introductions have shortened dramatically, with one study finding average intros fell from more than 20 seconds in the 1980s to just five I expect the decline of radio is the cause of this

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#212

Post by fennecbutt »

jollyllama wrote: post #44
boringg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You let your dopamine loop get hacked

This. It's going to take some serious effort to un-wirehead yourself. Look to religious traditions for methods. Meditation, fasting, prayer.

Or just walk outside lmao. Those religious traditions have roots in control and manipulation.

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#213

Post by fennecbutt »

firefoxd wrote: post #97

I've banned shorts from my house [0]. The more you watch it, the more your attention span gets scrambled. If a joke doesn't land in 15 seconds, you skip it. If the video that just started doesn't reach its climax now, you skip it. There's actually a format for movies now, where a short scene is shared with the contrast cranked to 11, and background music. And it pays off in under a minute. Shorts is short for climax,…

But to be fair, there's the opposite end of the spectrum where our time is being wasted. Like the whole life story before the recipe type thing. Or American YouTubers intentionally speaking veeeerrrryyyy sloooowwwwllllyyy.

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#214

Post by nottorp »

Funes- wrote: post #195
nottorp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed my second statement, I think. How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?

>You missed my second statement, I think. I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote. >social networking has the same effect on a laptop You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every…

... but what makes you pull out the phone while waiting in line at the grocery store?

It's not the device's fault.

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#215

Post by 1718627440 »

kulahan wrote: post #131
keiferski wrote: post #12

Too simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-... So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The…

Worth mentioning that literally any video under 60 seconds is forced to be a short, which is that stupid type of YouTube video where they remove a bunch of controls and make the overall experience miserable. So maybe that’s pushing longer-form content as well. Some people making 30 second videos moves to 90 second ones to avoid the bad format, this crowds the format and pushes others up as well? Totally talking out o…

> where they remove a bunch of controls

For your information, you can view every video through the normal interface by changing the URL to the usual /watch?.

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#216

Post by euroderf »

fennecbutt wrote: post #213
firefoxd wrote: post #97

I've banned shorts from my house [0]. The more you watch it, the more your attention span gets scrambled. If a joke doesn't land in 15 seconds, you skip it. If the video that just started doesn't reach its climax now, you skip it. There's actually a format for movies now, where a short scene is shared with the contrast cranked to 11, and background music. And it pays off in under a minute. Shorts is short for climax,…

But to be fair, there's the opposite end of the spectrum where our time is being wasted. Like the whole life story before the recipe type thing. Or American YouTubers intentionally speaking veeeerrrryyyy sloooowwwwllllyyy.

Or Faceborg videos that cannot be fast-forwarded and have no progress bar, leaving unanswered the musical question "When does it get to the point, if ever ??"

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#217

Post by coldtea »

int_19h wrote: post #197
coldtea wrote: post #65

TikTok and those consuming it can rot. Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.

War and Peace is hardly a stellar example of good literature, though. Tolstoy in general is very overrated, and W&P especially so.

>War and Peace is hardly a stellar example of good literature, though

Based on some totally idiosyncratic personal assement maybe.

Not in any canonical ranking (or in mine).

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#218

Post by coldtea »

mdavid626 wrote: post #203
coldtea wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There a stock of older movies though, bigger than I can watch in a lifetime, and that's just considering the good ones.

Sure, that can work. One would want to watch also contemporary works.

Nah, I try to actively avoid those. But there's a substantial number of good contemporary world cinema too.

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#219

Post by theshrike79 »

jerf wrote: post #167
ryandrake wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kid and all of her friends watch video content at 2-4x now all the time, because they just can't seem to get through anything talking at a normal pace. I want to worry about that, but I don't know why it's worrying.

After some pondering, I've come to consider it a generally positive thing. If I compare watching a 1x video to my reading the transcript, I am reading very much faster than the person can normally speak. Cranking the speed up makes it so the video much more approximates a reading speed. You still don't get as much random access and I can generally still read at a speed where I wouldn't be able to comprehend the speec…

Most meetings could be an email and most Youtube videos should just be a blog post with pictures.

In most cases I want to ingest the content, not watch a dramatisation of it.

Watching stuff for entertainment value is fine, I can watch a 3 hour analysis of some event easily. But when shit's on fire right now and I want to know how to fix it, I don't have time for fluff pieces.

(this is actually a good use for AI, a simple yt-dlp script + local LLM can easily grab the video transcription or subtitles and condense the actual points)

Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

#220

Post by rrgok »

mtalantikite wrote: post #174
rrgok wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I have a hard time reading most books because they are indeed slow-paced. And by "books" I mean novels and fantasy books. But I can read an HN/Reddit discussion of several pages without a problem. Heck, sometimes I spend hours reading a specific subreddit. I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across sev…

> I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across several pages. Well, novels are just more subtle. A good novel will get you deep into the emotional landscape of it's subject, or give you a vivid portrait of a scene that is happening, or transport you to a historical or future time. You get to embody a particular charac…

> We can get lost in the beauty of a landscape we've never visited before in a novel, which is the crux of the matter, even if it doesn't seem like it.

> You get to embody a particular character or world, which builds your own personal knowledge and empathy.

An aside. I don't like this. At least, IME I don't think this a good thing. If you read a novel - exclude fantasy or obvious reason - of something you never experienced, then that will condition your first experience of that thing. You will be bringing something dead - the words on the book - alive through you. You will lose your genuine expression.

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