Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use • Hacker News Board

Re: Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

#211

Post by gblargg » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 8:50 AM UTC

grvdrm wrote: post #205

gblargg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also ban autoplay of the next video. You have to be involved in choosing the next video to watch (or none).

This makes the bigger difference imo. Long enough time in front of autoplay sends a kid down some very strange rabbit holes. Not acceptable to me. Less worried about the format and more the endless doom watching that the algorithm is happy to allow.

The automatic play is what bothers me. When I'm done with a video, I reflect on it, and think what I want to do next, not necessarily watching another video the moment the first ends.

Re: Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

#212

Post by crowbahr » Thu, Nov 27, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

tylervigen wrote: post #210

crowbahr wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't be further from my experience. I enjoy it, watch for a bit, or even for an hour+, and then put it down. No noticable impact to my ability to focus at all: 5 hours flies by while coding still. Idk if I'm built different, but I generally doubt it. I find these statements about brain rot to be either hyperbolic or at very least reminiscent of the "violent video games make you kill people IRL" conversations of t…

Your experience is at odds with the statistical results of the linked studies covering nearly 100,000 participants.

The linked study r values are all minor to no effect. -0.37 as an r value is barely correlated. Talk to me when they're up above -.5

How much of it is just constantly being told that SFVs are bad for you?

The linked article is a meta analysis with basically 0 controls that finds a statistical correlation barely better than background noise. Yawn

Re: Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

#213

Post by groundzeros2015 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:42 AM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #133

nverba wrote: post #26

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 being a paying subscriber, you've indicated: * that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you * that you have disposable income * that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things * that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits w…

This is a great point. A disproportionate part of internet economy is from upper middle class people willing to spend money.