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Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

psycnet.apa.org

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

#41

Post by SunshineTheCat »

I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element.

It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.

That key variable seems to matter more than the format.

For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.

Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.

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

#42

Post by tartuffe78 »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #41

I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element. It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water. That key variable seems to matter more than the format. For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form vid…

I don't think getting addicted to constant serotonin boosts from enjoyable videos is that much better to be honest.

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

#43

Post by mrDmrTmrJ »

taw1285 wrote: post #24

This tracks for me. I have deleted TikTok and Instagram but now I find myself browsing X short videos!! Addiction is a crazy thing. I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.

I have YouTube.com and X.com IP blocked on this computer for exactly that reason.

Because I noticed I have zero self-control with the short-term video format. So now I don't touch it and consider it similar to cigarettes.

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

#44

Post by apsurd »

taw1285 wrote: post #24

This tracks for me. I have deleted TikTok and Instagram but now I find myself browsing X short videos!! Addiction is a crazy thing. I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.

Information for its own sake to obtain doesn't have any lasting effect, it makes sense why you forget. Try to intake the information and have it cue a relation to your life, have it spark some internal thought. I'm struggling to articulate this, I've always been "a thinker", just think about things all day. I rarely finish books because whatever I read I think about it for so long.

It's my own personal reflection on information, knowledge, and learning, I hesitated to write this comment but I did at the chance it helps.

Information is basically a commodity these days. The leverage is in how the info informs your thoughts.

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

#46

Post by cultofmetatron »

Barrin92 wrote: post #38
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?

companies don't work like people, there is no limit to their desires. Trying to appeal to the good taste of a trillion dollar company is, as the anecdote goes, like letting a tiger swallow you up to the shoulders and then demand that it spare your head.

> companies don't work like people, there is no limit to their desires.

public companies specifically force this kind of capture all possible revenue capture to the point of hurting long term profits.

Take Valve, a private company that understands that its not worth pissing off your customers in the long term and have an incentive structure that supports that.

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

#47

Post by j2kun »

Nobody is using this thread to actually talk about what's in the paper, just as a place to rant about short form videos... One question that comes to mind to me is: r=-.034 a reasonable effect size? Having seen many scatter plots of r values, 0.3 seems basically like random noise. Is this just falling into the same problem as all huge meta-studies, that there's way too much variability to get any kind of clear signal?

And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?

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

#48

Post by jlund-molfese »

derefr wrote: post #33
baxtr wrote: post #10

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…

I disagree in principle, but your comment was actually pretty interesting, so I still upvoted it!

I sometimes watch shorts when I go directly to a creator's page, but still notice myself sucked into the loop of the next short automatically playing and not being particularly interesting.

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

#50

Post by lbrito »

Its been a long time since I took statistics courses, but aren't those r values rather low to conclude anything?

"Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"

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