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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

#51

Post by nxor »

OGWhales wrote: post #35
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?

Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.

Funny enough, last I saw, shorts of course are less profitable than videos, because they can't carry as many ads, and supposedly advertisers would rather put their ads on longer videos anyway. This would imply they just want to stay relevant. After all, if they didn't make short form videos, someone somewhere would be convinced they are missing out (personally I find shorts a lot worse than long videos).

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

#52

Post by SantalBlush »

foofoo12 wrote: post #7

Totally my feeling too. The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...

This accurately describes the front page of reddit, too.

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

#53

Post by moduspol »

I know it's probably offensive but I do suspect SFV use also correlates with lower intelligence. This study suggests it leads to poorer cognition, which is in the same ballpark, but I am curious if in the next five or ten years, we'll find out that this stuff disproportionately targets vulnerable people, even if not explicitly intended.

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

#54

Post by nxor »

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.

You don't. This is where taking public transport to work shines.

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

#55

Post by tormeh »

These correlations are not good, obviously, but in which direction does the causality go? As someone with attention issues, I've had to remove these apps from my home screen and disable notifications because I can't handle them well. I suspect I might be more susceptible to SFV due to attention issues, rather than SFVs causing any change. It's a lousy way to spend time, though.

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

#56

Post by SirHumphrey »

I would caution against reading too much at this stage, even though the researchers were very careful to talk about only correlation, a lot of people here seem to read causation. This are population studies so the variables are not independent.

The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people.

This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.

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

#57

Post by nxor »

tartuffe78 wrote: post #42
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.

Not for me. It's also about the kind of thinking this behavior engages. If you only think superficially about kittens for 30 minutes ... personally I would find that similarly awful. Whether the videos are rage inducing or not, it's only passive consumption. And I would rather spend that time using my brain.

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

#59

Post by GloamingNiblets »

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…

The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention.

From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".

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

#60

Post by mrandish »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #9
ge96 wrote: post #2

yeah I'm trying to watch less YT, hard for me to just sit in silence and think trying to be more of a producer than consumer, not saying this to look down I'm socially/financially a failure, trying to change my habits

I hate that I can’t use youtube at all without being forced to fed short form video content. Or kids schools referencing youtube content for educational purposes and they are then force fed short form video content.

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 TV sticks) I use an app called SmartTube (https://smarttubeapp.github.io/).

On desktop/laptop I decided to go deeper into YT customization. My current mod stack for YT completely re-imagines the YT interface to be focused and space efficient, replaces spammy, inaccurate thumbnails with actual video stills, re-formats spammy ALL CAPS AtTentIoN SeEKiNG headlines, shows enough of the expanded description to be useful and outright blocks a bunch of stuff I never want to see (channel promos, upcoming, shorts, live streams, algorithm recommendations, etc). It takes me straight to a grid of only new videos posted by the niche channels I subscribe to, so I never even see the Youtube home page.

Warning: I cobbled together this stack over time out of disparate unrelated components by just experimenting until I found a combination which "fixes" YT in exactly the ways I want. Even though it heavily customizes YT, it's all been working great with no changes for over two years - but YT could break it any time. If you're okay with that, this should get you started:

1. A UserScript YouTube 'mod platform' called [Nova YouTube](https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension). This does the thumbnail, description and other reformatting as well as most of the content blocking by type (with a couple uBO filters found in the uBO subreddit).

2. A Stylus userstyles (CSS) mod called [AdashimaaTube](https://github.com/sapondanaisriwan/AdashimaaTube). This mostly handles reformatting the interface like number of rows and columns in grids and selectively removing YT's dark-pattern UI cruft.

3. "Youtube Enhancer" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-enhan...) is a Firefox add-on which I mostly use for one feature it does perfectly (auto-expanding videos to fill the browser viewport but not in 'full-screen'). I also like the way Enhanced YouTube's configurable player interface buttons work and look.

My YT account was created in 2008 and until I did this I didn't even realize just how awful YT had become because it was done so gradually over the years. There are a lot of different add-ons and userscripts out there and the ones I happened to land on may not suit you, so just try different options to see what's possible and then experiment until you find a stack which works for you.

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