The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok.
Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
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 actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long.
Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical.
For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now.
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Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos?
Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.)
And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content.
YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.
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.
The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts!
Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.
I mean it makes perfect sense. Short form content succeeds by giving people peak payoff moments really quickly over and over again. Cognition, attention and inhibitory control require the exact opposite - going through a bit of relative boredom before you get the bigger payoff
Does anyone know if the opposite, longer form content like novels, has been shown to improve these areas?
I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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)"
ge96•57m ago
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
pcthrowaway•49m ago
righthand•46m ago
the_af•29m ago
While 3 minutes is indeed an arbitrary limit, the difference between short and long form videos is very noticeable. Long form requires another form of attention, focusing more, more commitment, less distraction; there's even a form of "delayed gratification" (a form of attention that only grownups can provide) in that the payoff isn't always immediate and can sometimes be very delayed.
Short form is like junk food, zero friction, instantly addictive and doesn't require you to really pay attention. Surely the immediacy of attention it needs is completely different to long form video.
I also disagree with your other comment that maybe long form can promote similar consumption habits (you call it "overconsumption"); I don't think anyone can get "addicted" to long form video, it's simply too time-demanding, you don't get a "fix" and the "zapping" effect of quickly moving from one video to the next.
pcthrowaway•24m ago
I don't know what qualifies as "addiction", but it is typically where I get my news, where a web-series I watch is released, and where I learn about social justice issues important to me, through video essays.
I'm sure my consumption is very different from that of someone who watches 100 1-minute Tiktok videos per day, but I think it's worth at least questioning how this might also contribute to cognitive performance and mental health.
Though I think a big difference with short-form content is the autoplay functionality (as your sibling commenter mentions). I watch videos which are released by channels I subscribe to, and occasionally (maybe once a week) watch something Youtube recommends to me. So I retain some agency over my viewing habits compared to someone whose decisions are dictated by the algorithm, which also has an incentive to keep people watching as long as possible.
Chabsff•26m ago
unethical_ban•23m ago
In short: There are a lot of differences in how long and short videos affect a person, in my opinion.
thanhhaimai•48m ago
Short form pop content like TikTok doesn't give my brain enough time to engage the thinking muscle.
I think it's better to identify the characteristics of the media we consume, rather than lumping all of them together.
righthand•44m ago
You’re hand waving it away because you prefer long videos. What about all the people using TikTok as a search engine?
oceansky•38m ago
godelski•28m ago
I'm all for nuance. Its also why I'm biased towards long form media as it's more likely to contain nuance, but not guaranteed. The gps specific example of lectures is quite narrow and more likely to have depth. Which is the entire problem of short form media, that we live in a complex world where we can't distill everything into 1-2 minute segments. Hell, even a lecture series, which will be over 10hrs of content is not enough to make one an expert on all but the most trivial of topics.
You're right that we need nuance but you're not right in arguing for it while demonstrating a lack of it. A major issue is we need to communicate, something we're becoming worse at. We should do our best to speak and write as clearly as possible but at the end of the day language is so imprecise that a listener or reader will be able to construct many, and even opposing, narratives. It is more important to be a good listener than a good speaker. I'd hope programmers, of all people, could understand this as we've invented overly pedantic languages with the explicit purpose of minimizing ambiguity[0]
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI
SlightlyLeftPad•39m ago
Chabsff•28m ago
It's the algorithmic loop that starts the moment you scroll to the next video that starts playing before you even have a chance to decide whether or not it's something that you want to watch that's abhorrent to me.
kevin_thibedeau•34m ago