Tiktok Has Turned Culture Into a Feedback Loop of Impulse and Machine Learning
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The article discusses how TikTok's short-form video format has influenced culture, leading to a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning, with commenters debating the implications and their personal experiences with short-form content.
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But yeah, there's a dehumanization going on. Speeding up videos to deliver the maximum words per second to the viewer is inhuman. It started as an appeal to ADHD children, but i that meme is overdone, people actually do have attention and still interested in humans, not just what they say.
Somehow the breathless speech pattern they all adopt is really irritating to me. Thats saying something coming from an ADHD person.
Information compression and storage is the baseline of our species evolution.
I don't think that long-form content is always superior to short, but I do think overconsumption of short-form content reduces peoples' ability to handle irreducible complexity.
Also appreciate the joke.
If that wasn't ironic enough to the title of the article, upon hitting the "X" and then "Back" on my phone (because it generated enough rejection on me that I didn't want to keep reading), the popup appeared again (-: so double annoyance for the price of one.
Better to be just a txt file. If OP wants $$, just put up a Pantheon page.
If you spend your days watching "content" it's your fault.
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"?
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 day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really?
Get real.
It's not the device's fault.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-downl...
It truly is like a drug.
Attention and concentration are skills that can be trained, so not all is lost. I was feeling like I was losing my focus about a decade ago and decided that every morning I'd wake up and read a novel for 30 minutes or so. Within a few weeks you'll notice the difference.
Reading a book, require attention but of lower intensity. While watching an hour long fast paced video, require a high intensity attention.
My attention span went (back) up after I forced myself to read some books start to finish. It’s something you can lose, but fortunately it’s also something you can regain.
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. While forums — like HN or Reddit — are high-resolution prose. I don't know if I make sense.
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 character or world, which builds your own personal knowledge and empathy. We're not just reading a collection of facts or statements. 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.
Those sorts of novels tend to be challenging to read, but most things worth doing challenge us. If you've never read something like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Gabo's 100 Years of Solitude, or many of the other great artistic achievements in literature, you really should challenge yourself to do so. They make us better.
> 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.
In the case of watching an hour of video, you're just there consuming what's going on. Reading a novel requires you to world build internally. I'd say that sort of attention is a much higher intensity version. Or at least it takes a lot more active involvement.
If you've ever sat for meditation you'll know that low-input stimulation can be much harder to keep your attention on, but being lost in daydreaming and 'monkey-mind' chatter is pretty effortless. Once you train in it it becomes no big deal, though. Same is true for reading novels.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23988110/
I mean, first of all, who falls asleep during a movie? Even stuff I've seen 30 times already, is still engaging and holds my attention from start to finish. Yet, then again, we've had to cancel "friends movie night" in our house because people would come over, sit down to watch the movie, and after 10 minutes they're all scrolling their phones and bored with the movie. Unless it's got frantic action every second, you're going to lose people. Something is really wrong with our attention spans.
No YT, FB, IG, TT, or TV for sure. For an extra challenge, try no music (except what you can make yourself) or news (including HN). You'll find yourself grabbing your phone only to immediately put it down again.
No need to force yourself to read or go for a walk or whatever. Do whatever you feel like all day, just not the digital things.
It is also a side effect of the fact that frankly a lot of stuff on YouTube doesn't actually need to be on YouTube and is, as I mentioned in my first post, really just a podcast with a video track because it has to have a video track to be on YouTube, but that is perfectly ignorable. Even channels as high quality as Practical Engineering are (guestimating) something like 80% stock footage and 20% something he actually created that is useful and germane to the topic.
I often have a hard time dealing with videos at 1x as well but it's not like it has impacted my social relationships or anything. I don't perceive normal people as speaking slowly now or anything like that. Somehow my brain has this segregated, and I phrase it that way because it's not like I can consciously take credit for it, I didn't do anything, it's just happening naturally.
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)
And if you can’t even do that, I suggest you start reading a book right before sleeping until you pass out. Every night. You will fall asleep extremely fast at beginning but I managed to get back to reading while having extreme difficulty concentrating from a completely different illness than TikTok. It only took 2 years.
You'll get there. Go from shorter form content to things that'll grab your attention, piece by piece.
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 most popular video creators are doing both; even MrBeast routinely has videos over 30 minutes long.
Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.
TikTok has not "won" at all. There's a place for content of all different lengths. The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.
The majority will be listening to it while on their commute, or at the gym, or doing chores around the house. My wife (a civil engineer) has a podcast going in the background even while working. I asked her how she actually manages to pay attention to it and she says that it's mostly for the background noise.
> Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.
Because these movies are not made for the cinema anymore, but for streaming platforms, where people can consume in the same way they consume their podcasts.
Just because one person uses a podcast as background noise, doesn't mean everybody else is.
My dude you’re using music wrong. Noise generators do exist - you can even pick a color for your noise!
It even has a name - "second-monitoring".
Spend 15 minutes with the median 7-30 year old and you’ll think differently. Yes it’s not everybody. But it’s clearly most of them.
Mandaloregaming
Josh Strife Plays
The Sphere Hunter
The Making of Vampire Survivors by noclip.
Vintage inspired with the game choice, not straight vintage, but noclip is one of the best doing game documentaries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmcbShMFNY
The Story of Thief & Looking Glass Studios, also by noclip.
As vintage as they come.
Joseph Anderson, NeverKnowsBest, SuperBunnyHop and MandaloreGaming are the ones that come to mind. They've uncovered so much about games that I never knew was there! :)
I think some would recommend Matthewmatosis, Hbomberguy and Raycevick as well, I'm just less familiar with their work personally.
I almost never want 2-hour documentary style videos, yet 1-minute teasers leave me even more dissatisfied.
I want 5-minute to 15-minute videos. They can be either overviews or summaries that cover broad stretches or super focused essays that go deeply in depth on just a singular hyper-focused point.
Long-form typically means opinionated and written for a lay audience. Filled with unnecessary pregnant pauses, fluff, and breathing room. Historians trying to craft a narrative.
Stop wasting your viewer's precious time on b-roll or building a case. Smart audiences will trust you if you're succinct and factual.
So take the heinously verbose documentary format, trim it down to just 10 to 15 minutes, and you're left with a fast-paced, frenetic, fully dehydrated, factual blow-by-blow.
That's the sweet spot. Maximum information density.
There is no sweet spot. Different people have different preferences. Not every Youtuber needs to make 10 minute videos. Not every Youtuber needs to make hour long videos. It depends on their audience.
If you don't like hour long videos, that's fine. You're not the intended audience. Stop trying to make every content creator abide by your preferences and just look for those who already cater to your preferences.
Maybe we'll get AI summarizers for video soon.
Perverse incentives.
You could argue that anything except the thesis statement is a "waste of time," but the videos are for entertainment at the end of the day.It wouldn't entertaining for someone to say "The Oof sound in Roblox was invented by Joey Kuras for a game called Messiah. Tommy Tallarico says he made it but he probably didn't." then the video ends.
What is fun is watching a long deep-dive pulling apart all the ridiculous lies and exaggerations of a fascinating narcissist like Tallarico.
AI in particular is like coke to lazy content makers. I've had to drop a few because it became clear that AI took the lead in writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcUUbGb77tY
Could it be that the shorter videos that are now 30-60 seconds present the same information as they did when they were ~10min, just without all extra prologue, epilogue, and sponsor inserts? Wasn't one of the reasons they were ~10min in the first place simply to get monetized better?
It's this ad incentive that has made long-form videos more popular on Youtube.
They start cycling content and using innovative ways to make videos artificially longer. Some videos of have "what this video is about" and "Summary" sections which can be even half of the video length in total. Sponsored sections are getting longer. There are longer pauses and less editing. The list goes on.
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 of my ass here.
I couldn't find a source (other than my memory) though, the earliest I could find is a reddit post from 2016 https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/4v6bmy/wh...
For your information, you can view every video through the normal interface by changing the URL to the usual /watch?.
But this can definitely trip people up, especially now the maximum length of a YouTube short is 3 minutes instead of 1. If you recorded a 3 minute video on a phone (or other random vertical screen device like a Game Boy/DS/3DS), YouTube will classify it as a short and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
The main new takeaway is that the shortform category is bigger and more important than previously imagined but hardly the sole winner.
Your narrative isn't any less "simple" or any better backed up.
That may be a consequence of the monetization algorithm. It allows more time for ads.
The format of too many Youtube videos now is
- Useless intro
- Long recap of historical info to allow space for ads
- Actual new content
- Filler
- Conclusion
Those are the ones that aren't just some neckbeard with earphones and a big microphone.
I assume this is a replacement for TV/streaming. Cases were you previously would've wanted a 10-minute YouTube video are becoming cases where you watch 30-60 second ones. Cases where you previously wanted a 20+ minute Netlfix show are becoming ones where you turn to long YouTube videos
I wager most people are putting those on while having a meal and using their phones or tablets at the same time. Moreover, 99% of the most watched content on YouTube is utter garbage that would make the average reality show on TV twenty years ago look like The Godfather in comparison. Gossippy, clickbait videos made to induce an immediate dopamine dump and be used as background noise aren't "in-depth" anything. I don't think people are sitting in front of a TV watching an hour-long, non-sponsored, ad-free interview with Margerite Duras and doing nothing else concurrently, for instance.
On top of all that, this trend of making longer videos comes mostly from an attempt to increase ad revenue. Let's not be fooled here.
It's true and it's devastating. I intentionally never signed up for TikTok because of the dangers of hyper-addictive short form content. Ultra-processed, junk food content.
But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc.
TikTok won, and we're all worse off for it.
There are notably numerous Chrome/Firefox extensions that will hide Shorts from the YouTube homescreen. Plenty of creators are still focusing on normal-length content
I guess the solution is just no YouTube on the phone.
The one that upsets me the most is Instagrams shift from photos to video. I miss seeing cool photos from my friends.
No, sorry I read the first and last sentence. This is why I like the short format more then the long forms, it often boils down to the same clever narrative trickery without waisting 3 hours of your life.
It did not take me 3 hours to read that article.
I love YouTube but my problem with the content of YouTube is that almost all videos are introducing you to everything every time.
For example, there's this science video about this interesting property of fire right? They start with what's fire, when it was invented, what led to be studied this way and then they deliver the money shot. It is O.K. to be introduced to a topic once but it is brain wrecking to be 101ed every time. They are doing it to increase the watch time and the ad revenue and its horrible.
Forcing the videos to be short makes them deliver the gist quickly, TikTok videos that are trying to the introduction 101 thing are just as horrible, when a video is over 1min I'm very skeptical and feel the urge to move on.
Of course in-depth videos need to be long but those are not that many actually. From the pop-sci genre Veritasuim does it well but that kind of production takes long time and they publish videos every now and then. With the race to pump videos as quickly as possible, the short format is the better since you can get the content quickly and if you want to know more about it you can actually read about it. Which is how you actually learn anything BTW.
Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
Short-form content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content
YouTube still requires disconnecting connected chromecast devices to view YouTube Shorts?
I would say short-form content found a gap in the market and now exists in addition to long-form content without replacing it.
Point being TikTok js a winner in a slice of the population. I just stopped following the bunch of Indian folks even though they had an Instagram or reel account because I just could not get used to it. Similarly I followed a few people on rednote but promptly abandoned it when TT came back. So maybe TT won. But look at it from the other side. People in India and China don't follow what I follow. And there are billions of those.
TikTok is an awesome platform but not yet a "too big to fail" like YouTube I guess
Edit. But I get the point of 60 second media winning. Nowadays I am just unable to focus on a tv show. Or I am watching a show with some digression (Reddit, tiktok) in my hand. Theaters is the only place I am unable to do so and that's the only place I now enjoy movies I guess.
It's kind of like Reddit and other "customize your feed" social media. If you subscribe to the defaults, yeah, it's hot garbage. If you select content creators or topics that support your individual growth then you get a much different outcome.
Of course not to say I couldn't have benefited from the same topics via another type of media. But I enjoy the few minutes I spend on TT per day, seeing what my favorites have posted, etc. I even met a cool dummer named Zooich in Japan who I enjoy following and interacting with each week. And I've made a bit of content myself which I'm proud of.
Lastly, in no way does my positive experience diminish the negative issues surrounding TT. I fully agree it contributes to reduced attention span, spreading misinformation, etc. -- just like most other forms of social media. And there's a very real risk of it becoming state media in the future. I just wanted to provide a different perspective other than "TT is terrible in every way, ban it!".
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