I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus.
It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV.
If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.
The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.
The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
That's right, but it's not just products that they can "sell" you. It's all about your data, which is worth much more than any upsell opportunity.
Whether the user pays for YouTube Premium or not, they still have access to your behavioral data, your interests, they can easily determine your location, and so on. All of these data points contribute to your profile, which is a literal gold mine for their entire business. How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity, the price can only go up.
It's a goddamn racket that needs to be made visible and subject to thorough public and legal scrutiny.
> How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity,
Companies like Google and Meta don't sell your data, on dark markets or otherwise.
They keep it in-house for advertising targeting purposes.
If they sold it to other companies it would reduce their competitive advantage. It's not even worth it for them.
Google doesn't want to sell your data. They want to keep it internal as much as possible so their ad platform is valuable.
Whether they're directly doing business with data brokers or not is not the point. They're indirectly profiting from the profiles they build by selling access to them via their advertising platform. It's just a roundabout way of doing business, as is common in advertising.
Besides, even if they're not selling these profiles, they will end up on data broker markets one way or another. Whether their lack of security allows companies to export it, as in Meta's case, or simply by using their tools to gather as much information about people as possible.
The reality is that nobody outside of these companies, and likely only people in executive positions, knows how they operate internally. They have an army of PR and legal people to do their bidding. Whatever practices the public thinks these companies are or aren't involved with is mere guesswork, but one thing is certain: they don't maintain their size and power by keeping their hands clean. But then again, I'm probably on the wrong forum for this line of thinking.
> The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet
There are no ads on a sub, this doesn’t make any sense as such to the parents comment.
Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".
Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.
But Youtube isn't a monopoly. It's competing with Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu Instagram, Tiktok and Twitch off the top of my head. So they do have to make Youtube competitive
Your theory of
> just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
It is a monopolist in the format it specialises in - medium length 'creator content' that the creators typically post every 2-10 days. Some do post to Nebula and Patreon, but really, there's nowhere else to go for that kind of content, and that's the content that most of their ad revenue is attached to.
There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
They don't make more money from showing you shorts once you've paid to remove the ads.
The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
I would wager some VP at YouTube in charge of shorts has their performance evaluations tied to how many hours of shorts are watched. So that's one incentive. Another is customer retention. Make current paying users addicted to shorts, and maybe they'll be more likely to keep paying.
I think you're basically right, but the comment I replied to was saying they'll somehow get more of that specific user's money. While the shorts may improve retention in aggregate, this particular paying customer doesn't want them.
It's possible that particular user, despite not wanting the shorts, will keep paying for YouTube for longer because they enjoy shorts. It's also possible that they genuinely don't like them and are less likely to keep paying because of them. People are different. What keeps some customers engaged can turn off others.
They use your data to target ads at you elsewhere on the internet, improve their analytics platforms and give it to oppressive regimes. It also often ends up at shady data brokers.
They make all sorts of money doing that, but they get upset when people say Google is “selling” the data.
> The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
My guess is they know exactly what users are doing with the app and website, and know that people use shorts more often than we think.
This is one of their prime products, and they're Google, the biggest surveillance company on the planet. Of course they know how users interact with their service.
This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.
The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.
> This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.
Why would it be?
Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.
Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.
Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
From what I’ve heard, Google makes more on Premium subscribers than from ad-watchers. This should incentivize Google to get as many people on Premium as possible. The content is the same, Premium or not, so if they want more people to sign up, they need to give the users features worth having.
In terms of content. Very little of what I watch is must-see. It’s just something to kill time. Right now I’m watching some guy jump a bicycle through two moving truck trailers. If this was cable in the 90s, I’d probably be watching How It’s Made. These things are essentially interchangeable for me.
Sadly this requires a browser plugin. Happily, those exist. I also pay for YT and use "enhancer for youtube" which can do a plethora of things, one of which is to disable shorts.
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).
Use the Brave browser and look at the inbuilt filtering (search for "Content Filters" in settings), it allows explicit removal of shorts via enabling of "YouTube Anti-Shorts" filter list. Does the job beautifully.
There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)
But users like me who hate shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app aren't addicted to shorts because we refuse to open them. And there's no risk of me going to Tiktok or reels because I hate short-form video.
* 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 with you, compared to people they know nothing about
By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.
So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.
In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.
Why would a user who hates shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app be sharing links to shorts with their friends?
If a paying user want to disable shorts, wouldn't allowing that ability make it more likely they will continue to pay?
The reason I started paying for Youtube premium was to turn off the ads. I hate YT shorts and I get annoyed when I accidentally open one. If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
> Why would a user who hates shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app be sharing links to shorts with their friends?
Because the user thinsk it's a funny penguin and that their friend will laugh. The reality is that for almost all users, the demonstrated and disturbing reality is that they will engage with what you put in front of them if you can tune it right. They may wish you didn't do so, and may idly lament to people about how much they resent you for not giving them more control, but they still engage, and in cases like yours, still subscribe. They're that attached (addicted) and therefore that valuable.
> If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
What modern online media companies learned is that they really don't have to care about that. Individually, you and your subsription don't matter to them at all, and most people just don't get indignant enough to storm off over stuff like that as long you you put the right funny penguins and half-naked women in front of them, so it all works at scale regardless.
And if you were to cancel your subscription, are you ready to go so far as to give up the platform entirely, or would you just fallback to being an ad target who's demonstrated all the appealing targeting characteristics you already have, while still being fed shorts?
YouTube can be used in a healthy way: use NewPipe and subscribe to channels with edifying content and then, when a new video appears that you would want to watch properly, send the direct video link to yt-dlp on your computer. You then avoid the actual website, its algorithm, and its enshittification like short-form videos.
Choosing edifying content requires, of course, some caution. Avoid individual “content creators” who might feel pressure to slowly conform their content to the algorithm and sponsors’ demands. Instead, follow e.g. local arts organizations who do their events as part of a whole offline ecosystem, and then just upload video of it to YouTube. Or universities who create teaching content for their own needs but then upload it to YouTube, etc.
Oh sure - or, just realize that 99% of content is absolute garbage and go use your time in something else entirely. It’s what I do - I understand if others choose to do differently with their time and resources.
If YouTube was an independent company, which it'd be nice if it was, then by paying for it you'd be supporting YouTube (in case you decided it was worth it and they treated you nicely). But as it is, you're supporting Google, which is arguably an undesirable thing to do given how "evil" they've become. So a first course of action could be to close the tap and don't give them your money for a service that they've enshittified in the name of profit.
They could also make the experience out of the box like SponsorBlock and skip the sponsorship segments, but they don't do that either for their paying users.
Despite YouTube's attempts at blocking adblockers, I am still using YouTube successfully without ads. That said, at times I do have to reload the page for the video to load properly.
On pc i use chrome plugins to block all these distractions from me. It work's pretty well. Any idea how to do it on android phone. You can't intercept http requests or edit apps here that easily.
Honestly, I use revanced on my android phone which lets me disable all shorts content appearing. and on browser if i stick to the subscriptions tab and maybe the sidebar on videos, there's no shorts.
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.
I wonder what the issue is with shorts? Usually if I look something up on youtube (say a how-to or a product review), I don't want to see a half hour of blithering that could be compressed to a tweet. I generally pick the shortest video I can find about whatever it is. If it's limited to under a minute that's great. I'd really rather have a text post than a video, but those don't seem to exist any more.
Your comment made me see that there are two kinds of "shorts." The best analogy is print magazines. The one you prefer is like when someone tells you that Byte has a short review of a new device - you go to a library, find the issue, and look up the info. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are like glossy magazines often available in waiting rooms, these can be read (or rather consumed) from any page to any page until you're next in the queue. The mere existence and success of such glossy magazines means there will always be demand for this kind of consumption, this time just on another medium.
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.
> 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.
Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
> Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more.
People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it.
I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.
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 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.
---
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.
If you're anti-shorts, you could also choose to send a message to the creators by not watching their shorts. If they previously made long form but have switched to shorts, they're concerned with views, so you deny them the views.
Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.
Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
I mean... I'm against short-form videos. I'm not against YT shorts, because they (mostly) aren't short-form videos. They're just vertical videos that trick people used to short-form videos into thinking they'll be getting short-form videos, but (mostly) give them long-form videos. (Or... medium form? What do you call a two-to-three-minute-long video that thoroughly answers one very specific question?)
Especially the creators who've "previously made long form but have switched to shorts" — they're not making short-form videos. They're just making long/medium-form videos in portrait now.
IMHO, if something markets itself as a problematic thing, but doesn't actually deliver on the problematic part, then it isn't problematic. (E.g. convincing kids that frozen peas are "pea candy" isn't problematic. You're not making them like "candy." You're making them like peas!)
I hear what you're saying, but YT shorts are literally short-form videos. I guess if your scale of short/long all fits within 3 minutes, then a 2 min video could be considered "long", but we're talking about 3 mins or less vs much longer.
Kudos to your training of the algorithm if scrolling shorts gives you nothing but interesting informational bits, but you're still supporting the short-form format, which leads to more short-form videos. Like you said, YT is pushing and creators are incentivized, so our clicks make the graphs go up and accelerate our march into ADHD doom scrolling dystopia.
Non-Shorts can be vertical as well. It works fine, and without the swipe-encouraging UX. If they were “just making long/medium-form videos in portrait now” they don’t need YT Shorts to do that.
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.
I noticed that as well (though I do think there is a time limit), but decided I didn't want to encourage more of it and still avoid any shorts. I usually watch on a TV anyway, so vertical videos are pretty weird...
Pretty sure YouTube shorts have a 3min time limit. That's what it was last time I uploaded a video. By the way, it's really annoying that videos a minute or under need to be Shorts and they converted all old short videos to Shorts
Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content.
BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0]
When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal.
Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video.
I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.
I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."
You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.
On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
I have a theory: just like with excessive porn consumption, could it be that depressed people tend to watch more short-form videos? I have a chronically depressed friend who confirms this theory: she can't be bothered to do anything and can only muster the energy to watch Shorts when she's feeling down. Shorts are not the cause, but a symptom of the consequences of her depression.
I have taken three multihour Flixbus journeys in Central Europe this year. Each time, what astounded me was how every woman under 30 in sight from my seat was watching Tiktok for the entire journey. Just one thirty-second clip after another for four or five hours, and apparently mainly content that, even if it is about something else, serves to flog cosmetics brands.
Obviously it’s hard to diagnose depression from merely looking at someone. But none of these Tiktok users seemed like sad sacks, indeed some looked like successful professionals. I could only conclude that there is some truth to this platform hijacking even well-balanced people’s brain.
Yes, but consuming and getting addicted to (porn|SFV) might as well induce some apathy and later to depression. In my experience (which is NOT a statistics study) the problems go in spiral.
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.
One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts.
It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself.
But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do.
something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"
The "Vintage Space" channel host Amy Shira Teitel recently posted this long form video expressing her frustration with YT so heavily incentivizing SFVs with its creators. She goes into considerable detail about the intentionally addictive nature of the format, and how it clashes with her own publishing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM
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.
The interesting part here is what they carve out - they don't see impacts on body image or self esteem. These are classic effects identified as negative impacts of social media in general. It it would be really interesting if somehow SFV format prevents their impact.
My guess: the SFV they are talking about is generally just fully attention baiting and not from peers or others that people feel are "comparable". If you don't feel the source or the subject of the video is comparable to you, then there's no compulsion to reference it in a judgemental way against your own circumstances.
But I bet if you did just focus on SFV from eg: friends or peers, you'd be right back to self esteem and body image impacts again.
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.
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".
Is all short form video "highly stimulating" and/or "fast-paced" though? I can see the argument for the format being inherently stimulating/fast-paced, but I think that it still comes down more to the content than the format.
The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I suspect it has similar mental effects to constant interruptions, like a bad day at work where slack and email prevent you from getting into flow state/real work.
The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is further chopped up with cuts and zooms etc, techniques designed to tickle your brain and keep you engaged, more stimulation.
Look at what twitter et al. did to long form reading. Short video is the same.
> The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating.
I've been over-indulging in context switching long before short-form videos ever showed up. The internet itself is all about context switching. But the UX around short-form videos definitely encourages doomscrolling, similar to how microtransaction games encourage neverending grinds.
We definitely need better habits as a collective, but I think a list of "do's" is just as important as a whack-a-mole list of "don'ts".
Yep, the internet as a whole and is the real culprit. We love instant gratification and short feedback loops and the internet provides.
I feel like things will likely get worse before it gets better, but I have long-term hopes that eventually we'll see some cultural change that promotes doing vs consuming.
It may be that some media or some alcohol is more toxic than others, but it's still fair to test whether the mode of administration has an independent or enhancing effect.
E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.
wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.
So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.
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.
The danger of short form videos is because the form enables the algorithm designer to artificially maximize the reward with minimum effort by the viewer. It doesn't matter whether you watch kitten ones initially. After watching it for a month casually, chances are you would end up watching some addictive videos for hours with little effort. It could be some endless stream of Buddhist monks talking about suffering, if someone likes that kind of thing. It's just designed to be addictive with crazy high reward/effort ratio.
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?
I don't think you're wrong but I think you're being too quick to attack the gp. They're not wrong either. The point you brought up doesn't contradict theirs but adds nuance.
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]
The paper is specifically studying short-form videos like on TikTok or Youtube Shorts, so there would be no implication for videos longer than 3 minutes (the maximum for YT shorts)
I don’t think it’s correct to say there are no implications. The only discernable difference between a short and long videos effects is that one of the videos is capped at 3 minutes. There could be plenty of implication and correlation to high intake watching videos of any length.
There is a HUGE difference in that the combined short length with the fact that the video starts playing before you even have a chance to make a decision on whether to watch it or not leads you to a "heh! I'm here already, might as well just watch the thing".
This is a response to you and the other Y people that confuse short videos with autoplay and user engagement techniques.
There are people that autoplay long videos, in fact people stream random Simpson’s (or other favorite tv show, podcast, music, books on tape, etc) episodes in the background while they work. Classic TV has autoplay with no opportunity to decide. Autoplay is not an exclusive short form video feature. I can make a short video on my computer and it will not autoplay other content.
There's no confusion here. It's pretty easy to make the argument that the combination of auto play and short form is orders of magnitude more problematic than the sum of their parts.
Yes but then we’re not talking about short form video being addictive but rather the hunt for a good short form video is addictive. This same idea can be applied to long form and any other medium you enjoy, finish, and immediately want more of. Now if you have only 30 mins before your next task to watch a long form video then you may skip starting the video, but that doesn’t mean there is anything inherently bad about short form video but rather the tools for viewing it. So yes you are confusing and you’re intentionally confusing the two so that your point stands about short form video, but it doesn’t because your points are about the viewing tools.
If you continue to push this point, people will only think that short videos under 3 minutes are some how the devil and TikTok et al will continue on making whatever length of video is next in line, more addictive.
Sure, but that's beside the point. The discussion here is about the unique qualities of SFV and its affects on attention span and thinking. It's about the instant-reward feedback mechanism of swiping quickly and the ability to ingest a larger narrative. It's about the super-short cuts of video and audio that beg for attention, versus longer, more static content that requires patience, doesn't constantly dump dopamine, and stays on one topic longer.
In short: There are a lot of differences in how long and short videos affect a person, in my opinion.
I don't know if that's the only discernible difference.
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.
I probably spend 1-2 hours per day watching content on youtube (and much of that is at ~1.5-1.75X speed)
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.
Are your habits typical though? Playing long form videos at 1.75 speed? I suppose once you start engaging at hyperspeeds, you're making it closer to short form compulsive consumption. It'd be like speed reading a book instead of letting ideas and thoughts form.
I think you should watch at whatever speed you best ingest the material. Don't get me wrong, some lectures I watch at 2x but it isn't about optimizing speed. It's about optimizing attention. I go faster if the speaker is too slow and/or too monotone so my mind starts drifting. Speeding up can force me to concentrate and not drift but the right speed is dependent in many factors that it can't be a hard rule. Regardless of the speed, in a lecture video I'll pause and rewind. That's the large benefit to them, though at the cost of being unable to engage and interact.
There's no deficit of time in the day, the deficit is in energy and attention. I'm worried we conflate speed and productivity (I'm unsure if you do or don't) but these are original. Speed gives the illusion of productivity but it is ignorant of quality and efficiency. It's only a first order approximation of productivity and a noisy one at best. Velocity is more important, as it requires direction but even velocity is ignorant of momentum, acceleration, force, and many other factors that go into making one productive. Speed is only important if everything else is held constant.
Let's not confuse speed for productivity. I'd argue that is a major contributing factor that has gotten us to this point. Where everything appears to move fast but in reality moves slower than ever
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.
Honestly, I don't mind the format in principle, and the process that goes from YT's homepage to watching a single one of them is not that bad to me. As long as I get to make a decision that I want to watch something, consciously go "I will click on this thing and watch it" and only then proceed to watch it, then it's _fine_.
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.
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.
I appreciate the knowledge share. Fixing it for me is one thing, I can be relatively disciplined to watch how I spend my time on it. The huge issue for me is that it’s on every kids device. It’s super predatory and these companies know the damage they’re causing children at this point.
I agree. For our teen it's a combo of taking the phone during homework & sleep time and limiting daily time in certain apps using parental controls.
I would mod the YT app to remove 'autoplay next' and algo recommendations but unfortunately my kid is on iOS where modding isn't possible. The best thing we did was not get her a phone until after she turned 13.
I was surprised that the podcast Stuff You Should Know now advertises a short firm video provider, but I couldn't explain exactly why. Maybe this sheds some light on my concerns.
If you want to hide Shorts completely on YouTube, or make watching them a more intentional act by hijacking YouTube's navigation to make them display in the regular video player, Control Panel for YouTube [^0] has options for that, as well as for removing any other sources of algorithmic/recommended videos you don't want, including the new "More videos" in the new video UI (which you can also disable if you don't like it)
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)"
I think it really is important to stress that these are correlations only. Something I've noticed: those with poor attention spans or generally low engagement with deeper material tend to be attracted to SFV. Likewise, those in a state of depression or have ADHD can easily get into the quick satisfaction coming from SFV. It may exacerbate existing issues, but not necessarily be the cause.
Is it important to stress that though? This feels like a personal responsibility argument while also acknowledging that it disproportionately affects people who don't have a ton of control over their response to it.
I think that this is an opinion. For instance, one might think online gambling should be illegal, regardless of whether it causes addictive behavior or exacerbates some genetic predisposition to it.
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.
So the old saying "I can feel myself getting dumber for watching" has some merit. I used to say that for things like Housewives/Kardashian style tripe, as well as bad sitcoms with laugh tracks like Big Bang Theory that was supposed to be so smart
Algorithmically served short form videos is clearly the smoking of our time. I cannot stand the conservative view of "well we don't know the videos cause mental health decline, or if it's simply those with a genetic inclination who seek out short form content.", exactly mirroring the skeptics about smoking causing cancer. I'm hopeful that in 5-10 years (but more likely 20) people will view this AI served, maximally engaging, content in the same way we view smoking now: disgusting and horrible, but adults should be allowed to do what they want. I can easily imagine kids/teens sharing their illicit access to shorts much in the same way they share vapes/cigarettes, which would be a much more preferable situation than the unlimited use we see today.
I absolutely see the correlation myself, but which way does causation go?
I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok.
But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem.
The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?
I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening.
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 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.
My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.
I wonder about the cognitive and mental health correlates of living in a world that no longer makes any sense.
I remember 10 years ago watching a documentary about the previous ten years explaining how we we had moved into a post meaning world, and how this was being weaponized by various interests.
That time seems positively quaint to me now!
I was reading a book from the 1960s, and it was talking about how the world is too complicated now and moving too fast.
And of course if you read books from the late 19th century they say the exact same thing...
Yeah, I remember reading an issue of Planetary from about (GOD HELP US!) two decades ago where the plot involved baddies who had invaded a fictional universe. In the time since then, I went from thinking "What a crazy idea for a plot" to "Hmm, I can see what inspired that" to "Jesus wept. People can basically choose to do this now. And they vote!"
I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim.
This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout:
> Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024).
Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve.
It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.
The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
Whenever I search anything in my native language, and I mean literally any topic, one of the top recommendations (if not the top one, which autoplays by default) is the local far-right party. It's crazy. We've become used to this but it's crazy.
Far-right politics[a] encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, radical anti-communism, ethnonationalism, and nativism.
Anyone who's able to stomach those short videos has to have cognitive deficits or mental issues. I'd rather watch an advertisement than those (and I can't stand watching advertisements).
I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus.
It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV.
If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.
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?
The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.
The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
That's right, but it's not just products that they can "sell" you. It's all about your data, which is worth much more than any upsell opportunity.
Whether the user pays for YouTube Premium or not, they still have access to your behavioral data, your interests, they can easily determine your location, and so on. All of these data points contribute to your profile, which is a literal gold mine for their entire business. How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity, the price can only go up.
It's a goddamn racket that needs to be made visible and subject to thorough public and legal scrutiny.
> How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity,
Companies like Google and Meta don't sell your data, on dark markets or otherwise.
They keep it in-house for advertising targeting purposes.
If they sold it to other companies it would reduce their competitive advantage. It's not even worth it for them.
Google doesn't want to sell your data. They want to keep it internal as much as possible so their ad platform is valuable.
They won’t sell your raw data, but they will use your data to charge a premium for their ads.
It’s indirectly “selling your data”.
Its monetizing the data. Selling the data (directly or indirectly) is inaccurate.
Countless studies have shown how to extract personally identifiable information from Google’s monetization platform by giving them money.
They sell your data by any definition of “sell” that existed before they redefined the term so that it excludes their businesses.
Whether they're directly doing business with data brokers or not is not the point. They're indirectly profiting from the profiles they build by selling access to them via their advertising platform. It's just a roundabout way of doing business, as is common in advertising.
Besides, even if they're not selling these profiles, they will end up on data broker markets one way or another. Whether their lack of security allows companies to export it, as in Meta's case, or simply by using their tools to gather as much information about people as possible.
The reality is that nobody outside of these companies, and likely only people in executive positions, knows how they operate internally. They have an army of PR and legal people to do their bidding. Whatever practices the public thinks these companies are or aren't involved with is mere guesswork, but one thing is certain: they don't maintain their size and power by keeping their hands clean. But then again, I'm probably on the wrong forum for this line of thinking.
> The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet
There are no ads on a sub, this doesn’t make any sense as such to the parents comment.
They mean the premium subscription, not channel subscriptions.
You don’t get ads with the premium subscription. Have I misunderstood the intent of this correction?
They also own the ad slots everywhere else.
Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".
Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.
But Youtube isn't a monopoly. It's competing with Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu Instagram, Tiktok and Twitch off the top of my head. So they do have to make Youtube competitive
Your theory of
> just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
is the most likely culprit
It is a monopolist in the format it specialises in - medium length 'creator content' that the creators typically post every 2-10 days. Some do post to Nebula and Patreon, but really, there's nowhere else to go for that kind of content, and that's the content that most of their ad revenue is attached to.
There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
They want more of your money. They will monetize you as much as they can. You're just a well-supported, paying product.
They don't make more money from showing you shorts once you've paid to remove the ads.
The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
I would wager some VP at YouTube in charge of shorts has their performance evaluations tied to how many hours of shorts are watched. So that's one incentive. Another is customer retention. Make current paying users addicted to shorts, and maybe they'll be more likely to keep paying.
I think you're basically right, but the comment I replied to was saying they'll somehow get more of that specific user's money. While the shorts may improve retention in aggregate, this particular paying customer doesn't want them.
What you want and what behaviors you may be induced toward via a nonstop campaign of unwanted UX changes are two different things.
When a pusher gives you some free drugs, they are not taking into account whether you want to be addicted to drugs. Not part of the business model.
It's possible that particular user, despite not wanting the shorts, will keep paying for YouTube for longer because they enjoy shorts. It's also possible that they genuinely don't like them and are less likely to keep paying because of them. People are different. What keeps some customers engaged can turn off others.
They use your data to target ads at you elsewhere on the internet, improve their analytics platforms and give it to oppressive regimes. It also often ends up at shady data brokers.
They make all sorts of money doing that, but they get upset when people say Google is “selling” the data.
They can still use it to learn your preferences and tighten their profile of you for all the searching and other ad-enabled activities you take.
> The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
My guess is they know exactly what users are doing with the app and website, and know that people use shorts more often than we think.
This is one of their prime products, and they're Google, the biggest surveillance company on the planet. Of course they know how users interact with their service.
Yes, as you say, maybe there isn't a big demand to disable shorts completely.
This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.
The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.
> This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.
Why would it be?
Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.
Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.
Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
From what I’ve heard, Google makes more on Premium subscribers than from ad-watchers. This should incentivize Google to get as many people on Premium as possible. The content is the same, Premium or not, so if they want more people to sign up, they need to give the users features worth having.
In terms of content. Very little of what I watch is must-see. It’s just something to kill time. Right now I’m watching some guy jump a bicycle through two moving truck trailers. If this was cable in the 90s, I’d probably be watching How It’s Made. These things are essentially interchangeable for me.
Sadly this requires a browser plugin. Happily, those exist. I also pay for YT and use "enhancer for youtube" which can do a plethora of things, one of which is to disable shorts.
I use the Unhook extension, which is also very good.
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).
Get Unhook extension (for desktop)
yup, this one :up
I would consider paying premium if they allowed me to disable shorts
Use the Brave browser and look at the inbuilt filtering (search for "Content Filters" in settings), it allows explicit removal of shorts via enabling of "YouTube Anti-Shorts" filter list. Does the job beautifully.
They want you to never unsubscribe, which requires your addiction.
Incentive to addict + Ability to addict = outcome
It doesn't require addiction though. It only requires an aversion to watching ads, or the more general aversion to being annoyed.
There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)
You can. Turn off Youtube history, it disables shorts. Not an ideal solution if you actually did want to keep your Youtube history, but this works.
People are less likely to quit buying something when they’re addicted to it.
Google wants you to be addicted to YouTube. It makes you more likely to renew.
And it helps keep you off competing platforms (TikTok, reels, etc).
But users like me who hate shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app aren't addicted to shorts because we refuse to open them. And there's no risk of me going to Tiktok or reels because I hate short-form video.
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 with you, compared to people they know nothing about
By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.
So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.
In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.
Why would a user who hates shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app be sharing links to shorts with their friends?
If a paying user want to disable shorts, wouldn't allowing that ability make it more likely they will continue to pay?
The reason I started paying for Youtube premium was to turn off the ads. I hate YT shorts and I get annoyed when I accidentally open one. If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
> Why would a user who hates shorts so much that they want to disable them in the app be sharing links to shorts with their friends?
Because the user thinsk it's a funny penguin and that their friend will laugh. The reality is that for almost all users, the demonstrated and disturbing reality is that they will engage with what you put in front of them if you can tune it right. They may wish you didn't do so, and may idly lament to people about how much they resent you for not giving them more control, but they still engage, and in cases like yours, still subscribe. They're that attached (addicted) and therefore that valuable.
> If YT continues to shove shorts down our throats, I'll probably cancel my subscription because I hate shorts that much.
What modern online media companies learned is that they really don't have to care about that. Individually, you and your subsription don't matter to them at all, and most people just don't get indignant enough to storm off over stuff like that as long you you put the right funny penguins and half-naked women in front of them, so it all works at scale regardless.
And if you were to cancel your subscription, are you ready to go so far as to give up the platform entirely, or would you just fallback to being an ad target who's demonstrated all the appealing targeting characteristics you already have, while still being fed shorts?
The best thing you can do is stop paying and wean yourself off YouTube. It’s terrible for your mental health.
YouTube can be used in a healthy way: use NewPipe and subscribe to channels with edifying content and then, when a new video appears that you would want to watch properly, send the direct video link to yt-dlp on your computer. You then avoid the actual website, its algorithm, and its enshittification like short-form videos.
Choosing edifying content requires, of course, some caution. Avoid individual “content creators” who might feel pressure to slowly conform their content to the algorithm and sponsors’ demands. Instead, follow e.g. local arts organizations who do their events as part of a whole offline ecosystem, and then just upload video of it to YouTube. Or universities who create teaching content for their own needs but then upload it to YouTube, etc.
Oh sure - or, just realize that 99% of content is absolute garbage and go use your time in something else entirely. It’s what I do - I understand if others choose to do differently with their time and resources.
If YouTube was an independent company, which it'd be nice if it was, then by paying for it you'd be supporting YouTube (in case you decided it was worth it and they treated you nicely). But as it is, you're supporting Google, which is arguably an undesirable thing to do given how "evil" they've become. So a first course of action could be to close the tap and don't give them your money for a service that they've enshittified in the name of profit.
They could also make the experience out of the box like SponsorBlock and skip the sponsorship segments, but they don't do that either for their paying users.
I use ublock origin for this. Also the NYT Opinion section because ain’t nobody got time for that nonsense.
Despite YouTube's attempts at blocking adblockers, I am still using YouTube successfully without ads. That said, at times I do have to reload the page for the video to load properly.
On pc i use chrome plugins to block all these distractions from me. It work's pretty well. Any idea how to do it on android phone. You can't intercept http requests or edit apps here that easily.
Honestly, I use revanced on my android phone which lets me disable all shorts content appearing. and on browser if i stick to the subscriptions tab and maybe the sidebar on videos, there's no shorts.
Also the weird YouTube Playable Games thing that shows up every few weeks.
they want your time
attention is all they want
Attention is all they need.
Can't we just give them a hug instead if they're that lonely?
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.
I wonder what the issue is with shorts? Usually if I look something up on youtube (say a how-to or a product review), I don't want to see a half hour of blithering that could be compressed to a tweet. I generally pick the shortest video I can find about whatever it is. If it's limited to under a minute that's great. I'd really rather have a text post than a video, but those don't seem to exist any more.
Your comment made me see that there are two kinds of "shorts." The best analogy is print magazines. The one you prefer is like when someone tells you that Byte has a short review of a new device - you go to a library, find the issue, and look up the info. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are like glossy magazines often available in waiting rooms, these can be read (or rather consumed) from any page to any page until you're next in the queue. The mere existence and success of such glossy magazines means there will always be demand for this kind of consumption, this time just on another medium.
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.
> 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.
Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
> Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.
If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more.
People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it.
I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.
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 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.
---
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.
If you're anti-shorts, you could also choose to send a message to the creators by not watching their shorts. If they previously made long form but have switched to shorts, they're concerned with views, so you deny them the views.
Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.
Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
I mean... I'm against short-form videos. I'm not against YT shorts, because they (mostly) aren't short-form videos. They're just vertical videos that trick people used to short-form videos into thinking they'll be getting short-form videos, but (mostly) give them long-form videos. (Or... medium form? What do you call a two-to-three-minute-long video that thoroughly answers one very specific question?)
Especially the creators who've "previously made long form but have switched to shorts" — they're not making short-form videos. They're just making long/medium-form videos in portrait now.
IMHO, if something markets itself as a problematic thing, but doesn't actually deliver on the problematic part, then it isn't problematic. (E.g. convincing kids that frozen peas are "pea candy" isn't problematic. You're not making them like "candy." You're making them like peas!)
I hear what you're saying, but YT shorts are literally short-form videos. I guess if your scale of short/long all fits within 3 minutes, then a 2 min video could be considered "long", but we're talking about 3 mins or less vs much longer.
Kudos to your training of the algorithm if scrolling shorts gives you nothing but interesting informational bits, but you're still supporting the short-form format, which leads to more short-form videos. Like you said, YT is pushing and creators are incentivized, so our clicks make the graphs go up and accelerate our march into ADHD doom scrolling dystopia.
Non-Shorts can be vertical as well. It works fine, and without the swipe-encouraging UX. If they were “just making long/medium-form videos in portrait now” they don’t need YT Shorts to do that.
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.
I noticed that as well (though I do think there is a time limit), but decided I didn't want to encourage more of it and still avoid any shorts. I usually watch on a TV anyway, so vertical videos are pretty weird...
Pretty sure YouTube shorts have a 3min time limit. That's what it was last time I uploaded a video. By the way, it's really annoying that videos a minute or under need to be Shorts and they converted all old short videos to Shorts
The question is: why are you still on this treadmill?
I'd also ban autoplay of the next video. You have to be involved in choosing the next video to watch (or none).
Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content.
BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0]
When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal.
Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video.
[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remov...
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...
Just want to thank you for the comprehensive extension list, this is very useful!
I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.
I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.
What's the problem with that?
I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."
You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.
On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
I have a theory: just like with excessive porn consumption, could it be that depressed people tend to watch more short-form videos? I have a chronically depressed friend who confirms this theory: she can't be bothered to do anything and can only muster the energy to watch Shorts when she's feeling down. Shorts are not the cause, but a symptom of the consequences of her depression.
I have taken three multihour Flixbus journeys in Central Europe this year. Each time, what astounded me was how every woman under 30 in sight from my seat was watching Tiktok for the entire journey. Just one thirty-second clip after another for four or five hours, and apparently mainly content that, even if it is about something else, serves to flog cosmetics brands.
Obviously it’s hard to diagnose depression from merely looking at someone. But none of these Tiktok users seemed like sad sacks, indeed some looked like successful professionals. I could only conclude that there is some truth to this platform hijacking even well-balanced people’s brain.
Probably a feedback loop though. Like other addictive behaviours. There are many ways for life to go wrong, and only a few ways for it to go right.
Yes, but consuming and getting addicted to (porn|SFV) might as well induce some apathy and later to depression. In my experience (which is NOT a statistics study) the problems go in spiral.
I am ready to pay for disabling em feeds.
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.
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.
You don't. This is where taking public transport to work shines.
are you watching talks while driving?
One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts.
It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself.
But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do.
something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"
The "Vintage Space" channel host Amy Shira Teitel recently posted this long form video expressing her frustration with YT so heavily incentivizing SFVs with its creators. She goes into considerable detail about the intentionally addictive nature of the format, and how it clashes with her own publishing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FRHHD3F2gM
Short form is no good to consume anyway.
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.
The interesting part here is what they carve out - they don't see impacts on body image or self esteem. These are classic effects identified as negative impacts of social media in general. It it would be really interesting if somehow SFV format prevents their impact.
My guess: the SFV they are talking about is generally just fully attention baiting and not from peers or others that people feel are "comparable". If you don't feel the source or the subject of the video is comparable to you, then there's no compulsion to reference it in a judgemental way against your own circumstances.
But I bet if you did just focus on SFV from eg: friends or peers, you'd be right back to self esteem and body image impacts again.
I literally feel like I'm doing drugs when I'm watching short-form videos.
You need to do more drugs then.
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.
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".
Is all short form video "highly stimulating" and/or "fast-paced" though? I can see the argument for the format being inherently stimulating/fast-paced, but I think that it still comes down more to the content than the format.
The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I suspect it has similar mental effects to constant interruptions, like a bad day at work where slack and email prevent you from getting into flow state/real work.
The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is further chopped up with cuts and zooms etc, techniques designed to tickle your brain and keep you engaged, more stimulation.
Look at what twitter et al. did to long form reading. Short video is the same.
> The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating.
I've been over-indulging in context switching long before short-form videos ever showed up. The internet itself is all about context switching. But the UX around short-form videos definitely encourages doomscrolling, similar to how microtransaction games encourage neverending grinds.
We definitely need better habits as a collective, but I think a list of "do's" is just as important as a whack-a-mole list of "don'ts".
Yep, the internet as a whole and is the real culprit. We love instant gratification and short feedback loops and the internet provides.
I feel like things will likely get worse before it gets better, but I have long-term hopes that eventually we'll see some cultural change that promotes doing vs consuming.
It may be that some media or some alcohol is more toxic than others, but it's still fair to test whether the mode of administration has an independent or enhancing effect.
E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.
wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.
So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.
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.
The danger of short form videos is because the form enables the algorithm designer to artificially maximize the reward with minimum effort by the viewer. It doesn't matter whether you watch kitten ones initially. After watching it for a month casually, chances are you would end up watching some addictive videos for hours with little effort. It could be some endless stream of Buddhist monks talking about suffering, if someone likes that kind of thing. It's just designed to be addictive with crazy high reward/effort ratio.
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?
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
Long form educational YT videos are amazing. It makes my brain work hard, and I feel like I learn more.
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.
There could be overconsumption effects of short form media that exist in long form certainly.
You’re hand waving it away because you prefer long videos. What about all the people using TikTok as a search engine?
I don't think you're wrong but I think you're being too quick to attack the gp. They're not wrong either. The point you brought up doesn't contradict theirs but adds nuance.
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
May God help them
> hard for me to just sit in silence and think
Maybe practice slowing down by reading a book. Any book, hard copy.
> trying to be more of a producer than consumer
Thank you!
The paper is specifically studying short-form videos like on TikTok or Youtube Shorts, so there would be no implication for videos longer than 3 minutes (the maximum for YT shorts)
I don’t think it’s correct to say there are no implications. The only discernable difference between a short and long videos effects is that one of the videos is capped at 3 minutes. There could be plenty of implication and correlation to high intake watching videos of any length.
There is a HUGE difference in that the combined short length with the fact that the video starts playing before you even have a chance to make a decision on whether to watch it or not leads you to a "heh! I'm here already, might as well just watch the thing".
This is a response to you and the other Y people that confuse short videos with autoplay and user engagement techniques.
There are people that autoplay long videos, in fact people stream random Simpson’s (or other favorite tv show, podcast, music, books on tape, etc) episodes in the background while they work. Classic TV has autoplay with no opportunity to decide. Autoplay is not an exclusive short form video feature. I can make a short video on my computer and it will not autoplay other content.
There's no confusion here. It's pretty easy to make the argument that the combination of auto play and short form is orders of magnitude more problematic than the sum of their parts.
Yes but then we’re not talking about short form video being addictive but rather the hunt for a good short form video is addictive. This same idea can be applied to long form and any other medium you enjoy, finish, and immediately want more of. Now if you have only 30 mins before your next task to watch a long form video then you may skip starting the video, but that doesn’t mean there is anything inherently bad about short form video but rather the tools for viewing it. So yes you are confusing and you’re intentionally confusing the two so that your point stands about short form video, but it doesn’t because your points are about the viewing tools.
If you continue to push this point, people will only think that short videos under 3 minutes are some how the devil and TikTok et al will continue on making whatever length of video is next in line, more addictive.
Sure, but that's beside the point. The discussion here is about the unique qualities of SFV and its affects on attention span and thinking. It's about the instant-reward feedback mechanism of swiping quickly and the ability to ingest a larger narrative. It's about the super-short cuts of video and audio that beg for attention, versus longer, more static content that requires patience, doesn't constantly dump dopamine, and stays on one topic longer.
In short: There are a lot of differences in how long and short videos affect a person, in my opinion.
I don't know if that's the only discernible difference.
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.
I probably spend 1-2 hours per day watching content on youtube (and much of that is at ~1.5-1.75X speed)
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.
Are your habits typical though? Playing long form videos at 1.75 speed? I suppose once you start engaging at hyperspeeds, you're making it closer to short form compulsive consumption. It'd be like speed reading a book instead of letting ideas and thoughts form.
Learn to watch at 2x speed (or faster with an extension). Then use the saved time for productive activities.
I think you should watch at whatever speed you best ingest the material. Don't get me wrong, some lectures I watch at 2x but it isn't about optimizing speed. It's about optimizing attention. I go faster if the speaker is too slow and/or too monotone so my mind starts drifting. Speeding up can force me to concentrate and not drift but the right speed is dependent in many factors that it can't be a hard rule. Regardless of the speed, in a lecture video I'll pause and rewind. That's the large benefit to them, though at the cost of being unable to engage and interact.
There's no deficit of time in the day, the deficit is in energy and attention. I'm worried we conflate speed and productivity (I'm unsure if you do or don't) but these are original. Speed gives the illusion of productivity but it is ignorant of quality and efficiency. It's only a first order approximation of productivity and a noisy one at best. Velocity is more important, as it requires direction but even velocity is ignorant of momentum, acceleration, force, and many other factors that go into making one productive. Speed is only important if everything else is held constant.
Let's not confuse speed for productivity. I'd argue that is a major contributing factor that has gotten us to this point. Where everything appears to move fast but in reality moves slower than ever
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.
Honestly, I don't mind the format in principle, and the process that goes from YT's homepage to watching a single one of them is not that bad to me. As long as I get to make a decision that I want to watch something, consciously go "I will click on this thing and watch it" and only then proceed to watch it, then it's _fine_.
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.
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.
I appreciate the knowledge share. Fixing it for me is one thing, I can be relatively disciplined to watch how I spend my time on it. The huge issue for me is that it’s on every kids device. It’s super predatory and these companies know the damage they’re causing children at this point.
I agree. For our teen it's a combo of taking the phone during homework & sleep time and limiting daily time in certain apps using parental controls.
I would mod the YT app to remove 'autoplay next' and algo recommendations but unfortunately my kid is on iOS where modding isn't possible. The best thing we did was not get her a phone until after she turned 13.
If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725
I was surprised that the podcast Stuff You Should Know now advertises a short firm video provider, but I couldn't explain exactly why. Maybe this sheds some light on my concerns.
If you want to hide Shorts completely on YouTube, or make watching them a more intentional act by hijacking YouTube's navigation to make them display in the regular video player, Control Panel for YouTube [^0] has options for that, as well as for removing any other sources of algorithmic/recommended videos you don't want, including the new "More videos" in the new video UI (which you can also disable if you don't like it)
[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
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)"
I think it really is important to stress that these are correlations only. Something I've noticed: those with poor attention spans or generally low engagement with deeper material tend to be attracted to SFV. Likewise, those in a state of depression or have ADHD can easily get into the quick satisfaction coming from SFV. It may exacerbate existing issues, but not necessarily be the cause.
Is it important to stress that though? This feels like a personal responsibility argument while also acknowledging that it disproportionately affects people who don't have a ton of control over their response to it.
It is important; if SFV cause these symptoms, that could be grounds (long-term) to ban them. Not so if they only exacerbate preexisting conditions.
I think that this is an opinion. For instance, one might think online gambling should be illegal, regardless of whether it causes addictive behavior or exacerbates some genetic predisposition to it.
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.
So the old saying "I can feel myself getting dumber for watching" has some merit. I used to say that for things like Housewives/Kardashian style tripe, as well as bad sitcoms with laugh tracks like Big Bang Theory that was supposed to be so smart
Algorithmically served short form videos is clearly the smoking of our time. I cannot stand the conservative view of "well we don't know the videos cause mental health decline, or if it's simply those with a genetic inclination who seek out short form content.", exactly mirroring the skeptics about smoking causing cancer. I'm hopeful that in 5-10 years (but more likely 20) people will view this AI served, maximally engaging, content in the same way we view smoking now: disgusting and horrible, but adults should be allowed to do what they want. I can easily imagine kids/teens sharing their illicit access to shorts much in the same way they share vapes/cigarettes, which would be a much more preferable situation than the unlimited use we see today.
Oh man, they take random people's clips, stitch them together with a voice over and include false information eg. an incorrect fact about an animal
I hope you don't mean conservative in the usual political sense. I know more conservatives worried about this than not.
I absolutely see the correlation myself, but which way does causation go?
I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok.
But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem.
The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?
I try to tell my parents to watch less short form videos. They don't care. Thank you Meta and Alphabet. :(
I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening.
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 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.
Why would you think it's not explicitly intended?
If anyone from APA.org is listening, this website is really bad on mobile
Great ad for Grayscale on your phone and chrome extensions that get rid of shorts
My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.
I wonder about the cognitive and mental health correlates of living in a world that no longer makes any sense.
I remember 10 years ago watching a documentary about the previous ten years explaining how we we had moved into a post meaning world, and how this was being weaponized by various interests.
That time seems positively quaint to me now!
I was reading a book from the 1960s, and it was talking about how the world is too complicated now and moving too fast.
And of course if you read books from the late 19th century they say the exact same thing...
https://xkcd.com/1227/
Yeah, I remember reading an issue of Planetary from about (GOD HELP US!) two decades ago where the plot involved baddies who had invaded a fictional universe. In the time since then, I went from thinking "What a crazy idea for a plot" to "Hmm, I can see what inspired that" to "Jesus wept. People can basically choose to do this now. And they vote!"
I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim.
This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout:
> Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024).
Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve.
It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.
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 ...
Whenever I search anything in my native language, and I mean literally any topic, one of the top recommendations (if not the top one, which autoplays by default) is the local far-right party. It's crazy. We've become used to this but it's crazy.
People have beliefs you don't share?
No, he's referring to politics.
Far-right politics[a] encompasses a range of ideologies that are marked by ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, radical anti-communism, ethnonationalism, and nativism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
This accurately describes the front page of reddit, too.
Yep. It's ironic that reddit itself cured my reddit addiction.
People are already calling it “brain rot” so it’s not surprising.
Anyone who's able to stomach those short videos has to have cognitive deficits or mental issues. I'd rather watch an advertisement than those (and I can't stand watching advertisements).