They are all reward hacking, but tiktok is audiovisual immersion, dating apps are romantic validation and twitter is outrage/information foraging

It's about the same amount of time that attention is given to any focus, most of those are less than a SFV length.

It really makes sense now. Emotional dysregulation comes into play and now I wonder that it's not just me who is quietly angry (at Match Group) all the time while still addicted to swipe based dating apps.

Leetcode became popular along the same time line.

Coincides with GenZ aging into adulthood after being educated in the debunked "3-cueing" or "whole language" reading education model. So far 40 states have pivoted away from it as states that switched first saw reading comprehension improve.

Whole lot of social experimentation without informed consent being put on people by 50+ year olds who run the world and never had to jump through the same thought policing.

Psychiatrist argues Americans have lost their grit for irrational reality we are forced to live in and actually are snowflakes: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...

What if I watch a movie in 56 two minute clips while someone extrudes playdoh in the corner?

Reading might not make you intellectual, but if you read because you thought it made you intellectual, it definitely made you insufferable.

It's a lot worse. It's like comparing a bow and arrow to an M-16. Yes they both shoot projectiles, but...

The quantity is endless. You can run out of channels, sweep through them a few times, give up, and get bored, while doom scrollers give you an infinite stream of faux-novelty. It's entirely possible to scroll for eternity and never run out of what at least seems, to your limbic system, like information and social stimulation.

The content is generally much lower quality than TV. Even really bad dumb TV is high art compared to a lot of what's on the doom scrollers. It's hyper-optimized for narrow addictiveness and literally nothing else.

There's a closed feedback loop optimization system in place. The site knows you're scrolling. It knows how fast, where you pause, in some cases even where your eyeballs are going. It knows what makes you interact. It knows what you watched before you stopped watching vs what you watched and kept watching. It also has tons of third party data on you and sensor data that often even includes your location. It can optimize its addiction mechanism in a personalized rapid feedback closed loop way that television could never achieve.

It's like a smart drug that tries to keep you hooked. Imagine if the heroin had a learning algorithm that adapted its chemical structure in real time to keep you from quitting and it was powered by fleet-wide learning cross all heroin molecules in the world.

You read the newspapers, books, watch a movie: eventually there is an end and you have to do something else

Also, books, TV, board games, newspapers didn’t disappear. So it’s compounded in some ways

The hyper normalization on technology fueled escapism is the difference.

Everyone had freedom to pick their poison so to speak. Now? All tech and screen based.

Hyper-social normalization always falls apart. It's unnatural; modern human biology evolved for thousands solving problems mostly in isolation. Tech fueled distribution of material goods humans need to survive is great as it removed risk to biology. But social normalization sucks.

Whether the socialized motive is appease gods by living up to scripture, keep a job/build career make money, or validate it just normalizes people and if we all know the same shit, why discuss anything with them? We already know the same shit.

This is just a nonsensically reductive argument.

Reading is obviously healthier than scrolling tiktok.

I think there is something distinctly unique between dozing off from reality by letting your mind wander or twiddling your thumbs, and scrolling short form video.

In my personal experience short form content is easier to get sucked into for hours on end than those other ones and something I’m more likely to regret participating in. (Learning this early I stopped so I’m not the biggest consumer of it and may have an atypical opinion compared to 1-2 billion people actively watching tik tok for hours a day.)

Hmm... this doesn't quite add up. Do we have brain scans showing that critical thinking centers of the brain turn off when people read books or play table games?

> the brain needs dozing off from reality

Sure, and the body needs to be fed, but it still matters what and how much you feed it.

Exactly, should the "control regions" being deactivated be something that is activated all the time, or is that associated with burnout, or chronic stress?

"It's not that bad, everything was toxic befor so we can continue as if nothing was bad."

They are different categories. Brain rot isn’t an imagined thing and we aren’t confused about where it comes from

Something feels different with the short form, rapid fire stuff, at least to me

The Reddit tier mental gymnastics on display here to avoid any kind of acknowledgement of the dangers of short form video specifically is impressive.

I never made that connection, and I am old enough to have seen Max Headroom when it came out. Thank you.

I would like to take this opportunity to state one of my core beliefs: we are all easily programmed meat machines. Accepting this fact is uncomfortable, but important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert

This "low power mode" is a myth, the brain pulls a pretty constant amount of power (about 20% of metabolic energy), and most power isn't consumed by the action potential/neurons firing, but rather in keeping the neuron ready to fire.

And the regions involved in the default mode network are actually some of the metabolically most active regions in the brain, involved in memory consolidation, future simulation, theory of mind, and self-narrative; among other things.

I would postulate that it's even worse than this, given that default mode network activity is proven to be essential for a healthy mind. This is when engage in useful thinking even when we're not "doing anything".

I think screen activity/tiktok keeps us in some kind of purgatory where we can neither fully engage nor fully disengage.

This framing seems like the correct one, but I think that just like being physically sedentary leads to weakness of muscles and joints and health problems, so being mentally sedentary could also lead to a mind that is weakened in the long term, though the weakness could likely be reversed with exposure to exercise.

the article does note:

"The researchers caution against reading the deactivation as evidence of impaired cognitive function. As they put it in the paper, “this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.” Instead, the team argues the pattern likely reflects an adaptive shift toward low-effort, automatic processing during passive, low-conflict viewing."

my take: if the study authors could qualify a subject's liked videos, they could qualify a subject's liked activities, and study activation thresholds prior to and post short form content exposure. this would provide a better substrate from which to draw such conclusions.

but I don't need a study to tell me that short form content fries the brain ... it fries my brain!

I uninstalled basically all of these EXCEPT youtube, and that's what I struggle with sometimes now. I find so much great long- and medium-form content on Youtube that I want to keep it around. But I have to admit that I can sometimes fall down a time-wasting rabbit hole with shorts.

The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!

It is a proprietary eponym.

It's this generations leaded gasoline and paint

Absolutely baffling you’re being downvoted lmao. Social media Astro turfing teams working overtime I guess

Full social media ban would be easier and more effective imo. Public spaces would come back to life in no time at all if social media was heavily curtailed or banned entirely. This would be an obvious win for everyone involved outside of the terminally online and corporations benefiting from their lack of self control.

define short form content as anything under an arbitrary time threshold, legislate all online providers of short form content to mandate an arbitrary time limit per day for all users, add a law that parents knowingly allowing children to exceed national daily short form content limits are subject to penalty. seems fairly straightforward. but uh, I guess we could all capitulate to giving corporations our biometric data ...