short form content

#1

saebr

i'm curious, how much short form content everyone consumes per day, things like tiktok, reels, shorts, snapchat (I think it's called highlights?), anything that's specifically designed in this way to keep your attention. how often do you watch it? only when you have nothing else? or do you prefer it over other things? does anyone else actively avoid it?

personally, i've been actively avoiding it because i know that if i keep watching then i'll have a harder time consuming stuff i enjoy now. i uninstalled tiktok to achieve this but i still get caught on youtube shorts or reels sometimes but it's usually kept to a couple a day because i'll notice around then. also when i watch i'm usually almost dreading it, i can't stop scrolling but it's not really "entertaining", it's kind of a hard feeling to explain but i hope you understand.

this came to my mind because a few days ago, i saw my brother playing marvel rivals while having his phone on his desk and scrolling through tiktok which i found very odd because to me that's too much to pay attention to, as well being comparable to a video with subway surfers at the bottom so i figured that can't be healthy.

more recently i asked my friends if anyone has seen breaking bad and when i had asked i had originally thought that the responses would be more along the lines of "who hasn't", "of course", but rather i got "nah it's too long", "i tried it but it was kind of boring", which are both valid criticisms but knowing that i have friends who can easily spend 3-4 hours a day on tiktok/reels a day, time is probably not one of their constraints.

maybe these examples are tame compared to your experiences, maybe marvel rivals is just that boring without tiktok at your desk, or maybe breaking bad is not as well received as i had thought. of course there's several more experiences but these are the recent ones that pushed me to want to talk about it. kind of scary though, feels like AI and short-form content go hand-in-hand with trying to take away our time to do anything creative with our lives.

#2

1243

-1

Frags

+

–

breaking bad is kinda boring to start with

#4

saebr

1

Frags

+

–

i can't really attest to this because i watched it way long ago but personally, i don't think i ever got bored of it until like the last season because i already knew a lot of what happened from youtube shorts.

#3

adi02

2

Frags

+

–

So true. I have an ig acc which i use only on browser to avoid watching reels (been doing this for a year now). Short form content unknowingly takes a large amount of time. Also informative short form videos are myths as people forget the very next hour what they watched.

#5

ionlyHave1Zuni

0

Frags

+

–

it frieduzz my brainuzz

#6

widepeepofrosty

0

Frags

+

–

Foruzz realuzz bruzz

#7

saebr

0

Frags

+

–

sorry to hear 💔

#8

Vaaero

1

Frags

+

–

I only do yt shorts but I've felt my brain expand ever since they introduced 3 minutes shorts

#9

Warlordwibz

2

Frags

+

–

Never downloaded TikTok app.
Rarely watch shorts, always prefer 8 to 15 min videos.
Mostly use reels for food/culinary related stuff but do get distracted by random animal vids time to time (fishingarrett).

#10

saebr

2

Frags

+

–

yeah lol the culinary videos always catch me on reels. always save those even though i'm too broke to make any of them

#11

bees

5

Frags

+

–

It's literally addictive. I have never once gone overboard with alcohol, but I regularly struggle to put my phone down when I get caught in a doomscrolling fit.

And yes, it is ruining our attention and creativity. Something that isn't talked about much is that art is a product of boredom. For almost all of our history as humans, there would be hours a day where we just don't do anything. We used to fill it with just sitting around, thinking, processing our emotions. Sometimes singing or dancing or coming up with stories. It was idle time to simply let the brain run its course.

Consuming short form content takes that time from you. It's weeks, months, even years of never allowing your brain to stop and process your life. It goes hand in hand with insomnia, as lying down in bed and trying to fall asleep is exactly when all those strangled thoughts and emotions come through.

We call it "meditation" now, but it was something almost everyone used to do - sit in silence and just let your brain run.

It is every bit as scary as what you said in your last paragraph. This is intended by the people in charge of these media platforms.

#13

saebr

2

Frags

+

–

Thank you. After reading your message I feel I focused more on the attention-span side rather than just how addictive it can be even though the addiction can be very very serious.

About your last paragraph, I think you mentioned an important point. It's just all of these media corporations capitalizing off of this. Almost all of them. They want to push short form content because it's easy for them. The more addicted you get, the better. And when it's worded like that, it sounds borderline inhumane.

Some countries have started to ban TikTok (I think due some data selling accusations or something..?) but this doesn't change anything, everyone will just flock to the next best app. I almost want to advocate for some regulations against this kind of content.

I think if we're struggling as a generation that had TikTok introduced midway through, the next generation after us is going to have an even greater problem, given that they will grow up with this and it's very attractive. It really did feel a little dystopian when I met up with my friends and a good 30 minutes was spent looking at our phones, occasionally laughing and sending each other videos.

#22

bees

1

Frags

+

–

These companies are straight-up unethical. I support banning them, but like you said, there's always gonna be more popping up.

I know it's become a meme, but the fact that so many parents are raising iPad babies who are building the habit nearly from birth of consuming digital noise at the slightest feeling of boredom is going to have serious consequences.

#12

Conceit

1

Frags

+

–

I consume almost no short form content, maybe the occasional youtube short of a content creator who usually does long form, but I've never had tik tok nor instagram so I never got into it. I'm a big video essay enjoyer

#14

saebr

0

Frags

+

–

I used to like video essays a lot too but I can't seem to get past 20 minutes now, I don't know if that's because of what the essay subject is or because of my attention span :/. Maybe some both. Do you have any favorites?

#18

Conceit

0

Frags

+

–

I'd recommend doing things while listening to video essays, something that doesn't need your full attention, that what I usually like to do. Personally I usually listen to political video essays cause I like thinking about those kinda things. My favorite channel would probably be Shaun ,because he doesn't have too much of a visual component required to understand his videos, so I can just pop on one of his videos while I'm doing something else, but if your not on the left he may not be the best for you. Another great one is hbomberguy if you haven't seen him, very informative and funny videos about a wide variety of topics

#15

w1atrak

2

Frags

+

–

Read a book, books are great

#16

saebr

2

Frags

+

–

I personally read a lot. Made it a goal to read at least an hour a day and I've kept it up since around May 2023 I think. Though it's difficult to recommend to people who want to fix their attention span because even before short form content became so popular, reading wasn't favored much.

#20

w1atrak

1

Frags

+

–

True

#17

Kurisusf

1

Frags

+

–

I had to actively start avoiding them bc I just wouldnt go to sleep. I really never liked short form content so I never had tiktok but got into reels bc my friends sent me a lot of them (might sound harsh but honestly I just ignore them now, they fr send like 20+ reels a day in the gc). Now I just watch yt shorts when Im having breakfast before work, since Im kinda rushed I dont spend much time on them and use them just to watch smth.

#19

ASTEROIDCHILD

1

Frags

+

–

swore it off over a year ago
i used to cope and say i would only watch the cooking ones to find recipes but realistically that was never gonna happen so i stopped watching those too
is brain poison

#21

jixk

1

Frags

+

–

its just a adult pacifier giving you stimulation during day to day activities and gives you a easy way to disassociate and create a bubble where you don't have to process your life instead you have stimulation for every single second of your life(like drugs,narcotics,etc) and AI is gonna destroy us no matter what so that doesn't matter tbh they say they are trying to "regulate it" but what they really mean is giving indie devs more hoops to jump thru so they have less competition so they can slowly and surely degrade there quality create problem so they can add "features" behind pay walls etc etc like every other development cycle these days

#27

saebr

0

Frags

+

–

Lmao this is the mindset i have towards AI but i've doomposted far too much

#23

bronzil_enjoyer

0

Frags

+

–

i watch yt shorts for 15-30 minutes in a day ig

#24

SuperRoss

0

Frags

+

–

tldr

#26

saebr

0

Frags

+

–

you can just answer the questions in the first paragraph if you'd like

#25

froggy_lol

0

Frags

+

–

Allat

But in all seriousness, short form content is an issue. For example, I have a friend who plays video games, watches TikTok, listens to music, and is in a discord call at the same time. It is 100% addictive.

#28

GlitchGull

0

Frags

+

–

I never watch shorts or anything like that, worst I use is twitter
If u mainly watch yt on pc theres a no yt shorts extension you can install on chrome

#29

IonlywatchvcjXD

0

Frags

+

–

Hated it, even though I'm actively avoiding it, I know I'm just one good thumbnail away from scrolling for 1 hour.

#30

Dan_E56

0

Frags

+

–

I don't actively avoid it but I try to balance it out by watching other medias in my free time. VCT or just live streams in general was one of the major ones last year (probably this year too). Movies, shows, video games (other than online shooters) and books. Currently I am on my second run of cyberpunk and also reading through the witcher books, which has cut down my time spent on shorts or YouTube in general. I guess short form content is just gonna be in my cycle of multiple forms of media I consume it just depends on how I decide to spend my time.

But when it first came out, I would be lying if I didn't doom scroll. I don't know, I didn't hate it but definitely started to get bored of it. Maybe its because shorts just has way less variety of content than reels. I don't have instagram and I can't even access tiktok so I don't know the content difference.