Not much of a tangent but has anybody here ever used tiktok or youtube shorts? I understand who we are collectively and stigma for saying yes, so I imagine most people will not admit if they have.

I never used tiktok but I got to experience what it's like with youtube shorts; I watch a number of things on youtube, I really wish the content I like were on alt platforms, most have some presence but it's not unified at all, I digress. It is insanely addictive by design, I can put a youtube video I enjoy down easily, I have no social media presence anymore except on some services which have tried to enter the social media space, I can drop my phone faster than a bad habit and only use it if I need to know something or if I'm in a situation which could be described as hurry up and wait or if I'm checking my news and content aggregators in the morning or while on the can. I use it for the convenience I don't let it eat up my day. context aside, I have used the youtube shorts function on maybe 4 occasions over as many months, and I recall the jist of the experiences.

First use, it's a bunch of crap, pop culture shit and some stuff they are putting up is based on click holes I'm in and guessing at my demographics based on content I've viewed, I browsed maybe 7-10 videos in half as many minutes and thought: "wow, this is crap"

Second use, I think I clicked a link to a short not knowing what it was and got sucked down the rabbit hole, I think I spent 35 minutes on it before noticing I had lost a half hour, and in that time I had probably viewed over 60 videos, as a youtube user I know to use likes, dislikes, etc to shape the content I'm delivered by the algorithm and do it unconsciously because I know that if you passively watch anything on the platform with no hint of negativity toward it the algo will start force feeding you it if it thinks that thing is relatively more ad-friendly than your other dominant viewing patterns, funnily enough I don't get ads with my browser but the system is still really aggressive.

Third use, I'm genuinely ashamed, I watch nearly an hour of video, felt like shit after and told myself I wasn't going to use the feature anymore.

The system doesn't know me or anything like that but it has enough of an approximation of things that would pique my interest to keep me swiping down, just another 30 seconds, just another minute, each time, it's such a small amount of time when you have no meaningful time crunch on your mind, that it isn't even really a value judgement for the time you are sinking.

TL;DR I'm not a web addict, and youtube shorts sucked me in hard this morning, I checked content ags for news, saw an interesting video, turned out to be a short format, and unthinkingly I scrolled down when it finished, that would have been about 8:50 am, my stomach rumbling pulled me out of it at about 11:30 AM. I'm actively avoiding this format from now on and it's mere integration into regular youtube may convince me to finally just move to the other marginally less kiked alternatives, to avoid ever slipping into a click coma like that again. I can barely imagine what this is doing to the minds of children.

The reason I bring all this up is, in reference to the OP, I think this is a two way street, stupid people get easily sucked in to this behavior and made even worse off but normal people get caught unawares of the effects of technology designed to addict and made stupid over time.

I'm thinking of profound effects on cognition for children in particular, Most people think in terms of words, either the sounds or written words or both, some people think in pictures, and a smaller segment thinks in both pictures and words, and then some people think in concepts, messy bundles that you would probably not really grasp intuitively if you just took a brain scan and transplanted it because the concepts usually have relative contexts to the individual and they translate conceptual thought into the spoken word when communicating; I nearly went on a diatribe explaining conceptual though as a base cognitive type, be thankful I didn't, the formerly rare cognitive type in question we are hearing more about now is children that think in something akin to short video clips. I'm afraid it will produce a shitload of bugmen that have problems with their sense of self as many of them will likely style this basic cognitive type around stimuli such as tiktok.

I use my phone for messages (not obsessively) and phone calls. I play Scrabble on there too. That's about it. I just can't stand having my face in a phone all day, and accessing anything you watch or read will pretty easily give me a headache.

Dumb, impulsive people engage in activities that reward being dumb and impulsive. Story at 11.