I avoided shorts on YT religiously, but as people sent them to me and they became more tuned to my preferences, I began absent mindedly scrolling them. I fucking hated it, I would realize I had wasted so much time idly swiping. I started running revanced specifically to turn that shit off on my phone so that the temptation wouldn't exist. So happy with my decision. I don't think it rotted my brain, but it made my phone a landmine for shit content, scammy ads, and wasted time.

Short form videos are fucking digital opium. I hate it. I deliberately do not have instagram/YT/tiktok accounts with the intention of avoiding it, but I have repeatedly found myself watching a short vid sent from a friend before I find myself scrolling and then snapping back to attention, 40+ minutes later, like some Jekyl/Hyde shit. I imagine it’s what having an epileptic seizure is like. I just lose track of time completely and I hate it.

I never agreed with Bradbury about how TV is so bad so forth, but I am with him now. Shit’s addictive

With short-form video now dominant on social media, researchers are racing to understand how the highly engaging, algorithm-driven formatmay be reshaping the brain.

The issue isn't the short form video. It's the algorithm behind everything to keep people addicted to what ever social media website.

challenges with focus and self-control

This seems to be what teachers are reporting.

There's some threads in /r/teachers on that other site which are pretty terrifying. It sounds like the majority of kids are in dopamine withdrawal all day at school.

"TV will rot your brain."

is what they used to say

I use AdGuard Home on a home server to block all social media for my kids for this very reason.

The Boondocks | Huey's "Black Television" Experiment | Season 1 Episode 12

I can't read all that, can someone give me a computer voiceover of an AI summary played over subway surfers footage?

when we have a real culprit, we’re still blaming that gosh-darned video

Obligatory Carl Sagan from 1995:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Emerging risks... We're already there, like this is why we got trump 🤷‍♀️

Cause or consequence, now that is the question.

Propaganda to make the old poors hate the young poors

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives