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TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

(www.thenexus.media)
292 points natalie3p | 3 comments | 10 Sep 25 16:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.885s | source
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atlintots ◴[10 Sep 25 16:31 UTC] No.45200124[source]▶
For me, the worst part is that it is so hard to go back to previous forms of media. I often delete these short form content apps in an effort to quit them, but it is now so difficult to get engaged with "slower" forms of media. The thing with Tiktok isn't the length of the media, it's just how fast-paced and "catchy" it is. I could watch an hour long fast paced video just fine, but watching a slow paced show, or reading a book is so much more difficult.

It truly is like a drug.

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jerf ◴[10 Sep 25 16:41 UTC] No.45200282[source]▶
Try the video speed adjustments. Most sites offer 2x now. Up to 4x is getting around, and that's generally going to be past what most people can understand for speech, even with practice. I do a lot of YouTube long-form content but I do a lot of it at 2x or even 2.5x. There's also a lot of such things that are effectively podcasts with irrelevant video backgrounds, or only rarely relevant video, so you can do something else entirely while listening.
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1. ryandrake ◴[10 Sep 25 18:49 UTC] No.45202030[source]▶
My kid and all of her friends watch video content at 2-4x now all the time, because they just can't seem to get through anything talking at a normal pace. I want to worry about that, but I don't know why it's worrying.
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2. jerf ◴[10 Sep 25 20:03 UTC] No.45202858[source]▶
After some pondering, I've come to consider it a generally positive thing. If I compare watching a 1x video to my reading the transcript, I am reading very much faster than the person can normally speak. Cranking the speed up makes it so the video much more approximates a reading speed. You still don't get as much random access and I can generally still read at a speed where I wouldn't be able to comprehend the speech if it was keeping up, but I think being able to handle increased information density is generally a good thing. It also tends to filter out videos that are just noise and flash and such, because any video tuned for simple tickling our lizard hindbrains at 1x is much less appealing at 2x (because if it was more appealing at 2x, that simply would have been the original speed it was served at).

It is also a side effect of the fact that frankly a lot of stuff on YouTube doesn't actually need to be on YouTube and is, as I mentioned in my first post, really just a podcast with a video track because it has to have a video track to be on YouTube, but that is perfectly ignorable. Even channels as high quality as Practical Engineering are (guestimating) something like 80% stock footage and 20% something he actually created that is useful and germane to the topic.

I often have a hard time dealing with videos at 1x as well but it's not like it has impacted my social relationships or anything. I don't perceive normal people as speaking slowly now or anything like that. Somehow my brain has this segregated, and I phrase it that way because it's not like I can consciously take credit for it, I didn't do anything, it's just happening naturally.

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3. theshrike79 ◴[12 Sep 25 09:54 UTC] No.45220492[source]▶
Most meetings could be an email and most Youtube videos should just be a blog post with pictures.

In most cases I want to ingest the content, not watch a dramatisation of it.

Watching stuff for entertainment value is fine, I can watch a 3 hour analysis of some event easily. But when shit's on fire right now and I want to know how to fix it, I don't have time for fluff pieces.

(this is actually a good use for AI, a simple yt-dlp script + local LLM can easily grab the video transcription or subtitles and condense the actual points)