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this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Technology
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Honestly the short form content incentivizing formats should be dropped altogether. Short form content has pretty clearly fried people's attention spans and burnt a lot of their fuse to boot.
The incentive to be smug snappy and smarmy to own people for internet points is too much, nevermind the algorithms that more or less act as a match finder for mass shouting contests as opposed to organic socialization where people who aren't psychopaths tend to have the good sense to just ignore each other if they encounter irreconcilable differences of ethical and political values.
That's right, the echo chamber was invented by the social media companies to gaslight you for not being happy they basically play rage tinder with your feed.
tl;dr?
I don't think there's actually any evidence that short-form content reduces people's attention spans.
I think short form video specifically is pretty bad (in high volume)
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1298361/full
It looks like that study checked the effects of short-form content addiction, rather than short-form content in general. Addiction can be caused by underlying factors, such as stress or depression, which are shown to reduce attention span so I don't think it really shows a direct causal connection. In fact, I think it's more accurate to say short attention spans cause short-form content rather than the other way around.
That said, excessive social media consumption can make stress and depression worse, I just think we're focussing on the wrong aspect of social media's effect on our mental health.
I think it's clear it does. Students in schools switch their attentions so incredibly quickly that it preempts any immersion in the material. Seriously, talk to any teacher they will explain it better than me, I just deal with student computers.
Doesn't mean it's caused by short-form content. It's kinda annoying seeing that repeated everywhere without evidence imo.
Fine, disprove it then asshole. Where's your evidence? If educators everywhere are setting alarms off about it, that implies something's going on. This is the new thing that's changed.
No need to be toxic about it. Do you think anyone who disagrees with you is automatically an asshole?
Other than that, there's plenty that's changed other than the existence of short-form content, with everything going on in the world right now people are more stressed than ever. And stress is definitely one thing that reduces attention spans.
Not saying that that is the solution but it's definitely one explanation and in my view it's more likely than what's basically just the equivalent of 'phone bad'.
I have a feeling that the only short-term solution is heavy content curation by the users themselves. Nobody is incentivized to do it for us. It takes time and effort but the only thing that has made any kind of difference is blocking everything you don't want to see. And I mean ruthlessly doing so. Someone replied with a clown emoji to this thread and they're now blocked. That's how petty I'm about it nowdays. The vast majority of users on social media just add to the noise and it's this group of people I'm trying to get rid of.
The way I think about it is by imagining a room with 100 random people. Do I want to talk with all of them? No. I'd rather talk with the couple most interesting ones among them and ignore the rest. I don't have the time and energy to pay attention to the constant feed of meaningless nonsense.
Block subs you're not interested in. Block users that dont bring any value. Add content filters for topics you're sick of reading about etc. You're not going to miss out on anything. You're not going to run out of content. You'll hardly notice any difference but after some time the signal does start to get stronger and the noise does quiet down a bit.
It shouldn't take so much effort. I really wish there was an automated way to share block lists with like minded users, and to discover those users based on similarity in who we've blocked.
Ok but you are commenting that in a short-form reply to a short-form social media post. Just saying…
pretty sure they mean like the 120/240 character definition of short.