TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning (opens in new tab)

Too simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-...

So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The most popular video creators are doing both; even MrBeast routinely has videos over 30 minutes long.

Reading Debord's Society of the Spectacle in the age of TikTok is surreal.

In some ways, it reads like prophecy. He mapped the inevitability of image-mediated life before we had the feeds to prove him right. In other ways, it feels trivial. Today's hyperreality makes the theory so obvious it barely registers as theory at all, more like a weather report. We don’t have to imagine the spectacle when we're already drowning in it.

My gripe with "How is new media transforming us?" journalism is that it never gets past the pre-theoretical stage. It inventories symptoms: shorter attention spans, algorithmic optimization, but won't name the cause. It's like reporting the moon's position every night and refusing to mention gravity.

The point that matters is Debord's: social relations mediated by images have replaced embodied relations. Platforms sell us connection, but what they deliver is commodification. Yes, some internet friendships spill into real life. But most are fragile, living inside economic structures designed to monetize attention. Everyone already knows the real relation isn't friend-to-friend but user-to-advertiser, and money always wins.

That's the basecamp for any way out: recognizing that hyperreal social life can't substitute lived social life. The spectacle doesn't mediate friendship, it mediates consumption. And if Debord feels obvious now, that's only because his warning has become the background condition of everyday life. Facebook can't really connect you to friends; it can only connect you to advertisers.

This post popped up a blocking window before I was even 3 sentences in, so maybe unsurprising that I clicked away in less than 60 seconds. If the author wants people to read whatever it is they have to say, maybe they should not put distractions in front of their writing?

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.

Yea, because it's a superior format.

I love YouTube but my problem with the content of YouTube is that almost all videos are introducing you to everything every time.

For example, there's this science video about this interesting property of fire right? They start with what's fire, when it was invented, what led to be studied this way and then they deliver the money shot. It is O.K. to be introduced to a topic once but it is brain wrecking to be 101ed every time. They are doing it to increase the watch time and the ad revenue and its horrible.

Forcing the videos to be short makes them deliver the gist quickly, TikTok videos that are trying to the introduction 101 thing are just as horrible, when a video is over 1min I'm very skeptical and feel the urge to move on.

Of course in-depth videos need to be long but those are not that many actually. From the pop-sci genre Veritasuim does it well but that kind of production takes long time and they publish videos every now and then. With the race to pump videos as quickly as possible, the short format is the better since you can get the content quickly and if you want to know more about it you can actually read about it. Which is how you actually learn anything BTW.

So strange to think about how Vine could’ve won this and an American company could’ve been the leader here.

> The irony, of course, is that if you've read this far, it may mean you’ve already mastered a rare skill: sustained attention in a world of distraction.

No, sorry I read the first and last sentence. This is why I like the short format more then the long forms, it often boils down to the same clever narrative trickery without waisting 3 hours of your life.

I've banned shorts from my house [0]. The more you watch it, the more your attention span gets scrambled. If a joke doesn't land in 15 seconds, you skip it. If the video that just started doesn't reach its climax now, you skip it.

There's actually a format for movies now, where a short scene is shared with the contrast cranked to 11, and background music. And it pays off in under a minute. Shorts is short for climax, and everything over a minute is boring.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/shorts-climax

I m more annoyed that everything is in portrait.

But yeah, there's a dehumanization going on. Speeding up videos to deliver the maximum words per second to the viewer is inhuman. It started as an appeal to ADHD children, but i that meme is overdone, people actually do have attention and still interested in humans, not just what they say.

Does no one remember vine? They showed there was a niche for a certain type of content. I think it all generally boils down to a sort of comparison of cell phone vs desktop vs maybe even laptop. It's not that when one came out the other was used less. It's instead that each was used now for different purposes, so usage in total basically 2-3x'd.

I got addicted to YT shorts for a little while, but I've mostly stopped doomscrolling now as, counter-intuitively, it wasn't addictive enough to keep me engaged. Sure, the first few dozen hours the carefully designed feedback loop keeps you engaged, and then... it wore off, at least for me. The algorithm seemed more interested in pushing what was popular than what I was interested in. I tried gaming it by quickly scrolling past things I didn't care about or had already seen a million times (like those retention farming 3-second loops of reddit/twitter screenshots), and hanging around on stuff I liked, but it didn't seem to budge the needle.

I guess it's a lot like real drugs - you build a tolerance and you need a bigger dose to get the same effect. In this case, no bigger dose is available.

Considering that YouTube is still wildly successful and TikTok is now showing me 5+ minute long videos I really don't think this theory holds up.

I would say short-form content found a gap in the market and now exists in addition to long-form content without replacing it.

I deleted TikTok and my Twitter account. Also stopped watching TV. I'm happier and more productive.

Much as many insist they dont and will never use AI, all too many let their entire media feeds, if not their whole personality be defined by `recommendation_watchnext.serve()`

This is terrible to say, but if 170 million people are spending an hour a day watching 60 second videos, aren't they just dumb and easily entertained? Without this, wouldn't they just be consuming other dumb entertainment, or failing to find that dumb entertainment, going outside, and meeting other dumb people in order to do stupid things?

Also, I'm sure I have to subtract a huge number of these people from the dumb list, because they probably just watch a bunch of TikTok to unwind or get summaries of the events of the day, then move on to real content. People spend a lot more than an hour in front of screens, and have for the past 75 years. Plenty of the world was already watching dumb short animal videos, fail videos, success videos, astonishing videos, etc. long before TikTok.

Early youtube absolutely despised and made difficult uploading videos over 10 minutes. The thing was made to share tsunami videos and what were basically animated personal snapshots.

Acting like this is a qualitative change is just easy ragebait, and this story has been written again and again since MTV debuted (which is why it felt the need to refer to it.) That was almost 50 years ago.

edit: Martha Quinn is 66 years old.

I'm not on TikTok and never have been, but I've seen plenty of shortform videos shared elsewhere. Here's the thing about all of them.

They never inform.

The number of video creators I can actually recall and point to who have affected me on any real emotional or intellectual level via shorts I can count on one hand.

"Old-school" longform video (on YouTube and elsewhere) is a medium with real utility and artistic merit. Shorts are mildly entertaining at best and mind-numbing goop at worst. And, as usual, the meme is true: *this could have been a blog post.*

I’ll bet some number of readers here asked an LLM to summarize this article.

Just don’t install the app. I never did that and I want to make sure my son doesn’t whence he gets his own phone. Well he can do whatever when he is an adult but that’s more than a decade away.

Vine had 6 second short form video in 2012.

Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)

Short-form content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content

YouTube still requires disconnecting connected chromecast devices to view YouTube Shorts?

Youtube forces 30 seconds of adds multiple times a video. Tiktok has absolutely become more popular than youtube thanks to its less intrusive ads.

Twitter did this already for the text form. In depth analysis articles and blogposts got replaced with whatever could fit in 40 characters and what mattered more than anything was the impression. It changed how politics is done, so I would say it had an even bigger impact to society.

It is all depressing. As if the spectacle has devoured the whole reality and there is now nothing but it.

TikTok and those consuming it can rot.

Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.

Is the posting account a bot? It’s posted only links and zero comments since it was created.

It's basically television^1000. TV was also constantly criticized for reducing critical thinking skills and championing mediocrity. Douglas Adams put it best of course: "the future is the same old stuff with faster cars"

> TikTok won. Now everything is 60 seconds.

It's true and it's devastating. I intentionally never signed up for TikTok because of the dangers of hyper-addictive short form content. Ultra-processed, junk food content.

But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc.

TikTok won, and we're all worse off for it.

I'm going to be the odd duck here and suggest TikTok has been helpful for me. I view it as a tool. It can be used in a harmful way (scrolling for hours, reduced attention span) but it can also be helpful if used correctly.

It's kind of like Reddit and other "customize your feed" social media. If you subscribe to the defaults, yeah, it's hot garbage. If you select content creators or topics that support your individual growth then you get a much different outcome.

Of course not to say I couldn't have benefited from the same topics via another type of media. But I enjoy the few minutes I spend on TT per day, seeing what my favorites have posted, etc. I even met a cool dummer named Zooich in Japan who I enjoy following and interacting with each week. And I've made a bit of content myself which I'm proud of.

Lastly, in no way does my positive experience diminish the negative issues surrounding TT. I fully agree it contributes to reduced attention span, spreading misinformation, etc. -- just like most other forms of social media. And there's a very real risk of it becoming state media in the future. I just wanted to provide a different perspective other than "TT is terrible in every way, ban it!".

Tiktok has such a better feed algorithm than any of the incumbents. You see what you like, plain and simple.

It made me realize how much the incumbents myopically prioritize ad engagement above all else.

I want to note that culture has been shaped by recommendation algorithm looong before tiktok...

First time I noticed that was "we are number one" meme in autumn 2016

I used to love watching the hour long essays but after notebooklm I just get a briefing summary and realize most of these essays are mostly vibes.

Would someone be able to explain how I, as someone who has never installed TikTok be interfacing with this new change in culture?

I could easily watch TikTok short for 10 hours or more. No problem at all.

I’d ban shorts immediately. It’s like crack or fentanyl.

We lost control long time ago.

It’s ads for the generation that didn’t grow up with no-choice broadcast advertising.

I am traveling to India and unfortunately "our services are not available in your country or region". And a few months back we were all singing "oh wen ji" (really badly paraphrased) on RedNote when TikTok was already down pending reinstatement by Trump.

Point being TikTok js a winner in a slice of the population. I just stopped following the bunch of Indian folks even though they had an Instagram or reel account because I just could not get used to it. Similarly I followed a few people on rednote but promptly abandoned it when TT came back. So maybe TT won. But look at it from the other side. People in India and China don't follow what I follow. And there are billions of those.

TikTok is an awesome platform but not yet a "too big to fail" like YouTube I guess

Edit. But I get the point of 60 second media winning. Nowadays I am just unable to focus on a tv show. Or I am watching a show with some digression (Reddit, tiktok) in my hand. Theaters is the only place I am unable to do so and that's the only place I now enjoy movies I guess.

Facebook and Instagram did this a decade before Tiktok.

I’ll have to take your word for it, I’m not on TikTok.

To be fair, you can just ignore TicToc.

Okay... maybe you can't. Maybe there are people in your life that won't let you forget it exists. Maybe your job is in communications and you have to get on TicToc (or YouTube or InstaGram or whatever.)

170 million people is about half the U.S. population. And I can't say this without sounding like an elitist pr*k, but it's always seemed like about half the population is below average. (And since we're all savvy consumers of statistics here, we all know that attempt at a joke would be better if I said "half the population is below the median.")

So assuming an algorithmic dopamine-stroking video platform is a social evil, maybe people are susceptible to it because there's something missing in their lives? I don't watch a lot of TV and look at the internet mostly through a text based browser. Mostly because I KNOW I have attention problems. I don't need flashy ads bombarding me with distractions. But mostly it's because I do a lot of other things that aren't watching videos that are more fulfilling (like commenting on HN threads.)

I don't know if this is true... but I like to play the game where you think about how the world would have to change for various statements to become true. (It's fun to wallow in the swampy mud-bath of your own imagination.) What if... TicToc (and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and all the other attention sucking apps) are a net benefit to people's lives?

I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't. Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow have been dead for decades. If, as a culture, we valued the Children's Television Workshop, we would have funded them publicly instead of letting them crawl into (financial) bed with NBC/Universal and Warner Brothers.

So sure... maybe TicToc is evil, but what alternative are we offering the half of society that wants their midbrain stroked?

At whose expense?

Information compression and hyper-stimulation are two different things. Many forms of content online have become meaningless long form slop that could get to the point in less than 10 seconds, but are drawn out to drive view-time advertising metrics.

Fast and compressed is also a sign of intelligence rather than 'stupidity' as so many faux iconoclasts like to say. Our media storage over the last 5,000 years has most been about compression and speed, and to those who dismiss that... I dunno I guess I'll just quote Socrates succinctly "Books are for the stupid."

I HATE short form videos with an abiding passion. As a user, my preference is long form YouTube videos I can listen to while my hands are busy with the dishes, dog walks, etc. I am ventured more into podcasts because even such videos are painfully annoying with ad interruptions that demand skip click. Under no circumstances do I want to interact with the device every 60-90 seconds. That totally defeats the purpose of listening while being productive in the day.

Are there generational differences? Do (say) Boomers or GenXers use different social media sites/apps than Millennials which are different than Gen Z?

There's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a two decade streak of innovation and improvement to the world's telecom system.

... but everything was mostly crap and not worth your time even before it was 60 seconds long.

If you spend your days watching "content" it's your fault.

What a shockingly vacuous article, I don't think it says much other than dressing up the idea of people watching 60 second videos in the most cartoonishly alarmist language conceivable. If there actually is a reason to believe that "attention spans" are getting "damaged" by watching silly videos, TFA doesn't show any -- I always just see this stated as fact, but a priori in the absence of evidence I find it a very extraordinary claim.

Then again, if it's effective enough at maximizing psychological grip to hold people's attention for a full hour every day, maybe we should be getting worried... /s

>Song introductions have shortened dramatically, with one study finding average intros fell from more than 20 seconds in the 1980s to just five I expect the decline of radio is the cause of this

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