The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
Algorithmically served short form videos is clearly the smoking of our time. I cannot stand the conservative view of "well we don't know the videos cause mental health decline, or if it's simply those with a genetic inclination who seek out short form content.", exactly mirroring the skeptics about smoking causing cancer. I'm hopeful that in 5-10 years (but more likely 20) people will view this AI served, maximally engaging, content in the same way we view smoking now: disgusting and horrible, but adults should be allowed to do what they want. I can easily imagine kids/teens sharing their illicit access to shorts much in the same way they share vapes/cigarettes, which would be a much more preferable situation than the unlimited use we see today.
Anyone who's able to stomach those short videos has to have cognitive deficits or mental issues. I'd rather watch an advertisement than those (and I can't stand watching advertisements).
The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts!
Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.
I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening.
I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".
This tracks for me. I have deleted TikTok and Instagram but now I find myself browsing X short videos!! Addiction is a crazy thing.
I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.
As a premium paying user, I am also using Vanced-patched Youtube on android and I have a browser extension for desktop to largely remove this shorts bulls*it. It's just Google being evil, I guess...
I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element.
It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.
That key variable seems to matter more than the format.
For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.
Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.
Nobody is using this thread to actually talk about what's in the paper, just as a place to rant about short form videos... One question that comes to mind to me is: r=-.034 a reasonable effect size? Having seen many scatter plots of r values, 0.3 seems basically like random noise. Is this just falling into the same problem as all huge meta-studies, that there's way too much variability to get any kind of clear signal?
And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?
I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.
Its been a long time since I took statistics courses, but aren't those r values rather low to conclude anything?
"Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"
I know it's probably offensive but I do suspect SFV use also correlates with lower intelligence. This study suggests it leads to poorer cognition, which is in the same ballpark, but I am curious if in the next five or ten years, we'll find out that this stuff disproportionately targets vulnerable people, even if not explicitly intended.
These correlations are not good, obviously, but in which direction does the causality go? As someone with attention issues, I've had to remove these apps from my home screen and disable notifications because I can't handle them well. I suspect I might be more susceptible to SFV due to attention issues, rather than SFVs causing any change. It's a lousy way to spend time, though.
I would caution against reading too much at this stage, even though the researchers were very careful to talk about only correlation, a lot of people here seem to read causation. This are population studies so the variables are not independent.
The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people.
This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
My wife is bipolar 1, and whenever she would go into a manic phase, I noticed her attention span would diminish as her condition worsened. First she couldn't tolerate a whole movie. Then not a 40 minute TV show, then not even a 20 minute show. She would go through a music video phase where she would watch those on repeat for hours, but eventually even those become too long, so the last stop was YouTube shorts when her mental health was at its worse. I always knew she was getting better when she started watching longer-form content.
I think it really is important to stress that these are correlations only. Something I've noticed: those with poor attention spans or generally low engagement with deeper material tend to be attracted to SFV. Likewise, those in a state of depression or have ADHD can easily get into the quick satisfaction coming from SFV. It may exacerbate existing issues, but not necessarily be the cause.
I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim.
This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout:
> Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024).
Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve.
It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.
I absolutely see the correlation myself, but which way does causation go?
I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok.
But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem.
The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadtrying to be more of a producer than consumer, not saying this to look down I'm socially/financially a failure, trying to change my habits
The formula seems to be: dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, infuriating country dividing content, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine ...
But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok.
Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts!
Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.
I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".
I have a daily 30 minute one way commute. I usually put on a YouTube video about startup or tech talk. But I find myself forgetting it all the day after. I am curious how you go about remembering the content without being able to take notes while driving.
It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.
That key variable seems to matter more than the format.
For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.
Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.
And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?
"Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"
The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people.
This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout:
> Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024).
Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve.
It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.
I can make a case for how engaging with short form video can be bad for mental health. I certainly saw evidence of that first hand in one of my children who engaged heavily in TikTok.
But I can also make a case for how poor mental health makes it hard to resist engaging with short term video. For example I have a child who is currently struggling with being suicidal. I find that when she's in particularly bad shape, I find it much hard to resist getting sucked into YouTube shorts. But when she's in good shape, I have no such problem.
The combination of the two seems to lead to a doom loop that some people get sucked into. But how can anyone separate the relative importance of the two directions in which causation could run?