It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
If you want your own home you can use something like Urbit.
Generally in the web as it is, we are all serfs on other people’s computers.
this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".
I don't think it makes sense to say that they are forced by the market to do this to compete with the candy store, when they already know I don't want candy in the first place. Instead, this sort of annoying practice pushes me to leave and visit the organic market instead (Nebula).
I don't think "revealed preference" is the right explanation here either, because these kinds of settings preferences are tailored to an individual account, and I never click on Shorts and always select the "hide" dropdown, so the preference that I have revealed is one that is strongly disinterested in Shorts.
I think the correct explanation is that someone's KPI is attached to increasing Shorts viewership, and they're trying to earn their bonus, even if it's at a cost to the success of the organization as a whole.
> why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
You can see how these are not analogous. The store _is_ slipping Oreos in your vegetables. So yeah… don’t install TikTok _or_ YouTube. I get that you’d rather YouTube to be YouTube-without-shorts, but it’s not a thing anymore, vegetables-without-Oreos is not an option at this grocery store
I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.
They previously had a whitelist feature where parents could curate channels and videos for their kids.
That has been silently broken and all related features are disabled or non-functional.
Whoever is pushing Shorts is the equivalent of a drug dealer waiting outside a junior school to sell heroin to kids.
Sociopaths do this kind of thing.
That’s a very competitive arena and while you and I may be health conscious - they’re fighting a trench war, you and I don’t matter.
Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.
When I say I don't like short-form video content, I typically mean the tiktok-influenced infinite scrolling algorithm-driven video wall of videos. Where you might click on one thing that looks useful or interesting on your home page and without even thinking about it you start swiping through the videos and suddenly you emerge an hour later form a brain rot video fueled fever dream, with no idea how you just lost an hour of your life to useless shit online.
At least losing an hour to video games or reading online might leave you with a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. I have never felt anything positive after binging on social media videos.
Even that’s imperfect because Zuck really was interested in the interactions he thought were best despite them not being highest engagement, but you can’t only do that and stay alive in a competitive market.