I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
The proliferation of tiktok and other extremely short-form content, and parents being comfortable with their kids using it.
I agree the “brain-rot” is real. I don’t even watch TikTok or Youtube shorts but even normal 10 minute Youtube videos now feel way faster and more condensed than a few years ago, and it’s definitely harming my attention span.
I’ve been going out of my way to get back into more long-form content I enjoyed before and not get suckered into watching hyper saturated media.
On the plus side, it’s a refreshing move away from the opposite: videos that are dragged out, padded up, and way longer than they need to be. Remember when YouTube required videos to be at least ten minutes to be monetized or something like that and suddenly every video that should have been less than five minutes was 10:01? Every basic how-to video suddenly had a filler arc.
Netflix’s docuseries are getting this way. 6 Episodes about things that could be covered in 45 mins if they didn’t interview completely pointless “experts” who are experts in drama and nothing else. Or these weird semi-reenactment ones where they use the original people? And the whole thing is still written the Cable TV way where they keep repeating themselves and hyping up whats going to be coming up after the commercial.
People forget how shit TV was for wasting your time, summed up perfectly in that Mitchell and Webb skit with the TV show that was entirely teaser clips of what’s coming up followed by recap clips of what we’d just seen
There’s endless extended longfirm content on YouTube, someone like Isaac Arthur with his 60 hours just taking about one category of solutions to the Fermi paradox or you can watch someone talk for forty minutes about their ten minute morning routine.
I hate, hate, hate, haaaaate, that the fake ai voices on short videos has leaked to YouTube and Instagram and anywhere else that hosts videos. I’m assuming that happened, because TikTok started off mostly as a Chinese company. People couldn’t speak English and used ai voices to remedy that and here we are.
A runner up is the downward trajectory of reaction videos. Now people are just pasting their floating heads nodding in the corner of a reposted content.