I would scroll a bit after someone linked me a video. Content was fun, but after like 3 minutes, I could feel something wrong in my brain. Like just the nonstop influx of content with no breaks. You might think one video was faked, but you didn't have enough time to contemplate it before another shows up in its place.
I have some friends who spend hours on it. I can't imagine deciding to participate in that for so long.
Short video formats on all platforms make me very quickly feel like I'm going crazy. Just one voice after another, trying to cram whatever they have to say into your ears, or one joke taken out of context, or one simplistic moral, or absurdist humor that wouldn't hold up for longer than a few seconds. My partner watches endless "reels" on Facebook, and that hurried talking they all do, with all those cuts to make sure there's no gap between words, makes me fell very weird and agitated. It's like everyone has the same voice. And then it keeps looping. I waste far too much time on Lemmy but the short video stuff seems like another level of brain melt.
I wouldn't say that I don't see the appeal of it. I would probably get sucked right in if I gave it a shot. It's a consciouss decision on my part to simply not do that. I don't not-consume short-form media because I'm better than the people who do, I prohibit it from myself.
TikTok has tons of issues but this bugs me so much. There are many examples of people sharing their creativity, their skill, their knowledge, their passion to the world on tiktok and it's so good at exposing you to it if you are interested in seeing all kinds of people expressing themselves.
Since when does the value of content correlate directly with the amount of time it consumes?
Trying to make any sort of nuanced or subtle point about anything important is pretty much impossible in such an artificially limited format, though.
Sure, simple political memes can be done in a compact frame, but actually discussing the framework surrounding that meme, or trying to correct a bit of misinformation is not really possible to do under those same limitations of time or character count.
I actually help run a blog, so I know first hand how many barriers there are between a blogger and their audience and it's getting worse all the time. These days even if you do make good content that people are looking for, the search engines summarize your content or rank higher content which has scraped your content and summarized it.
that's even if you have the skills to set up a blog and the resources to fund it. Not everyone has that and if they don't, does that mean their content shouldn't be seen?
trust me, I wish the Internet was different but with things like TikTok, you just have to focus on making your content and it takes care of bringing it to the people. With a blog, you really need to seek people out and a lot of people are turned off by self-promotion.
And yeah, I know there's an argument that people shouldn't need other's validation or attention for their art but also as a creative person it is demoralizing to make stuff that no one ever sees.
Tiktok ban is a good opportunity to educate the common folk on the benefits of federation
Although I am not sure if short video format addicts' needs can be fixed with this elegant solution but it definitely works well enough as reddit and twitter replacement.
It's called Instagram or YouTube Shorts. Same thing...TikTok offered nothing new. And I'm here, but all I see on Lemmy are the same posts 3-4 times, predictable pearl clutching reactions to everything, and very limited news coverage with a proclivity for posting random, fringe sources
You have a point. It felt different when I signed up but now all the most upvoted content here seems to be screenshots from Twitter, regurgitated memes and similar low-effort dopamine triggers. And when I left reddit it was mostly reposted TikTok reels anyway. Cognitive fast food that's easy to lose yourself in but unhealthy and unfulfilling as a habit. Lemmy doesn't really have many niche communities to outweigh the slop either. Consequently, I spend less time here as well. Which is probably a good thing.