Social media end users are consuming more short video content nowadays. YouTube shorts are a new addition to this highway. In this post, we are going to talk about short video content addiction and how to get rid of it.
The platform “Vine” first started a short video format where they allowed their users to share a 6-second video. Then Tik Tok inspired that in a short video content, which gained popularity mostly in India but later got banned in India for some reason. Within a month, Instagram introduced IG Reels, which are now extended to YouTube as well in the form of YT Shorts.
Even YouTube has announced a $100 million YouTube Shorts Fund for the years 2021-22, which will be distributed to eligible Shorts Creators. That’s the reason YouTube is flooded with short videos nowadays.
First, the short video platforms are bottomless. If you don’t like a video, you can scroll up for another, and you’ll be scrolling up for more interesting content, and it is a never-ending story.
The "short duration" of these platforms, which typically ranges between 15 and 30 seconds and up to 1 minute in rare cases, is their selling point. According to some institutional studies, content with a longer duration is not delivered to most people completely due to a lack of short attention span, and that urges us to find new content.
Our brain has a reward system that causes us pleasure; when we enjoy something, we get a dopamine hit in our brain, which happens most often when we enjoy good food, sex, sleep, or when we beat our personal records. Whenever this reward circuit is activated, our brain thinks something good is happening and wants that to be repeated.
These short contents act as a reward to our brain, causing pleasure, which triggers the dopamine hit and causes us to consume more content in order to experience that pleasure again; now, these platforms use this trick to gain more screen time for their applications.
When you don’t like a video, you end up scrolling for more to get the reward and this doesn’t drain your short attention span as you’re finding new content after every video.
It’s common that 5% of people will stop watching videos before a minute, and 60% of viewers stop after 2 minutes, but short videos help viewers get to the end of the video, and chances of skipping a video are also very less, therefore, all social media platforms are trying to use this as an advantage for their branding and advertisement purposes.
As of now YT creators only create long content, but short videos are not like that anyone can create, and it is easy to make, the reach is also high. And shorter videos interest people because we are so far used to the longer format.
And the algorithm they’re using is also extraordinarily strong; it knows which type of video you want to watch based on your likes, dislikes, the videos you save, share and skip, how many times you watch, how many seconds you’re watching a video, and everything is noted, and then it shows content accordingly to keep you hooked to their platform to get more screen time, which helps their business.
Think of the drawbacks of it, it keeps you hooked, and you are wasting your prime time in your life without doing anything useful.
These short videos seem harmless, but they lead to countless diseases like anxiety, depression, and mental problems. The funniest part here is that people don’t know that they are already addicted to this.
Yes, I know it is difficult but you’ve to detox from it and save yourself. Reduce your usage time by watching tutorial videos for learning purposes so the AI can change its future recommendations, or use digital well-being apps to keep yourself in control by using the auto-lock feature to stop accessing the apps if you use them for more than 30 or 45 minutes in a day.
There is a world outside waiting for you, look at it once and stay away from the social media loop.
Until next time,
Peranesh xx
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About The Author
Peranesh is an IT professional and an occasional writer. My other works are available on Substack, YouTube, and my website.
Originally published at https://peranesh.com on December 26, 2021.
