> Quickly my For You page was transformed. I saw long thoughtful videos on motivation, psychology, science, and philosophy. I listened to excerpts of lectures on Stoicism or Zen Buddhism, and speeches by enigmatic Indian meditation gurus. It figured out I was a software engineer and showed me many jokes or insights about work. At one point I was hunting for a job and TikTok started showing me interview tips. I witnessed drawings and paintings and animations by countless visual artists. I found myself zooming through trippy 3D fractals while listening to Alan Watts. Instead of watching videos with thousands or millions of views, I was seeing videos with a hundred views or even ten views. The algorithm seemed to be trusting me to deliver an early vote.

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This is both inspiring and terrifying to me. We're working toward AI that can almost read your mind and show you videos that are extremely relevant and impactful with nothing more than watch time measurements.

If we gave that kind of power a goal like "make them better people/help them achieve more/find happiness" we could usher in a new golden age of achievement, fulfillment, and mental health.

Unfortunately, right now we've only figured out how to give this power a single goal, "increase watch time/engagement," and I don't want to be turned into a zombie optimized for ad consumption.

Of all the content on social media, I think TikTok is one that feels the best for me. YouTube videos are very often much longer than they need to be and devoid of information. Facebook isn't even worth mentioning. Instagram is mostly just friends and celebrities posting the best parts of their life and nothing worth discussing.

TikTok content is short and typically pretty interesting. You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you and unlike YouTube you don't have to sit through long introduction paragraphs or sponsorships. They also added a progress bar that you can scrub through so if a video seems longer than it needs to then you can skip through it to the interesting part.

You just need to train your brain to put TikTok down instead of constantly scrolling which takes a little self control (but what in life doesn't?)

> You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you

You most definitely can't. The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff.

When I first started using TikTok I felt like I was constantly getting scammed of my time.

I think TikTok is the worst social media platform. It's extremely easy to waste a large amount of time on it and come away with nothing.

> The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff

TikTok added a progress bar so you can skip to the end in those cases and save yourself the time now.

Or, you can just scroll past those videos. Again, the reason they're clickbaity is because your brain thinks there's going to be a payoff, but if you train you brain to instantly scroll past those videos then you'll also train the algorithm to show less of those kinds of videos.

>There are TikToks on eigenvectors, Taylor series expansions, making butter blocks for traditional layered pastries, calculus, Kubernetes and how to exit vi.

So? It's still limited by the ADD format of TikTok and you'll forget about it 3 seconds later. It's garbage.

TikToks loop automatically, they tempt you to view the content again, to notice more, to extract as much as possible from it. In fact, much of TikTok’s content is actually iterations and new ways of seeing existing TikToks.

Sure, this isn’t always good, because then you can have 1000 snowclones of something uninteresting, but it isn’t particularly invasive to the general experience.

YouTube just bumps you to the next video. That’s worse if you’re trying to retain info. Coursera courses usually have short snippets of video throughout the lesson, there’s nothing particularly ‘ADD’ about that.

It’s very common for people to memorize TikToks and I remember the content plenty of the ones I have looked at, despite being diagnosed with ADHD.

Why exactly would I retain information less from TikTok than from a Khan Academy video?

I don't care if your brain is hardwired into a TikTok video and you watch it 10,000 times. It's maximum 3 minutes. You're not learning anything in 3 minutes. You might learn something that is entirely self contained in 3 minutes, but you probably already learned that stuff in the 3rd grade. Taking something large and complex and narrowing it into a short clip doesn't do anything for anyone. I guess you get some information, but you're not getting knowledge, and there is no incentive to study. At best you are trying to arm-wrestle a lion and it's an uphill battle. I'd rather take a book and spend a weekend, then I might have a chance of grasping something.

>Why exactly would I retain information less from TikTok than from a Khan Academy video?

Unless you are watching some sort of structured course type thing that is broken down into... 100's of 3 minute videos? I don't see the point.

The maximum is 10 minutes these days, and multipart videos are common. This is approximately the length of the individual videos in Coursera, eg Andrew Ng’s course on machine learning.

I was in a computer science theory class at a prestigious university, and a number of otherwise extremely intelligent CS majors had a curious difficulty understanding the Pumping Lemma. They would ask the teacher to explain it. This happened a few times since attendance wasn’t mandatory and not everyone was present.

The resulting explanation from the instructor would absolutely fit into a three minute TikTok, plus it would be rewatchable. Unfortunately, there’s no video there that explains it today, but that could be remedied.

Hmm I guess that's fair, it still feels like a poor medium.