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.