More than 15% of teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok ‘almost constantly’::A new Pew Research Center study finds that more than 15% of teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok “almost constantly.”
I wonder how much this compares to kids and tv viewing habits before household internet.
Man even Cinemax didn’t have hard core porn and beheadings. The shit that those two apps show you should never be seen by anyone.
You think teens are being exposed to porn and gore on YouTube and tiktok??
Not, ya know, pornhub and liveleak?
That’s a pretty fuckin weird take since YouTube and tiktok are well known for overly aggressive content moderation
LiveLeak still exists!?
Obviously, you can just search google for porn. Head to a library, I’m sure you’ll find stuff there some people say is smut. “The Algorithm” doesn’t catch it all. What it pulls down and “moderates” is copyrighted content. The rest, they get to when they get to it.
Yeeeeeah but I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of teens aren’t actually filling the majority of their view time with porn and trauma. Though I’m sure there is some significant porn watching, the beheadings part is far less so I am willing to bet.
I just know what I have seen the algorithm push. They are not actively seeking it, it is being shown to them by the algorithm. Is it all the time? No, but once is enough to do some serious mental damage.
I don’t think the issue is the content – in fact, I feel our ability to interact with anyone anywhere is a net gain for humanity for many reasons.
I think the issue isn’t what they’re seeing, but how.
Learning worldviews from 2 minute TikToks or YouTube shorts where everything is surface-level with no incentive to expand that knowledge, presented as authoritative and bracketed by ads, does bad things to young brains.
There’s no depth to understanding, it’s just hot take after hot take, with no real discussion about the whys of things. The brain is actually trained away from developing deep understandings of things, and misinformation flourishes.
It’s not so much the content as the delivery. Junk food isn’t bad because it contains sugar and fat – that’s okay if it’s not your main diet.
TikTok, YouTube shorts, and similar superficial media are Pringles. And now kids are living off Pringles and little else.
I bet about 15% of teens also wildly exaggerate.
omg that is sssooooo exaggerated like 1000% take that back pls
I’m surprised it’s that low, it’s certainly looking more than that here. It’s not getting any better with parents using phones to shut their little ones up, toddlers are growing up with them around the dinner table.
You missed a 0 on the end of that number
Source: “a teen”
What are they doing there? I spend a lot of time on YouTube (probably max 2 hours per day), but if there are no new videos from channels I subscribe I just quit.
I’ve spent over 2,000 hours on YouTube this year alone and am in the target demographic of this study. I watch a lot of videos in the background while I work, commute, or just chill, to keep myself stimulated.
Although not all of the content I watch is necessarily educational, a grand majority of it is. Whenever there’s a science video in my feed, I’ll probably click it. I’m subscribed to Veritasum, TED, Vox, No Boilerplate, etc.
They are using YT shorts. The next video auto populates with something the algorithm thinks you’ll watch for 15 seconds and it’s usually correct. Its like a slot machine. Quick and easy entertainment that people can lose hours in
YT shorts is garbage. It will show the same videos to me over and over again.
I have seen that almost every time I used yt shorts.
I’m on it about ten hours a day when I’m at home, sometimes 15. About the same amount of time I used to listen to the radio - it’s great background for when I’m coding, modelling, video editing or whatever plus a great way of relaxing in-between as well as being a great learning resource.
It’s great because I can choose what to watch based on the task I’m doing, background waffle about interesting but missable subjects works well for a lot of stuff. I like twitch too but at it’s live I can’t walk away so easily if I get absorbed into someone’s stream so find YouTube much more functionally useful.
15 hours…sleep for 8 hours, and you have 1 waking hour where YouTube isn’t playing.
I guess old people are/were like this with TV and/or radio, though, so it’s nothing new.
you’re just not subscribed to enough channels. I probably spend 4h+ a day on average, mostly watching channels I’m subscribed to, and I don’t usually watch everything. Ah, and no shorts, that’s garbage.
Back in 2005, I never would have thought YouTube would be so popular as it is now. But here we are over 15 years later. Teens probably think Facebook is uncool, and apparently they’re not all on Instagram “almost constantly” the same way as TikTok. Yet there is YouTube, chugging along, hugely popular for young and old.
Video is expensive so competition is harder to kick up unless it does something very different.
I think it makes sense. Visual media just work well and universally so for all humans I’d say. All the other limited platforms are stuck with some indelible fashion like a haircut from a certain era and so always show their age eventually.
On top of this I think there’s an argument that YouTube have been uniquely successful in their attempt to take a middle path between profitability and facilitating creators, the result of which is that you get a performant and easy to use service (with a pile of ads) that connects with what feels like a huge range of real people talking about real interests.
YouTube has pushed itself more as a product than a community. People won’t stop using Amazon because it’s ‘uncool’. I imagine this is similar.
I don’t know how successful it is as I’m not a big consumer on there, but from what I’ve seen a number of YouTubers create community around themselves using whatever they like including other platforms, which again, is the way to do it.
Yeah, most of a creator’s interaction with their community probably happens on other sites, with YouTube just being the video delivery platform.
Instagram is for 20-40s, Facebook is 30s+, TikTok is 20s and under.
You people make up the wildest shit lol.
Lemmy is for 16-25, but not 26-28 year olds, but then 29+. It’s the darnedest thing
I mean of course YouTube is popular. User-generated videos have always been popular (even pre-internet, like home videos on TV etc), but it’s never been the case that storage and bandwidth was cheap enough to not operate a website with videos at a loss.
The only ones being able to operate such a site are entities that have lots of spare cash. Otherwise, if the site gets too popular, it’ll have to shut down or become unusable because of having to limit access behind paywalls or similar, hugely stifling its popularity and likely killing it.
Google created a very good service with YouTube that no one else could compete with because no one had so much money to “burn”. They kept this up for years to a point where it didn’t really make sense for neither creators nor viewers to want to go anywhere else.
And now there is a lot of good content on YouTube. The content is good because creators can actually live off the YouTube payments, thus being able to spend a lot of time on the videos. It will thus stay popular, because creators will not start risking their livelihoods on any other platform.
Now we need Neil Degrasse Tyson to buy these platforms and switch all the videos to physics and math videos
No offence, but please not him
He’s the best and I’m tired of hiding that. The silent majority has been silent too long
As long as he sticks to subjects he clearly understands. Everytime I’ve read or watched one of his take on veganism/anti-specism I was left dumbfounded and ashamed for him.
this is a problem for a LOT of public intellectuals/academics.
What did he say
There was a chapter in his book “Starry Messenger” dedicated to this subject. I unfortunately cannot reproduce the entire chapter here. However, here is a video essay on it that you can watch if you’re interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbXw13Npvlg (25min)
One of his dumbest argument imho was trying to claim that vegans were specist towards plants, even though no scientific existence of sentience in plants exist which is the moral criteria used in most anti-specist philosophy. I will add that even if plants were all found to be sentient, we’d still kill less sentient beings by eating them directly rather than feeding them to non-human animals and then killing them.
Here is another video of him talking about this very chapter for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9HrMdNEKPA (6min). I think this shows a complete misunderstanding of what veganism and anti-specism is about. To me it seems like he does not even consider the sentience of the animals and considers them as machines. He also seems to straw man the position to “vegans want to protect life”.
That is actually pretty hilariously stupid.
He 100% just doesn’t like vegetarians and worked backwards, coming up with some half-baked nonsense to back himself up.
Not exactly following the scientific method there.
I guess we all have our blind spots :)
vegans were specist towards plants
they are. they’ve identified a whole group of species and decided to treat them differently.
Again that’s a misunderstanding of the position. The discriminatory criteria is sentience. If a plant was found to be sentient, this plant would be included in the moral circle. You can make the same argument for things we consider animals but lack all of what we currently consider needed for sentience. An example would be a sea sponge. I personally do not include a sea sponge in my moral circle and I do not think they have any sentience even though they are considered animals. I would also consider someone that says sea sponge should be included in our moral circle just because they are part of the animal kingdom to be quite dogmatic.
And even if we want to debate on whether a sea sponge is sentient, there is absolutely no debate on most animals we currently kill for food or exploit for entertainment. They are clearly sentient.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=wbXw13Npvlg
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=z9HrMdNEKPA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
So… 16%?
And? I put in thousands of hours of video games and TV.
Tiktok is going to be the video games will rot your brain of this generation.
I don’t know, seems like TikTok may actually be doing that though. The format completely destroys attention spans, it spies on you for the Chinese, and is a huge propaganda machine.
Video games don’t do any of those things and at least with TV, you have to pay enough attention for 20 minutes to an hour to get anything out of it.
there is a ton of propaganda in TV too. And even on videogames, to a lesser extent. An example, the other day my niece was playing FarCry 6 and when I read about the story it was clearly American anti-Cuba propaganda, appropriating “revolutionary fighters” that fight to make Cuba a capitalist democracy.
Edit: just for clarification, I do not support the Cuban government, but neither I do support the US and how historically they’ve wanted to make Cuba one of their satellite countries.
It’s a bit different because the short videos are algorithmically targeted for individuals, as opposed to the viewpoints just being broadcast. This makes it much easier to manipulate people in specific ways
