alright, let's talk about tiktok, since that's what yesterday's main NYT story was about. still too tired to go through screenshotting it piece by piece, but i have enough to say regardless.

tiktok is a threat to national security, but it's also a threat to public health. i would like to see politicians arguing more for the latter than the former, but at the same time we don't have a great track record of banning things that are bad for us.

i don't like tiktok. i don't have a tiktok account, i avoid it wherever possible. i feel like tiktok has destroyed so much, and it's all at the behest of a country that does NOT have our best interests in mind. i'm not going to give a chinese authoritarian algorithm control over my dopamine receptors.

tiktok destroyed our attention spans. gen alpha can't focus on anything longer than 15 seconds anymore. longform social platforms have upended their formats to try and imitate tiktok. i don't want reddit to look like tiktok, i don't want youtube to work like tiktok!

and on top of the ADHD-brain bite-sized content format, it's promoting an addiction to endless scrolling. i used to be able to open up my sm of choice, read whatever had been posted since the last time i looked at it, and be done.

@dietotaku look at modern pop music as opposed to 1960s. pop songs are under 3 minutes. songs from the 60s were often over 10