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
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
So… 16%?
