Introduction#
I have been thinking about this topic for a long time, trying to write it down many times, but I always felt that it wasn't the right time, and as time went by, it became more and more complicated.
But no matter what, I still want to write a little bit.
Successful Short Videos#
I started using short video platforms when they first came out, but soon I felt significant negative effects on myself, so I started to stop using them.
Unexpectedly, after a few years, these types of apps became more and more popular. From rural areas to cities, from children to the elderly, from mainland China to North America, from Douyin to... TikTok, the high user stickiness and time occupancy rate have made this business model hugely successful.
Despite Facebook's acquisitions, TikTok still managed to confuse them, forcing them to go all in on the meta-universe. Weibo has added a large number of short videos to its homepage to retain users. Even Zhihu, a platform that emphasizes information quality, has started promoting terrible short videos (this is the worst experience I've had since using this platform, which directly led to me abandoning it). Even WeChat quietly embedded a short video creation platform and used a series of techniques to promote it on Moments.
There is no doubt that as a commercial product, short videos are very successful: high user count, high stickiness, good social diffusion, and extremely long usage time. After entering the stock competition, internet platforms hope that users will spend all their time on their own software because if users spend an extra hour on their own software, they will spend one less hour on their competitors' products.
Terrible Short Videos#
But for us users, the commercial success is not as important as our own experience and the impact we receive. When we open a short video platform, it is obvious that we are not there for serious learning purposes, but to observe the world and relax.
So the question is, does watching short videos really help us observe the world and relax? The answer is NO.
There are many problems with observing the world through short videos: behavior pattern training, fictional cognition, energy consumption, and these problems are largely caused by advanced recommendation systems.
Recommendation Systems and Behavior Patterns
Let's first discuss the first problem, which is behavior patterns.
I have some understanding of the recommendation systems of various companies and platforms. Most companies solve the cold start problem by using user profiles and then collect a large amount of user behavior data to strengthen the preference of the push stream.
In other words, when users first start using the product, the software will collect non-behavioral information about the users, including usernames, contact lists, location, age, gender, education level, associated accounts and behaviors on other platforms, and so on.
Don't doubt it, there are information interfaces and to some extent, communication between various platforms. This is also why shopping platforms will promote products that you have seen or talked about on social platforms. To a large extent, this is due to real-name registration on mobile phones and the mandatory binding of social platforms to mobile phones.
Next, the platform will start pushing some short video streams based on this profile and then collect detailed user behavior, such as how long the user watched a video, whether they liked, shared, saved, or commented on it, to update the recommendation model and make the video stream fit the user's preferences better.
According to unreliable sources, the current recommendation models have become extremely sophisticated in data analysis: software can even collect users' movement information through gyroscopes and other hardware, and then combine it with time to determine the user's state. Is the user watching while commuting on the subway, during lunch break at work, browsing on the toilet, or before going to bed in bed?
Such personalized recommendations naturally fit users' interests extremely well and even train users' brains to fit this preference curve. Originally, a user's preference for Topic X was 80, for Topic Y was 60, and for Topic Z was 20. After a series of preference pushes, the system influences the user's behavior through the push and eventually trains a brain that is only interested in X and Y, and prefers to spend 15 seconds on X and quickly swipe past Y.
In other words, the short video recommendation system not only caters to our preferences but also influences our brain patterns, or behavior patterns. I believe everyone has seen the GIF of a monkey continuously swiping through short videos, which is a typical manifestation of a well-trained pattern.
Recommendation Systems and Fictional Reality
Are users only changed in terms of behavior patterns? Far from it.
Most of the short videos that can be pushed to the recommendation stream are well-produced. In other words, the scripts are carefully designed, and every line of dialogue accurately hits the user's points of interest. In other words, the series of short videos you see not only cater to your preferences but also have highly industrialized production.
If this were a movie, TV show, or stage play, it would undoubtedly be a good thing, but this is "momentarily recording life" short videos.
The shooting locations of short videos are not in studios but in everyday life scenes. The people appearing in short videos are not actors or celebrities but ordinary people around us. The clothing in short videos is not futuristic or formal attire but everyday wear. All these details subconsciously tell the audience that everything you see here is the real world.
It is clear that a person who spends a long time browsing these content that matches their preferences, looks incredibly real and everyday, will gradually map these contents to their perception of the real world in their brain.
For students who have not yet stepped out of the ivory tower, once they see these video streams while doing exercises, they will naturally feel that the world is just like what they see in the short videos, where everyone is using the same popular phrases, consuming promoted products, and living a well-designed life.
Even adults who have experienced various things, especially in the simplified Chinese cultural environment where the news media industry has almost completely died, will gradually change their cognition if they lack other channels to obtain information and are influenced by short videos.
Energy Consumption
Some time ago, while listening to the "Voice East, Strike West" podcast, a scholar introduced a result of interdisciplinary research between neuroscience and information science: when users watch short videos, it seems like they are not moving or thinking, but their brains are highly active because watching short videos requires the brain to process a large amount of visual and auditory information, even if this information has high redundancy.
This explains the feeling of emptiness and exhaustion after a long time of scrolling on the phone because the brain doesn't get any rest but instead exhausts itself by processing garbage, which goes against our initial motivation for watching short videos.
So when you need to rest, please turn off your phone, take off your headphones, go for a walk, look at the scenery, and chat with family and friends, instead of constantly scrolling like a monkey, indulging in false reality.
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This article was originally intended to discuss variety shows and short videos together, but now I think there are still many differences, so I will leave it for future evaluation.