A new Pew Research Center study finds that more than 15% of teens say they're on YouTube or TikTok "almost constantly."
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."
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'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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.