You are making assumptions about what I am saying again. I am not advocating for more TikTok usage. At no point did I say anything positive about TikTok. What I am advocating for is people reaching a certain threshold of evidence before going around stating things as fact.

No, you did not get that right. I’m saying there is a small body of evidence that may or may not indicate some detrimental effects and that we should conduct further research before jumping to conclusions. The claim that TikTok is rotting people’s brains is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. A claim being unfounded doesn’t strictly mean it is untrue, but it does mean there isn’t any real reason to be making the claim in the first place.

But think of all the space that would take! If you replant forests where are we going to put our superhighways and parking lots?

The first one is one that I didn’t find in my own time. It correlates heavy usage of TikTok with a decreased ability to block one’s own distracting thoughts. Certainly interesting, and worth further study, but the authors appear to have equated that correlation with a causal effect. They did not satisfactorily delineate between someone who has a poor attention span and is attracted to TikTok because of it and someone with a poor attention span caused by TikTok.

The second and third studies I have already addressed in my other comments. The second study being the Chinese one that demonstrated a correlation between heavy TikTok usage and memory loss, anxiety, stress, depression, etc. Again, important findings, but crucially not causal. The third is the meta analysis that refused to make a statements regarding detrimental effects of TikTok usage.

The fourth isn’t a study, it’s an article. This article does link to several studies, however the only one the directly mentions TikTok is, again, that same study of roughly 3,000 Chinese students. The rest of the studies mentioned are targeting social media use in general.

Which neuroscientists are saying that? All the articles I’ve found referring to “TikTok Brain” quote one Dr. Patrick Porter. And I have become quite wary of trusting one man’s word, even that of a professional, since the whole vaccines cause autism thing.

You have linked a term paper, one study, and two articles. The study is a meta analysis that refuses to comment on the detrimental effects of TikTok usage due to a lack of research in the field in general. One article is about social media use in general and does not directly link to any scholarly works. The other does directly target TikTok and links to a study on Chinese students. There, TikTok Use Disorder was positively correlated with memory loss, anxiety, stress, and depression. Unfortunately my understanding of statistical analysis is not strong enough to judge the quality of the study, but to my limited knowledge it seems robust for its purposes. That being said, positive correlation does not necessarily prove causation. Notably, this study was a one time questionnaire. Meaning there isn’t any mechanism to determine the effects of high TikTok usage over time.

All this is to say that the field is deeply understudied, and that there aren’t any reliable conclusions that can be drawn yet. It may be that there are adverse effects, but that has yet to be proven.

Do you know how many times I’ve heard the “designed to exploit the dopamine pathways” line? You know how much proof I’ve seen for that? Zilch, nada, nothing. Not a single source is ever provided to back that claim. Does that automatically mean it’s a false claim? No, but it’s definitely suspicious. From my limited time looking into it for myself all I can see is that TikTok does, in fact, produce a dopamine response. That’s it. None of the (very few, this is an under-researched subject) studies I have found even differentiate it from other sources of dopamine. Hell, one of the articles I saw used the amount of time a fucking hashtag stays on the trending list as an indicator of the degradation of attention spans. I trust I don’t have to explain how those two are only superficially linked.

On my PC I have 8TBs split across various SSDs (both NVMe and SATA). All of them have games folders. My Switch has 64GB of internal storage and a 512GB microSD card, though I do have a 1TB card ready to go. Just haven’t taken the afternoon to pop it in and redownload my games yet. My PS4 is sitting stock with it’s 500GB internal drive. My Wii U has a 2TB external HDD hooked up to it (I was very optimistic about its potential library). The PC has over 2TB of just games on it. To be frank, it could very easily have a full TB more. But I don’t feel like hunting down all the various launchers’ folders at the moment. Honestly this is largely data hoarding. I only play a few of the games regularly. I keep telling myself I’ll get to dealing with my backlog eventually, but I never seem to find the time for it. The Switch is nearly full, I could fit maybe two more retail games on it. Mercifully Switch games are still pretty small as a rule, I have a library of about 80 games installed on it. Once again this is a case of data hoarding. The majority of the games are ones I have either beaten or played my fill of. I just keep them installed for no particular reason. The PS4 stores more dust than games nowadays, but if I recall I had five games downloaded and they used up somewhere between 300 and 400GB. I’ve honestly considered selling the thing, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy it given its condition. The Wii U, as you might imagine, has vast quantities of space available. Still, I somehow managed to use up a bit over 100GB on the external drive. The largest game I have installed on it is Breath of the Wild at 19GB.

I’d say the situation is unfair to all parties involved. No matter what someone loses. If the viewer watches the ad, the ad buyer does not receive a return on investment. If the viewer blocks the ad, the content creator is not compensated. If the viewer choses to not watch videos at all, they miss out on whatever benefits the video would have provided.

The problem with that is lost time. It’s not much, but it can be a bit of a headache especially on things like repair videos.

The question becomes, how does someone that does not have any disposable income support creators they like without inundating themselves with ads for products they are unable to afford?

What I typically do is listen to some music. I have a collection of soundtracks from some of my favorite video games. I pick a couple of pieces from the whole collection and let the music lead me through my memories. It’s not too far off from the feeling of going through an old photo album. I imagine one could get a similar effect by returning to any number of things that they used to enjoy.

Looks like a centralized alternative to a bank card. Rather than using an existing network like Visa or MasterCard as the backbone it appears that their intent is to build their own separate system. The project is still in the planning phase though, so what it eventually looks like (if it ever happens) is anyones guess.