On the contrary, what I've seen of Douyin is no more substantive than what is on TikTok, it's just more compliant with CCP censorship. It is an entertainment medium first and has no pretensions about being anything else. This "common sense" you reference sounds like the same kind of "technology rots your brain" Luddite-ism that welled up for a while and then faded back into well deserved obscurity when radio and then television and then the Internet first proliferated.
I want to see the studies or even any kind of actual data substantiating this "dumbing down" or even "harm" that doesn't reduce down to teenagers saying and doing stupid shit, as has been done for a good chunk of our species' time on this rock.
You think recognizing the ill-effects of TikTok is just Luddite-ism? How nice for you. I mean, the evidence is on the Internet; here is one study[1]. I also think it is pretty clear that consuming TikTok regularly by children has a direct consequence on attention span, I don’t require the Cleveland Clinic to tell me that. I think there is a difference from mindlessly consuming TikTok than programming a C64 or playing an MMORPG with complex leveling/crafting/etc systems. Realizing that fact is not anti-technology.
What a garbage study! n=28? Self reporting? Uncritical acceptance of user profile info and video content with no verification? No mechanism of causation?
Salient quote: "64.3% of subjects cited were selling merchandise on their TikTok account related to their TikTok tics or could be contacted for paid appearances."
It's trash. It's not science. In fact, it's offensively not science. What's next, reporting on the supernatural stuff that we see on video sites? By this standard, I find the top 20 or so people on TikTok that report ghost encounters and can get a paper published about how ghosts are real.
Snark aside, if this is the quality of material you are basing your assumption of "ill effects" on, I feel more comfortable in both calling TikTok no different from any other media sharing platform, and characterizing this handwringing about it as tired Luddite-ism, than I did before reading your link.
You think it is equivalent to supernatural mumbo jumbo? It’s pretty early days for the research of this but there is also common sense. If you really think there is no difference between TikTok and other media platform then I am happy for you.
I want to see the studies or even any kind of actual data substantiating this "dumbing down" or even "harm" that doesn't reduce down to teenagers saying and doing stupid shit, as has been done for a good chunk of our species' time on this rock.