Now weigh (e.g. multiply) the number of each with the number of people actually consuming it. Just look at Youtube: If a serious video that teaches you something interesting has a thousand views it can be called "very popular". The latest useless joke video easily gets a million views.
The most amazing math textbook in the world may sell maybe 100K copies tops. 50 Shades of Grey sold 125 million. Does this mean books are bad, or does it mean people aren't always exclusively interested in intellectually challenging topics?
The Gutenberg revolution had its critics. I think criticising the Internet as a medium has parallels to that. That's not to say any arguments made are idiotic, just that they may miss the point. I think there are reasons why the view counts are so different that don't imply the Internet is a shitty medium.
Firstly, a 3 hour podcast takes 3 hours to listen to, generating one click per three hours of listenting time for that podcast. TikTok videos take a few seconds to watch, so in 3 hours you're doling out thousands of views.
Secondly, views are distributed differently for those types of content because everyone finds roughly the same things funny, but only few find the same things interesting. If you want to watch something funny, you're probably not gonna spend much time finding suitable content, instead just consuming whatever is popular, so a handful of videos end up with insane amounts of views. But if you want to take up a hobby project you'd pick something that interest you, which is very different from what might interest me, even within the domain of CS and maybe even within subdomains of CS, so views are distributed more evenly for instructional videos.
And now we're here comparing the view counts of popular funny videos to instructional videos. I think it's clear why that might not be a good data point.
Except that the "useless" jokes will always win the view battle since they are very easy (i.e short) to consume. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that people are consuming long form videos and podcasts
And why is that a problem? So what if I scroll through 200 Twitter memes on my lunch break and then throw on a 2-hour educational YouTube video in the evening? Sure, I've given 200 impressions to the bad kind of content and only one impression to the good kind, but I don't think I've disastrously eroded my ability to focus on things.
