How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?

The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.

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jfindper 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?

Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.

1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.

2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.

3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.

4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.

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yifanl 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot slower and less efficiently.

And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.

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safety1st 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree.

So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.

	▲	ncruces 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I pretty much agree with this. We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc). Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand. It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap. Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.

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mckirk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Do you or a loved one suffer from an abundance of brain cells? Speak to your doctor today about whether The Jersey Shore might be right for you!"

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testing22321 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In Australia TV is very commonly referred to as “the idiot box”.

Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.

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kentm 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?

I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.

Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.

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micromacrofoot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TV programming has to broadly appeal to society generally... you can't really go down a niche algorithm that progressively feeds you more specific content until you're radicalized any certain way (it can sorta, see conservative media, but there are some guardrails). Social media can with much less restriction.

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ch2026 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We had the same fear mongering in the 80’s and early 90’s about TV. And in the 20’s and 30’s about radio programs.

Same shit, new generation.