Please add YouTube to the list. I'm watching my kids' brains slowly melt as they go from YouTube short to YouTube short like little crack addicts trying to get their next fix. Throw in a bunch of AI generated bottom of the barrel swill and I'm on the verge of blocking YouTube entirely yet again. I blocked YouTube for years because of all the garbage child targeted auto generated videos that were flooding the platform. It's very frustrating because there is a lot of good content that I would like them to continue to have easy access to, but the cost of entry is way too high.

To some extent I feel the same about video games too.

I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes.

I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.

It's worth blocking shorts alone, they're the worst culprit. Letting kids still access long form videos.

The fact that Family Link app on Android doesn't have this feature drives me crazy.

Youtube kids exists, but the many many channels are not available without manual intervention.

disable Youtube history and no more shorts or AI suggested content. It quickly becomes a useful tool since you can see channels you subscribe to or if you are interested in a subject you have to search for it instead of getting pulled in the AI suggested contents as soon as you open the app.

The author of this blog wrote a whole freaking book about exactly this!

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How is this like 95% of the comments here, as if Haidt didn't write an incredibly well known book about how all of this is bad!

Most people here didn't even follow the link and are just responding to the title. They don't know who wrote the piece, much less what it actually says.

They've also been scrolling too much.. Their attention span cant handle it lol.

Their propensity for scrolling has degraded their ability to criticize it.

I don't get what you are trying to say? Can't people share their experiences?

Because even though he is reposted here every few months not everyone has deigned to actually read any of his stuff

This x10000.

I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats.

As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the cherry-boy x Russian rubbish like Friedman, Peterson, Jones et al) then please let us know.

All the (popular) social medias morph towards the tiktok short form content. Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.

It’s the most attention holding thing a.t.m.

Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst [0], so a determined skeptic would probably not find this persuasive. But I think he's been directionally correct about all his major points in the past decade:

* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]

* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a lot worse off

* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]

* There's no effective counterbalance to these forces except culture change, and AI threatens to make the problem much worse. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we're still headed in the wrong direction.

[0] https://matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/blog-post-7.html

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/business/jonathan-haidt-s...

[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/its-the-phones-stupid/

[3] https://www.sexual-culture.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones

TikTok, Snapchat, Meta (FB, Instagram) - all this garbage needs to go, at least for anyone younger than 18.

We have a plethora of evidence on how destructive social media has been for (especially young) people and still nothing is being done about it.

I think it's because a lot of adults cannot empathize with the lack of self-regulation in children and young adults. They imagine themselves being able to reject the social media firehose (whether true or not ...) and have no real model of being in a formative state.

Sorry but have you seen "most adults"? They're the worst. It's how we have America ran by a guy who makes Idiocracy's president look amazing.

Youtube (esp. shorts)

To all the people who keep jumping in and saying "why not $SOCIAL_PLATFORM": the author (Jonathan Haidt) has been writing against all social media for years now and is well aware of the problem of all of them. He's basically become the anti-social media guy, it's what he does. This piece happens to be about TikTok, but TikTok being bad does not preclude other platforms being bad too, and he's written dozens of blog posts and a whole book on the subject. TFA even includes this footnote emphasizing the point:

> Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.

> But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text.

Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!

This seems to happen somewhat often.

Actually, it is quite weird, I wonder if some bad best-practices have been circulated.

It would be really nice if legal documents were prepared in some sort of standardized markup-like language.

This happened a few times in 2006. I guess we never learn.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698326

It happens constantly, just the other day Meta/Facebook's lawyers redacted graphs by drawing a box over them https://www.theverge.com/news/648893/meta-redacted-documents...

How is this still happening?

Adobe Acrobat even warns you if you pick black as highlighter color!

Maybe it should instead do actual redaction? Or at least ask if that's what the user wants?

OK let's ban social media and roll back to 20 years ago. I'm perfectly happy with that. With social media it's so easy to manipulate than emails, websites and phones.

Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).

I often wonder if we (the tech industry) have come up with anything actually good since about 2005 or so, in terms of being a net win for society or something people actually need.

Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities. The power we have to do so is staggering; we are changing the parameters and modes of how people relate to each other on a daily basis.

I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.

The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.

20 years ago we had reality TV, video games, and rock music which were the perveyor of body issues and FOMO etc. The issue is not technology, but popular culture. Pre the end of the 20th century most people considered knowledge and skill to be the peak of human progression. Now it is money and image. As money and image can easily be given/bestowed whilst knowledge and skill cannot, I believe the general population has become much easier to manipulate by using these traits.

There are very few young people today who dont value money and image as something to aspire to. IMO this is a really dangerous thing of which there is no way back.

Vanity and greed are called deadly sins for a reason. It is clear these are afflictions humans have always had to deal with. Unfortunately, culture isn't built from the top down and takes generations to change. I am sure we will see a swing back toward traditional values as people learn the hard way that not all things old should be thrown out.

The endless series of 10 second video clips, selection optimized by algorithm to keep your attention just enough to continue on and on and on...

That's not at all the same as TV, video games, or rock music.

Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.

Since everyone banning anything is exactly the same level of pointless are you also in favor of bringing back more asbestos, lead, and child labor as well? Or would you say that context matters, evidence matters, and critical thinking about the actual circumstances under discussion is often necessary?

> Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.

I'd be fine with that, if it means I never have to hear that robotic argument ever again.

That's what ignorant culture warriors claimed was harming children. There was never much evidence to support those claims; they were the ravings of clowns, not statements to be taken seriously.

The damage from social media is widespread, well-studied, and unequivocally harmful to millions of people. There is no equivalence, it's a different technology with objectively worse impacts.

I guess nothing can ever again harm us now that it turned out those things didn't, nice. Do you have a link to the studies that say those things didn't do any harm, btw?

TV, video games, rock and roll music, nor dungeon and dragons were specifically designed for compulsory use, reduced the users' ability to focus, or exposed them to the kind (or sheer quantity) of harmful material that TikTok does.

You could get reprieve.

With TikTok on mobile, it's ubiquitous.

I think your comment, while not especially constructively formed, is a good warning about alarm-ism. However, I think you should at least consider a few things:

1. The concerns about D&D were quite different. Most parents admired the creativity involved in role-playing. The concerns came from a relatively small subset of parents who were concerned about the morality of the subject matter (monsters, demons etc.). For the record, I thought at the time that these concerns were pretty silly and had little merit, and still do.

2. Just because there have been moral/social panics in the past, doesn't mean the concerns about social media today are invalid. Sometimes worries are wrong, sometimes they are right. Having been wrong before does not make it rational to never be concerned again.

3. It is entirely possible that concerns about high-volume TV watching were correct. Just because my generation (X) survived the TV era does not mean we came out of it unscathed. Much of the ignorance and obnoxiousness of our current age may very well be caused by today's middle aged people growing up watching television. (Or maybe it was the lead paint our parents grew up with?)

The core problem is media being a for-profit organization. As long as the primary goal is profits it will be focused on extracting as much as attention as possible. It's an insignificant issue that it also ruins our attention, spreads misinformation etc. as long as profits go up.

We had social media 20 years ago.

And what would happen in another 20 years? What exactly would prevent this from happening again?

Maybe instead of just knee-jerk reactions like "Ugh stupid social media, let's ban it" we should think it through and solve the underlying issues.

We did not have the social media technology and pervasiveness of today, 20 years ago. Absolutely objectively not.

So, only Tiktok? Or all social media? Headlining this as Tiktok really smells of moronic propaganda.

Every time there's a post like this on HN ("social media app harms children") responses like this seem to be a primary response. It always feels like handwavey avoidance of addressing the actual issue at hand: harm to children. "Oh so it's only bad because the Chinese own it? You're okay with American propaganda?!??"

"TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale" does not imply "Instagram Is Not Harming Children at an Industrial Scale". It is simply studying one app. There have been numerous reports of the dangers Instagram poses (especially to teens), and when they get posted we get a raft of "why just pick on Instagram?" comments. It's tedious.

> It's tedious.

Worse, it's distracting.

Exactly. I think the more thoughtful responses are starting to bubble up to the top now, but when I first got here, essentially all the comments were of this form.

This is Jonathan Haidt, and he's been writing against all social media for years now. This article is about TikTok, but a quick stroll through the archives shows they released an identically-titled article about SnapChat yesterday:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat

The archive also includes a bunch of articles on social media in general, edtech, and similar.

>This is Jonathan Haidt, and he's been writing against all social media for years now.

Yeah, it's not "moronic propaganda", it's someone who has, historically and famously so, been very focused on the broad issue of social media's impacts focusing in on various specific aspects of it, of which TikTok is a part.

OP seems, respectfully so, ignorant to who Haidt is and would perhaps do well to read up on more of his output (apologies to OP if this assumption is incorrect).

I guess you could say that lazy thoughtpieces harming HN users on a cottage-industry scale, then.

Have you actually read anything written by Jonathan Haidt, or is this a drive-by dismissal?

You missed the sarcasm. HN articles all follow a formula, almost predictably so, where they’re lazy thought pieces by a self important blogger.

Tiktok is clearly the worst of all due to incredibly high usage among kids. And being controlled by the Chinese government is clearly problematic.

> being controlled by the Chinese government is clearly problematic

I read it a lot, but it's actually highly dubious that that is a problem at all.

The problem is how western kids react to TikTok content and why they do it that way.

TikTok is also present in many other parts of the World and it's not causing the same harm everywhere, it must mean something.

The title should actually be "TikTok is harming American children at an industrial scale" and the focus should be on why Americans are more susceptible to TikTok[1], whose content, BTW, is mostly created by fellows Americans and not directly by the Chinese government.

[1] the why is also somewhat explained, even though I do not believe those are root causes, they're just symptoms

“It’s better to have young people as an early adopter, especially the teenagers in the U.S. Why? They [sic] got a lot of time.”

“Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience . . . . If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.”

It should be noted that every US corporation had a meeting where executives said or proposed something very similar. It's capitalism 101, first: profit, then, maybe, if you're forced to, ask for forgiveness .

If you say C C P at night, Xi Jin Ping will come out from under the bed and get you.

As far as I am aware you need to say it three times at midnight

It does matter. Both things are a problem. Just for different reasons.

Citations aren't really needed when a 2-second Google search brings up tons of information, but for the terminally lazy:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

I think the track record of the Chinese government is well established at this point.

I feel like this is a site full of educated people, for whom a citation for this claim is about as necessary as one for the claim "the President is the leader of the executive branch of the US government"

Honestly, I question the motivations of any techie trying to argue that a Chinese state-controlled propaganda machine consumed en masse by children is anything but especially problematic.

We all know how controlling and evil the CCP is... Citations not needed!

The front page of the site links to "Shapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale" (https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat) so I'm pretty sure it's about all of them. And at an industrial scale!

Note both of those articles are by the same authors, one of whom is Jon Haidt, who is a well known researcher on the harms that cell phones and social media have caused children since the widespread uptake of smartphones, and the author of The Anxious Generation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation

The author of this piece, Jonathan Haidt, wrote the book The Anxious Generation, which is very much about how all of social media is bad for kids (and adults, actually, but the book is more focused on kids).

Certainly not only TikTok, but - IMHO - the most damaging part of every other social media _is_ the one based on it: Reels, Shorts, etc. The endless swiping for the next dose of dopamine.

The YouTube's one (Shorts) is especially irritating, as you can't really ban children from using YT - there's stuff there they need to watch for classes and so on. I guess the only chance this will stop is a government regulation of some sorts.

Tiktok really purified the "swipe" model of passive content consumption, but at this point everyone else has copied them, so really this needs to be much broader— it can't be about banning a single foreign company, but rather about patterns of interaction and addiction.

This "it's not bad until you say it about the US companies" mindset is going to absolutely fucking annihilate some of you starry-eyed hopefuls out there. It is possible for both to be net-negative platforms at the same time.

Two things can be true at the same time

Kids don't use other social media generally, Tiktok is what Facebook and Instagram were 10 years ago

Haidt rails against the others too, but kids don't use Facebook, and Instagram is for their moms now.

https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/

TikTok is especially bad. If you compare IG "kids" and TikTok the intended content for minors is strikingly different. Even platforms like Roblox will maliciously recommend questionable content to children.

While I don’t agree with the whole “Palestinian views should be censored” thing, that might be the ticket we need to set a precedent for regulating children’s access to social media. That’s the thing about politics—you have to be willing to make compromises with people you don’t see eye to eye on.

If your principles get in the way of making compromises that could help, you’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something to think about.

Reminds me of the "stimulus" cheques during Covid.

Giving people money so they can pay rent and buy food during lockdown? Preposterous!

Giving people money so they can "stimulate the economy"? Now we're talking!

Between TikTok and fentanyl China is covertly doing serious damage to the USA, and most people don't care.

Between Meta/X and opioids, the USA is overtly doing serious damage to the USA, and most people don't care.

(In all seriousness, I do agree that TikTok is awful, but I find the fascination with TikTok while ignoring all other social media and their dangers to be interesting)

Who is ignoring all other social media? Meta is literally on trial right now and there are comments about how bad they are almost daily on this site.

I think actually lots of people do care about all these problems.

It's weird how so many of these threads are "whatabout other social media", when there is no contradiction in just saying "that too", and essentially none of the people who agree with the premise that TikTok is bad will argue that other social media is good.

You are posting in a thread where the OP is saying China is covertly doing damage via TikTok. Do you seriously not see the contradictions here?

China is doing damage to us when we are doing damage to ourselves too? Really? It’s going after the wrong thing and so not finding the actual problem and hopefully the solution.

Kids don't use X and Facebook is for their grandparents now

> Facebook is for their grandparents now

I use Facebook for the local buy nothing group. Everytime I open Facebook I'm shocked by the manipulative AI slop (person in a boat pulling barnacles off a dolphin that's standing up in the water) that shows up in the first screen. I'm terrified that grandparents who vote are engaging with this stuff.

Look, I hate the current admin deeply, but China is very much not our "friend"

Extremely few countries are “friends.” Maybe the past Canada/US relationship could have been considered legitimate friendship between two countries, but it was a very rare thing.

China is just a competitor, not some sort of boogeyman.

The US is a competitor with a lot of countries. Maybe they should ban our social media, but for whatever reason that is mostly not done. If we want to set that as the convention, it is certainly worth considering.

>but China is very much not our "friend"

Sorry, but which part of my comment implied that I think they are?

Fentanyl is made from common chemicals that are used in normal industrial processes. We use them for everything from making insulation to medicine. And it only takes a small amount of these chemicals to make a large batch of fentanyl. All the fentanyl produced in a year only takes 1,800 gallons (around 33 oil drums) of chemicals to make.

The latest Annual Threat Assessment: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-202...

Noted that production of those precursors has shifted to India.

The fentanyl itself is made in labs in Mexico and then smuggled across the border. It requires no sophisticated lab equipment to make. You can easily obtain everything needed at consumer retail stores and make a batch in a garage. One liter of finished fentanyl is enough to create 50,000 to 100,000 doses.

So if you squeeze the balloon, it just pops up somewhere else. Put pressure on China and India starts supplying the chemicals. Start shutting down Mexican labs and they'll make the stuff in Oklahoma.

Not that these are bad things to do but unless you address the actual demand for the stuff it's going to be nearly impossible to eliminate it.

Not covertly. Overtly, and most Americans do know about it and care deeply.

Our “leaders” have abandoned us.

The opioid crisis is a uniquely American problem, entirely of its own creation. Blaming it on other countries is convenient but false.

This is decidedly not true on almost every account.

Europe has its own opioid crisis, and we absolutely can blame other countries who play host to the primary runners of heroin and synthesizers of fent. The pain industry is just the first baby step to hard drugs. We already handled our side after OxyContin - it’s impossible to get more than ibuprofen from a doctor without doing backflips through flaming hoops.

I live in the European country most like the USA, in a poor area of a major city. We don't have a crisis.

> We already handled our side

What did you do about the millions of Americans already hooked?

As I understand it, stopping the supply from pills mills lead to people hitting the street to buy product cut with fent. Some handling.

the USA also seems to be starting its own cultural revolution, so we've got a lot going on right now

Who forces Americans to consume both?

Do you blame prostitutes when husbands cheat on their wives at a whorehouse too?

No, but I'm also not a die hard libertarian, so I'm open to arguments that 1. This is bad, and 2. There may be net positive policy interventions available.

On prostitution, I'm a bit skeptical that the policy interventions over time have been net positive, but maybe they have.

On social media, unfortunately I'm very skeptical of the proposed policy interventions, in general. But I'm convinced that the status quo is bad. But sometimes there just isn't a policy solution available that doesn't have tradeoffs that make it even worse than a bad status quo. It's still good to bring attention to the problems with that status quo, though.

In the case of TikTok in particular, I think forcing divestment is a no-brainer, but for totally different reasons than what Haidt is writing about.

In America this is precisely what happens — blame falls on the woman

TikTok isn’t doing much that our domestic social media overlords aren’t doing to us themselves. Yeah Facebook is for boomers and Instagram is for millennials, but they’re only targeting the platforms like that because TikTok has already seized the younger demographics. If it wasn’t there they’re be on a Meta, Snap, YouTube, or Twitch app instead and still having their brains rotted.

We need actual data privacy laws that make that business model of invasive surveillance capitalism non-viable as well as some of severe regulations placed on algorithmic recommendation engines to limit these harms. At the very least, users should be permitted to tune their algorithm parameters, including deciding how much they see things they’ve explicitly requested to see less of.

Yeah we can scaremonger about TikTok all we want, but it’s not solely TikTok’s fault that it’s trash. The economic incentive structure is to produce a surfeit of brainwashing trash that erodes people’s mental health. We need to structurally change privacy laws and force market competition to crack these network effect monopolies if we want that to stop.

China will need to have 4 undercover agents meet in the same place at the same time. They won't all meet each other, but a series of hand offs.

Conveniently, a small local college asian club wants to have a stop asian hate rally on the weekend of the 17th, at a local park which would be an ideal location. Tiktok gets word from Bytedance, who by Chinese law have party members on their board, that this rally needs to be heavily promoted organically to other Asians who live in the area. No ads, if someone talks about it in their tiktok, push it. Push it especially towards beloved Asian influencers with a large follwing.

The day comes and the turnout is a total blowout. A sea of Asians filling the park to support a noble cause.

80% of them are there because the CCP wanted them there to cover their operation, but when asked, every single one laughs at the idea that "Tiktok is a tool for propaganda". They say "I have never seen anything that promotes red flag communism or CCP ideals."

The scenario above is why the US government wants tiktok banned. The privacy stuff is second and the screen addiction stuff a far far third.

Related critcism of the book and the authors of this site: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/why-academics-...

Adults too

Parents even

Great, Meta next?

He's already been on Meta for years now:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aafterbabel.com+instag...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aafterbabel.com+Facebo...

Meta is currently on trial for antitrust.

As was pointed out elsewhere in this post Jon Haidt has been railing about social media for a while now, and has written several books on the subject.

https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/

Hopefully all social media.

and all of them should be run by non-profit organizations unconnected to any charity nor politically motivated organization nor state.

Agree with this. All of them.

That includes the new ones such as Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon.

If you have read anything Haidt has written, you'll probably note that this implies criticism of him being only anti TikTok is quite far off the mark.

Won't someone think of the profits??

That doesn't fit into the yellow peril narrative.

Or it could be that it doesn't fit into the age demographics. Not many studies on child behaviour are conducted at the Bingo Hall.

Meta owns Instagram, which is still very popular with people who have most of their original teeth.

This is an ignorant assumption about the author's motives that doesn't withstand even the least bit of scrutiny. Meta came first under Haidt's crosshairs and has been targeted since this article was released. Snapchat was targeted with a partner piece to this one yesterday:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat

Haidt isn't anti-China, he's anti-all-social-media.

Then why isn't the article "Social Media Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale?" USAID checks?

Meta has towering mountains of criticism and legal issues against them. For the most part it just doesn't involve kids, as kids don't really use their platform.

Instagram is just as bad, meaning it should be put to the same scrutiny. It’s not ok just because it’s from the US

The main reason TikTok is being targeted is because it doesn't silence pro-Palestinian perspectives on the conflict. This is a direct threat to the leadership of the people in charge because it fractures their narrative they work tirelessly to promote (the perpetual victim).

They may be part of why the American rhetoric is against Tiktok specifically rather than other platforms, but this specific author has a far wider remit against social media as a whole.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=afterbabel.com

> The main reason TikTok is being targeted is because it doesn't silence pro-Palestinian perspectives on the conflict.

First of all, TikTok was being in the crosshairs ever before Hamas decided to slaughter and take hostage civilians on Oct 7th.

Second, why is it always the pro-Palestine crowd that acts like their issue is the most important thing in the world, completely de-railing any debate? Seriously, no other geopolitical conflict has so many people injecting it into any debate they can find.

Well an active genocide seem like quite an important thing and that is happening right now not years ago.

The same people who continue to make excuses for and rationalize the ongoing genocide are in charge in the USA in the political and business sphere. All dissent will be crushed until morale improves.

Wasn't the previous ban put in place by the Biden administration? And then Trump flipped sides to become the savior of TikTok or something like that?

Doesn't exactly align with your claim.

Of course it does. https://www.instagram.com/p/DIepR0EMuRN/

Then why does the current administration keep suspending the ban?

the panda is dissatisfied

tiktok is geofenced

the same old story repeating with every generation. historically however, none of the 'devilish technologies' was banned

ALL social media are harming children at industrial scale.

The author of this blog is one of the leading proponents of this idea!

I'm really starting to think all these whataboutism posts are bots. It just seems too hard to believe that so many people would come here to make this same idiotic point in response to a post by this particular author.

So is YouTube

I would love to first shut off Facebook before we do anything to TikTok.

I would love action to be swift and simultaneous.

YouTube shorts too

I hate when people copy other's ideas. Gmail was such a hotmail/yahoo copy.

Gmail was an improvement though. What did Youtube Shorts improve on tik tok exactly?