Everyone complains about shorts or reels format. But reading comments is the short format of reading.
And I can attest the the feeling is the same, quick dopamine release and after a session we can’t barely remember most of what was read, just like short video format.
Comments under a thread generally relate to a singular, related topic and are part of a larger discussion. Reading a comment chain is more closely related to following a conversation and engaging in discourse.
Shorts they ain’t.
Perhaps a closer analog would be an anthology of poems or abstracts?
Good point. Comments are connected to each other, while short videos aren’t. If you truly want to same brainrot experience, you need to jump from post to post all the time.
At least threaded comments like on here and reddit is a lot easier to follow than on forum sites.
Although I do look back in warm nostalgia quoting forum posts as I back read 3 pages of them when I got back to a forum topic after 3 days. Hell, sometimes even just a few hours if it’s a hot topic. I wouldn’t dream of doing it nowadays though.
Oh the threaded comment system changes everything. Since all of this is on activity pub, you can also read Lemmy comments from Mastodon. Ever seen people put hashtags into Lemmy comments? Yeah, those people are interacting with Lemmy without actually being on Lemmy.
The random mess of a Mastodon feed never felt right for me because there wasn’t anything connecting the messages with one another. In that sense, you could say that Mastodon gives you the kind of unstructured experience short form videos have.
Yep, I have encountered mastodon and the like posts here on Lemmy etc. Somehow a lot of them show up in !firefox@fedia.io
Well actually being in fedia.io it would makes sense, since fedia being mbin supports threaded posts and microblog posts.
Oh no please don’t say that! I thought I was doing well for myself by reading through the articles and reading comments on Lemmy! I know it’s not as good as reading a book, but it’s progress damnit!
I say all that in jest of course lol I probably should get back to reading all those books I downloaded and added to my Calibre server now.
They are not the same thing as far as bad for the brain. Short videos are worse. But in their categories (reading and videos) they are similar ranking.
Nah. Cliffs Notes is the short form of reading. Comments are like reviews.




