The amount of time it took me to actually find this thread is ridiculous, considering it was right in front of my eyes with an obvious name
I tried to watch shorts and TikTok but they are not for me. I guess it is more for young people.
TikTok is...different. I thought it was very vapid, but then I got a new phone with TikTok preinstalled and actually watched it for a while...and I found out that these shorts really help me with insomnia and anxiety attacks. The content is really mindless, but it is also very relaxing, at least the stuff that comes up in my feed. Dance challenges and memes that I always knew TikTok for never even came up, surprisingly. My feed is a mix of nature videos, animal videos, people doing various crafts and hand-making stuff and random satisfying videos of "1000 dominoes falling" or "lighting matches in extreme slow-mo" variety. When I first joined, some political content came up, but it stopped coming up fairly quickly because the algorithm is really good at identifying the content you skip and offering you something completely different instead. It also used to recommend me a lot of cooking instruction videos and even though I wasn't skipping those, I somehow feel like the algorithm knows too much and at some point it somehow realized "bish, you ain't cooking anything, you just like staring at food. Here, watch some mukbangs instead"
Maybe it's the same thing as YouTube. I mean when a person says "I like watching YouTube for fun" - it doesn't give you even the most vague idea what that person's interests are, unless they elaborate. For all you know, they could be watching anything from radical political content and serial killer/disaster documentaries to slime ASMRs and spongebob meme compilations.
This is a really great topic. We all could use a distraction once in a while. Wish I had good recommendations, but I am really short on ideas even for myself lately.
