Endless Nonsense. An Editor's Column
They say evolution “invented” the crab at least five times—meaning five different species independently evolved into something crab-like. Scientists call this carcinization. The same process seems to be happening with social networks. Only instead of turning into crabs, they all turn into TikTok.
Open any platform—YouTube, X, even Reddit—and reels will be lurking among the main content. One careless swipe and suddenly you’re drowning in their endless stream.
Staged everyday mishaps. Street scuffles caught “by chance.” Animated graphs with crawling bars that, in a rational world, would be a simple chart. Cute animals. Dancing women. Deliberately absurd nonsense designed to bait mocking comments.
I’ve watched hundreds of these clips, and I know this much: nothing good comes of it. Out of all the crushing, pouring, sawing, stirring, gluing, and drilling, the end result is always stupidity. You can stop watching halfway through—you won’t miss a thing.
But humans are weak. When a clip promises to reveal what happens if you connect a computer to a garden hose with an HDMI cable… well, obviously water will come out. Close it, move on. Yet no—you came for something else, and bam—you’re trapped.
Engagement at All Costs
The goal of social networks has always been engagement: the more time you spend, the better.
In 2012, YouTube set itself a target: one billion hours of daily watch time. To achieve this, it reworked its algorithm to recommend longer videos. Creators caught on instantly and began stretching clips to thirty minutes. Thus, YouTube filled with endless talking heads instead of quick three-minute skits. Not necessarily bad—but revealing.
Often, though, the pursuit of engagement becomes openly harmful. Platforms know that shocking or irritating content keeps users hooked even better than pleasant posts. Outrage travels fastest: people share and comment out of spite, and to the algorithm, that’s pure gold.
TikTok perfected this model. Here you don’t need thirty minutes or even a coherent thought. It doesn’t matter if a reel amuses, annoys, or entertains—the only thing that matters is that you pull the one-armed bandit’s lever again, chasing one more drop of dopamine.
Journalist Ryan Broderick once observed that most TikTok “plots” are closer to pornography: no story needed, just stimuli people want to watch. Eating strange food. Squeezing slime. Shooting watermelons with a homemade crossbow.
Everyone has their poison: stunt tricks, drunken fights, cleaning videos, ASMR whispers from scantily clad streamers. The algorithm tests you with a video, tracks how long you watch, and, if it senses a spark, floods you with more.
A Stream With No Valve
Normally, I try to defend new trends against skeptics. Not here. If this endless stream of nonsense is the future of entertainment, then at least let’s pipe the sewage underground. I’d be perfectly satisfied with a “Do not show reels” checkbox—ideally in the operating system settings (since reels will inevitably creep into the lock screen and Start Menu anyway).
And for those who genuinely enjoy it? Well, I have an upgrade idea.
Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink has been implanting chips in monkeys, training them to control computers with their minds. The reward: a tube dripping sweet juice in front of the screen.
Now there’s the real innovation for social media. Forget brain–computer interfaces—algorithms already know exactly what you want. Just give people a juice tube.
