Study reveals some teens receive 5,000 notifications daily, most spend almost two hours on TikTok | Kids officially don't like Facebook
Study reveals some teens receive 5,000 notifications daily, most spend almost two hours on TikTok | Kids officially don't like Facebook::undefined
https://www.techspot.com/news/100327-new-study-reveals-teens-receive-5000-phone-notifications.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world643
Comments180
5,000 daily is 3.47 per minute for 24/7. Insane?
probably from all those people
who can't form a single sentence
without hitting "send"
every two words
I heard it coined as they use the send button as punctuation.
Mhm, I’ll absolutely do this sometimes, as a stylistic choice. I usually type and text with perfect spelling and punctuation (at least as close to perfect as my brain can get!)
Sometimes, typing in a punctuation-free or texting in a rapid manner like that can make a message come across the way it sounds in my mind.
I kinda need to do this with my dad, otherwise he doesn’t notice texts. For example he texts me “Buy that spread for €0.79”. “Hazelnut or cocoa?” which if I don’t follow with ~5 question marks, he won’t even notice.
I mean, it's understandable in cases like those, but when you tell a story that doesn't require an immediate answer and you end up sending 20 notifications instead of putting it in one longer message, it's more than annoying.
ew
Ok boomer
One day he will be gone, and you will give anything to have one more call with him.
Call? What's wrong with you?
I recently started dating again and noticed a lot of people do this now it’s very annoying.
I've got one person doing that in my work group chat. I've got Buzzkill installed for the sole purpose of muting the chat for five minutes whenever they send a message in order to avoid my watch constantly vibrating for two minutes.
TIL about Buzzlill. Holy shit. I could probably do the same thing with Tasker but I'll happily pay $4 so I don't have to.
it can also be plugged into Tasker :) you can set conditions to run Tasker profiles, for example. just saying.
Buzzkill is the first thing I installed on my OnePlus 11. I don't remember exactly, but I couldn't get some notifications to come through as vibrate only, and the ones that did vibrated for too long. Buzzkill let's me not only create custom vibrate notifications but also set the strength and duration. Game changer for sure
What's
With
Wrong
That?
What's the disadvantage? I really only see advantages.
So here's an example:
The first message introduces a conversation followed by a follow up. As soon as you send the first message it's easier to send the second one too since you already introduced the conversation.
The other person then answers with a short answer where they don't really have to think about what they write and how they write it. You instantly get an answer.
https://nohello.net/en/
as opposed to:
The amount of times I’ve had to send this to other developers is infuriating. I’ll wait 5 mins for them to send the part after “hey.” I’m not replying back without an inquiry. I’ve got work to do.
I don't bother responding to 'hey' messages either. Tell me what you need.
Yeah same here, if they don't say anything after "hey", then I'm not going to put in additional effort to get more work dumped on me
I don't really see a problem with that. Also it shouldn't vibrate if you're already in the chat. So that really isn't a problem since you usually see that the other person is typing and usually wait for them to send the message as long as they aren't taking too long.
and I do, because it doubles the amount of notifications I receive. if 5 people ask me something that way, I end up with 10 notifications, half of them being a pointless "hey". it's just plain inconsiderate.
I don't always immediately rush to check my phone when I get notified, not to mention that when the alerts are fired in a rapid sequence like that you often just don't have time to open the conversation before the next alert arrives.
Then you're slow. I almost always have the phone in my pocket
My friends in a group chat sometimes have something to ask me so they be like: 'Hey, Critical_Insight?' - to which I two hours later reply: 'Yeah?' and then maybe an hour later I get the actual question and an hour from that I reply to it. If they instead would've just asked the question in the first message, I then would have answered to in in my first reply, and then be done with it. Maybe it's just me, but I see that as waste of everyones time.
I know a lot of people who never change their Discord notifications. They get notifications for every message in every channel in every server. It's insane.
Obviously they do not actually interact with these notifications. They tune them out, and I guess eventually they will swipe them away. Personally it always stresses me out a little when I see their phones with a hundred notifications. I've never been a proponent of "inbox zero" for email, but "notification bar zero" has been my standard way of using smartphones for as long as smartphones have existed. If I got 3 notifications per minute on my phone, I would probably smash it with a hammer and go find a nice cave to retire to.
What about permanent notifications? I've got "a few".
Yeah, I have a few as well. A lot of those can be hidden without being killed if you long-press them and click the gear. Others I actually like to have so I can see the status, e.g. I want to know if my VPN disconnects.
The key will disappear from the status bar if it disconnects, you don't need the app icon too.
It doesn't have to. For example ProtonVPN stays active even if it disconnects. There's still the VPN symbol, but the notification will tell you it's trying to reconnect.
I just glance at it and instantly swipe away what I don't need.
This number is skewed by Notifications John, who receives millions of notifications a day and should not be counted
I feel like I'd install a bunch of shit before getting anywhere close to a tenth of that. I'd hate my phone. However, I'm far from being a teenager and their ways and methods have become somewhat mysterious.
I can see my phone getting that if I let every app just push whatever they want. I purposefully and carefully go through and ensure I'm only getting notifications for what I need them for.
I average 250 a day. With 3/4 of those being messaging apps.
Easily achievable if you participate in group chats.
I thought everyone disabled notifications in groups
Probably also random games and apps spamming you to play them
60% of the group get less than 300 80% get less than 500
5000 is probably a very very small percent, and probably kids that have a shit load of followers.
Holy shit man. That sounds so stressful
I get a lot, although not that many, but I have sound turned off for most and clear them like once a week or so.
That's about 4990 more than I do.
I've disabled almost all of them. Even the ones I do get only appear as an icon on my notification bar. I don't even have lockscreen notifications anymore. I find it too invasive, and feel like the device is demanding my attention.
IMO all notifications should be opt-in. I basically have everything but my phone, text messages, and Outlook email off. The constant buzzing throughout the day was driving me insane.
I have rule where if I install an app it sends me a notification that isn't necessary for the app's functionality it gets deleted forever. I'd have to make an exception for work apps but I don't think its been an issue.
I have very few apps not from fdroid.
aren't they already? for the past few versions of Android, every newly installed app needs to ask you for permission to send notifications, and I'm fairly sure iOS has had it for even longer.
Turn sounds and vibrate off. Then you can keep it in your pocket and enjoy silence.
I'd love to, but I need to be responsive for work.
Then filter only those messages that you need to respond to. Not everything is urgent. Check the non-urgent things manually every 15 minutes and you will still be fine.
Yeah, I’m with you. I declared war on notifications during covid and they suddenly became super annoying whilst working from home
God, I wish I could get Teams to do that.
I disabled lock screen notification for a) privacy; b) so that I could see my nice lockscreen wallpaper
5000 notifications per day? That's over 3 notifications per minute.
Are they opting in to get a notification every time someone in a thousand+ member discord server posts anything at all?
I think it might be notifications for group chats they're in. Maybe spread over multiple apps? Anecdotally I remember having the same friend group on multiple apps, with a couple of members missing/added in each. So many times the same topic create double or triple notifications. But 5000 is insane...
I can't emphasize how important it is for you to control your phone, especially notifications. Every notification is literally a mind hijacking attempt. Regardless of the type of notification, it's something that disrupts our thinking and our flow.
Some of them are necessary—but most aren't.
All the native apps will of course try to get as much permission from you as possible, including notifications. Don't allow this permission freely.
Get really strict about which apps need to send you notifications, and when. Take it from a dude who used to give free reign to all apps for notifications.
Once I started thinking in a more digitally minimalistic way, it made a huge difference. Running GrapheneOS actually helped with this a lot. But you don't need GOS to do this and feel the difference.
I got some notifications turned on, but most of em are silent. So they still get delivered, but they're not time-sensitive. They'll be there when I check my phone next. I don't need em interrupting whatever I was doing or thinking.
TL;DR: Be strict about which notifications you allow, and when. It'll do wonders for your thinking, productivity, and mental health.
I've developed some PTSD like symptoms for when my phone goes off.
Notification, call, whatever. Immediate panic and I have to remember to breathe.
Even trimming every notification I can, it still happens several times throughout the day, and my phone only has audible notifications when I'm at home, most from my wife.
I left that job over a year ago and still I can't shake it.
Sorry for you, but how the fuck did you get like that ? If you aren't massively exaggerating, that sounds super un healthy and a massive mental issue. What can possibly make it become like that?
Sole IT person for a corporation and was on call 24/7/365.
It was just supposed to be a help desk position.
It was for an MSP that... Well, the whole thing was a nightmare, but I had lost my IT hospitality job due to covid and the place shuttering. I was desperate.
For me a simple combination of autism, massive social anxiety, and actual PTSD ^^'
It's a symptom rather than a problem.
Some jobs are incredibly stressful - often the result of being given responsibility for things which are either out of your control or you don't have resources appropriate to address. Sadly, this intense pressure inspires high levels of performance at the cost of the individual's sanity.
If your phone is your "inbox" or the way you're notified of incidents then it's natural that over time a notification will signal your endochrine system to go into fight or flight mode.
When a lizard sees a moving shadow and darts for the bushes - that doesn't mean it's scared of shadows it just doesn't want to get eaten by a swooping raptor.
This is a mental disorder that you need looked into.
Agreed. The only notifications I have on are for my email and texts. The first thing I do when I download a new app is turn off notifications.
Agreed. Use the screen time app on your phone, go overboard with it. I allow 30 min for Tiktok, 10 for IG, 45 for web browsing in general, 20 for Telegram, and even these I feel are too much, but I get so bored at work. It's really easy just to get into a flow state and not realize you sat there for an hour straight staring at your phone. Trying to find more small paperbacks to keep in my pocket to replace this.
Also the "Clockify" app on PC can track how much time you are using it. You can set it to remind you certain amounts of time like Pomodoro when using which is great and makes you conscious of how much time you're using.
The more digital dopamine you can replace, the better.
An open source, cross-platform, and local-first (so data never leaves your device) platform is ActivityWatch. :)
I just wanted an easier way to filter what is notified. I don't care if X or Y promoted profile posted, but I want to know if a friend did.
That unfortunately is going to be app dependent as far as I know. Your phone can set if a given app will alert you, but for example facebook would have to filter which friend's notifications get sent.
An app that let you manage notifications by user across multiple platforms would be amazing.
"I don't want to hear from Jay today" would be an awesome checkbox.
Yeah, I believe the newer android versions allow for that but requires app developers to implement notification sorting. Unfortunately it really isn't in their interest to do so.
I don't disconnect my phone from internet because my usage is too spontaneous to always be turning it on or off. I do have my app permissions locked down though, GPS always off unless I'm using it, and nothing is allowed to run in the background except my VPN. I totally disconnect my pc from the network cable when I'm not actively downloading something though.
5000 per day?! That's insane. I feel like I get bombarded with notifications, so I checked how many I got today. Exactly 69.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice
Nice.
I feel like you have a nice balance that still feels too intense sometimes. I bet I get maybe 30 on a normal day and 50 on a busy day.
Lessoning notifications is one of the things I actively strive for to enjoy life more.
Nice.
No one likes facebook anymore. It’s been junk for over a decade.
I was in middle school when it was getting really popular, now it's like that one guy from High School you try to forget about....
WTF? Why do people like getting notifications at all? Every time I get one on my phone that is not important I am just full of anger because it is distracting me from getting stuff done.
For me, notifications trigger a small hit of anxiety
Yeah me too. Fuck.
Literal doses of happy chemicals get released because attention. You should watch the Social Dilema if you haven’t already.
You can literally get people hooked on this and retrain on what is good happy time and what is not good happy time. Shit is scary.
I get notifications for precisely two things: Texts and emails. And only emails because of work. Otherwise it would only be texts. I turn off all other notifications the second I install the app because I don't need that shit.
5000? I get annoyed just from one from an app I forgot I had installed.
My mom's phone looks like a notification factory exploded in her status bar. I bet she gets a dozen notifications a minute. She has all of her Facebook notifications on, set to push; she has weather notifications from multiple weather apps; she has email notifications, text message notifications, advertising notifications from random stores... it's hellish. Thankfully all of her notifications are set to silent.
Anyway, having seen my mom's phone, I can well imagine 5,000 a day in someone who doesn't know or doesn't care about notification hygiene.
As far as I can tell she ignores all but the top two or three at any given time, and just checks individual apps (messaging, email) as desired. So functionally, it's like she has no notifications.
5000 is 3-4 notifications a minute 24/7. I'm not seeing how a phone could be usable at that point.
I don't have kids yet but things like these make me wonder how a parent would deal with the kids having a smartphone. If you don't get them one they're going to feel left out as you can be sure as hell that most other kids have one. I'm no psychologist but to me if you buy your kid a smartphone then you basically risk having him/her destroy his/her brain cells and attention span with Tiktok and Snapchat. When I was a kid I did have a cellphone, and I had a PC too, but our house back then didn't have internet and receiving thousands of notifications in a single day was definitely unheard of back then.
That’s a very valid concern. Personally, I think parents should keep their kids away from phones much longer. While I’ve only got a kid on the way, I’m hoping to keep them off of smartphones until high school.
That sounds too long to me. Since later in elementary school (3rd grade), smartphone (and tablet I had at the time) have been really useful tools for me. Sure, I definitely wasted plenty of time on Minecraft videos, but it's not any worse than TV. It helped me learn a lot of what I know now. Without that, I'd have problems getting into any high school. For example, it helped me fly through chemistry and physics like a breeze. Also I learned English, which has unlocked me access to even more info. I wouldn't have been able to pass 7th grade without studying for history, again on my phone.
But of course, there was less crap than now. I am happy I got to grow up with YouTube channels like ExplainingComputers, ElectroBOOM, LGR, Scott Manley, Techmoan, The 8-bit guy, Tom Scott, Veritasium, Ted-Ed, and others I don't remember.
But even before I had smartphone, I could already watch youtube on my Sony Ericsson W200i. That was something. It ran at like 5fps in SD quality, but it worked. And 50MB was basically infinite data.
I watch most of those channels so here are a few unsolicited recommendations:
Technology connections
Cathode Ray dude
And maybe Aging wheels
I definitely think tech should be a part of their life, but a personal smartphone is something I personally feel can wait.
Can you explain why?
At this point, smartphones can most of the time replace desktop/laptop computers. At least Android. I am not sure how it looks on the side of iOS. Though, of course, using e.g. Collabora Office on smartphone isn't nearly as convenient as LibreOffice on laptop, but it can be done. And with Termux, it feels anything is possible.
If you mean that they'll have it 24/7 which feels unhealthy, they can just leave it at home. I did that until high school (my own decision) because I didn't want to break my phone. In fact, I still do that when I go walk my dog. I just bought the cheapest dumb phone that I don't have to worry about for cases of emergency. It was less than 10 bucks. Of course I tend to forget it, so it doesn't really work.
I want my kids to have the tools they need to succeed, and I realize a smartphone has nearly become essential at a certain age, but they also control the lives of many people. Technology is an amazing tools, but it has been designed to be highly addictive. Kids have enough problems to deal with, and I don’t want to make things harder for them.
—- edit —- I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that I want my children to first learn healthy habits.
I'm torn because your cell phone use sounds pretty healthy but I worry others get a more negative experience overall especially with social media.
Also the idea of anyone prior to high-school having cell phones feels odd to me, when I was in school kids worked summer jobs to buy a phone so senior year of high school was a popular year to get into the cell phone game. I didn't get one myself until I completed college and thought I'd need it for work (I didn't). Hardly use it but it is expected to have once you're in your mid 20s making appointments and whatnot. But do people really expect you to have one in elementary school?
My friends gave their kids a cell phone at 12. Lots of parental controls on it.
That’s about what I’m expecting. 12 and 14 aren’t that different.
disable notifications for most apps. I'm not sure if you can do it for iPhone, but any android phone, you can stop any app from sending any type of notification, even separating based on category. Eg. Turning off all youtube notifications except for security ones.
Have your kid read books, this will do wonders in helping them get ahead near the start of their school life, as well as doing wonders on their creativity and imagination.
Limit their screen time, and force them to find something else to do with their time. My mum did this to me, I hated it growing up, but I'm incredibly grateful now. It forced me to find ways to have fun without technology.
Drop these restrictions down when they are a teenager. Teenagers want freedom. Hopefully, through making your kid read books while growing up, they will choose to read books in their teenage years. I know I did, and both my sisters did.
Although this is the thoughts from someone who is 20, going off their own recent experience and from watching their siblings, I would definitely love to hear thoughts from others about this, tho.
My classmates get similar amount of notifications. It doesn't seem to be a problem, they just ignore all of them. There's no way you're going through each of those.
If you aren't even looking at most notifications why have them enabled? Just seems like you are torturing yourself by that point.
I block notifications on all my devices for most things beyond messaging apps. I also turned off badges on my mail client because I already know I'll never get to zero, so why remind myself of that?
Where are you guys subscribed to? I only get a couple e-mails per month.
I hope to teach my kids the beauty of Do Not Disturb. I get a lot of notifications but they don't notify me.
Things this has been said about before: internet, computers, video games, cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, comics, pulp novels, newspapers, the printing press, widespread ability to read/write...
Hell, the first kid to utter a word probably got growled at.
Just because we can't keep up as we get older, doesn't mean the kids are doomed. They live at a faster pace than us, it's always been like this. It's just technology didn't change as fast.
I'd go insane if I got 5k notifications in a day
Let's write 5k comments... evil laughter
5k notifications are 99th percentile. Probably the media is around 100-200 and average should be lower.
My stats say my phone gets ~140/day. I definitely ignore 99% of them, just like my 10k+ unread emails.
I'm genuinely curious why you don't disable notifications you don't need, and unsubscribe from emails you dont want?
Notifications get rolled up all the time, if I've received a lot of messages in Signal or Teams, I just have one notification in the dropdown for each group, even though I may have "received" 50 notifications from that group.
On emails, reply-chains are prevalent, so I can read the latest one and usually not have to open 20 emails.
I have some services set to email me events, transactions, and notifications, which I don't need today. However, sometimes these sites go offline, discontinue a product, remove the ability for you to view prior information or contributions, archive old data, change their ToS to something you can't stand, any number of things that might mean that data is now unreachable to you. So for those emails I just sort them off and they're archived.
I'm almost 40 and I officially don't like Facebook. Why anyone still uses it is beyond me, it's just don't a good experience anymore.
Tbf though, I've backed off most social platforms.
Meanwhile I’m here with 2 notifications a day that are @everyone tags or group notifications.
Kids have not liked facebook in ages
They've reported it for ages, but it's only been in the last few years that they've actually been not signing up.
I think you can just say “everyone officially dislikes Facebook.”
Except grandmas
Totally unrealistic. "Some teens" are the addicts that would have watched TV 16 hours per day if they were born 20 years before, young guys know how to manage notifications and most of them just don't care about them
*Raises hand shamefully, then looks for the remote.*
I turn off almost all notifications. I only allow messaging apps, and system notifications. Even then I find it too much to be honest.
I just have my phone always silenced except for phone calls from contacts.
Exactly same for me. Like, there's rarely anything urgent enough.
5000/day doesn't sound realistic, c'mon kids are addicted but it's not >5k per day. That's like one every ten seconds for your waking hours
Consider, if you will, a modest to large group chat. Say a few people start chatting. dindingdingdingding People float into and out of the chat keeping it going for hours and notification after notification after notification comes in. Maybe they're in a group chat for several classes and/or interests and/or family. I can easily see it. I have to mute the group family chat I'm in when they really start to get going, especially my wife and sister-in-law.
Day after day, a message every few seconds?
Well it did say some which may make their wild exaggeration of a headline partially true so they can generate more clicks.
I'm honestly wondering since study seem to primarily include Android users. It seems like the only main statistics they showed about notifications was for the most popular ones (including about eight specifically). It feels strongly plausible that 5,000 notifications a day could be coming from eight different apps.
Also, given how a lot of Android notifications are used for things like background updates, or also things like media controls (which are technically treated as notifications). This would also add a bit of plausibility to that metric. Especially in the case of a more digitally savvy user.
There's no thing we can do that we won't enthusiastically overdo.
How? I hate getting any notification unless it's a text or phone call.
I'm 36, certified old to a teenager, and I think Facebook is the lamest of them all. They're all pretty toxic (even Lemmy can be, definitely reddit) but Facebook is easily top 3.
Two hours a day? Rookie numbers...
5000 seems like way too much. That's roughly 1 every 15-20 seconds, including at night.
I would be interested to see what percentage of those are actual real interactions (e.g. DMs), which are general interactions (e.g. "XYZ liked your post") and which are marketing CTAs.
Apps are designed for maximum engagement. I don't know if my experience is unique but I turned off all notifications in Twitter's settings, yet it still shows exactly one notification when I launch the app. Kinda creepy how blatantly they ignore your wishes to not get spammed.
At some point notifications changed from solely "Look, this person interacted with your thing" to include things like "Look, someone on your friends list added a person you dont know" and i just know this boosted metrics enough to get some jackass a bonus.
Mostly because they don't actually know how to disable notifications
5000? lrn2 opt out. I'm always turning off notifications I don't care about. most. most apps overdo notifications and need to be silenced as a minimum. having my phone constantly doinking gets old pretty fast
I already get an internal struggle to scream out of frustration every time I see the mail box of one of my colleagues having 100+ unread mails. Most coming from automated systems like Jira, Jenkins, etc. I funnel all those mails into separate folders, and just click through them once in a while. Or mass mark them as read.
I don't think I could survive 5000 notifications.
Kids don't like Facebook!?
They don't like posts that have captions like "wait for it" or "when you see it" for clips where nothing even slightly out if the ordinary happens?
I use FB for the messenger app, and even then most people I know who were on FB ditched it for Instagram ages ago. Basically useless.
Instagram is just Facebook with more pictures though tbf
A plague on both their instances
Good, let Facebook die in the hands of the children .
There's an entire generation (40+ years old? Maybe a little younger?) who will never leave Facebook. It's like AOL was for their parents. They know how to use it, their friends and family are on it, and they won't quit using it until they're dead.
It's also kind of hard not to use at that age simply because it's like the telephone, just everyone uses it. I am no less guilty, but I loathe it.
Are those average?
This means there are even kids out there with probably double the amount
Of course not.
I just use GPT to summarize the article for me. Here's the results:
Source: Conversation with Bing, 10/1/2023 (1) Study reveals some teens receive 5,000 notifications daily ... - TechSpot. https://www.techspot.com/news/100327-new-study-reveals-teens-receive-5000-phone-notifications.html. (2) TechSpot | Tech Enthusiasts, Power Users, Gamers. https://www.techspot.com/. (3) TechSpot News Archive. https://www.techspot.com/news/.
Anyone actually know how to see a # per day?
Too lazy to manually count lol
Android (Samsung) has a Digital Wellbeing app that shows number of notifications (and source of each) when you tap "Screen time".
Thanks, never noticed this tab before
Guess I get about 170 a day
I think this is a built in part of Android (or Google Services?) now. Have the feature on the original Pixel and on a OnePlus.
Oh good! I just didn't want anyone to get mad or sad they what I said didn't apply to them.
Have discord mobile.
Be in a big, active room. Or multiple active rooms.
Have notifications on.
Easy.
I don't; but I can easily see how one could if they didn't bother turning them off (which if you're not disabling the entire app from pushing them, you need to disable it for every server/channel you don't want notices for).
That is not too shocking.
ok? it's a different generation, they define things with difference importance, it's a part of growing up
throw your fucking phone away
Because phones aren't a basic necessity in the Western world in 2023 or anything.
Yes don't use this specific copy of a computer use this one instead.
5k notifications from a Chinese propaganda tool. Not good.
So, 2 hours a day, which is more than 700h a year... Imagine if that time was dedicated to something productive. You can learn a number of different languages every year. You can learn carpentry and build things for yourself. You can sail around the world. Instead it's wasted on watching retards meow and giggle. Holy hell.
You can play that game with anything though.
People can pick what they waste time on for themselves. I’m not going to spend 2hrs/day on social media, but I might play a video game, read a book, hike in the woods, watch a movie, organize photos, whatever. It’s my time, and mentally checking out for a bit doing something that’s not “productive” gives me energy I can apply to other pursuits.
You are right of course. It's just as time goes by I start to value more productive use of it.
That sounds like a good way to shorten your life.
Oh yeah, definitely an over the top example to point out how micro managing your life isn’t always a good choice… hell, too much stress can kill you and that’s essentially what trying to make the most out of every second will do.
I was thinking about the diseases you'd catch from your unwashed hands.
How much cable did previous generations watch? 2 hours in an evening seems reasonable, maybe even low for some people
Plenty of movies are >2 hours long, plus like an hour of advertisements.
But on a daily basis?
Sure. Who doesn't like to chill after an exhausting day at work. So basically every day
wow this person hates fun
Sailing around the world costs money, but you can learn about other places through other people sharing their experiences on tiktok. There are livestreams teaching language, where you can get a much more personalized teaching and your questions answered without judgement for interrupting, there are carpenters sharing useful tricks, and showing how to build things for yourself. There are livestreams showing how to operate a crane at a shipping port, and what that career is like. TikTok has a lot more than the dancing, meowing, and giggling, although if that's what you watch a lot of and interact with, it will happily give you only that, but that's a user problem, not a platform problem.
So what? Every generation has their form of entertainment. How is this worse than reading a book or watching TV or playing a video game for fun? Or spending your time on Lemmy? Or really just doing anything for fun where you don't expect an outcome. I don't want to work every living minute.
Also yeah, you could learn a language a year if you do it every day but
Social media is mostly used if you don't have anything else to do and can't just leave. So like on the toilet or in school. Also who says they aren't doing something productive while watching? It makes repetitive tasks less boring. So you can totally still learn carpentry while watching TikTok or anything really.
Time you enjoy isn't time bad spend. Why do anything you hate doing? How does sailing around the world or learning a new language makes you enjoy your life more? Also: how is sailing the sea more productive than watching TikTok when most of the time, you do nothing on the ship.
For the same reason that studying art makes you enjoy life more. You see things you've never seen before. You learn new things to appreciate and you learn how to appreciate things in a new way.
It doesn't even say a large number of teens, let a lone a majority, just some. This is not normal.