My mum watches them and I can't help but look over sometimes. It's just grievance interspersed with ads, people reading ads while pretending they're not reading ads, and inane shit like Piers Morgan and Jordan Peterson talking about how success is your children choosing to hang out with you and how valuable family is. The other short video platforms aren't exactly intellectually deep but reels seems like the lowest of all of them. Most videos are just people acting out epic owns on Karens and Managers and Obnoxious Mothers-in-Law and lifting aita posts whole cloth and reading them out with ai tts over Minecraft parkour clips.

Obviously I have a sample size of 1, and my mum's always been partial to Karen-type content (she still reads notalwaysright.com in 2023) so maybe the algorithm is just serving her up what she wants but the constant barrage of these videos really feels like it's somehow designed to make someone distrust and dislike the general public (or in the parlance "lose all faith in humanity") and retreat away from engaging with other people. Idk I just find it really grim