By skyforbes 
I’m not a fan of TikTok. It’s lazy, addictive, and engineered to erode what little attention span we have left. My sister, who’s an editor for a huge South African publication, routinely rants about the tidal wave of misinformation on the app (This is not her son- for context). She’s not wrong: studies have shown TikTok is especially good at promoting diet culture, fake health tips, and political conspiracies.
One 2022 study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that TikTok served harmful content to teens every 39 seconds, even after they signed up with terms like “healthy eating.”
So when my 15-year-old nephew told me, completely out of the blue, that he wanted to be a writer, I saw a rare opportunity. I told him that he could earn money writing on Medium. I’m not actually sure if Medium pays under-18s, but that was beside the point. The goal was to redirect him from passive scrolling to something creative.
Knowing that a teenager’s attention span is about as fragile as a sandcastle in a storm, I proposed this: write one drabble a day, and I’ll give you $2 for each. For the uninitiated, a drabble is a story that’s exactly 100 words — no more, no less. Day 5 just passed, and I’ve received a new drabble from him every single morning.