The Matter of Comment Section Detour
A clip watched in thirty seconds contains a comment section that can occupy several multiples of that time.
The clip was thirty-two seconds long. The subject watched it.
Then the subject read the comments.
The first comment was a correction of something in the clip. The second was a correction of the first comment. The third was a question about the correction. The fourth was an answer to the question that introduced a separate claim. The subject was now seven comments in and had stopped thinking about the clip.
This is comment section detour.
Any case of comment section detour entered for less than a minute may continue until the user notices time again. The subject did not notice time. The subject was reading a debate about regional terminology in a thirty-two-second clip about a cooking technique. Both the terminology and the technique were unfamiliar to the subject. Neither of these facts shortened the session.
Structural Observation
Someone spends longer reading comments under a short video than watching the clip itself. Each clip is easy to leave while the feed removes a natural stopping point. The comment section is not technically part of the feed. It is attached to the clip, accessible by a single tap, and it has no bottom. The subject scrolled past the point where comments loaded in batches.
Comment section detour extends the break by one clip. The feed removes clear boundaries between what comes next. The break becomes a session requiring a separate act of will to end.
Outcome
The subject stopped. This was approximately eleven minutes after opening the application for a brief rest. The subject closed the application, set it face-down, and returned to the previous activity. The comment section remains unresolved. It will be unresolved tomorrow.