Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 434 posts

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#41

Post by tyrfing »

woodruffw wrote: post #3

Maybe it's because I haven't used it, but a lot of the language around TikTok feels exceptional in ways that aren't justified: Twitter has (tens of?) millions of "terminally online" users, but we don't compare it to "digital crack." This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk abou…

The primary difference between TikTok and other social media platforms is about a decade. For example, Development of a Facebook Addiction Scale - 2012. In other words, mostly recency. Another major difference is age group; these days platforms like Twitter will skew much older than TikTok, and "the youth are being corrupted" is really a timeless story.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#42

Post by yalogin »

bayareabadboy wrote: post #40
yalogin wrote: post #18

No wonder Facebook is spooked. They tried to get it banned in the US so as to buy some time, but it didn't work. I actually think Facebook would have banned the previous guy earlier but Peter Theil probably promised he could get TikTok banned in the US. When they couldn't deliver the TikTok ban, facebook didn't need him anymore.

Reality should determine your politics, not the other way around.

I fully agree, the above was just a theory obviously with a large probability window.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#43

Post by kingcharles »

It really is something else. I saw TikTok on TV a lot and it seemed just an extension of it's previous incarnation, Musical.ly: just being dancing around and singing.

Then I installed it to see. I was blown away. Within minutes we'd got away from the goofy stuff to genuinely awesome content about mental health that was really life-changing for me.

I love TikTok. I reserve 30 mins at bedtime each night for it. Swapping videos we've found by DM is one of the fave things my gf and I do.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#44

Post by productceo »

I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make sure to click like or add comment on interesting ones, in order to send signals to AI.

I'm not embodying any fake persona, just trying to find what I would find interesting. I just don't get addicting content. I even try searching so that TikTok would get explicit keywords from me.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).

I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally. I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers: I check out mainstream videos on YouTube like MKBHD and even subscribe to his podcast (This is to show I find content for "mainstream consumers" interesting, though I work in tech and know more about tech things than MKBHD's target audience).

Can someone help? Why is the whole world praising TikTok while I am failing repeatedly?

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#45

Post by ogwh »

htrp wrote: post #26
karpathy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, b…

I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows). My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.

Other platforms only look for similar content to what you've already seen. They don't take novelty into account.

If you like one picture of a dog on Instagram it'll just show you more dogs and you get bored. Watch a few YouTube videos about one topic and the algorithm gets fixated on it.

YouTube is so bad now that if you use it to listen to music the autoplay gets into an infinite loop of songs that sound near identical, it's torture if you don't already know what you want to see/hear.

In short the usual algorithms are tailored to find similar content only, rather than finding novel content several degrees of separation away from what the user has expressed interest in.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#47

Post by drstewart »

adfgadfgaery wrote: post #32
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #6

Wow, this is saying something since it's coming from(the),"Director of AI at Tesla, leading the Autopilot Vision team. Previously OpenAI, CS231n, PhD @ Stanford. I like to train large deep neural nets " (his Twitter description)

AI at Tesla is a scam, so it probably doesn't say what you think it says. It's a shame that Karpathy actually seems to know what he's talking about. Maybe he originally bought in to the Tesla vision and doesn't have the integrity to admit it's failed. Maybe he's like von Braun, doing great evil because he wants funding. Either way we lost a seemingly talented researcher.

>AI at Tesla is a scam

Have you reported this to the SEC yet?

>Karpathy actually seems to know what he's talking about

So it does say what he thinks it says.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#48

Post by bagels »

ogwh wrote: post #45
htrp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows). My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.

Other platforms only look for similar content to what you've already seen. They don't take novelty into account. If you like one picture of a dog on Instagram it'll just show you more dogs and you get bored. Watch a few YouTube videos about one topic and the algorithm gets fixated on it. YouTube is so bad now that if you use it to listen to music the autoplay gets into an infinite loop of songs that sound near identi…

Reddit made a change recently (in the last week or so) along these lines, to start injecting new subreddits in to your feed. They've picked up on this too.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#49

Post by 10000truths »

kfrzcode wrote: post #28
htrp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows). My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.

The massive data vacuum is probably part of it.

But that’s not at all unique to TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc. have massive amounts of data to play with as well. What else does TikTok have that these other platforms do not?

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#50

Post by adfgadfgaery »

discordance wrote: post #38
adfgadfgaery wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI at Tesla is a scam, so it probably doesn't say what you think it says. It's a shame that Karpathy actually seems to know what he's talking about. Maybe he originally bought in to the Tesla vision and doesn't have the integrity to admit it's failed. Maybe he's like von Braun, doing great evil because he wants funding. Either way we lost a seemingly talented researcher.

Do you want to back that up? Although FSD is still between Level 2-3, the ML system and work that has gotten it this far is pretty stellar.

Tesla released a doctored video in 2016 claiming to have a fully-functional system that needed humans only for legal reasons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo...

Over the years, they repeatedly pushed this narrative to sell cars. Tesla promised on several occasions to have millions of fully autonomous "robotaxis" on the road in 2020, making their owners in excess of $30,000 a year. Currently there are, of course, zero.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

Take a look at this video for what Tesla describes as a beta for their "Full Self Driving" system. A beta is, of course, meant to be feature complete software in final testing. Does this look like it's nearly ready to be pushed out to every car on the road?

https://twitter.com/BS__Exposed/status/1449158254081290242

Post reply on HN