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TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

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

#81

Post by vmurthy »

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.

You’ve to remember that they have an (ancient == valuable ) source of customer data. They started off as a news aggregator and must have had a decade of customer data to utilise while showing these videos. I remember reading in the book (the attention factory) how fanatical the leadership is towards investing in ML talent

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

#82

Post by rvz »

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.

> Do you want to back that up?

A simple question:

Where exactly are the robo-taxis that were promised in 2020 alongside with Level 5 FSD for release in 2019? [0].

[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...

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

#83

Post by novok »

10000truths wrote: post #49
kfrzcode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From what I've seen from Chinese tech companies, I've always noticed they tend to go one step even further in ignoring privacy. You think FB is bad, wait until you realize what Baidu, Tencent, etc do without even blinking. Probably because what the Chinese government demands of them, the only ones that stay standing are the ones willing to do that. And if your willing to do that, what is doing something similar when your not forced to?

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

#84

Post by sytelus »

wbear wrote: post #80
sytelus wrote: post #73

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.

In my experience, you have to search for things you like for a few months to give TikTok the data it needs for recommendations.

That’s not people below 40 say. They describe it as an instant drug.

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

#85

Post by novok »

sytelus wrote: post #73

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.

I used it for a few days and I can't even really remember the soft porn. I got pretty quick into science, comedy and cute/stupid animal behaviors. I pretty much thought "I understand why people like this" and then quickly stopped using it. I think the fact you can't use it anonymously unlike youtube somewhat disturbed me and I stopped.

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

#86

Post by ClumsyPilot »

xnx wrote: post #65
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.

More data beats better algorithms, and Tiktok gets a lot of signals about what you might like based on how long you watch, how many times you watch, what you like, what you comment on, if you go to the profile page of a video you just watched, if you share, etc. Multiply that by all the videos you can see in a single hour, and Tiktok learns more about you than YouTube has in the past 5 years of use.

Absolutely not - I was using youtube for 10 years and every year my feed gets worse. Now the original content creators are dissapearing from my newsfeed and uts fetting invaded eith short clips of family guy. Its also will show me same clip again and again. It shows clips from creators i disliked. New uploads of creators i follow sometimes arent on my feed - its a shitshow. Half of comments are trolls and bots.

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

#87

Post by ramraj07 »

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…

YouTube recommendations used to be quite good for a brief amount of time when google brain originally took over it I think? Now it’s a mess but it’s clearly due to exec meddling. like their absolutely product destroying migration towards videos 8 minutes or longer; most original content is now fully shit because they are filling it up with garbage to pad the time and release in a cadence. All stupid rules imposed by YouTube, which just takes creativity out of people.

It’s also possible any recommendation system can only stay pure for a few years until everyone from both sides is gaming them so badly for money it just cannot work anymore.

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

#88

Post by arvinsim »

wbear wrote: post #80
sytelus wrote: post #73

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.

In my experience, you have to search for things you like for a few months to give TikTok the data it needs for recommendations.

It is scary how easy and willingly we just give up our privacy and data away.

Truly the future is Brave New World, not 1984

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

#89

Post by dehrmann »

jodrellblank wrote: post #16

" If people have the right to be tempted - and that's what free will is all about - the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold. " - Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, "Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, March 2007 https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...

And you don't need AI for this. There are lots of media outlets with entertainment news that at best, lack nuance, but most often just spread misinformation in an echo chamber they built.

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

#90

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

secondaryacct wrote: post #72
kpennell wrote: post #4

I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't…

The first Chinese app with some traction and it blows american ones by being delightful and diverse :D Wait for them to start doing TV shows with some non-Chinese focus.

I think Chinese cultural exports obviously lag behind those of Japan and Korea because the government censors confine their creatives, leaving them less free to create.

The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon.

I'd love if they proved me wrong.

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