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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

#91

Post by dehrmann »

kaycebasques wrote: post #68
productceo wrote: post #44

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…

> I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers > I subscribe to a bunch of... RSS feeds Does not compute

I'll add

> I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally

Liking the "technology industry generally" is closest to mainstream interests, but even then, people like that their new phone is thinner or their new Xbox has better graphics. Regular consumers aren't too worried about ARM vs Intel, MS dropping support for old PCs, or any use of blockchains beyond asset speculation.

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

#92

Post by silisili »

kristopolous wrote: post #23

I've tried it a few times. Even ran an account for a project I do. I don't know. Maybe I'm not the right personality for this stuff but I found it annoying and taxing. Open it up and you get these obnoxious videos and then have to press a button to make them go away. The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic. Lots of people love it so maybe I'm just too old. Perhaps they've "cracked some psychological secr…

I'm with you. I assumed it's because I'm older than the target demographic, but maybe it's just because I'm not a 'fun' person - don't sing or dance or party.

My wife loved it to death, and I just found it incredibly annoying and overbearing even just hearing my wife play with it.

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

#93

Post by productceo »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #71
productceo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So you weren't interested in dance, but you got interested through TikTok? Reminds me of how Pinterest's value prop includes exploration and inspiration (as opposed to searching for what you know you are looking for).

No. Some of the dance content hooked them but they used not interested to get rid of it.

Ah, thanks for correcting my understanding.

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

#94

Post by fragmede »

gutitout wrote: post #69
cmckn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with them last year, and literally everyone I spoke to was brilliant. I think a lot of their magic is in hiring great people and having a very flat org chart. They get out of people’s way, and let them do cool shit.

Are they an American or Chinese company?

Chinese, but they're building recommendations teams in Mountain View and Seattle.

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

#95

Post by reillyse »

tapoxi wrote: post #14

I gave it a shot last night and selected three topics: Comedy, Pets, Science and Technology. It gave me a lot of garbage. Maybe it requires much more frequent use than the 10 minutes I gave it, or it somehow infers a good jumping off point. I feel like there's something I'm not seeing, or maybe I'm just too old?

It doesn’t need a jumping off point, open it again today and watch a few more videos (or skip the ones you don’t like) it’s Algorithm is impressive.

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

#96

Post by dehrmann »

Sebguer wrote: post #8
stefan_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe all those kids using TikTok have the faintest clue it's "a weird Chinese app".

Not even to mention, in what world is TikTok "a weird Chinese app". It's just an improved and iterated upon version of Vine.

I wonder if there's a way Vine could have iterated and TikTok never caught on in the US. Was Vine just before its time, and that alone doomed it?

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

#97

Post by ALittleLight »

KarlKemp wrote: post #74
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...

Yeah, that's wrong: the market is quite obviously limited by the ability to produce temptation, not consumer's finite ability to buy it. As in: before TikTok, there was lots of TikTop-Temptation to be sold. Demand didn't change, supply did.

I think that's what the article is saying. The market will continue to innovate to provide greater temptations because that's a competitive and profitable strategy even though it will have some downsides.

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

#98

Post by lambdasquirrel »

productceo wrote: post #44

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…

When I was using TikTok, it was the first truly openminded social media platform I found. Stuff I was watching on it:

- A girl coder who showed people how she operated her light airplane, flying between different little Midwest cities where she lived.

- A free diver (living in Hawaii?) who could stay underwater for several minutes at a time (and film fun chill videos while at it).

- Good relationship advice from progressive-thinking folks who weren't out to make a political point, or shame one party or another.

- Nifty yoga tricks from someone in SoCal.

- Longboarding cosplayers from Asia (yes, they would dress up... and longboard...).

It was also the first social media platform where I saw plenty of positive representation of folks from different backgrounds – including the country my parents came from. Far, far cry from what I read in the US media, by contrast. Compared to the awful divisive stuff I saw on FB, I thought to myself, it's really odd that the US tried to shut this down. Call it addictive, but it didn't leave me feeling soul-damaged.

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

#99

Post by nsenifty »

ipaddr wrote: post #20

Maybe it's me but tiktok content is boring to me. Videos too short to care. Finding videos by your keyword is difficult. The camera angles are too zoomed and the thin width and increased height creates ugly looking videos. The videos themselves are people picking an action or movement and isolating it for effect. I wonder how many others haven't been bite by the tiktok bug.

I installed TikTok after seeing the above tweet but all I got was boobs and ass. I don't know if I'm supposed to be actively liking and disliking content but it is a hard pass for me.

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

#100

Post by mym1990 »

karpathy wrote: post #10
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…

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 think the important distinction in 'do I really want this' becomes whether I chose to do that activity, or if I kind of just got sucker punched into it.

I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.

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