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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

#161

Post by acchow »

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…

Tiktok is the anti-Instagram.

It rejects Instagram’s focus on aesthetics and instead appeals to playfulness and authenticity.

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

#162

Post by chefandy »

mym1990 wrote: post #100
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 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.

About a year and a half ago, I acknowledged how negatively some reflexive social media habits impacted my life and managed to extricate myself from them. A year or two before that realization I installed TikTok to see what the fuss was about, checked out the stream for a few minutes, looked up at the clock to realize it had actually been about two hours, and immeditealy uninstalled the app.

Astonishingly good attention and interest manipulation. Terrifyingly good, in fact. I don't moralize about getting lost in trash entertainment, but there's a significant swath of the population for which this format combined with these design patterns is a big problem.

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

#163

Post by oefrha »

dmitriid wrote: post #145
oefrha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also seems very easy to take recommendation into your own hands on TikTok with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible. Once I started to get quite a bit of political / cultural war crap in my feed; I “not interested” a few of them, the feed improved markedly almost immediately. With YouTube I guess you can sort of influence your recommendations by digging into your watch history and deleting a bu…

> with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible First time I heard about it. If it's hidden behind an undiscoverable gesture/tap, it's not accessible.

IIRC it’s among the first things they onboard you about. It’s also in the share menu, you should have seen it if you ever tried to download or share a video, or create a duet, or something. Long press is just an easy way to bring it up. Given the percentage of people commenting on TikTok threads who’ve never used it, “first time I heard about it” doesn’t mean much.

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

#164

Post by w-ll »

balls187 wrote: post #143
w-ll wrote: post #114

Why no one in here understands TikTok is because ya'll old. Like, I know you don't wanna hear that as the reason, but it's true. Can't ya'll remember some shit your parents didn't understand, but just made sense to you?

Yes, to a certain extent--along with age comes wisdom and experience, which is likely what contributes to the lack of appeal tiktok has to older people. My parents did not understand why I got a tattoo when I was in high school; lucky for me, all mine are easily hidden.

Age doesn't guarantee wisdom. Kids today get tattoos on their face, they arn't trying to hide them.

Which is to say. They are going to do things, new things, that don't make sense to us... Im not claiming to 'get it', but i get that they are going to do new stuff that confuses me.

Older folks claiming to have wisdom, and shaking a finger at the kids is as old as history.

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

#165

Post by w-ll »

alar44 wrote: post #151
w-ll wrote: post #114

Why no one in here understands TikTok is because ya'll old. Like, I know you don't wanna hear that as the reason, but it's true. Can't ya'll remember some shit your parents didn't understand, but just made sense to you?

Not like this. Yeah, we had different tastes in media, but TikTok is to video as radio commercials are to music. It's like you guys are just watching commercials nonstop. It's nearly devoid of actual content.

HN is full of commercials. Some days the ratio of commercial to content is worse than other social media.

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

#166

Post by Jensson »

fartcannon wrote: post #135
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 can relate, but depending on your perspective, maybe even worse because I find the recommendations off-putting. I don't understand what's happening that people like. I can't think of another word: It's just off-putting. Discordant. Dissonant. It's like being a atheist, raised in an atheist house, in a country full of atheists and then going to church for the first time.

I think it is like licorice, some say they love it but I can't imagine why anyone would want to eat it as the taste is so overwhelming and horrible.

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

#167

Post by bodge5000 »

I'm not on TikTok (I heard about all the data collection and decided I didnt need another one of those in my life), but it does look interesting and good fun.

That being said, what I notice the most is the speed at which people are able to read the captions. I'm not old at all, mid 20's, but whenever my younger brother shows me a tiktok I have to ask him to pause it so I can read the text, whereas he can watch a 3 second clip with text and understand it in realtime.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a slow reader, entirely possible, but it does seem the next generation is, rightfully so, optimising more so for fast data processing rather than retention. When you have limitless information at your finger tips, you don't so much need to keep all that information as you need to process it very quickly... Or I am just a slow reader.

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

#168

Post by cobertos »

madeofpalk wrote: post #103
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 understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP. Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees. I will say - I've never seen a social network…

I agree though with your last point. I get a lot of queer content and it's usually very welcome. Though some niches in that subset that focus on discussion of harassment of queer people are much more anxiety inducing.

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

#169

Post by Jensson »

wara23arish wrote: post #120
badestrand wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just entertainment. You could say the same about books or TV. At least Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social and interactive and encourage people to produce content instead of just consuming passively.

Someone’s who’s read a lot of books is called well read. Someone who’s watched a bunch of shows is called a binge watcher. No matter what they’re called, reading specifically requires more active thinking than watching stuff. I wouldn’t say theyre the same.

Someone who read a lot of porn novels wouldn't be called well read, and someone who watch a bunch of college lectures wouldn't be called a binge watcher. What matters is the content, not the form of the content.

It is just that simple content tend to choose easy to digest mediums, there is not much demand for low effort literature today since people just watch movies instead.

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

#170

Post by nytesky »

I think your title is prescient. The algorithm is amazeballs at engaging content, TikTok has been linked to even worse outcomes in teens, and the Chinese govt limits their own youth strictly.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934

It’s much more like a drug (or to lean on the paranoid side, weapon) than normal social media.

US social media companies have clearer objective: sell ads, make money, go public etc.

With Chinese govt involvement ByteDance has murkier intentions, and I can’t help but be reminded by another nation’s foray into social media in 2015-2016.

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