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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

#181

Post by kubb »

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…

yea, it's incredibly annoying, and "cringe". the feed just doesn't give me anything interesting, or satisfying. i never felt good about using it, during or after. it's just not for me. i also hate that synthesized lady voice

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

#182

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

It'll learn. Just pulled up my tiktok account and what I got was:

- A dude from Bermuda making food from the early 1900s: @bdylanhollis

- A delivery guy who meets new dogs on his routes and befriends them: @christhedogguy

- A woman who scratches her ass... donkey: @fortheloveofass

- A dude who owns a septic company telling about his day: @wellandsepticlife

- Random animal facts: @mndiaye_97

- Typesetting and printing: @sachistorymuseum

You see the generic dancing crap and memes at first, but the system will learn pretty quickly.

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

#183

Post by Jensson »

drstewart wrote: post #47
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.

>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.

Not all scams are illegal. For example, MLM's are scams but they are fully legal.

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

#184

Post by Gatsky »

ryanSrich wrote: post #7
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…

Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like. It’s both scary and extremely impressive. Twitter on the other hand seems to promote monoculture, and tends to push you towards what everyone else likes. It essentially pushes whatever is popular. Some of the most interesting content and users on Twitter are shadow banned, either intentionally or through…

Not my experience of twitter. I follow a few people who provide a stream of high quality insights about 99% of the time. It has materially helped my career for example.

I don’t use it as entertainment, I never tweet anything myself, I don’t read the replies to tweets and I have retweets turned off for almost all of the people I follow. If someone strays into tweeting about politics, culture wars, woke/antiwokeness then I cull them from my follow list.

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

#185

Post by icelancer »

laurent92 wrote: post #179
icelancer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like Yes, it absolutely does. Nonviolent social activism, LGBTQ content, and anything judged to be "subversive" is downranked/shadowbanned.

Oh that’s interesting. An entire platforms that hinges on not trying to social-engineer its users, and being successful. I’ve also heard that TikTok wasn’t showing the same contents inside China than abroad. It would be flattering the dopamine receptors worldwide, while flattering nationalist values inside China. Is it true? It could easily be that the engine is personalized enough that it does behave a bit different…

I've heard that too, but I've never been able to verify it. If you find any sources on it, please pass them along.

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

#186

Post by systemsignal »

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.

Focusing on content rather than a social network.

Most videos you see on tiktok are probably not people you are following, while most on Instagram probably are

They test content on a small circle of users, if metrics are good they keep expanding

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-...

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

#187

Post by gpvos »

jancsika wrote: post #31
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…

Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing." So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes? I'm going to go ahead and guess "pr…

Are you referring to some in-joke that I am not getting?

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

#189

Post by ur-whale »

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…

> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc

I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it.

Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever.

What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral?

Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?

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