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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

#191

Post by abliefern »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #98
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 prog…

How do you find these? I've given up on the app multiple times. Never got beyond being shown teenagers doing teenage things.

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

#194

Post by mlindner »

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…

In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.

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

#195

Post by inapis »

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…

Same reason why I am absolutely terrified of playing any instrumental music on Spotify. I let one track run till the end and my next 2-3 discover weeklies will be filled only by instrumental music.

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

#196

Post by seanw444 »

alar44 wrote: post #147
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.

Anyone who would rather watch 1 good 2 hour video rather than 500 random 10 sec videos isn't going to like TikTok. It's the dumbest shit I've ever seen. Half the time I have no idea what the fuck I'm even looking at. Maybe I'm old, but I think maybe the kids are stupid too. Both can be true.

Like the sibling comment, I'm in my early 20s. So pretty close to the target audience age. My friend tried hard to get me to create an account on TikTok because he was super into it, and making videos, and wanted me to participate and do them with him. I heeded him, and gave it a shot. Overall, it felt like a chore to try and remember to open it up and scroll through tons of short clips.

I like to learn from long-form content that can go into detail on a topic. That's much more appealing. Then again, I'm on Hacker News, and I think the majority of the people here are the kind of people that prefer long-form content over short-form, otherwise we'd be scrolling through TikTok rather than reading articles and typing multi-paragraph comments.

What I was originally trying to say though is: I don't know that it's old age. I'm young and I don't find it enjoyable.

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

#197

Post by ako »

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…

It's interesting that these companies go into these different product directions, while i assume they're both looking at similar metrics, and optimizing for the same outcome: engagement and number of users.

Somehow YouTube is seeing more engagement by showing more of the same, and TikTok is seeing even more engagement from showing fresh content.

Maybe the risk of an upward trend in outcomes, that blurs the fact that you could see even better trends by done things differently.

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

#198

Post by AlexandrB »

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 remember hearing similar things about Instagram vs. Facebook many years ago.

Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?

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

#199

Post by seanw444 »

alar44 wrote: post #150
arvinsim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Get off it. Asking an app to serve you content isn't giving up privacy. Get some fucking perspective.

Yes, it is kind of weird to say "social media exists = 1984" but I think they were meaning that it's worrying how many people use it without realizing they're basically doing the NSA's job for them.

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

#200

Post by mongol »

I used TikTok for some weeks in summer. There were lots of home improvement tips, cooking tips, and dancing. I appreciated all of it. Then I did not use it until the past month. Now all that is mostly gone. I now see skiing and Ukraine mostly. Not sure why it changed, but made me realize that it may differ a lot between people?
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