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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

#221

Post by johnnyanmac »

Gatsky wrote: post #184
ryanSrich wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That makes sense, because you are aggressively tailoring your experience to make sure you only see what you want. No retweets mean you don't get distracted from your main focus, blocking any slightly controversial topics mean you don't expose yourself to the most ornery users. But that isn't how 99+% of users who tweet use twitter.

It's like a discord server where you set "slow mode" to 5 minutes, remove reactions to comments, and require a 500 character limit to any message. That's one way to try and turn a normally chaotic, real time chat program into a sane platform for longform discussion, but few users would describe discord that was just because one niche server retrofitted it.

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

#222

Post by HumanReadable »

vmception wrote: post #208
HumanReadable wrote: post #203

I tried on multiple occations to get hooked on tik-tok, but each time after spending an hour scrolling through the feed with absolutely nothing interesting appearing I gave up. Was I doing tik-tok wrong? I am a sociable 23 year old, so it's not like I'm way out of their target audience or anything. I am a bit confused as to why the algorithm seemed to be so poor at finding anything interesting for me, when have neede…

That’s a strange experience, I think you need to deliberately follow a few people and interact with a few things And then it will attempt to hook you more

like for example, after writing this comment I just tried creating a new account again (using my facebook to login).

Half the videos are in dutch for some reason (I'm from Denmark, I don't speak dutch nor have I ever lived there). I tried searching on some topics that interested me, and found some of them pretty compelling. Then I went back to the feed, and it just kept showing more dutch content.

Every time I've tried tiktok it's more or less been like this, except with less dutch.

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

#223

Post by captainmuon »

abliefern wrote: post #191
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it is a regional problem? Your name sounds German, I'm in Germany and also get a lot of teenagers, and a lot of dressed up people doing staged "funny" things.

I've never seen any interesting tech content, or insightful political content (beyond hot takes on current news), or interesing hobbies and DIY projects (instead I get a lot of people from Asia doing bricklaying or welding).

Maybe we are in the wrong bucket?

(Or maybe it is a scam, and they hired a ton of people to manually pick addictive videos for selected "influcencers", and the silent masses get random videos to please the masses? :-D)

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

#224

Post by fullsend »

ur-whale wrote: post #189
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 fo…

These are good questions and I think it’s nowhere near as rosy as OP described.

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

#225

Post by johnnyanmac »

dehrmann wrote: post #96
Sebguer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From what I can gleam, Vine simply had no way to monetize itself (something Twitter struggles with to this day, despite being the top 3 largest platforms), while Snapchat and Instagram could capitalize on that much more quickly as they implemented vine like features into their services.

And that just spelled the death toll. Why would a creator stay on one platform when the other is paying them? Consumers bemoan the constant bombardment of ads and now data tracking, but those are the costs of business if the user isn't directly paying a subscription (something services like Patreon and Onlyfans would take advantadge off around this same time that Vine was struggling. So Vine had potentially more than one way out). And if you don't/can't, some other billion dollar coporation will happily sell their soul for the trillionth time to outcompete.

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

#226

Post by mackrevinack »

inapis wrote: post #195
ogwh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i used to instinctively turn on private mode every time i opened the spotify app (on desktop at least, since it was easy enough to get at)

with youtube i usually open a video in a incognito tab anytime im watching something random, otherwise it takes weeks of clicking "not interested" just to get rid of some recommendations. sad times

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

#227

Post by froh »

wolverine876 wrote: post #153
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...

How and what is LessWrong doing? I haven't heard much about it in years. In a way, it's not a good fit in the 'post-truth' era.

From themselves, via about and a link there "A Brief History of LessWrong" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S69ogAGXcc9EQjpcZ/a-brief-hi...

> In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead. In 2017, a team led by Oliver Habryka took over the administration and development of the site, relaunching it on an entirely new codebase later that year.

> The new project, dubbed LessWrong 2.0, was the first time LessWrong had a full-time dedicated development team behind it instead of only volunteer hours. Site activity recovered from the 2015-2016 decline and has remained at steady levels since the launch.

> The team behind LessWrong 2.0 has ambitions not limited to maintaining the original LessWrong community blog and forum. The LessWrong 2.0 team conceives of itself more broadly as an organization attempting to build community, culture, and technology which will drive intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems.

I'd be curious about their funding

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

#228

Post by johnnyanmac »

okasaki wrote: post #215
realYitzi wrote: post #174

I think the truth is pretty dark. Until TikTok most recommendation engines placed the most weight on your declared preferences. TikTok doesn't seem to care about what you "say" you like." They watch your behavior to see what you actually like. So you can "want" to be shown math videos and like tons of math videos and follow dozens of professors. But if TikTok observes that you are more likely to watch a professional…

None of this seems dark and you're using some very charged language. Showing you a video when you tap back isn't "hacking your brain". It even says "tap twice to exit". Get a grip and give humans more credit.

> Get a grip and give humans more credit.

I started doubtinng that around... 2017 or so. by 2020 is was a complete wrap and I'm 99% convinced that humans truly do need to be told that companies aren't providing a free app for their amusement, and that companies don't care about them.

On top of that, I don't see it productive to cricitize someone for charged language and then say "get a grip". That seems to betray you message. Debate the content, not the user.

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

#230

Post by nicky0 »

grishka wrote: post #190

Probably a good thing I've never had it installed and never will. I do occasionally stumble upon TikTok videos in other places, but it's the algorithms that make it addictive, not the content itself.

It can’t be reduced like that. If anything it’s a combination of the tools for content creation (sounds, filters, duets, replies, text features etc.), the content itself, the comments system, and the algorithm. Honestly, if you’ve never use the app you have actually no idea what you’re talking about.
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