Live data from Hacker News

TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

twitter.com

241–250 of 434 posts

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

#241
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More data beats better algorithms, and Tiktok gets a lot of signals about what you might like based on how long you watch, how many times you watch, what you like, what you comment on, if you go to the profile page of a video you just watched, if you share, etc. Multiply that by all the videos you can see in a single hour, and Tiktok learns more about you than YouTube has in the past 5 years of use.

Absolutely not - I was using youtube for 10 years and every year my feed gets worse. Now the original content creators are dissapearing from my newsfeed and uts fetting invaded eith short clips of family guy. Its also will show me same clip again and again. It shows clips from creators i disliked. New uploads of creators i follow sometimes arent on my feed - its a shitshow. Half of comments are trolls and bots.

> family guy

Holy crap literally this happened to me few days ago

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

#242
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…

No post body was provided.

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

#243
post #147
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.

Comparing things like vine or TikTok or Instagram reels to a 1 or 2-hour long video makes no sense at all. Those are wildly different things and both have their time and place.

I haven’t used TikTok but I do use Instagram reels and the feed is what you make of it. I follow a lot of musicians so I get interesting snippets of songs or things people are working on, or theory/exercise tips etc.

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

#245

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…

>This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.

>TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.

It widely depends. A lot of apps do override the back button behavior too, (especially ones that have lots of state, to avoid you exiting the app when you've filled 9 fields or are deep in a scroll) at the very least, ask if you want to exit. TikTok doesn't display a message, but a second back press closes it anyways.

>What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.

Hilarious. Youtube has been convinced for the past few months that I really want to watch Nurburgring laps because I watched a single F1 reel, and occasionally suggests Jordan Peterson throughout whenever there's even just a single, accidental click on an edgy video. Netflix recommends its own dogshit. Absolutely no engine has good recommendations. At the very least, TikTok is heavily influenced by both their guesses, and by what I do. When I tell tiktok to fuck off with the videos about X, I truly will not get X videos. So, between a shit engine that believes it's better than me at knowing what to watch, and Tiktok's that at least listens when I tell it it's wrong, I4ll take the one I can actually influence.

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

#246
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you have to search for things you like for a few months to give TikTok the data it needs for recommendations.

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

How else would a recommendation algorithm work? I don’t see why it’s concerning that a company knows that I like to follow musicians, etc.

What’s the alternative? Never finding new things because I refuse to divulge what niches or hobbies I like?

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

#247

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…

Just out of curiosity what are you using to read RSS feeds

Feeder on Android, but nothing yet on PC, because all RSS feeds has ugly, old school UI.

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

#248
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?

These things live and die by the recommendation engine. Only fun I remember having with Vine was when someone would compile top 10 vines and put them on YouTube…

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

#249

My analysis, without having read the article: TikTok's greatness is that it's the only happy social network!

There are toxic sides to tiktok just like any other social platform

Obviously. But TikTok/Instagram Reels are orders of magnitude more pleasant than Facebook or Twitter. It’s not really comparable.

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

#250
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> propaganda that COVID came from China Where do you think COVID came from? Can you provide independent sources to support your claim?

WHO investigation is an independenct source. Many scientists have condemn racism against Asian Americans and racist right wing propagnada against China [1]. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-strongly-...

I'm not going to claim answers, but many of the scientists on the WHO investigation and in that letter have conficts of interest: careers based on collaborations with labs in China, careers based on funding labs in China, etc. Dependencies upon the continuation of Chinese government support and upon the continuation of gain-of-function research. Many of these conflicts are still undeclared. Not to mention that the WHO panel reviewers were not able to access the raw data: data was synthesized for them by scientists of the Chinese government.
Post reply on HN