Is this just a post linked to the tweet in the headline? How has HN content gone so downhill?
TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
261–270 of 434 posts
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#262I'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…
> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general populati…
Yes, there is a huge disconnect in the Instagram discovery feed for me as well. I follow friends & family, some astronomy, photography, tech accounts but when I browse Explore it’s full of influencers and fit girls in thighs. It got slightly better a few months ago when I think they did something but only introduced 20% of my tastes rather than 0%.
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#263Is this just a post linked to the tweet in the headline? How has HN content gone so downhill?
My comment[0] from months ago still holds true.
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#264Earlier 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.
> 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).
The thing is, the engine creates the content. Not quite as efficiently as a human producer saying "I want a 30 second video about X", but through the feedback loop of what gets promoted.
Twitter is run by libertarians who prioritise free speech, and therefore what Twitter produces is more and more intense political argument. Once the Tahrir square revolution and the color revolutions happened, that's what the place is locked into.
Instagram created the "influencer": young hyper conventionally attractive women photographed in beautiful locations, advertising products like energy drinks on their own account rather than a traditional modelling agency structure.
Youtube created the "let's play" and the "thirty to 120 minute political rabbithole" and the "shocked face thumbnail" genres.
Tiktok's secret weapon - and I'm not familiar with how it works in detail, but the effects are very clear - is a video editing tool, a content creation system, that is accessible for ordinary people. The evidence of this is that much of the "reels" content on Instagram's Tiktok clone has Tiktok watermarks on it.
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#265I 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 subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list). I think we have the same "problem": "content" doesn't engage us, "discussion" does. It's not so much about the exact topic as much as the ability to…
Wait. Isn’t “discussion” just another form of “content”? How is it really different?
I thought you might be referring to “other people thoughts” outside your bubble? Which could hint to why you don’t like Instagram (they try to keep you in one thought bubble) compared to HN/Reddit.
PS: I’m actually interested in both, content and discussion. Which is bad because you get addicted to all kind of platforms!
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#266I find any site that has a long/infinite feed of posts a bit like daydreaming - you don't know what thought is going to come up next, you hop from one thought to the other to the other, thinking about mostly useless things or even things that bring down your mood until you suddenly snap out of it realising how much time has been wasted.
A relative easy fix here is to add some hurdles to seeing feeds in the first place e.g.
- uninstall apps on your phone and bookmarks in your browser.
- install uBlock ad blocker and block pages with feeds like the front pages of reddit, the Youtube front page and recommendations sidebar, all of Facebook etc. Or even block by DNS. You can turn all this off but at least you have to make a decision to do it.
I find when I have to purposely search for things I'm much less likely to get roped into daydreaming through feeds and will make progress on useful things I want to learn more about. At least Hackernews doesn't update that often and isn't full of useless memes.
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#267I tried it a couple of times, and found most content stupid. 90% was girls trying to be cute. Some DIY ones were OK, but I'd rather watch 40 minutes of Tech Ingredients on YT.
> 90% was girls trying to be cute
And 90% of those girls have an OnlyFans account. For an app that was first / still is targeted towards children and teenagers I find that extremely predatory and dangerous.
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#268Earlier 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…
Banning LGBT content is definitely social-engineering its users.
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#269Yes. For many times I have to remove it from my phone after I realized hours of time spent (not wasted) in the app day after day...
Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack
#270I 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…
Is it because you’re outside of TikTok? You maintain a mental model of the app and its algorithm. The app is in your lab, not the other way around. A like or a share is a calculated action that occurs simultaneously in your mental model and in the app. Thinking like that kills immersion for me. For example, I was playing Mass Effect 2 on my Framework (with Wine) yesterday and caught myself thinking about whether any…
I sometimes wonder if I'm not enjoying TV and movies to the fullest because I get distracted by thinking about where I've seen the actors before, the production process, or how they were able to achieve a particular effect.