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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

#291

Post by ratww »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #284
trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

Not quite sure how you can call 30min a day for months not a success. The algorithm success is measured by how much time you spend on the app, not whether you enjoyed it.

If they spent 30 min a day to experiment it but was able to stop cold turkey, I wouldn't call it "addictive" like crack at all. You don't "experiment with crack everyday for a month".

I have the same view as them, to be honest. The algorithm isn't really special at all, but the app is where young people live, so there is a shit ton of content.

The point of the algorithm itself however isn't to offer relevant content, it's to offer an infinite amount, with a pittance of actual relevant stuff. You can call this "a success" for TikTok, but the algorithm itself doesn't have any quality at all, IMO, it's hot garbage.

People keep coming because they want to find that 1% content that is gold, but the algorithm doesn't give that. It's as good as a toin coss.

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

#292

Post by criddell »

henrikschroder wrote: post #231
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 legitimately laugh my ass off Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky? Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many d…

I’ve tried it twice now and it just doesn’t click for me. I think the most interesting thing it found for me was a video of a person doing some really excellent welding.

Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.

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

#293

Post by xenocratus »

trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

> if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter

What would you say your hobbies are?

There are obviously some who wouldn't find much of value in TikTok because the nature of the content (3 minute videos) cannot deliver in-depth technical material about a complex topic, for example. The medium is clearly very different from those that you found addictive, so blaming the algorithm for not delivering good content might be a case of blaming apples for not being oranges.

I've had two separate experiences with TikTok - in the first one I ended up as you describe, seeing mostly content that I found boring or useless. The second time I made a mental note to not interact in any way with content that seemed in the same category - I would move on to another video as fast as I could. That helped a lot, and now I enjoy at least every other video I see. But then again, I don't use TikTok for hobbies, it's mostly for generic interesting stuff.

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

#294

Post by skummetmaelk »

cmckn wrote: post #64
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.

I interviewed with them last year, and literally everyone I spoke to was brilliant. I think a lot of their magic is in hiring great people and having a very flat org chart. They get out of people’s way, and let them do cool shit.

Nothing makes me more depressed than thinking about the amount of human ingenuity dedicated to making teens spend as much time as possible consuming "digital crack".

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

#295

Post by saiya-jin »

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…

Imagine all that time spent watching other people do hobbies you would like to have instead be spent actually doing those hobbies. Where would your life be right now and where would it go from there.

Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.

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

#296

Post by lftl »

pjc50 wrote: post #273
rococode wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really does seem like a lot of the magic here is simply the format. The video lengths are a perfect balance between short enough to be addictive, and long enough to enable content more varied and interesting than just short gags. Instagram and Facebook get bland real quick. Youtube/Netflix videos are often too long to be really addictive - "just one more" isn't as persuasive if "one more" takes 10 min+. With short…

> Vine was hugely popular when it was shut down by Twitter, and I think it'll go down in history as one of the largest corporate mistakes every made. They were so close on the format - they just needed to allow slightly longer videos (which they did with Twitter message lengths around they same time they shut down Vine!!!). Vine's top creators "unionized" and started demanding to be paid a cut. Vine had to be destroy…

That's somewhat ironic since TikTok pays certain content creators, although apparently not well.

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

#297

Post by trh0awayman »

xenocratus wrote: post #293
trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

> if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter What would you say your hobbies are? There are obviously some who wouldn't find much of value in TikTok because the nature of the content (3 minute videos) cannot deliver in-depth technical material about a complex topic, for example. The medium is clearly very different from those that you found addictive, so blaming the algorithm…

I think some hobbies work really well for the format.

At one point in my life, I was interested in chicken breeding. I could see that being really easy to capture in TikTok format. I'm also a long distance runner - so that's a pretty popular hobby, but I don't know that I'd ever watch a video about it.

But I'm primarily interested in early Christian history and treasure hunting/specific antiquities. I'm interested in virtual worlds like Ultima Online.

There are some accounts that deal with those topics, but I'd mostly get general history videos and gem/mineral hunting videos, which I'm not really interested in - at all.

Like you said, I would occassionally see a video that was outside of my hobbies that I found interesting.

But maybe TikTok is telling me something else: maybe I'm just a very dry boring person these days.

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

#298

Post by Kaze404 »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #294
cmckn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with them last year, and literally everyone I spoke to was brilliant. I think a lot of their magic is in hiring great people and having a very flat org chart. They get out of people’s way, and let them do cool shit.

Nothing makes me more depressed than thinking about the amount of human ingenuity dedicated to making teens spend as much time as possible consuming "digital crack".

Definitely don't think about all the ingenuity that's wasted on making you click or buy something then.

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

#299

Post by 7952 »

pjc50 wrote: post #264
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.

> 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 theref…

I watched my nephew create a training montage for a toy. He takes in some video sequences, adds some music and gets something far more compelling and does so quickly. We just don't have a good natural understanding about what turns raw content into a good video. Tools like this help massively with that.

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

#300

Post by [deleted] »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #294
cmckn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with them last year, and literally everyone I spoke to was brilliant. I think a lot of their magic is in hiring great people and having a very flat org chart. They get out of people’s way, and let them do cool shit.

Nothing makes me more depressed than thinking about the amount of human ingenuity dedicated to making teens spend as much time as possible consuming "digital crack".

[deleted]
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