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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

#321

Post by crubier »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #310
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 am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few…

Important reminder: don’t talk too much publicly about your (wife’s) TikTok feed, because it says more about you than you’d think.

I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.

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

#322

Post by Clampower »

oefrha wrote: post #60
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…

It also seems very easy to take recommendation into your own hands on TikTok with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible. Once I started to get quite a bit of political / cultural war crap in my feed; I “not interested” a few of them, the feed improved markedly almost immediately. With YouTube I guess you can sort of influence your recommendations by digging into your watch history and deleting a bu…

TikTok and HN (to a lesser degree) are the only places that don’t force feed me racial culture war stuff.

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

#323

Post by Clampower »

flyinglizard wrote: post #260
ako wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me, YouTube is literally the same - I get the same videos thrown into my feed in repeat. Apparently this converts well for YT and the result is that my feed is maybe 10% genuine discovery. The rest is shit.

YouTube also does this weird thing for me where, for example, I watch a couple of videos of an android related YouTube channel about new phones, and then it’ll recommend me videos from 2008 about phones being released then. Lol

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

#324

Post by EamonnMR »

codingdave wrote: post #305
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…

> Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds." Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to…

On reddit you need to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff, usually by stumbling across good subs from outside the site. TikTok is better at serving you the things you like as you passively consume them.

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

#326

Post by agumonkey »

ejb999 wrote: post #313
agumonkey wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally. It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.

Yet, but it will.

Hey, maybe it will stabilize.. surprises happen :)

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

#327

Post by foldr »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #206
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…

> 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…

I had to spend hours training Instagram not to show me endless pictures of hot shirtless guys when I go to the 'explore' feed. I follow one or two pop singers who sometimes post sexy photos, but for the most part I just follow people that I really know. I'm not sure how my feed ended up so sexualized. My theory is that Instagram notices that I spend longer looking at hot guys when they do appear than I do looking at other kinds of photos. (I am happy to stare at hot guys, but it's not what I'm actually looking for when I go to Instagram.)

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

#328

Post by rchaud »

agumonkey wrote: post #280
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…

Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally. It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.

It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion.

IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics.

At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues.

At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there.

It'll happen to TikTok as well.

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

#329

Post by dougmwne »

crubier wrote: post #321
NikolaNovak wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few…

Important reminder: don’t talk too much publicly about your (wife’s) TikTok feed, because it says more about you than you’d think. I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.

This is spot on. One person I know gets pimple popping on a fresh TikTok feed within minutes. I have no idea how the algorithm can converge on that so fast, but its certainly some dark NN magic.

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

#330

Post by SSLy »

baxtr wrote: post #265
johnnyanmac wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

Discussion is "content" but in very strong context to some other "content". Feed's next video doesn't broaden that context, it creates a new one. Reply on HN/lobsters/reddit/even 4chan of all places isn't like that.
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