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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

#341

Post by mchusma »

trh0awayman wrote: post #289
fouronnes3 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that regard, I guess you're right that it was a success. In the 2 - 3 months I used it, it was probably for around 10 - 20 hours total. I was probably shown plenty of ads in that time and now they have a vector of my interests sitting somewhere, selling it to other ad companies. But I really just kept using it because I wanted to see what people were talking about - which was not about how successful it was, but a…

I don't understand why there isn't a downvote in TikTok. I tried for maybe 3 hours total just to try and get it to show me a feed I like. To no avail.

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

#342

Post by Kye »

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.

The hard truth. I don't use TikTok right now, but this is the kind of stuff I would see:

https://twitter.com/Vomit_Dragon/status/1506109341484474370

https://twitter.com/WatsyTheOtt/status/1507646007294631941

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1507592587426906114

https://twitter.com/tealeafraccoon/status/150735003807424512...

Some of it is actually from TikTok.

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

#343

Post by avazhi »

I'm 35 and I don't understand the allure even 1% - same with Instagram. I'd say the last social media that really made any sense to me was Snapchat, and that was simply because it had a singular purpose and worked well for it (but certainly wasn't something that I'd stare at for hours at a time).

Feel like a bit of an alien at this point (well, what I actually tell myself is that 25s and under are just fucking stupid).

Guess I'm a grandpa at this point.

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

#344

Post by relaxing »

altdataseller wrote: post #309
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…

What about Instagram Reels? Is that bland too?

The content creators aren’t there. Most of the good stuff is ripped directly from Tiktok.

Also their recommendations aren’t as good but that could just be a side effect of the above.

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

#345

Post by madeofpalk »

htrp wrote: post #26
karpathy wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

No other social network lets users send a “dislike signal.

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

#346

Post by Ekaros »

andrewzah wrote: post #246
arvinsim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah. It should be obvious that recommendations to work somehow you need to track what you like. Or other alternative is to just recommend the most popular mainstream thing at the moment... Which then get also attacked for various reasons.

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

#347

Post by relaxing »

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.

The priors say humans should not in fact be given more credit.

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

#348

Post by BurningFrog »

amelius wrote: post #285
sytelus wrote: post #73

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.

> It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content Is TikTok used equally by men (boys) and women (girls)?

It catches on pretty fast to what you like.

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

#349

Post by Ekaros »

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…

"Don't recommend channel" is very effective for me to ignore creators I just don't care about or content I'm at moment not interested in.

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

#350

Post by Ekaros »

htrp wrote: post #26
karpathy wrote: post #10

Earlier 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 haven't tried it, but my understanding from reading the experiences that it is about content not the creators.

Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook all about creators and social "connections" or follows to these. So you get the good with all the ugly and horrible. Want insights, art or jokes. Get the horrible political opinions and signalling too... And then see all the fights.

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