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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

#361

Post by tnel77 »

lvass wrote: post #355

If you believe that, you should not only avoid using it yourself, but also proximity to users. Would you want your social circle to be full of crackheads? If you believe it harms the brain, would you hire someone who uses tiktok? I, for one, would welcome hiring processes that privilege non-users. It's a shame the usual HR is filled with heavy social media users who even use it for hiring, but I believe this error wi…

While I mostly agree, I don’t like the idea of HR having access to anything of mine that is not work related.

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

#362

Post by nowahe »

ramraj07 wrote: post #87
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…

YouTube recommendations used to be quite good for a brief amount of time when google brain originally took over it I think? Now it’s a mess but it’s clearly due to exec meddling. like their absolutely product destroying migration towards videos 8 minutes or longer; most original content is now fully shit because they are filling it up with garbage to pad the time and release in a cadence. All stupid rules imposed by…

On the other hand, if I ever fall alseep in front of YouTube with the autoplay on, I will more often than not wake up in front of either Tom Scott's unedited video about sending garlic bread to space[1] or Micheal from Vsauce reciting primes for 3 hours[2] (which tends to result in some pretty interesting dreams tho)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAblynZYhI

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEaYbDWyQE

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

#363

Post by dahdum »

adamrezich wrote: post #334
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…

my fiancée is hopelessly addicted to TikTok and just about everything she shows me from there is wholly devoid of actual authenticity—it's all fake as hell. "cute" moments between couples that were obviously staged and rehearsed instead of being impromptu as implied, young mom's desperately making a big deal out of everything their kids do because she needs Content for the Channel, and more. I kind of get the feeling…

The staged relationship content is just another niche on TikTok. I skip that content almost immediately so it’s rare for the algo to surface any, but it’s popular because enough people really enjoy it. The same type of content is on YouTube and other platforms.

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

#364

Post by jancsika »

GlennS wrote: post #118
jancsika wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing." So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes? I'm going to go ahead and guess "pr…

Your comment is incomprehensible.

I'll take another stab at it.

OP's critique seems to be that TikTok caused engagement with their preferred content for a longer duration than desired. That's not an interesting distinction from what happened back in the day with people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. "Digital crack" is hyperbole if all it means is spending longer on the topics one already likes.

My question: is the TikTok algo consistently steering users toward/away from categories of content they would have otherwise had an interest in consuming? E.g., are there pro-unionization users who accidentally spend 2 hours watching pro-unionization TikToks? Or is the recommendation engine steering those users to 2 hours of some less contentious category?

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

#365

Post by sizzle »

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…

“Naturally selected and evolved”

Wow I never thought of this applied to algorithms and AI. Very profound to think about in this context, of users selecting the best videos with their clicks and evolving the naturally selected videos to out compete the other videos, in the same vein as survival of the fittest.

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

#366

Post by sizzle »

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.

I don’t understand, what does this signal about you personally?

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

#367

Post by Micoloth »

sizzle wrote: post #366
crubier wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand, what does this signal about you personally?

That you (consciously or not) like young dancing girls

This might not be a problem, of course, but in other situations might be something you don’t want to make public?

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

#368

Post by flycaliguy »

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.

In my case the algorithm decided I should be slowly forwarded into the arms of a pharmacist prescribing a stimulant to help with a bunch of mildly ADHD/ASD quirks in my personality.

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

#369

Post by wkrause »

adamrezich wrote: post #334
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…

my fiancée is hopelessly addicted to TikTok and just about everything she shows me from there is wholly devoid of actual authenticity—it's all fake as hell. "cute" moments between couples that were obviously staged and rehearsed instead of being impromptu as implied, young mom's desperately making a big deal out of everything their kids do because she needs Content for the Channel, and more. I kind of get the feeling…

I don’t know, we’ve had staged content presented as reality for a long time(ie almost all “reality” tv) and we seem to be doing ok. The TikTok content you’re describing doesn’t feel terribly different from that.

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

#370

Post by agumonkey »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #351
agumonkey wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God.. beyond the sad but obvious pattern. It seems the web is just a incoherent runaway. New "platform" > bubbly phase > distortion for bad incentives (money, fame, else) > rot > abandonment for next "platform". It was fun to observe that during the myspace days but it's getting annoying.

Huh it's funny. When you put it that way is sounds like all those same arguments people have been making against crypto - except the fallout from the "rot" phase of crypto will have very significant real world consequences. It's as if people who have been on the internet since those days can easily see what's coming.

Plausible, except I think crypto ending up as yet another asset class might enjoy a longer life because, allegedly, institutions are playing in it now. They can leave too though.
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