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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

#381
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…

> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it. Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there fo…

AFAIK the content is permanent.

There's a website as well as the app.

You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What is the feed like for women?

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

#383

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.

TikTok didn't work for me because of the young dancing girls. Yes, I clicked "like" on some of them, because they ARE cute and put in the effort. Doesn't mean I want to see young dancing girls all the time. TikTok showed me stuff and since I liked it, I clicked like. So TikTok shows me more of the same stuff, and not the other stuff which I might also like.

So I guess you have to be super disciplined to get a nice TikTok feed? Or just try it long enough? Or it only works for women, because they may click less on young dancing girls?

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, assuming he’s a heterosexual male, isn’t it just assumed he would like young dancing girls?

Young meaning really young.

Not really - just mostly Asian, so perhaps to you they look younger than they are.

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

#385

I 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 think of Tik Tok as being like Pringles - as in, once you pop, you can't stop. Something about being able to easily flip to the next thing, combined with TikTok's excellent recommendation engine, makes for a very addictive experience - for me, at least. If you're not enjoying it, despite using the product as intended, then I'd just guess you and it aren't a good fit. That doesn't seem to be any huge mystery - all p…

I found it very stressful because I couldn't get rid of the annoying stuff. Swiping it away would just bring up something new that was also annoying.

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

#386
The engagement in Tiktok is part of what makes it addictive. You post a video and Tiktok gets it in front of people who will engage with it(in many different ways). Then your brain releases dopamine. And the cycle of continues. Which makes me wonder, if someone created a wearable hardware device. Then, when you press a button it tells your brain to produce dopamine. Will this device be made illegal? Because that is exactly what cocaine does to your brain.

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

#387
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you want to back that up? A simple question: Where exactly are the robo-taxis that were promised in 2020 alongside with Level 5 FSD for release in 2019? [0]. [0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...

The AI people are doing solid work as far as I can tell. It is the marketing department and the twittering CEO that are scamming.

They continue to work on this project despite knowing it is fraudulent, which makes them complicit.

Besides, I don't see that they're doing solid work. It would be solid work if they ditched pure vision and moved to a system that works. Instead they are putting in heroic efforts on a dead-end technology. That is impressive in the same way that getting Doom running on a TI-84 would be impressive.

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

#388
post #319
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more I fear this is our generation's 'smoking'

Both things use chemical reactions in the brain to create an addiction. The only difference is that smoking is regulated.

I do not think they are the same. People addicted to social media can be locked in a room for a week, without social media, and show no adverse withdrawal symptoms. If you try the same to people addicted to drugs, they might die.

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

#389
post #5

Maybe it's because I haven't used it, but a lot of the language around TikTok feels exceptional in ways that aren't justified: Twitter has (tens of?) millions of "terminally online" users, but we don't compare it to "digital crack." This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk abou…

I don't believe all those kids using TikTok have the faintest clue it's "a weird Chinese app".

Even if they do, they do not care. The user only cares about what the app can do for them.

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

#390

tiktok has great features that make its content more addicting to return to than any other platform: - it’s all video means it’s higher quality than an image - every video is guaranteed views which lets anyone go viral - when anyone can go viral you get more organic content. depends on your patterns but i think most people see majority videos by regular people. the content is much more relatable - no need to follow -…

Yup, you got it. Tiktok is not digital crack. It is digital cocaine. The purest form.(Assuming the purest form is the best).
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