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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

#411

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.

Young dancing girls is exactly how it was advertised to me, a not-so-young adult, when it was still called Musical.ly. I remember being throughly creeped out by how shameless those musical.ly YouTube ads were.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, it depends on what your goal is. If you want to emulate human driving, then pure vision is a viable way to go. After all, humans drive also using pure vision.

But your car has to drive a lot more cautious than with more sensors, like lidar. Can't be 100% sure this white blob is not a truck? Then you have to slow down. With lidar, you can be a bit more robust, but you still need vision to identify objects.

And if your goal is to build a non-human driver, that is one that drives "perfectly" and pushes the speed envelope perfectly, then I think lidar is also only a stop-gap solution. What you'd want is active components in the street and in other cars. In other words, a virtual rail. In that case, you can accelerate and brake as aggressively as the humans inside would tolerate. You could accelerate together with the car in front of you in traffic jams, etc.

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

#413
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean why would you even discuss this openly outside of a scathing criticism that TikTok must be corrupting the young minds of children if the algorithm is starting to pollute your (or your wife’s) feed with young kids emulating highly sexualized dance routines, without you ever training it to do that..

The thing is that you DO train it to do that. Not everyone’s feed is like that. It just depends on what TikTok infers from your usage.

So in a way, saying that TikTok is outrageous is a bit hypocritical: it shows what you seem to like, and surely you calling it outrageous can only be a posture.

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

#414

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Young meaning really young.

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

Lolll read my message above again!

Most of us get exactly zero Asian girls on our TikTok. You just basically told everyone that TikTok detected that you probably have a (maybe subconscious) attraction to Asian girls.

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

#415

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.

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 Ti…

Lol. Assuming you’re not trolling, I’d say yes, you have to be aware that any signal from you (including time spent watching each video) is analyzed by TikTok.

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

#416

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In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.

Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".

Then I'll say it has a relatively minor use among the voting-age population. Most users are children.

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

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".

Then I'll say it has a relatively minor use among the voting-age population. Most users are children.

It seems voting-age adults are in a large majority, with "only" 28% under-18 and therefore 72% over-18 Tiktok users[0].

However, you have more of a point if you look at typical likely-voters instead of all voting-age people.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikT...

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

#418

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There’s nothing inherently wrong about short videos. Content isn’t inherently good because it’s longer or on a specific medium. Nobody is saying that only one type should exist. Everything has its place.

> There’s nothing inherently wrong about short videos. sure, but there seems to be something inherently wrong with people filming them ...

No there is not. Like anything else, there's good and there's bad content, and there's a LOT of content. I'll take a 30-sec or 60-sec video that's straight to the point versus a meaningless 8-10 minute video that's been padded with fluff.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lolll read my message above again! Most of us get exactly zero Asian girls on our TikTok. You just basically told everyone that TikTok detected that you probably have a (maybe subconscious) attraction to Asian girls.

I don't get those young girls (I mean children as you seem to imply) - but replying to your message, I assume some did. Or rather you did, or else how would you know they are "very young girls"?

It seems really off to accuse random people on the internet to be attracted to kids.

What I was saying is that I was shown young women, but it still annoyed me.

As for attraction - that is what TikTok's algorithm started out with, and I liked some of them, because why not? As I said, they are cute and they put in the effort to do some funny stunts or whatever. I didn't dislike them, so why not press "like"? Doesn't mean I want to see those girls all the time. Also yeah, I am a heterosexual male, so young women are attractive to me.

I probably would have liked a lot of cat videos, too, if TikTok had shown them to me. Doesn't mean I want to see cat videos all the time, either, and also not that I am sexually attracted to cats.

I only tried TikTok for maybe two days, so I really think it is a failure of the algorithm, not a reveal of my subconsciousness.

Since everybody was raving about the TikTok algorithm, which is what made me try it out in the first place, I assumed that I wouldn't have to be super careful in "training" the algorithm. Apparently I assumed wrong.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ti…

Lol. Assuming you’re not trolling, I’d say yes, you have to be aware that any signal from you (including time spent watching each video) is analyzed by TikTok.

So what? I don't know what you are implying? So you never like videos of young women dancing? You go on TikTok and are very disciplined to only click on videos with CSS hacks or something?

I uninstalled it for two days, so I really don't have a guilty conscience of secretly liking young girls or whatever. It was ultimately just annoying.

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