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TikTok’s Poison Pill

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Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#171

Post by puppymaster »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #42
nixcraft wrote: post #5

There is lots of talk going around TikTok, especially now geopolitics has been added to this kind of discussion due to ongoing tensions between two giants. Instead of banning or removing the TikTok app, how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO. Let users download…

> Just make one rule for all. This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground. What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt. We'r…

while many struggles with the mental gymnastic, for me it has always been clear-cut. Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it?

Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light?

Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopic produced by Russian production house?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#172

Post by nradov »

grumbel wrote: post #110
madeofpalk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the "addictive" part of tiktok to ban? Scrolling? Providing recommendations? Seems quite nebulous to legislate against.

The core problem with most social media, including TikTok, is that they fully control how you can consume the content, be it the endless-recommendations-scrolling of TikTok or the Twitter or Facebook timeline. You can't browse it in a non-addicting fashion, even if you tried, as third party clients are not allowed. So the solution should be to force them to open up to third party clients. This won't magically make th…

And how much should those third-party clients have to pay for access? Who sets the price?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#173

Post by root_axis »

lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

It's just a video app, exercise some self-discipline and self-accountability and uninstall the app.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#174

Post by silicon2401 »

lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

> It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it.

That's most social media and even products in general. Profit comes from consumption, and the best way to keep you consuming is to keep you engaged. Products thrive off of outrage which is why platforms like social media and the news optimize for outraging consumers rather than efficiently delivering information, which is why I actively avoid typical social media or the news. Just don't use it

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#175

Post by maicro »

lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

I've not been diagnosed with ADHD, though have some symptoms (though honestly, some of those are just standard "human living in 2022"), but I do know I have what I would consider an "addictive personality".

I can't answer how gambling addicts or smokers feel, but I will share a similar experience - I had to uninstall Candy Crush Saga from my phone, because I would literally open it, and then "come to" ~40 minutes later at the end of my drive (carpool, not me driving). This went on for about two weeks before I decided to uninstall the game.

I've never been on TikTok, but I do know that mobile games like Candy Crush are designed specifically to be addictive/habit forming - look up "gamification" for some related aspects, though that's really more about applying those sorts of mechanisms (mostly daily login bonuses / streak rewards, but also carefully spaced repetitions / cooldowns to get you to come back multiple times a day, highly stimulating audio and visual feedback for that "dopamine rush") to form habits around other domains (exercise being a theoretically "positive" application).

All that is to say, good on you for recognizing your negative interaction with that app, and for uninstalling it. I don't know where the balance lies when weighing personal freedom (of both you to install whatever you want, and developers to release whatever they want) vs. legislation and regulation, but I do think awareness of the techniques that are being used (similar to how I learn as much as possible about scams / social engineering) is extremely important on a personal level.

One final note - 2048, a few years after Candy Crush, hit me in a pretty similar way. The interesting thing there is, with no ads, microtransactions or fancy animations, it really was the core gameplay loop that I got hooked on. After finally hitting the titular number, however, I uninstalled it and haven't gone back.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#176

Post by dqpb »

lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

> It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away

Have kids. They will claim your agency for themselves, and you’ll have none left for TikTok.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#177

Post by meltyness »

Banana699 wrote: post #20
thih9 wrote: post #9

> If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Is it really a competitive advantage if a competitor is doing better without it?

The competitor is not doing better because of its disadvantage, it is doing better despite it. The space of apps is high dimensional, (what used to be) Facebook's niche is a very obvious local optima that it filled early on and locked away from past and future competitors. Tiktok was forced to find another non-obvious local optima and it did. Facebook also have long abandoned their competitive advantage with their ou…

I wouldn't call it better, TikTok isn't presently obligated to care about their market, however.

Wheras YouTube recommendations are seen as exploitable by an adversary to undermine ad revenue and platform trust, TikTok has the benefit of being "nascent" with a "runway" to survive without a real business model, on the relative strength of the current user base.

This isn't a new frontier, and ByteDance hasn't solved the robustness problem, they're just receiving the going discount on ignoring it. It'll work itself out.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#178

Post by mal-2 »

Milank wrote: post #52

It's the flow of nature. Nothing lasts forever. Looking from addiction perspective, TikTok is even worse. But, as the author said, it's more shallow, so it should be easier to move away from. I hope that people (or at least majority) will find a way to move from this mindless fun and finally start using all the technology we have at our disposal in some more meaningful way.

Many recent boycotts and other activist causes have achieved critical mass through organizing on TikTok. A ton of content there is historical and educational. People misunderstand short-form as shallow and that has never sit right with me. I find creators on TikTok to often go deeper and communicate more clearly than the cacophony of text posts on reddit or Facebook.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#179

Post by Sparkle-san »

root_axis wrote: post #173
lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

It's just a video app, exercise some self-discipline and self-accountability and uninstall the app.

They clearly did uninstall it but "use some some-discipline" is pretty disingenuous given companies are abusing biological mechanisms to get people hooked on their apps. This is especially true for teenagers who are underdeveloped in the self-discipline department.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#180

Post by zoltrix303 »

maicro wrote: post #175
lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

I've not been diagnosed with ADHD, though have some symptoms (though honestly, some of those are just standard "human living in 2022"), but I do know I have what I would consider an "addictive personality". I can't answer how gambling addicts or smokers feel, but I will share a similar experience - I had to uninstall Candy Crush Saga from my phone, because I would literally open it, and then "come to" ~40 minutes lat…

I read a book called "the power of habits" a few years back and there was a few chapters focusing on the gamification and how our brains tend to develop habits (and in some case addiction).

Ever since reading this book, I've noticed patterns in the way apps are developed.

Candy crush and other similar game apps are a bit obvious, but for me the most sticking one for me is the facebook app. They introduced a few years back these emoji that flash in the screen when you received a hearth or a smiley face in the chat. This is almost a direct copy of a technique used by the gambling industry where they flash coins in the screen of a gambling machine. In the book, I believed they explained that by making positive results / feeling of result stronger, you can trigger more deep rooted habits.

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