Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TikTok’s Poison Pill

calnewport.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 430 posts

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#211

Post by wzdd »

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 understand that having ADHD would make this more diffcult, but I have found it helpful to use the feature on my phone (iOS, but presumably Android has similar) which limits the total amount of time I can use a particular app every day.

When the time limit is up, I can still keep using the app if I want to, but often that is a sufficient reminder ("I've already been using this app for an hour?!") that I can stop.

I appreciate this feature because I can enjoy the app but also still feel in control of my time.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#212

Post by JasserInicide »

yorwba wrote: post #27
est wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because collecting meme video feeds are vital to OSINT.

People upload all kinds of stuff. I remember seeing videos with a TikTok watermark of Russian military equipment being moved towards the Ukrainian border before the invasion. E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shows-russian-troop-b...

Near the beginning of the war, I saw a reuploaded Tiktok of this Ukrainian girl hopping into an abandoned Russian tank and figuring out how to drive it.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#213

Post by moolcool »

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.

Some of the brightest minds in the world work tirelessly to develop impossibly advanced algorithms which exploit our monkey-brains' attention mechanisms. It's scary to me that there's people working in the tech industry who would upvote a comment like this-- it shows a lack of respect for the level of power software engineers possess over real people's lives.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#214

Post by lghh »

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.

Exercise some self-discipline and read what I wrote. I did uninstall it.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#215

Post by soco »

severino wrote: post #190
soco wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your example of "US dissident" is the head of a global terrorist organization?

China will also call those dissidents terrorists, and some may even fill that definition. And we can end up agreeing: for example, last month, Sweden decided that the political refugees it has been hosting are now terrorists and should be extradited, as requested by Turkey in exchange of not vetoing the country's accession to NATO.

Nobody really cares what they are called, important is what happens to them. The ones put bombs and kill people, the others say nasty things about a government. This is what makes the difference between who got killed by the US (because bombs) and who got killed by Putin (because ooh critics) or who got killed by the CCP (because ooh muslim).

But let's not forget what started the discussion: we play here the game of relativization to justify the CCP spying on tiktok users. That's all there is to know.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#216

Post by Balgair »

pantulis wrote: post #36
meltyness wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cal has apparently confused his own language here. A graph of details about rich media is still, in some sense, a social graph. Rather than documenting: who do you know? when did you meet them? Capturing: what do you know? when did you learn it? who did you learn it from? what do you call it? how should it be presented? And so on...

I fail to follow Cal's argument. It seems that he is abandoning his "digital detox" doctrine towards privacy. If the issue with social networks is the time we waste on them, why would an algorithmically generated feed be less addictive than a social network feed?

I didn't read that Cal is arguing that one should use TT over FB.

I think he's just pointing out that FB's change into a TT-like graph isn't in their wheelhouse. FB built up a social graph. TT has built up an attention profile. Though they look similar, Cal is saying they are different. FB will be starting from the near bottom and years behind.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#217

Post by JasserInicide »

ok_dad wrote: post #63
cudgy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could present videos of dogs that look like cats to influence your opinion to be more favorable about dogs. They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness sel…

> They they they I’m, aren’t parents supposed to be keeping track of their own kids, not some company? The stuff you said in the last half there is insane to me, so I’ll assume you’re either trolling or perhaps we have a very different view of certain things.

The DoD did exactly this with a campaign on Facebook back in the 2010s (moreso to understand the capability of the platform rather than out of malice). There is nothing insane about what that poster listed.

If the Snowden leaks haven't shown you that the schizos are starting to become more right about many things, then I don't know what else to say. You're being willfully ignorant I guess.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#218

Post by psyc »

BurningFrog wrote: post #161
everdrive wrote: post #157

I do hate the equivocating between Tiktok and other social media services. (eg: "Well, isn't TikTok just as bad as what Facebook is doing?") But that said, the use of the term "poison pill" is excellent, and something that I've been using to describe modern tech in general. It'd be wrong to say that Google maps is "bad." Really, it's incredibly convenient. But it's got a poison pill: it tracks you obsessively, it can…

You can still use the ways of the past (paper maps, etc). The fact that we don't, show we think the new ways are, on balance, better.

It shows that we don't think the poison pill is going to poison us.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#219

Post by lghh »

dqpb wrote: post #176
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.

I do have kids.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#220

Post by jeffwask »

amerkhalid wrote: post #188
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…

As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies. Now in retrospect, I am glad that those regulations, taxes, and judgmental stares slowly nudged me towards quittin…

>As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies.

If the majority of this cultural change happened during the age of the internet and the leaked info from manufactures around tweaking recipes to be more addictive, falsifying research, etc was being dropped on Twitter, Reddit, etc on a weekly basis, I imagine that would have played out differently

Post reply on HN