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TikTok’s Poison Pill

calnewport.com

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Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#351

Post by algoatecorn »

Reading through the comments, I see so much focus on specific companies and the occasional focus on social media as a whole. You gotta keep zooming out if you want to understand the true issue which is the "attention economy".

Just stop participating in the attention economy. Well that's impossible of course, but seriously try to minimize your participation. It's a system designed to glean consumer preferences and then engineer marketing strategies for optimal sales. We don't need it. Stop over-consuming and stop feeding the system.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#352

Post by robocat »

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…

If you are interested in viscerally understanding gamification, I suggest you install a free-to-play game with the sole intention of understanding how you are being manipulated. Pay attention to the slow cook, the social pressures, the dopamine hits, the sunk cost. I tried this (The Walking Dead: Survivors) and I learnt a lot.

Question to gamification engineers: do you play addictive “gamified” games, or does the internal knowledge of how the sausage is made ruin the joy?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#353

Post by WaxProlix »

yadaeno wrote: post #295
angryasian wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting Even voting within states are completely rigged with gerrymandering and popular vote means nothing in national elections.

This is a disingenuous pattern of argument. You point out a known problem and then throw the baby out with the bath water. In this case, its clear voting does have some effect because seats are constantly changing parties, and parties fiercely compete for votes. Other similar examples of this argument: "Everyone knows taxes go to corrupt corporations, they are completely useless get rid of them" "Everyone knows masks…

> seats are constantly changing parties, and parties fiercely compete for votes

Possibly because those seats are worth money. I don't know that people competing for them means voting 'works' in any definitive fashion.

Princeton recently released a study (this one[1], I think?) that basically says as much: voting does very little.

1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#354

Post by yamazakiwi »

chowells wrote: post #334
angryasian wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting Even voting within states are completely rigged with gerrymandering and popular vote means nothing in national elections.

If voting doesn't matter, why do Republicans work so hard to prevent voting?

It depends on where you live. Some states your individual vote will not matter because the outcome has already been decided by the popularity of one party.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#355

Post by okasaki »

a_techwriter_00 wrote: post #328
okasaki wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a nice piece of creative writing. The internet truly is a wonderful place to let loose with one's imagination.

Do they still pay you guys 50 cents a post, or is it more these days?

Oh well, at least I'm paid.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#356

Post by BrainVirus »

puppymaster wrote: post #171
nonrandomstring wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 biopi…

>Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it?

Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.

Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#357

Post by bink »

Balgair wrote: post #216
pantulis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it matters much whether it's in their wheelhouse or not or whether they succeed or not. What matters is that transitioning away from the social graph is abandoning their moat, the very thing that keeps them a monopoly in social media. Once that's gone it'll be a level playing field and they are unlikely to survive for long.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#358

Post by mal-2 »

vecter wrote: post #251
closedloop129 wrote: post #250

TikTok is having longer and longer videos. TikTok will become something else. The machine learning only works for short videos. For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. I expect that both technologies will be combined.

> For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. YouTube is all about long videos and there is basically zero social graph on there.

Does YouTube organic discovery work for anyone besides toddlers? I can't remember a time I was suggested or autoplayed a video that I actually was interested in.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#359

Post by MandieD »

kennywinker wrote: post #170
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…

Or how people with body image issues feel about instagram? Or how people with social injustice fixations feel about facebook? Or how people with porn addictions feel about pornhub? These platforms are clearly utilizing super-normal stimuli to overwhelm our brains and elicit addiction-like behavior. Is that legal? Yes. Is that moral? Hell no.

The concept of super-normal stimuli, or more specifically, the avoidance thereof, has guided a lot of my parenting decisions. I know I won’t keep him away from all of that forever, but I want to make as much space as possible these early years for his little mind and attention span to develop.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#360

Post by betwixthewires »

I hope the author is right, and a social evolution toward more open networks would necessarily be the culmination of many factors, but I'm optimistically skeptical. TikTok is like a drug, it is an algorithm that unabashedly and almost directly induces an emotional state. It is similar to amphetamine, opioids, slot machines in that it distils almost to purity the traits needed to solely perform this function. These other addictive things have been around a long time. There's no reason to expect tiktok (or the concept of algorithm interfacing with human to produce chemical happiness) to go away.

That said, I hope so. I hope that these other empty social bahemoths chase tiktok to irrelevance, I hope the population gets burned out on the empty calories, but history tells us that this won't happen really. Some people, enough to keep it all going, just can't stop no matter how miserable it makes them.

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