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TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

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Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#81

Post by notpushkin »

ehsankia wrote: post #58
planetsprite wrote: post #5

Even if TikTok were suddenly wiped off every phone on the planet, a competitor would take its place. TikTok simply takes advantage of people's desire to be entertained and apathy over privacy issues.

I don't understand the point. Every social media's goal is to take advantage of people's desire to be entertained. Youtube, Instagram, etc. Yet TikTik has managed to come from behind and overtake all the other apps. People are so quick to dismiss its algorithm, yet no other app comes close to recreating the experience.

That's not because of the algorithm. That's because everybody's already on TikTok.

If you make a new Facebook, you better make something about it different because otherwise people would just stay on Facebook.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#82

Post by scarface74 »

jojobas wrote: post #74
scarface74 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win? https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/15/regul... > Regular cannabis use has become more accepted than smoking tobacco, the latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS) has found.

I'd take that with a grain of salt. If cannabis was allowed to be smoked in the open, subjecting others to the smoke, I can imagine people would be not as accepting. Prevalence of for monthly or more often weed consumption is still lower than prevalence of daily tobacco smoking, so yes I'd still call it a win.

These are the trends in the US

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/28/politics/marijuana-tobacco-ci...

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#83

Post by jojobas »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #37

There are two types of people: Those who have used TikTok, and those who haven't (but are nevertheless engaged in a full-on satanic panic / red scare over it).

You seem to imply that those who have used TikTok know for a fact it's harmless. It's not, on many levels. At the very least, it encourages harmful behaviours both while using the app (aka mindlessly hollow crap TV couldn't dream of) and off-app (by showing you stupid shit that gets promoted to the top, therefore implicitly approved by society).

Curiously, the kind of activities that the "TikTok algorithm" promotes in Mainland China are is different from dances, beer basketball or tooth filing.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#84

Post by dumpsterdiver »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #25
barbazoo wrote: post #11

I'm finally in a place where the only website I religiously check is HN. Because of it's nature, for me, it never takes up more than a few minutes every couple of hours. It took hard work to get there. I use Nextdns to block domains of websites and apps when I realize I spend too much time on them. Could I just allowlist domains, sure, and sometimes I do that when I need to look at something on Reddit for instance. B…

Damn man, I was just thinking about how annoying it is that I can't find anything fun to do on my phone. I just check HackerNews and painstakingly slowly type comments in on here at 20 WPM. I can get a tiny glance at the world news through news.google, but that site gets worse every time I load it up. I tried paying for Apple News, but it was all low-quality clickbait. What were some of the things you had to wean you…

> Damn man, I was just thinking about how annoying it is that I can't find anything fun to do on my phone.

I feel your pain. As I've grown older I've found it more difficult to enjoy video games no matter what the medium is, and likewise the news seems to all read the same these days except for the "who" in the story.

I used to think that no video game or movie could scare me, and I craved to find that, but then I played Friday Nights at Freddy's on VR and quickly found my limits. I know now that video games can scare me - to the point of involuntarily crying out in a high-pitched girly voice (for reference, I'm a middle-aged grey bearded man). So that wasn't my thing either.

The games I enjoy these days (far and few in between - i.e. a weekend every blue moon) are pretty much the kind of games I made fun of fifteen years ago - Farmville type games. I don't want to examine a table and read the description of all of the worse-than-worthless items upon it (looking at you, heavy brass candlestick). I just want to water my plants and come back later. Maybe I'll come back fifteen minutes later while I'm still on my elliptical and get another round of harvesting in, or maybe I wont return for another month. These days I don't play games often, but when I do, I play very slow games. At this point I wouldn't put it past myself to play a game that revolves around paint drying.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#85

Post by wingerlang »

m4jor wrote: post #72
cloudking wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updated with more context and source links. The real question is, why does it need all this data to show you videos?

I'm not an Android dev but I wonder if its ALL PURCHASE history or just access to purchase history and info in regards to the app like if you buy stuff in-app. Likely the latter if I had to guess.

I think without the context, it sounds extremely nefarious. But just as you, I think most of this data is things simply from within the app itself. Or data you explicitly grant access to.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#86

Post by saghm »

nifeoluyemi wrote: post #3

I chuckled at - "There is no time to think about what you just saw because as soon as the clip ends, you’re on to the next one. The spectator is rendered a consummate consumer," I still haven't installed/registered for tiktok, I have no more bandwidth for another social network. I'm still fighting IG and Twitter addiction, what happens when I add another one. Just throw your phones away haha.

> There is no time to think about what you just saw because as soon as the clip ends, you’re on to the next one

Did the author of the article actually...use TikTok? That's not at all how the app works; it loops the videos by default and you have to manually scroll. Sure, you can just swipe as soon as it's over, but my impression is that this is explicitly _not_ the "happy path" for the user. My girlfriend enjoys TikTok a lot (and I often will watch with her using our TV app, which interestingly is a better experience in a few ways, like not showing any ads, although it is missing some functionality), and generally if we like a video we'll start talking a bit about it as it loops, and we only move on once we're ready. Skipping immediately after it's over (or even earlier, if it's not interesting) is more of a failure mode in my opinion (although it does vary a bit; I don't think looping on the longer form videos is as common, but I'd argue that engagement with the longer videos is if anything a counter argument to what the author is saying). If there's a social issue with the way TikTok works, I'm not convinced that it's due to the actual mechanics or network of the app. If anything, despite the fact that I don't use any of them myself, Facebook and Twitter seem like a strictly worse experience for the user. It seems much less about directly following a large number people and more about just generally watching what comes up, which means that while you have a unlimited amount of content to view for all practical purposes, there's no illusion of "missing out" by not watching absolutely everything on your feed. Because of the compositional features (reusing the same audio from other videos, "stitching" your video onto the end of another one, "dueting" yourself side by side with another video), a lot of times there isn't even really one specific video to watch for a given "thing"; anything that's sufficiently popular will be reused in enough other videos that you'll end up finding it one way or another.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#87

Post by wingerlang »

cyral wrote: post #61
wingerlang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What purchases, from what source? Same with financial information. Contact info and contacts, only if you allow it? User content, what does that even mean? Search and browsing history is likely just from within the app, I don't see how they would get it from elsewhere.

Purchases probably meaning the in-app purchase for things you can send to people on TikTok lives. I have seen app dev advice that if you store purchase info on your server in any way, instead of it being a local only purchase, then you must check the box that you collect purchase info.

Which is exactly what they have done, considering this list is literally from the App Store page. This was only explained after the comment was edited and provides quite a lot of context to the list.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#88

Post by cerved »

notpushkin wrote: post #81
ehsankia wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the point. Every social media's goal is to take advantage of people's desire to be entertained. Youtube, Instagram, etc. Yet TikTik has managed to come from behind and overtake all the other apps. People are so quick to dismiss its algorithm, yet no other app comes close to recreating the experience.

That's not because of the algorithm. That's because everybody's already on TikTok. If you make a new Facebook, you better make something about it different because otherwise people would just stay on Facebook.

it's because of the algorithm, good UX and few, skippable ads

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#89

Post by nagonago »

After hearing so much about TikTok's addictiveness, I decided to give it a whirl. I spent a good few hours trying to get a feed that was interesting to me by searching for various keywords. I was mostly looking for weird, abstract, absurdist videos, but also anything else that interested me. Unfortunately it was quite difficult to find anything I actually liked. Most of "weird tiktok" seemed to be a teenager's idea of "weird"―too fauxdark, edgy, memelordic. I did manage to find a few videos and creators I actually liked, but not enough to make my feed much better. I eventually gave up and deleted the app.

Just one small anecdotal data point to counter the idea that the app is addicting for everyone. If anybody has any tips about how to get a better feed, I'm willing to give it another go.

Re: TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

#90

Post by Jensson »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #77
Firmwarrior wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's full of beans, man. This site loves contrarian views, so long as they're even slightly supported by facts or anecdata. The main thing that gets downvoted is angry tirades without evidence, and it happens to most political views/religious views no matter what side they're on.

You’re assuming everyone in HN downvotes just like you. How do you know that?

You can see which comments get downvoted, read them and thus learn others preferences.
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