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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

#121

Post by sushzbdbehsh »

formerly_proven wrote: post #109
filoleg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anybody has any tips about how to get a better feed, I'm willing to give it another go. I do. Don't waste time by trying to find the stuff you want by explicitly searching for specific tags (aside from maybe for the purpose of the initial seeding, but that's not a must at all). That would indeed bring up just tons of kinda trashy content that seems like it is tailored to either teenagers or the lowest common den…

While you're at it, some tips for getting hooked on heroin?

[flagged]

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

#122

Post by martin_a »

formerly_proven wrote: post #109
filoleg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anybody has any tips about how to get a better feed, I'm willing to give it another go. I do. Don't waste time by trying to find the stuff you want by explicitly searching for specific tags (aside from maybe for the purpose of the initial seeding, but that's not a must at all). That would indeed bring up just tons of kinda trashy content that seems like it is tailored to either teenagers or the lowest common den…

While you're at it, some tips for getting hooked on heroin?

Just give it a try! Works wonders, I've heard.

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

#123

Post by MikePlacid »

clement_b wrote: post #115

I think TikTok and similar products are garbage and will lower the average IQ, especially of younger generations. I am deeply concerned when I see kids hooked on that crack, because they are burning their potential. It's scary, and if I had one far fetched easy theory to make, I'd say TikTok is a way for China to mitigate the threat coming from the west's upcoming generations, by ensuring their collective capabilitie…

> TikTok (Douyin) also operates in China. No kid is spared.

Can’t vouch for the following observation, since I’ve never used either one, but:

"In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos and educational videos," said Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

"And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. Now they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. So it's almost like they recognize that technology's influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,"

https://thepostmillennial.com/tiktoks-chinese-platform-enric...

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

#124

Post by Slartie »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #17

I'm flabbergasted by the appeal Tiktok apparently has over the average Joe. I can't stand it. Vertical videos, combined with the exact duration of a short term memory loss affected person's attention span, make me want to throw my eyes into a furnace. I block Youtube shorts for this same stupid reason, even great channels can't resist Google's whip "incentivizing" them to make these AMAZING short vertical pieces of s…

90% of content is some scene that draws out 20-25 seconds of boringness in a suggested ascent to some expected climax or resolution at the end, screaming "watch it, wait, it's coming!" at you the whole time, with that resolution then being just even more boring and trivial than the 25 seconds before.

I don't get why anyone with an IQ above that of bread would fall for this lame trick more than a few times.

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

#125

Post by twright0 »

nagonago wrote: post #89

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 o…

> I spent a good few hours trying to get a feed that was interesting to me by searching for various keywords... If anybody has any tips about how to get a better feed, I'm willing to give it another go.

The whole magic sauce is that you don't/can't shape your FYP ("for you page": feed) by searching or otherwise sending deliberate signals to the algorithm. Instead you just flip through the videos it sends you and it reads into how long you watch, which videos you skip, where you like/comment, who you follow etc. If you don't consciously try to influence it and just mindlessly, organically consume you'll end up with a very accurate FYP of videos remarkably quickly. I'm not surprised that trying to drive your FYP in a specific direction backfired; I suspect they make search deliberately bad and don't take it into account in a meaningful way when constructing the FYP for a user.

It is, of course, up to you whether that sounds like a media experience that you want to participate in. I installed it skeptically but in literally less than an hour my FYP was nothing but videos I found engaging or fun, and several years later it's my most used phone app by a significant margin. Some of it is obviously low calorie entertainment but there's a lot of depth as well, and I continue to be struck by how accurately the FYP can identify what content I want to see and what I don't.

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

#127

Post by asutekku »

MikePlacid wrote: post #123
clement_b wrote: post #115

I think TikTok and similar products are garbage and will lower the average IQ, especially of younger generations. I am deeply concerned when I see kids hooked on that crack, because they are burning their potential. It's scary, and if I had one far fetched easy theory to make, I'd say TikTok is a way for China to mitigate the threat coming from the west's upcoming generations, by ensuring their collective capabilitie…

> TikTok (Douyin) also operates in China. No kid is spared. Can’t vouch for the following observation, since I’ve never used either one, but: "In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos and educational videos," said Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. "And they also limit it to only 40 m…

Any kind of amusing content for kids is time restricted in china. If a western game company wants to get into the market, they need to implement time limits & age checks.

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

#129

Post by andirk »

nagonago wrote: post #89

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 o…

Is it possible that the angle TikTok strives for simply lacks substance?

I'm working on making something called The Laugh Track where you send your friend (singular) the type of laugh you just did (from a select list of types of laughs). If it's worth it, they'll hit you up personally to know wtf happened :D If that takes off and becomes a national security threat, I will not say oh yeah this is great content, totally makes sense people are addicted to this nonsense!

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

#130

Post by schroeding »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #96
scarface74 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because the War on Drugs has worked wonders. Any law that is passed to restrict people from doing something that only harms themselves ends up being applied unevenly and usually only affects the poor/minorities. See “the War on Drugs”

What are you going to do, grow a social media network with hydroponics in your closet? Drug/alcohol prohibition doesn't work because production is inherently decentralized. Other forms of prohibition do frequently work. Conflating any form of prohibition with drug/alcohol prohibition specifically is a common libertarian trick, one they trick themselves with. What about prohibition of asbestos? That seems to be workin…

Use a VPN and download the british / european version of the app? US legislation will probably not be enforced in the rest of the world, in the case of TikTok.
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