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

TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–568 of 568 posts

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#561

Post by anthonypasq »

krapp wrote: post #418
anthonypasq wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh... he is saying that addictiveness itself is not a justification to ban something. exercising is addictive to some people, sex is addictive, reading is addictive for some people. everything worth doing in life is addicting. what matters is the negative consequences of doing something. so the justification for banning tiktok is that it destroys childrens attention spans for life and lets them get propagandized by…

Tiktok hasn't been around long enough for the claim that it "destroys childrens attention spans for life" to make any sense. And children get propagandized by hostile foreign governments everywhere online. And by their own government. The premise that TikTok was somehow more dangerous in this regard than Facebook or Twitter or even Discord is based entirely on sinophobia.

i thought we were done with all the phobia shit. these scare words have absolutely zero power

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#562

Post by Thiez »

IanCal wrote: post #560
Thiez wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DSM-5 acknowledges only gambling as a diagnosable behavioral addiction. Being addicted to a thing means substance addiction, not TikTok or games or internet.

The dsm-5 is not the only way we use words, but even there it clearly can define between liking gambling and being addicted right?

Sure, I just think we if we're going to pathologize activities with intent to pass laws we ought to at least stick to a science-based approach. Right now there is no basis to conclude that even a single person is addicted to TikTok, since no such diagnosis exists.

The word 'addicted' is used informally in all kinds of contexts where it's a wild exaggeration. Just like people say they have OCD or autism when they sort something, or say they are hypochondriacs when they wash their hands more often than average. Of course people who actually have these conditions might do the same, but a lot of the time it's just perfectly neurotypical people using hyperbole and/or a flawed understanding of psychiatry.

Let's wait until psychiatrists agree on the existence of TikTok addiction and come up with a set of diagnostic criteria. Until such time we should take the existence of such addictions with a grain of salt, and refrain from moral panic.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#563

Post by nik_0_0 »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #389
jamesblonde wrote: post #45

I gave a talk at PyData Berlin on how to build your own TikTok recommendation algorithm. The TikTok personalized recommendation engine is the world's most valuable AI. It's TikTok's differentiation. It updates recommendations within 1 second of you clicking - at human perceivable latency. If your AI recommender has poor feature freshness, it will be perceived as slow, not intelligent - no matter how good the recommen…

I have to say, it is _extremely_ impressive when a tiktok I watched reminds me of some other tiktok, so I go and search for a very loose description of the tiktok, and the first result is 95% of the time what I wanted to find. I don't think any single other platform has as good a search feature as TikTok does.

Thats super interesting (I deleted Tiktok because it was too addicting!), but this is a common complaint about Instagram is that it feels impossible to find a reel based on keywords.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#564

Post by IanCal »

Thiez wrote: post #562
IanCal wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dsm-5 is not the only way we use words, but even there it clearly can define between liking gambling and being addicted right?

Sure, I just think we if we're going to pathologize activities with intent to pass laws we ought to at least stick to a science-based approach. Right now there is no basis to conclude that even a single person is addicted to TikTok, since no such diagnosis exists. The word 'addicted' is used informally in all kinds of contexts where it's a wild exaggeration. Just like people say they have OCD or autism when they sort…

> since no such diagnosis exists.

The very specifically American diagnostic criteria are not particularly relevant, but more to the point

> we ought to at least stick to a science-based approach. Right now there is no basis to conclude that even a single person is addicted to TikTok,

I'd recommend reading the overview

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

> The Commission's preliminary views are based on an in-depth investigation that included an analysis of TikTok's risk assessments reports, internal data and documents and TikTok's responses to multiple requests for information, a review of the extensive scientific research on this topic, and interviews with experts in multiple fields, including behavioural addiction.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#565

Post by boelboel »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #531
chasing0entropy wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and Twitter are far worse sources of extremism. There are entire groups dedicated to genetic comparisons between races, 'who would you do' groups that do nothing but photos of young women in bikinis farmed FROM facebook/ig. 4chan is where you go too far. 4chan users typically don't foster extremism, they are the extreme. They don't post pictures of young women, they post addresses and walkthroughs of their a…

so it’s a place where people go when they’re already radicalized but it doesn’t radicalize anybody on it? Is that the argument?

Yes, I feel like it's far less harmful than the other sites for this reason. These bad parts of 4chan aren't the majority of the site either, a large minority maybe, but the site in general is much smaller. Users are also attracted to the image of 'extremism', 4chan in the far past didn't have this as its main audience of newcomers in its early stages.

It's easy to control for governments compared to facebook/reddit/... because it's just some boards, way better than massive amounts of posts creating a personal zone for everyone.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#566

Post by boelboel »

krapp wrote: post #491
boelboel wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan doesn't use algorithms to push users to certain boards afaik, makes it better than the others in its design. I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.

>I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism. 4chan has /pol/. 4chan inspired Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and numerous incidents of extremist violence. Those other platforms mostly just spread and accelerate the toxic culture that originated on 4chan.

I'm not sure if most of 4chan was actually so on board with the whole gamergate thing and all the things which followed. pre-/pol/ 4chan was a whole different thing. It was outsiders joining 4chan which did most of the posting, twitter and facebook were the ones which allowed this to happen.

Internet starting with a 1000 4chans wouldn't create what we have today (you'll just get lots of small fringe groups), internet starting with a 1000 facebooks/twitters/... will always end in extremism of a big portion of the population.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#567

Post by eggy »

wackget wrote: post #132
eggy wrote: post #71

I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention? The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecti…

You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money . And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible. The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems li…

There was significant awareness and negative sentiment toward advertising long before Marshall McLuhan became prominent in the 1960s. Some of the stuff from 1900 to 1930 is interesting. I realize there is a lot at work here with multi-faceted attacks on the senses, but advertising was intentional too, and I am not sure if just making things illegal that are hard to educate people on is the right tack.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#568

Post by alangibson »

7tflutter7 wrote: post #346
alangibson wrote: post #269

Give a kid a phone with TikTok on it and observe them for a while. It's genuinely upsetting. They'll spend hours with their heads down just silently looking at the thing. All desire to do anything else just vanishes. Then they freak out when you try to take it away from them. The only obvious difference between them and someone on fent is the verticality of their posture.

Using this logic the government should regulate Minecraft too.

No. Feed-based apps are uniquely bad.
Post reply on HN