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

This kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.

But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.

It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.

Its never really like this.

Tiktok spend a lot of money talking to EU regulators. They know shits coming down the track because these directives have to be put into law by eu members. that takes time.

> Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.

But thats not the point, companies shouldn't be doing stuff they know is harmful. Thats literally the point of regulation.

how do you feel about self control in the face large companies that are spending billions of dollars to intentionally trick you into not having it?

you can't even be aware of what they're doing, because the algorithms they're using to do it are black boxes

youtube algorithms have shown evidence that they've lead to radicalization

would you not draw a line on any of this?

When it's a streaming service, it might be equally worse IMO, but a bit less so if it's music you own. But anyways, I call these folks "electro autists" (with apologies to real autists) as they are rarely reachable for social interactions. Saying "good morning" in the elevator? No chance. Nor recognizing people left or right.

Or in the gym, where they block machines for many minutes, i.e. much more than the one or two minutes of resting in between sets, while paging through social media in between sets. Asking them to unblock a machine in the gym? Some are reachable there if you stand in front of them and wave your hands.

And walking the dog, or strolling with kids while on "social" media. I often observe them to neither recognize when either dog or kid try to show them things or events. I sometimes wonder (aloud and near them ;-), if they phone with their companions.

Oldie but Goldie: Charlene Guzman's video "I forgot my phone" from 12 years ago:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8

I like music and I like videos, but I also learned to concentrate on the task at hand and/or the people besides me.

Disclaimer: listening to music while doing chores like washing dishes is OK. But I prefer a dish washer and connect to people while the dish washer is running.

The algorithm is pretty simple, it'll show you a selection of videos that are from the n most popular genres of videos, then depending on your dwell time, it'll A/B test categories that are related, or sub categories.

That bit isn't that difficult or new. the special sauce is the editorialising and content categorisation. being able to accurately categorise videos into genres, subjects and sub subjects (ie makeup video, 25 year olds, woman, straight, new york, eyeglitter) and then creating a graph of what persona likes what.

The second secret sauce is people going through and finding stuff and promoting it. TikTok (used to) editorialise/pay highly for content.