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

nytimes.com

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

#151

Post by rektomatic »

DaanDL wrote: post #143
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…

What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?

are hard-drugs a design pattern?

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

#152

Post by dfxm12 »

dmix wrote: post #89
mtoner23 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short form video has been a total break from previous media and social media consumption patterns. Personally I would support a ban on algorithmic endless short form video. It's purely toxic and bad for humanity

People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.

The videos are the entertainment, not the endless recommendation algorithm.

Additionally, this is not about self control. The claim is that the algorithm is designed to exploit users. Insiders (including a designer of infinite scroll!) have admitted as much going back years: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959

We should be uncomfortable with companies spending huge amounts of money to research and implement exploitative algorithms. We did something about cigarette companies advertising to kids. This action is along those lines.

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

#153

Post by sven_8127642 »

DaanDL wrote: post #143
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…

What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?

Yes, many intelligent people DO think we should not ban any drugs/substances and that the best way to deal with them is instead regulate and set up societal structures and frameworks that support the issues around abuse.

The science tends to back these ideas up. Banning does not stop people from doing what they want.

Education and guard rails are always better than hard control.

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

#154

Post by mrighele »

dmix wrote: post #89
mtoner23 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short form video has been a total break from previous media and social media consumption patterns. Personally I would support a ban on algorithmic endless short form video. It's purely toxic and bad for humanity

People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.

Even most liberal societies tend to ban addictive things. Alcohol, smoking, gambling, drugs, they are regulated almost everywhere, in one form or another.

I think that algorithmic social media should be likewise regulated, with at the very minimum ban for minors.

Note that my focus here on the "algorithmic" part. I'm fine with little or no regulation for social media where your feed is just events in chronological order from contacts that you are subscribed to, like an old bullettin board, or the original Facebook.

Also, I think we should consider companies that provide algorithmic social media responsible for what they publish in your feed. The content may be user generated, but what is pushed to the masses is decided by them.

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

#155

Post by halapro »

glimshe wrote: post #17

Maybe I don't get addicted easily, but after 30 minutes of forcing myself to watch tiktok, I just uninstalled it. Friends told me I didn't give it enough time to learn my tastes but... How could it, given that literally 100% of the videos in my interest areas were trash?

I did the same, but because I realized it could become addicting. Too bad Instagram f'ed me by copying TikTok. Now I'm addicted to Reels and I can't uninstall Instagram because my friends message me on it.

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

#156

Post by vjerancrnjak »

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…

Flink is too slow for this.

If by features you mean tracking state per user, that stuff can be tracked without Flink insanely fast with Redis as well.

If you re saying they dont have to load data to update the state, I dont see how massive these states are to require inmemory updates, and if so, you could just do inmemory updates without Flink.

Similarly, any consumer will have to deal with batches of users and pipelining.

Flink is just a bottleneck.

If they actually use Flink for this, its not the moat.

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

#157

Post by moi2388 »

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…

Do they though?

I’d love to think of myself as an exceptional individual because I don’t use Facebook or TikTok, but most likely I’m not exceptional at all, and other people could also just not use TikTok.

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

#159

Post by miohtama »

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…

TikTok's differention is the userbase of all teenagers in the world.
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