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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

#221

Post by Jensson »

AreShoesFeet000 wrote: post #217
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise

That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.

Why is it good that you need self control to not get slop? Its much better if you can just turn that off and relax rather than having to stay alert to avoid certain content that it tries to trick you to serve you more slop.

Distancing yourself from temptations is an effective and proven way to get rid of addictions, the programs constantly trying to get you to relapse is not a good feature. Like imagine a fridge that constantly puts in beer, that would be very bad for alcoholics and people would just say "just don't drink the beer?" even though this is a real problem with an easy fix.

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

#222

Post by xp84 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #203
randysalami wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).

For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise

I try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…” Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.

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

#223

Post by Forgeties79 »

AreShoesFeet000 wrote: post #217
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise

That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.

I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.

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

#224

Post by MengerSponge »

randysalami wrote: post #174
dmix wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.

I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).

They built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive UX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

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

#225

Post by munk-a »

bondarchuk wrote: post #204
horsawlarway wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement. Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education. Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the l…

I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention. PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have…

It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.

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

#226

Post by AreShoesFeet000 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #223
AreShoesFeet000 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.

I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.

But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.

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

#227

Post by notyourwork »

miohtama wrote: post #159
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.

That didn’t by accident though.

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

#228

Post by wongarsu »

miohtama wrote: post #159
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.

But go just one layer deeper to 'why is every teenager using Tiktok' and the primary answer once again becomes 'Tiktok's recommendation engine'

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

#229

Post by btown »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #156
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 pipel…

Yea, the Monolith paper by Bytedance uses Flink but they only say it's in use for their B2B ecommerce optimization system. Maybe this is intentional ambiguity, but I'd believe that they wouldn't rely on something like Flink for their core TikTok infrastructure.

My hunch is we start to learn a lot more about the core internals as Oracle tries to market to B2B customers, as Oracle is wont to do!

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

#230

Post by walt_grata »

Retr0id wrote: post #64
walt_grata wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse enough it isn't addictive. The goal is non-addictive, whatever changes to whatever part are necessary to hit that goal.

"non-addictive" isn't a well-defined thing. It's like telling McDonalds that their food must be "healthy". There's a lot of regulation affecting the food that McDonalds serves (and that's probably a good thing), but it's all based on measurable things.

We could measure it for cocaine and cigarettes couldn't we.
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