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

TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 434 posts

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#281

Post by trh0awayman »

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself.

I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only covered in the most broad sense) didn't really fix that. I'm sure it works better if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter. I think there are some really funny creators and that's where it shines the best - comedy. Everything else is treated in a cursory manner that never really delivers.

The vast majority of videos were a complete waste of time and I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it. It took at least a couple months to find interesting creators, but they are so few and far between that it wasn't worth it.

For me, Livejournal was addictive, forums were addictive, Twitter used to be addictive. Especially when you stumbled on niche communities. I've never tried Instagram, so I'm not sure about that.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#282

Post by icoder »

jodrellblank wrote: post #16

" If people have the right to be tempted - and that's what free will is all about - the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold. " - Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, "Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, March 2007 https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...

More and more I fear this is our generation's 'smoking'

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#283

Post by trh0awayman »

captainmuon wrote: post #223
abliefern wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find these? I've given up on the app multiple times. Never got beyond being shown teenagers doing teenage things.

Maybe it is a regional problem? Your name sounds German, I'm in Germany and also get a lot of teenagers, and a lot of dressed up people doing staged "funny" things. I've never seen any interesting tech content, or insightful political content (beyond hot takes on current news), or interesing hobbies and DIY projects (instead I get a lot of people from Asia doing bricklaying or welding). Maybe we are in the wrong buck…

TikTok is vastly different between regions, even when you set a preferred language.

I'm American and live in Germany, and have tested it in both. In Germany, I get tons of those low-quality videos where they copy/paste something from Youtube and it looks "fried".

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#284

Post by fouronnes3 »

trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

Not quite sure how you can call 30min a day for months not a success. The algorithm success is measured by how much time you spend on the app, not whether you enjoyed it.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#285

Post by amelius »

sytelus wrote: post #73

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.

> It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content

Is TikTok used equally by men (boys) and women (girls)?

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#286

Post by alliao »

productceo wrote: post #44

I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make…

you're rich :)

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#288

Post by aembleton »

trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

> I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it

But you did just that.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#289

Post by trh0awayman »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #284
trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

Not quite sure how you can call 30min a day for months not a success. The algorithm success is measured by how much time you spend on the app, not whether you enjoyed it.

In that regard, I guess you're right that it was a success. In the 2 - 3 months I used it, it was probably for around 10 - 20 hours total. I was probably shown plenty of ads in that time and now they have a vector of my interests sitting somewhere, selling it to other ad companies.

But I really just kept using it because I wanted to see what people were talking about - which was not about how successful it was, but about how good or addictive it was. I never felt addicted - I felt like I was forcing myself to open the app.

I just kept walking away from it thinking "I didn't get anything out of that and now my eyes are strained". I felt like I wasn't using the app correctly, or that I had to give the "algorithm" enough time to learn. I was actively testing it to see what the phenomenon was all about so I as trying to get the same results that other people were talking about. That's why I kept coming back to it.

And then I uninstalled it once I realized that what people were talking about didn't seem to exist, or at least not in the way I imagined.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#290

Post by trh0awayman »

aembleton wrote: post #288
trh0awayman wrote: post #281

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself. I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only cove…

> I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it But you did just that.

That's true, but I wasn't really addicted. It felt like I was forcing myself to use the app, which I was. I was trying to see what people were talking about (like Karpathy in this post). I wanted to test the app. I uninstalled it and never thought about it again.

On the otherhand, it would be extremely difficult for me to quit reading Hackernews. I load it up multiple times a day, even if there are no posts worth reading. I do feel drawn to Hackernews/message boards/Reddit, even if I don't get enjoyment from reading them all the time. Even on vacations, I still actively read HN and I'm unable to stop myself sometimes.

Post reply on HN