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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

#301

Post by wat10000 »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #279
wat10000 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability. Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time. If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you c…

I don’t know what personal religious experience you’re speaking from, but my church is a little more oriented toward helping people overcome addictions and personal failings. If you’re in Europe, then I think the messaging in the mosques about consuming alcohol are pretty strict. I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge.

Well sure, they don't want the competition. Churches have naturally evolved to use techniques that keep people coming back. The ones that don't do that die out.

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

#302

Post by AreShoesFeet000 »

Jensson wrote: post #287
AreShoesFeet000 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that? I believe we’re out of ideas. TikTok’s crime was just be firmly successful because of good engineering. There’s no evil sauce apart from promotional content and occasional manipulation, which has nothing to do with the algorithm per se. And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is…

> I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that? Governments saying "if you are a social content platform with more than XX million users you have to provide these options on recommendation algorithms: X Y Z". It is that easy. > And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discov…

Fair enough. I’m not really a fan of regulation. The capitalist State is a total mess, but I really think we should try your idea.

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

#303

Post by bondarchuk »

munk-a wrote: post #225
bondarchuk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.

(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

SirMaster wrote: post #212
wackget wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way more complex than "no self control". Social media is addictive by design and is peddled at such scale that it is literally impossible to ignore. It's also backed by billions upon billions of dollars. Pitting the average person up against that, then blaming them for having "no self control" once they inevitably get sucked in is not a remotely fair conclusion.

People keep saying this and yet, I have never used any of these short form video services or really any social media outside of desktop websites like hackernews and reddit. Even on reddit I just subscribe to a few niche and mostly technical subreddits. It seems extremely easy to ignore it all.

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by tantalor »

Aurornis wrote: post #76

The headline overstates what actually happened. Ironic that they’re using clickbait headlines on an article about a service using tricks to get people to engage with something. They haven’t concluded anything yet. It’s early in the process and they’re opening the process of having TikTok engage and respond. The article starts with a headline the makes it sound like the conclusion was already made, then the more you r…

Which headline are you referring to?

The headline on the article is,

> Europe Accuses TikTok of ‘Addictive Design’ and Pushes for Change

What's overstated about that?

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

#306

Post by anthonypasq »

mrpandas wrote: post #240
forgotaccount3 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's [how they make money.] ... what people want. Fixed that for you. Your argument is basically the same as saying that Banana Ball should be banned because they are intentionally making the experience as fun as possible, because that's how they make money .

You're suggesting that it doesn't matter what children are exposed to / become addicted to because companies should be able to sell what children want? So there's no limits to that in your mind? Should every child be given cocaine because they ask for it? They're certainly given candy, right? You must believe there's no difference between cocaine and candy, I can assure you there is a difference and show you evidence…

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 a hostile foreign government, NOT that its addictive.

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

#307

Post by afarah1 »

Etheryte wrote: post #295
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 could make the same argument about sugary beverages, that you can't legislate intelligence, yet every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board. This of course omits a lot of nuance, but the main takeaway remains the same. We all have that monkey brain inside us and sometimes we need guardrails to defend against it. It's the same reason we don't allow advertising alcohol…

>every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board

Is there strong evidence for that? The first study that pops up if I search this suggests otherwise, that it could increase consumption of sugar-substitutes and overall caloric intake. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.019

>we need guardrails to defend against

There is no "we". You say that I and others need it, and you want to impose your opinion by taxing us.

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

#308

Post by vjerancrnjak »

btown wrote: post #229
vjerancrnjak wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Flink is not really a performance choice, it's bloat to throw software as fast as possible at problems. I don't think there's any benchmark demonstrating insane capabilities per machine. I definitely couldn't get it to any numbers I liked, given other stream processing / state processing engines that exist (if compute and inmemory state management is the goal). Pretty sure any pathway that touches RocksDB slows everything down to 1-10k events per second, if not less.

The problem of finding out which video is next, by immediately taking into account the recent user context (and other user context) is completely unrelated to what Flink does -- exactly-once state consistency, distributed checkpoints, recovery, event-time semantics, large keyed state. I would even say you don't want a solution to any of the problems Flink solves, you want to avoid having these problems.

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

#309

Post by turtlesdown11 »

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…

I'm also skeptical about banning products like opium or methamphetamine, just because people might overuse them.
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