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

nytimes.com

331–340 of 568 posts

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

#331

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…

It's interesting to how they found out the "lifetime" of features is a feature by itself. Meta features is real.

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

#332

What other instances of "we did our job as little too well" are there? I can think of tabacco and other drugs, but that's not really the same. Monopolistic behavior doesn't really fit either. Maybe Kleenex marketing doing so well their name became interchangeable with the word "tissue"?

Condoms or contraceptives (if they correlate with the drop of fertility

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

#333
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 can’t legislate intelligence

Au contraire

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

#334
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.

One of my gripes with youtube at the moment is that they break my adblock filters to remove shorts more often than they break the filters stopping the actual ads.

I naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.

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

#335

So, I think many will reach the conclusion that TikTok's design is addictive. No problem here. But, when I go to Youtube - owned by Google - and use those shorts (video shorts), I kind of "swipe down". Even on my desktop computer. This is also addictive until I eventually stop. Why isn't Google also fined? Where does the fine approach stop? I am all for punishing corporations exploiting humans, so that is all fine by…

We don't need to know the exact boundaries of what's acceptable to recognize obviously harmful behavior and make efforts to stop it on a societal level.

This is the classic "perfect is the enemy of the good" type scenario.

Let's make imperfect progress if that is what we're currently capable of.

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

#337
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is more damaging, a hammer, a sword, or poison? i hope i don’t have to go out of my way to explain the analogy.

So social media is pure 'poison' with 0 positive impact but other addictive media like video games are tools with noble utility? The World Health Organization has reached the exact opposite conclusion. The ICD-11 doesn't include 'social media addiction.' It doesn’t exist clinically. What they did include is 'Gaming Disorder', classifying your 'sword' alongside substance abuse and gambling. My point is governments cou…

It is not about that. There is surely lots of hypocrisy in particular around alcohol. In most parts of the world TBH.

The discussion is whether companies are treated equally with regards to a particular law.

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

#338
post #70

TikTok has a lot of issues, such as privacy, dubious content, 'brainrot', etc. I don't want to seem like I'm necessarily defending TikTok specifically here. But this really just stinks of Regulatory Capture to me. Their main argument is that the consumers like to use the app too much? Why? Because it's smarter and not as enshittified as the competitors? I'm sure if youtube, facebook, reddit, etc reduced the number of…

Regulatory capture that benefits whom?

This is typical "EU populism" signaling

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

#340
post #123
post #47

Idk how to feel about this specifically but I kind of hope they come for Duolingo next. They are up to some similar mind hacking shit to keep people from leaving. There's the downright abusive streak management tactics that have become a major part of their brand and PR, and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub. They reset your cl…

Devil's advocate here (not associated with Duolingo, and in fact I haven't even used it): > They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development. I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the…

I concede that repetition is a valuable part of learning and that there's no easy answer, but they way Duolingo does it seems pretty intentional given the level of polish they have in the app generally. When prior lessons reset, it can interrupt your progress on your current lesson and will actively block you from making further progress until you go back and do those lessons again, unless you "skip" them, which they use their weird sad owl to discourage. Often the lessons haven't changed very much and redoing it is just busywork, seeing the first couple words of a question you've seen before and remembering what the answer is before its even finished writing it out, which doesn't seem like it reinforces learning the language, just learning how to salivate when Duo rings the bell.

I haven't used Anki either and I'm not suggesting anybody ban either one, though I would be curious how Anki's spaced repetition implementation differs from Duos. In general I don't think bans usually have the intended effect, and trying to ban or discourage dark user patterns seems almost impossible to define usefully, let alone enforce even if it were the right thing to do. I'm not much of a gambler, but I live in one of the holdout US states that doesn't allow sports betting apps, which is an entire ecosystem of human-hacking dark patterns, and it bothers me that I'm disallowed from participating in the name of protecting other people from their own poor self-control. Duolingo has all the time in the world to defeat that kind of thing with loopholes and it would make it even harder for an alternative service to compete with them.

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