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TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

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

#351

Post by BoiledCabbage »

agumonkey wrote: post #336
rchaud wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion. IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics. At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tong…

God.. beyond the sad but obvious pattern. It seems the web is just a incoherent runaway. New "platform" > bubbly phase > distortion for bad incentives (money, fame, else) > rot > abandonment for next "platform". It was fun to observe that during the myspace days but it's getting annoying.

Huh it's funny. When you put it that way is sounds like all those same arguments people have been making against crypto - except the fallout from the "rot" phase of crypto will have very significant real world consequences.

It's as if people who have been on the internet since those days can easily see what's coming.

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

#352

Post by automatoney »

avazhi wrote: post #343

I'm 35 and I don't understand the allure even 1% - same with Instagram. I'd say the last social media that really made any sense to me was Snapchat, and that was simply because it had a singular purpose and worked well for it (but certainly wasn't something that I'd stare at for hours at a time). Feel like a bit of an alien at this point (well, what I actually tell myself is that 25s and under are just fucking stupid…

You're only 35 and you tell yourself "25s and under are just fucking stupid"? You probably have colleagues in that age range - being blithely dismissive of perspectives that are just barely outside of your own doesn't seem to be a useful strategy for moving through the world.

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

#353

Post by krallja »

mchusma wrote: post #341
trh0awayman wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I don't understand why there isn't a downvote in TikTok. I tried for maybe 3 hours total just to try and get it to show me a feed I like. To no avail.

Long press > Not Interested.

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

#354

Post by bpicolo »

benjiweber wrote: post #337

Been trying to signup to tiktok for years now every time I get Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'name') https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwWV3BWXAAQ5cKD?format=png&name=... When signing up with email. Tried with multiple browsers, multiple email addresses, multiple devices. How are other people signing up?

Might be a browser extension mucking things up? Ad blockers, etc

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

#355

Post by lvass »

If you believe that, you should not only avoid using it yourself, but also proximity to users. Would you want your social circle to be full of crackheads? If you believe it harms the brain, would you hire someone who uses tiktok? I, for one, would welcome hiring processes that privilege non-users. It's a shame the usual HR is filled with heavy social media users who even use it for hiring, but I believe this error will correct itself eventually.

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

#356

Post by ozymandias12 »

Vespasian wrote: post #252
henrikschroder wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I legitimately laugh my ass off Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky? Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many d…

Because I trust hacker news (somewhat), I just installed tiktok for the first time. 15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested. I just removed it again for that very reason.

3 days and it’s algorithm can figure out what you like, unstoppable after that, it just freaking knows you, brilliant app.

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

#357

Post by athrowaway3z »

lftl wrote: post #296
pjc50 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vine was hugely popular when it was shut down by Twitter, and I think it'll go down in history as one of the largest corporate mistakes every made. They were so close on the format - they just needed to allow slightly longer videos (which they did with Twitter message lengths around they same time they shut down Vine!!!). Vine's top creators "unionized" and started demanding to be paid a cut. Vine had to be destroy…

That's somewhat ironic since TikTok pays certain content creators, although apparently not well.

https://youtu.be/jAZapFzpP64

Worth the full watch on video media money. But tldw; TikTok splits a pot of money over the views each video gets. The pot doesn't grow with the revenue they make or total views, so it's pretty exploitative.

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

#358

Post by avazhi »

automatoney wrote: post #352
avazhi wrote: post #343

I'm 35 and I don't understand the allure even 1% - same with Instagram. I'd say the last social media that really made any sense to me was Snapchat, and that was simply because it had a singular purpose and worked well for it (but certainly wasn't something that I'd stare at for hours at a time). Feel like a bit of an alien at this point (well, what I actually tell myself is that 25s and under are just fucking stupid…

You're only 35 and you tell yourself "25s and under are just fucking stupid"? You probably have colleagues in that age range - being blithely dismissive of perspectives that are just barely outside of your own doesn't seem to be a useful strategy for moving through the world.

Sorry, it was slightly in jest.

I'm actually in uni at the moment doing a law/science double, so I'm around a lot of 20-23 year olds, many of whom are formidably smart, and much smarter than I. I do, however, think that 25s and under as a generation have a serious attention problem as a result of all the notifications and constant phone spam they get. For those at the top of the bell curve it's manageable (frankly I've seen students at the very top of my Law cohort successfully multitask in ways that conventional neuroscience says unequivocally are impossible), but I do have serious concerns about the rest of them. That inability to think deeply or to properly focus for any real length of time on things is going to be something that we as a species will have to grapple with in the next decade, and I think the effects are going to be terrible. That isn't to say that people over 25, or 45 for that matter, can't be or aren't affected by their phones, but the younger generation has never lived without these kinds of devices around them 24/7 vibrating and lighting up, so I think it's especially deleterious and problematic for them.

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

#359

Post by silentguy »

The people in this thread, who are very unimpressed by the tiktok algorithm, should try to disable their privacy guard and let tiktok gather the data before judging it. I suspect that a lot of people have all the privacy features enabled on their devices. And, that's why they can't relate to the general population's addiction of tiktok.

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

#360

Post by tnel77 »

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.

It seems like they were forcing themselves for the sake of science, but idk.
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