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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

#381

Post by amarant »

CJefferson wrote: post #355
amarant wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False equivalence. Unless you can point to an instance where tiktok claims to cure cancer or erectile dysfunction with their recommendations. To be clear: I don't like these addictive recommendation engines. That's why I avoid them. Some people do like them. I don't want to take their fun vice away from them. I also don't want them to take my fun vices away from me! Yes it'd probably be better for my health if I stop…

Question, do you have the same feeling about heroin? That people should be allowed to take things which are known to be highly addictive and bad for them?

Sure! They do anyway, or did you think heroin disappeared since it was banned?

It does need to be regulated. Doing it well will be difficult in a lot of places. I'd suggest modeling heroin sales after Nordic alcohol market: there's a single state-owned company that has a legislated monopoly, and no profit goals whatsoever. This makes it available, you can know that it's not mixed with anything cheap and deadly, and you also avoid anyone trying to push people to buy something that is quite obviously bad for them. I'm not saying it's an ideal situation that people do heroin, it is _quite_ destructive. But people do it anyway so let's make the best of that situation.

The harsh truth of reality is that people will make bad choices no matter what you do. Thinking you can ban something out of existence is naive and harmful. Best you can hope for is the entity selling drugs not using peer pressure to push it on kids who were only looking for weed. Which is what we have now if that wasn't clear.

To be perfectly clear, I do not encourage anyone to inject heroine, it's a terrible idea! Don't do it! But I'm realist enough to realise that some people are going to anyway, bans and common sense be damned,and I want to make that bad choice as safe as possible for them. I do not condone throwing drug addicts under the bus as we currently do, pretending that they're less than human and that they have no place in our society. I don't think the "outcast" status has ever helped anyone quit, in fact I'm quite sure it makes it harder. For example in Sweden being under the influence is illegal, so you could get in trouble for seeking help with your addiction. No wonder the druggies hide!

Well out of sight != Out of mind. At least not for me.

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

#382

Post by cwillu »

AreShoesFeet000 wrote: post #280
Jensson wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"? For example, lets say there is an option to only recommend videos from channels you subscribe to, that would be much less addictive, why isn't that an option? A regulation that forces these companies to add such a feature would only make the world a better place.

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…

We're allowed to create laws to avoid a result we don't like, regardless of how many good intentions paved the road that brought us to that result.

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

#383

Post by ffsm8 »

sidharthv wrote: post #334
BoxOfRain wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't turn it off entirely, but if you keep using "show less shorts" from the 3 dot menu it eventually goes away, mostly...

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

#384

Post by seydor »

pinnochio wrote: post #359
seydor wrote: post #342

Again, the most problematic in this is how vague and handwavy the regulation is. > The Commission's investigation preliminarily indicates that TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults. > For example, by constantly ‘rewarding' users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to…

You're quoting the NYT article. If you're going to criticize the Commission's language for being "vague and handwavy", you should quote the original source.

No, that is actually the EU's press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

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

#385

Post by comboy »

tock wrote: post #366
comboy wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do get addicted to bikes. Not even questionable. But of course that's not a charitable interpretation, and on that - yes I don't think personalized content is comparable to heroin. What is so evil about personalized content? I'm sincerely trying to understand. Your whole argument here is based on the premise that TV is OK because it's not personalized.

Yes my entire argument is that recommendation algorithms are designed to cause addiction. Some incredibly smart people have been working on this and they have succeeded wildly. And without personalised content the problem goes away. And that the problem is most acute in short form video platforms like tiktok, instagram shorts and youtube reels. And yes I do consider it closer to drugs than ..... bikes.

OK, but is it a problem if you get recommended repos on github? What I mean that perhaps it's not the good recommendation algorithm that is the problem? It seems like banning tcp/ip because porn is bad.

In China for example (IIRC) below 18 you cannot use these apps past some hour and not above some time limit per day. That seems far from correct solution but seems better than banning it outright and seems to be addressing most concerns.

Personalized content is crucial for functioning information platforms. Imagine if usenet had a single group only. The information sea is vast and the ways to browse and access it seem to only be diminishing. Relaying solely on LLMs outputs does not seem like a safe bet. We've been living off black boxes outputs since altavista, but it's nice to at least have many different black boxes to chose from.

(HN is very much a FYP, it's just that.we like similar stuff)

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

#386

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine

I mean, that's specifically fine because we have ample evidence to suggest it's just kind of a shit way to watch shows, and Netflix continually taking their own business model out back and shooting it doesn't really warrant government intervention

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

#387

Post by Izkata »

jstummbillig wrote: post #367
tantalor wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They might be referring to the headline of the hn post which I would agree is a pretty severe misrepresentation.

Based on the URL, the HN title is probably the original and it was changed.

For reference in case it also gets changed here, it's currently: "TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe"

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

#388

Post by hahn-kev »

kranke155 wrote: post #88
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 should be able to pick your own algorithm. It’s a matter of freedom of choice.

Yeah, I think that's the new thing these days. Companies have always been trying to make things addictive, but now they can target each and every individual. I wonder if we had strong privacy laws, if it were illegal for TikTok to have this private information about you.

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

#389

Post by eddd-ddde »

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…

I have to say, it is _extremely_ impressive when a tiktok I watched reminds me of some other tiktok, so I go and search for a very loose description of the tiktok, and the first result is 95% of the time what I wanted to find.

I don't think any single other platform has as good a search feature as TikTok does.

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