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Unfortunately, based on the consumption habits of many, many people, yes.
TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
41–50 of 568 posts
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#42Funny how Europe's "concern" for digital health only kicks in when a non US platform starts winning
European regulators and courts have placed a lot of scrutiny on big US tech companies, with frequent fines for privacy violations and potential anti-competitive behavior. Also as noted upthread, they're investigating Meta and Twitter on this specific issue.
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#43I don't understand the legal side, but after gaining and kicking a Tiktok addiction during and after COVID, I believe it. I was there 4-8 hours a day and tried to scroll videos while washing dishes (and during nearly any other activity).
Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog?
I think it is, but it's hard for me to articulate without getting into teleological judgments.
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#44Might be a generational thing, but I never understood the "shorts" (in any format on any social network).
I can watch a 9 hour video on GTA games without problems (not in one sitting, but in parts), but 3 'shorts' in a row with not enough info and explanation to be interesting makes me close any of the 'shorts' apps (tiktok, youtube shorts, instagram....).
(eg, the 9 hour video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faxpr_3EBDk )
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#45I 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 recommendations are.
TikTok's recommender is partly built on European Technology (Apache Flink for real-time feature computation), along with Kafka, and distributed model training infrastructure. The Monolith paper is misleading that the 'online training' is key. It is not. It is that your clicks are made available as features for predicitons in less than 1 second. You need a per-event stream processing architecture for this (like Flink - Feldera would be my modern choice as an incremental streaming engine).
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skZ1HcF7AsM
* Monolith paper - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it’s kicking itself lately. The content has gotten way less interesting over the past few months. Maybe it just has to run its course.
Are you in the US? Lots of people have reported that the forced sale "ruined" their algorithm.
That’s definitely part of it for sure.
But beyond that, the most compelling content was probably the best all time videos which I’ve exhausted. Plus half the videos now seem to cut off before they answer whatever question they posed. Very frustrating.
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#47Idk 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 cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them, as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again. I don't know what the solution is but I've known multiple people now who've gotten frustrated and blamed themselves for not being able to advance their skills with a language, but Duolingo's business model, like Tinder's, is completely opposed with the goals of their users. If Duolingo R&D discovered a magical new method of making you fluent in a language overnight, they would not sell it to you. Tinder R&D might have discovered the actual honest-to-God formula for True Love years ago and burned it because they can make more if you swipe forever.
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe because FB are getting away with the same thing?
I doubt they would if this becomes illegal. EU laws are slow, sometimes stupid, but consistent.
The problem I have with the way the EU doles out these punishments is that they like to spring them on tech companies after years and years of radio silence and then suddenly it’s “hey TikTok, we just determined you’ve been breaking the law for years, pay us a couple billion please.”
Like, where were they years ago saying “hey TikTok, we think your design is addictive and probably illegal, you need to change or face penalties.” If TikTok continues to operate in the same manner despite a warning, sure, throw the book at them. Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years. Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#49I don't understand the legal side, but after gaining and kicking a Tiktok addiction during and after COVID, I believe it. I was there 4-8 hours a day and tried to scroll videos while washing dishes (and during nearly any other activity).
Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog? I think it is, but it's hard for me to articulate without getting into teleological judgments.
Not sure if its worse but you are point rings a bell for me cause I feel that I can no longer do any task without having something being bombarded in my head, be it podcast, music or audiobook.
Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
How'd you kick it?
uninstall the app. Works really well to me. The conscious effort of reinstalling it is enough to prevent me from doing it. Whereas using the awfully implemented screentime guards, I just find myself clicking on "Allow for 15 minutes" before I even understand what I do.
I think im just less prone to doomscroll type addictions, but i found myself sitting on the toilet for longer than normal when youtube shorts became something tougher to easily remove from the base youtube experience on their app.
This caused me to disable the youtube app(literally can't uninstall it on a pixel stock os), and if i ever utilize youtube on my phone its through firefox instead.
I also got the extension unhook on my desktop/laptop, and now my youtube experience is more reminiscent of the early 2010s where I would just use it to look up sports highlights or music videos, and if i don't have a video or subject in mind im not force fed one.
This also just kinda shows me how terrible the search experience is on youtube. Feel like all of their effort is on their doomscroll / suggested content, rather than their search results.