411–420 of 568 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TikTok's differention is the userbase of all teenagers in the world.
But go just one layer deeper to 'why is every teenager using Tiktok' and the primary answer once again becomes 'Tiktok's recommendation engine'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don’t think that the addiction is exclusively due to the algorithm. There’s really a lack of affordable varied options for learning trade and entertainment. We say in Portuguese: You shouldn’t throw the baby away along with the water you used to bathe.
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.
consider air travel in the present day. ticketing at essentially all airlines breaks down as: premium tickets that are dramatically expensive but offer comfortable seats, and economy tickets that are cramped and seem to impose new indignities every new season. what could be the harm from legislation that would change that menu?
the harm would be fewer people able to travel, fewer young people taking their first trip to experiencing the other side of the world, fewer families visiting grandma, etc.
As much as people hate the air travel experience, the tickets get snapped up, and most of them strictly on the basis of price, and next most taking into account nonstops. This gives us a gauge as to how much people hate air travel: they don't.
this doesn't mean airlines should have no regulation, it doesn't mean monopoly practices are not harmful to happiness, it doesn't mean that addictions don't drive people to make bad choices, it doesn't mean a lot of things.
I'm just trying to get you to see that subtle but significant harm to human thriving can easily come from regulations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y…
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 are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money . And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible. The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems li…
If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it, that's a good thing. If it's about applying psychological patterns to trigger the addictive behavior that applies to a large swath of marketing.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it pretty hypocritical that the same people who push for e.g. legal marijuana would go for banning social media apps. Don't get me wrong, I use neither and think both are mentally, physically, and morally corrosive. I would not care to have either present in the community where I live, nor for my future children to use them. That does not mean it is the province of the state to ban them.
weed isn't designed to be addictive. You'll find most people would be cautious about legalising heroin, meth or crack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And children get propagandized by hostile foreign governments everywhere online. And by their own government. The premise that TikTok was somehow more dangerous in this regard than Facebook or Twitter or even Discord is based entirely on sinophobia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs…
Advertising is speech and it's often heavily regulated.
Why should it be illegal for me to like fishing videos, and want to be shown more fishing videos if I watch fishing videos?
Or to post at all online without a license and account tied to my real identity?
If I run a car forum, why should it be illegal for me to ban Nazis just because Nazi speech is legal in the US?
Or if my forum gets some arbitrarily large userbase, why should I be forced to give control of my forum to the government to be regulated as a utility?
All of these are rational, likely results of policies that people on HN have advocated, along with banning social media entirely (which would destroy one of the few truly free hypermedia and communication models out there.)
I don't trust the intentions of people who want to regulate social media and I absolutely don't trust the intentions of governments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs. It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more. The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated a…
Though capitalism is to blame for plenty of problems, I don't agree with this take, and I see it repeated quite often. Economies, capitalist or otherwise, are very much defined by needs and wants. (With this, I presume, you agree already.) But addiction is another topic altogether from everyday needs and wants like oil, aspirin, or cinema tickets.
2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.