421–430 of 568 posts
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TikTok's differention is the userbase of all teenagers in the world.
It also provides different opportunities for growth compared to other social media. A video that gets over half a million views on TikTok may not get 5 thousand on Youtube, or even 10 views on Instagram or Facebook.
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Yet if you advocate for regulation you are immediately attacked by billionaires and massive companies and people who think those two groups benefit them more than the regulations protecting them. These groups bring unbelievable sums of money to bear to influence policy and public perception to make sure they are as under-regulated as possible. “Regulation” is a four letter word in the US. Look at the hostility we see…
Which is why our democratic systems need to provide solutions because they're places where we still have power. I'm from the UK and an increasing amount of our economy is locked up in exploitive equity extraction, much of it US based. Its really bad in some fields (e.g. care homes, foster homes), where the entities are straddled with such debt that the orgs "have no choice" but to charge sky high rates while paying p…
If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.
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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'
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weed isn't designed to be addictive. You'll find most people would be cautious about legalising heroin, meth or crack.
Weed isn't designed to be anything, but it certainly is addictive in the same sense that social media is. There is no physical addiction (which is also true for TikTok), but there are definitely people that are hooked on it.
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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…
Where does a desirable product or experience end and addictive begin though? Pretty much all products or services sold are designed to be desirable. Some things are physically addictive (nicotine, opioids etc), so those are a bit more clear. But when we're talking about psychologically addictive, where do we draw the line between what's ok and what's not? If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it…
If not it’s probably worth just starting with basic definitions of addiction.
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…
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its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues. Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal. The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement…
> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues. No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns. Capitalism doesn…
Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.
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And it’s also mostly targeting children/teenagers. As a parent you can add limitations on cinema, binging series. You can’t on TikTok. I’m quite glad that there is a form of control preventing a company from a different part of the world that don’t really care about the mental health or wellbeing of my kids to creep into their life like that… As a parent, it’s not a fair fight and I should not have to delegate that t…
This strikes me as potentially a hardware problem more than a software problem.
Social network are not necessarily bad, even for teens. The issue here is the effort to make any user into a scrolling machine combined to a medium always in your pocket.
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But go just one layer deeper to 'why is every teenager using Tiktok' and the primary answer once again becomes 'Tiktok's recommendation engine'
They are arguing its not the recommender that is unique it is the network effect.
Network effect helps, but it only explains why they stay big, not how they got big
There really isn't that much making TikTok unique. Yes, their app is well designed. Yes, stitches and video replies make for great social/parasocial features because creators are actually interacting with each other and the community, almost like tumblr. But in my opinion those are reasons number three and two why TikTok is successful. Their recommendation algorithm is number one, by a wide margin.