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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

#461

Post by permo-w »

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'm sorry to point out the obvious here, but who is going to perceive their recommended feed as slow or unfresh if it doesn't learn from exactly the last video you clicked on within 1 second? The bar simply is not that high. The special sauce of TikTok is how it chooses the videos, not the speed it does it at. I'm sure the speed helps to give it that "spookily intelligent" feeling, but that's a cherry on the recommendation cake, a cake which is already twice as good as the nearest competitor. I'm sure your talk goes deeper than this, but if this is the main focus, then you've missed the point.

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

#462

Post by permo-w »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #374
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 thought was secret information. How long as it been publicly known?

The secret is how it chooses videos to recommend, not the tech stack it uses and how fast it is

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

#463

Post by D-Machine »

comboy wrote: post #341

I'm too late but I'm surprised HN crowd treats tiktok as some weaponized addiction machine. Youtube used to have a working recommendation system and it was usable too. Is it really bad to give me woodworking and learning chinese videos if that's what I'm interested in at the moment? If somebody is not interested in anything specific and just want to zone out, is it really different if he scrolls through tiktok or wat…

HN is becoming increasingly pro paternalism and censorship (largely invalidating the "Hacker" in its name). I'm not sure if this is natural / organic or some kind of astroturfing, but it sure is odd and doesn't really match the rest of the overall (historical) ethos of the site.

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

#464

Post by zapzupnz »

SirMaster wrote: post #194
wackget wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that. So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform? Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?

Congratulations, you've won the "Works on My Machine" award, except for self-control instead of software. Well done. Everyone's very impressed.

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

#465

Post by permo-w »

D-Machine wrote: post #459
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…

Has been really surprising to see HN increasingly turning pro paternalistic censorship and control, and increasingly skeptical about individual agency over the years.

And yet consistently the arguments you hear against regulation are these "let's pretend there's no such thing as nuance, how can we ever regulate an extreme case of something when we don't regulate minor cases?" arguments that act like no law has ever successfully regulated a nuance and improved people's welfare. Should we also allow heroin in baby food because cliff-hangers are allowed in films? Don't restrict my personal freedom to choose to be addicted to heroin from day 1!

I'm not saying these feeds are as bad as heroin for your health, but the difference in addictiveness between cliff-hangers in film and tiktok on your phone is about as big, and I equally think nicotine should be heavily regulated for similar reasons

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

#466

Post by D-Machine »

permo-w wrote: post #465
D-Machine wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has been really surprising to see HN increasingly turning pro paternalistic censorship and control, and increasingly skeptical about individual agency over the years.

And yet consistently the arguments you hear against regulation are these "let's pretend there's no such thing as nuance, how can we ever regulate an extreme case of something when we don't regulate minor cases?" arguments that act like no law has ever successfully regulated a nuance and improved people's welfare. Should we also allow heroin in baby food because cliff-hangers are allowed in films? Don't restrict my pe…

Yes the argument quality has become poor too, and there is less nuance than before.

And like obviously society benefits from some paternalism for things like this, and we really do need to see good, concrete recommendations be proposed.

Imagine if HN were discussing the merits of things like "interrupt every X minutes of infinite-scrolling with reminders / popups / forced X/10 minute breaks" or other actual concrete, balanced solutions to such problems. This would introduce the nuance and make things interesting again.

But it is increasingly the case I find I need to look elsewhere for such discussions.

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

#467

Post by tock »

comboy wrote: post #385
tock wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 addre…

> 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.

Please stop trying to compare social media recommendation algorithms with stuff like github. Its clearly a different animal with different set of business goals. And noone is saying ban tcp/ip. TikToks recommendation algorithm is not a fundamental building block like tcp/ip. I think you would be fine without it.

> 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.

Sure thats fine too. I think my solution is better.

> 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.

The algorithms today are still a black box. You don't know "why" certain content is being shown to you. You don't know which political party paid to show you what kind of ideology. I personally know facebook used to show hateful anti-(your opposite religion) posts in India during election times. You could click "i'm not interested/report the content" and they would still show you the same stuff. It only stopped after election season stopped. These companies are being paid to manipulate you.

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

It is user curated and everyone sees the same leaderboard of posts. No personalisation. I'm fine with such simple curation.

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

#468

Post by boelboel »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #454
boelboel wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan has a lot less extremism than people imagine, rspecially compared to platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on certain boards. The reputation of being extremist did more 'in favour' of its extremism than the original userbase and design ever did.

4chan is only outdone by 8chan. “It’s only concentrated on certain boards” is the same lame excuse Reddit used to ignore /r/thedonald and now /r/conservative.

4chan doesn't use algorithms to push users to certain boards afaik, makes it better than the others in its design. I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.

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

#469

Post by D-Machine »

integralid wrote: post #380
SirMaster wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that. So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform? Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?

You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea and yet for some reason we have very severe punishments for people that distribute it. Why? Because addictive things are addictive, and addicted people suffer, and everyone can get addicted if their guard slips. We prefer to regulate highly addictive things instead.

    > You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea
About 1–12 months after using heroin, only 23%–38% become addicted [1]. Occasional and controlled heroin users do in fact exist and are documented [2]. And, most famously, the use of heroin by American soldiers during the Vietnam war was largely situational [3].

So what "everyone knows" here is not very impressive. I still very strongly believe you'd be a fool or at least reckless to try heroin, but it really isn't the bogeyman people want it to be.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

[2] https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/3906/

[3] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.12...

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

#470

Post by notpushkin »

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 use NewPipe or YouTube ReVanced, or set up a “child” account and disable Shorts in the parental restrictions settings.
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