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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

#481

Post by D-Machine »

OrangeMusic wrote: post #479
D-Machine wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Over generalizations of what HN "is" or what HN "does" are always meaningless. It's a large group of different people who don't act as a single individual. For instance the comments and opinions in this post are very diverse.

Generalizations are just doing better than random guessing by just paying attention to base rates, or, equivalently, describing the majority / bulk of distributions. This isn't meaningless, it is just simple statistical summary in common language.

Also, with modern tools like sentiment analysis and other semantic analysis tools enabled by LLMs, it is pretty trivial to do empirical tests of claims like this (further proving how empty the claim that generalizations about a thing are "meaningless").

Being for paternalistic, censorious policies that restrict software behaviour so broadly is very obviously not "Hacker" (even if you agree with these policies), and this would have been far more surprising 10 years ago to see on HN. This is a "generalization" of the ideological shifts of HN, yes, but a meaningful one (which of course people are free to agree or disagree with).

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

#482

Post by wasmainiac »

D-Machine wrote: post #478
wasmainiac wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only for people who think comparing TikTok to heroin is some kind of gotcha. Do you have family? My cousins, aunts, even my mom is on it. And they all watch the most brain dead garbage. Even when they come to visit me out in the middle of no where, they still do it. The only explanation I have is that it is addictive, to not to all, but some (like you pointed out with H). Now based on how much time they spend on it…

> Do you have family? My cousins, aunts, even my mom is on it. Yes, I too am deeply traumatized from having family and friends... shudder ... using Social Media. Anyway, not sure of the relevance of the question. Not sure how "time spent" on a thing is proof of its badness either, but then, people comparing TikTok to heroin are clearly not generally interested in things like clarity and quantification.

Because it consumes hours of time on the daily. And I can’t whole heartedly say that it was a choice to do so since it appears to be habit forming.

It pushes out time for other activities, sometimes self-care like sleep, sometimes key milestones in our life. I’m not saying we have to piously eat porridge for breakfast and wake up at 5 am with the chickens, but damn, everything in moderation.

Obviously H can be a much more potent and life changing addiction, but we can draw similarities between the two. Not only from a dependency perspective but also from an economical one.

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

#483

Post by kgeist »

dmix wrote: post #85
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 noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.

It creates a weird feedback loop: after I watch video A, it recommends a similar video B, and if I make the mistake of watching that too, it then recommends video C on the same topic. Suddenly my feed is nothing but Stranger Things shorts for two whole days (literally not a single video about anything else). Skipping or disliking didn't help, then somehow it went back to normal after two days.

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

#484

Post by rjh29 »

dmix wrote: post #85
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 noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.

youtube's algorithm seems to be "oh you watched this video? now here's every other video by this creator, pretty much without a break, until you downvote it"

It never reliably gives me videos similar but not exactly the same, i.e. things I might be interested in.

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

#485

Post by sensanaty »

rjh29 wrote: post #484
dmix wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.

youtube's algorithm seems to be "oh you watched this video? now here's every other video by this creator, pretty much without a break, until you downvote it" It never reliably gives me videos similar but not exactly the same, i.e. things I might be interested in.

For me it's the same exact 5 videos on repeat, over and over and over again. I've gotten in a loop a lot of times, where it'll autoplay the same video I just watched, it's absolute madness

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

#486

Post by Nasrudith »

pardon_me wrote: post #420
finghin wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are…

Manufactured consent as a notion always felt like projection to me because of its advocates. As it was a notion pushed by people who insist they know "the interests" of people who are "voting wrong". All the while disregarding the fact that if we could rely on others knowing the interests of others better than others then aristocracy would be a superior system as the nobles being more educated would know the interests of the peasantry better.

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

#487

Post by dehue »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #421
AlienRobot wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't the inverse true though? it's not as if nobody's watching youtube, it's just that different videos are popular there.

It's not just different videos, Tiktok is much better at recommending videos by very small creators and people with no followers. On Instagram or Facebook if you don't already have a large following you most likely wont get any views at all no matter how well your video matches the platform. YouTube often pushes big creators that already made it big while Tiktok allows me to discover new and niche ones.

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

#488

Post by beAbU »

touristtam wrote: post #397
beAbU wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook does the same. The longer I dwell on an image post, the more likely the next batch of posts would be similar

Is amazon using the same thing??? I can't count the number of times I am getting recommended the EXACT same type of product I just purchased.

On amazon.ie I'm convinced they are running only two ads, because all I'm ever seeing are ads for grime brushes and window squeegees. Literally nothing else.

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

#489

Post by bondarchuk »

xeckr wrote: post #472
bondarchuk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.

There's an AI behind the video feed optimized for keeping your attention for as long as possible. That is quite different from making your media more engaging. The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from.

There's billions of dollars of psychology research behind mass entertainment for decades, too.

>* The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from. *

Sure, but this was always already the logical endpoint of entertainment media. Infinite Jest was written in the 90s, no tiktok needed.

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

#490

Post by Quarrelsome »

7tflutter7 wrote: post #406
Quarrelsome wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in Europe you can drink at 14. Age of consent is also 14. That is hilariously general. You're conflating a lot of different nations there. In practice; its different depending on the nation, consent is usually 16 and alcohol is ~18.

I was referring to Germany, the largest EU nation. But sure let's look at percentages. 40% of the EU has age of consent 14 or lower. (Germany, Italy, Portugal, etc.) 78% of the EU has it at 15 or lower (France, Sweden, Denmark, etc.) No 'official line' at 18-21.

its more complicated than that, the age of consent you're listing doesn't necessarily universally apply and is mostly that low when both people are within that age bracket. In Germany for example the age of consent is effectively 16, its more that there's wiggle room to 14, if both parties are under 21.
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