Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 568 posts

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

#491

Post by krapp »

boelboel wrote: post #468
Forgeties79 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.

4chan has /pol/. 4chan inspired Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and numerous incidents of extremist violence. Those other platforms mostly just spread and accelerate the toxic culture that originated on 4chan.

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

#492

Post by bondarchuk »

svara wrote: post #396
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.

Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else. See, "quantity has a quality of its own". Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it? I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketi…

I don't know man. It all reminds me very much of people trying to ban rock n roll back in the day.

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

#493

Post by direwolf20 »

kylecazar wrote: post #267
Jensson wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more. Why not let you choose to get a less addictive algorithm? Older algorithms were less addictive, so its not at all impossible to do this, many users would want this.

They're optimizing for time spent on the platform.

I have YouTube Premium. They should be doing the opposite. Getting me off the platform as quickly as possible so they get to keep a bigger cut of my fixed payment.

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

#494

Post by direwolf20 »

krapp wrote: post #491
boelboel wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism. 4chan has /pol/. 4chan inspired Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and numerous incidents of extremist violence. Those other platforms mostly just spread and accelerate the toxic culture that originated on 4chan.

And — this is really shocking — Jeffrey Epstein caused /pol/ to exist, which makes him indirectly responsible for almost all stupid internet politics of the last decade.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/epstein-met-4chan-...

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

#495

Post by direwolf20 »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #452
MengerSponge wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive UX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

At the risk of going off on a tangent about that maxim; I feel like it's just misusing the word "purpose". Maybe it would be cleaner to state that a system has no purpose (at least not until it is sentient), instead it has behaviors . Then one can observe that the purpose of the designers or maintainers of a system simply happens to be at odds (or as AI safety researchers would say, are "out of alignment with") the b…

If a system is not fulfilling its purpose, the system is changed. If the system is not changed, it is fulfilling its purpose.

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

#496

Post by direwolf20 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #383
sidharthv wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.

You can't turn it off entirely, but if you keep using "show less shorts" from the 3 dot menu it eventually goes away, mostly...

It comes back. It acts like it executed shortiness+=1 every day, and "show fewer shorts" does shortiness-=10 or thereabouts. The shorts position on the home screen is based on this hidden shortiness variable. It always bubbles back to the top unless you keep pressing "show fewer shorts" whenever you see it.

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

#497

Post by direwolf20 »

expedition32 wrote: post #345
wongarsu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But go just one layer deeper to 'why is every teenager using Tiktok' and the primary answer once again becomes 'Tiktok's recommendation engine'

No the primary answer is "teenagers do what other teenagers do". Remember we are advanced apes no more no less. There is this curious word "influencer" which everyone uses but few ever think about what it really means.

That's not an answer, that's a thought–terminating cliché.

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

#498

Post by exq »

satiric wrote: post #438
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 use an addon for firefox called "Hide shorts for Youtube™". Works just fine.

I use this add-on to redirect shorts to the regular video URL. I can still watch them but I don't get the infinite scroll and algorithm pigeon-holing.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/youtube-short...

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

#500

Post by direwolf20 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #365
haugis wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or coffee?

"One of these things is not like the others..." What are the harmful effects of a full blown coffee addiction? Headaches?

What are the effects of an LSD addiction? Oh you can't, because LSD is anti–addictive. But it's still schedule 1 while coffee is uncontrolled.
Post reply on HN