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TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

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Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#51

Post by kpennell »

productceo wrote: post #44

I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make…

I was living in Germany when I started using it and I told myself that it would help with learning the language, since I was being served german language content (oddly it seemed to think I was in Austria). It was a bit dull at first but I guess somehow, I kept using it enough. I'm not a dancer or super into dance but I did get hooked by some of the dancing stuff. Slowly but surely, I now get almost no dance content and it's all explainer/politics/philosophy/cycling/etc. I definitely used the 'not interested in this' feature a lot to train it.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#52

Post by chii »

10000truths wrote: post #49
kfrzcode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive data vacuum is probably part of it.

But that’s not at all unique to TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc. have massive amounts of data to play with as well. What else does TikTok have that these other platforms do not?

Perhaps they added a way to measure relationships between content, and expand the recommendation to several degrees of separation between related content.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#53

Post by adfgadfgaery »

drstewart wrote: post #47
adfgadfgaery wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI at Tesla is a scam, so it probably doesn't say what you think it says. It's a shame that Karpathy actually seems to know what he's talking about. Maybe he originally bought in to the Tesla vision and doesn't have the integrity to admit it's failed. Maybe he's like von Braun, doing great evil because he wants funding. Either way we lost a seemingly talented researcher.

>AI at Tesla is a scam Have you reported this to the SEC yet? >Karpathy actually seems to know what he's talking about So it does say what he thinks it says.

>Have you reported this to the SEC yet?

No, nor have I reported Deepak Chopra or Amway or Gwyneth Paltrow. There are blatant scams all around us. A lack of interest from the feds doesn't mean much.

Besides, the SEC has enough on their plate when it comes to Tesla.

>So it does say what he thinks it says.

Doctor Oz is, by all accounts, a brilliant surgeon. Would you follow the medical advice on his show?

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#54

Post by productceo »

kpennell wrote: post #51
productceo wrote: post #44

I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make…

I was living in Germany when I started using it and I told myself that it would help with learning the language, since I was being served german language content (oddly it seemed to think I was in Austria). It was a bit dull at first but I guess somehow, I kept using it enough. I'm not a dancer or super into dance but I did get hooked by some of the dancing stuff. Slowly but surely, I now get almost no dance content…

Interesting. So you weren't interested in dance, but you got interested through TikTok? Reminds me of how Pinterest's value prop includes exploration and inspiration (as opposed to searching for what you know you are looking for).

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#55

Post by dijonman2 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #7
woodruffw wrote: post #3

Maybe it's because I haven't used it, but a lot of the language around TikTok feels exceptional in ways that aren't justified: Twitter has (tens of?) millions of "terminally online" users, but we don't compare it to "digital crack." This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk abou…

Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like. It’s both scary and extremely impressive. Twitter on the other hand seems to promote monoculture, and tends to push you towards what everyone else likes. It essentially pushes whatever is popular. Some of the most interesting content and users on Twitter are shadow banned, either intentionally or through…

Twitter is an outrage platform. We would all be better off without it. I genuinely believe it’s a disservice to society.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#56

Post by dijonman2 »

foolfoolz wrote: post #17

tiktok has great features that make its content more addicting to return to than any other platform: - it’s all video means it’s higher quality than an image - every video is guaranteed views which lets anyone go viral - when anyone can go viral you get more organic content. depends on your patterns but i think most people see majority videos by regular people. the content is much more relatable - no need to follow -…

tiktok seems to intuitively know what I want and what I’m going to do. it somehow knows when I want to share something - probably inferred from viewing behavior.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#57

Post by Lamad123 »

productceo wrote: post #44

I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make…

I'm addicted to youtube and check HN everyday!! Not much else! And even youtube I like tot have it in the background while reading something.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#58

Post by adfgadfgaery »

astrea wrote: post #46

Breaking news: Something on the internet is addicting. Is this what we've been reduced to? Rehashing the same thoughts ad infinitum? Is it because a "thought leader" said it?

Is this your first day on this website?

There are occasionally interesting discussions, but the hero worship has got to go. Especially since people 'round here have awful taste in heroes.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#60

Post by oefrha »

ogwh wrote: post #45
htrp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows). My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.

Other platforms only look for similar content to what you've already seen. They don't take novelty into account. If you like one picture of a dog on Instagram it'll just show you more dogs and you get bored. Watch a few YouTube videos about one topic and the algorithm gets fixated on it. YouTube is so bad now that if you use it to listen to music the autoplay gets into an infinite loop of songs that sound near identi…

It also seems very easy to take recommendation into your own hands on TikTok with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible. Once I started to get quite a bit of political / cultural war crap in my feed; I “not interested” a few of them, the feed improved markedly almost immediately. With YouTube I guess you can sort of influence your recommendations by digging into your watch history and deleting a bunch of stuff, but it’s tedious and ineffective. “Not interested” on YouTube front page seems useless, I still get pushed the same repetitive stuff, maybe from another set of channels.
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