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TikTok and the Sorting Hat

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Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#71

Post by WhompingWindows »

Is anyone else here trying to reduce their use of technology outside of the workplace? My hobbies are music, painting, and woodworking, and it's all I can muster to focus on a screen from 9-5. I do comment here on HN and I peruse other websites, but I don't actively engage with any social media except HN.

I just find myself questioning the merits of attention spent on these social media platforms, given the information quality and density is so much lower than HN.

Maybe this is where TikTok has succeeded: short, snappy, quickly accessed videos; much more informational content than textual or image-based FB or Reddit, not to mention more skillfully executed, right? It's like a short-form, Twitter-ified entertainment version of YT.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#72

Post by filleduchaos »

matz1 wrote: post #15
codekansas wrote: post #3

Some really good points. Does anyone have a good explanation for why Chinese startups seem to have mastered build AI-centric apps while American startups (and large companies) lag behind? Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up hit despite having top-notch ML engin…

Elon musk recently said China rocks and the US has become more entitled and full of complacement. I kind a have to agree, even my company starting to shift a lot of development work to team in china. Their output and hard work has been amazing.

Very minor correction: you probably mean "complacency" not "complacement". And I do agree to an extent; from where I am standing the American software industry feels a bit bloated/stagnant/wasteful/some word I can't think of that covers all three.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#73

Post by bdickason »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #71

Is anyone else here trying to reduce their use of technology outside of the workplace? My hobbies are music, painting, and woodworking, and it's all I can muster to focus on a screen from 9-5. I do comment here on HN and I peruse other websites, but I don't actively engage with any social media except HN. I just find myself questioning the merits of attention spent on these social media platforms, given the informati…

I’ve been getting back into electronic music production and there’s a growing group of people who previously used ableton, logic, etc that are moving to pure hardware production (it’s called Dawless) to reduce screen time. Many are software engineers or work a day job at a tech company.

Interesting trends to keep an eye on.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#74

Post by dfxm12 »

quicklime wrote: post #70
sandworm101 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the effect of monopolies stifling innovation. Less monopolies, more so western culture. Many of TikTok's algorithms would be subject to great scrutiny if run by a western company. YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company. https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-use…

I feel like as of late, when China sees some success that the US does not, there’s a sentiment that they succeeded only because they’re a lesser society. They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom, or TikTok succeeded because Chinese corporations are happy to discriminate against groups that western corporations would obviously protect out of the goodne…

They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom

Who made this argument?

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#75

Post by mistermann »

Slartie wrote: post #68
chvid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not media format (short video clips) but the "sorting hat". That it breaks the traditional social media model with a news feed, discussions, a social graph of friends. I think it is completely meaningful to call it next generation (or second generation where the social graph model is the first generation). Also notice that this model can be applied to other media formats: Text, pictures, audio ...

> Also notice that this model can be applied to other media formats: Text, pictures, audio ... Actually, I don't think that this is as easy as you might think. The article goes into this a bit when saying that short video sequences are well-suited for such an algorithm because they provide a high frequency of "inputs" per time unit, but I think the article falls short of describing the other thing that makes videos p…

I'd like to see someone write a blog post taking a shot at (speculatively) "reverse engineering" how the TikTok algorithm works (or may work)...like what attributes it might extract from a video (some of which you've mentioned above) and what it might do with them. Basically, how the overall thing may work, as well as how it may improve over time, taking into consideration current cutting edge ML techniques and speculative future capabilities.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#76

Post by praveen9920 »

Nice read.

I guess TikTok has taken the quote "users don't know what they want" to next level. FB, YT, Twitter, Instagram are trying to use the labels/tags/likes/network provided by user while TikTok is using user's interactions to categorize user and recommend the content which the user himself didn't even knew he/she liked.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#77

Post by quicklime »

dfxm12 wrote: post #74
quicklime wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like as of late, when China sees some success that the US does not, there’s a sentiment that they succeeded only because they’re a lesser society. They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom, or TikTok succeeded because Chinese corporations are happy to discriminate against groups that western corporations would obviously protect out of the goodne…

They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom Who made this argument?

The idea of Chinese people (and Asians in general) being obedient to authority is something that I’ve heard frequently from people and in the news, but I didn’t mean to imply that sandworm101 made that particular argument.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#78

Post by mistermann »

filleduchaos wrote: post #69
rollinggoron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this very similar to Vine, the old video social network? Which Twitter bought and properly crash a burned?

The difference which actually changes quite a lot is that the maximum video length is much longer (six seconds vs a full minute). This lets people put more effort/content into their videos, allowing for more expressiveness than just memes. At the same time, a minute is short enough that it discourages the sort of rambling you might see on a freeform platform like YouTube. The outcome is a surprising amount of focused…

> I'm currently pretty deep in both crochet and recipe TikTok

Anyone know if it is possible on TikTok to temporarily check out different genres, but not have them become a part of your profile? Basically an incognito mode I guess?

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#79

Post by starfallg »

filleduchaos wrote: post #69
rollinggoron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this very similar to Vine, the old video social network? Which Twitter bought and properly crash a burned?

The difference which actually changes quite a lot is that the maximum video length is much longer (six seconds vs a full minute). This lets people put more effort/content into their videos, allowing for more expressiveness than just memes. At the same time, a minute is short enough that it discourages the sort of rambling you might see on a freeform platform like YouTube. The outcome is a surprising amount of focused…

I think the real difference compared to Vine is the amount of money that Bytedance sunk into advertising TikTok in past 2 years. All of the sorting hat stuff is nothing new. Without the follow graph, it doesn't endure.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#80

Post by Nacraile »

yamrzou wrote: post #65

For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of mediating between strangers who disagree with each other, they’re better off sorting those people apart. The only typ…

I'm not sure it's as much of a contradiction as you think it is. Noting "It manifests itself in the declining visit and posting frequency on Facebook across many cohorts", I find it entirely plausible that feeding the trolls yielded short term lift in target metrics at the expense of (much harder to measure and correctly attribute) long-term attrition of non-troll users. That hypothesis certainly fits the popular perception that FB is dying/dead. It somewhat fits my personal experience: I fairly aggressively pruned my news feed of any political content, which seems to have kept away the trolling, but the personal content that I wanted has dried up and my feed is now mostly ads and generic "recommended" clickbait. Why bother visiting?
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