TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack | Hacker News Reader

TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

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312 pointsmfiguiere416 comments

I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand. Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.

Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, but the other side of me is like wait where did 2 hours go? And do I really want this?

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.

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.

From what I've seen from Chinese tech companies, I've always noticed they tend to go one step even further in ignoring privacy. You think FB is bad, wait until you realize what Baidu, Tencent, etc do without even blinking. Probably because what the Chinese government demands of them, the only ones that stay standing are the ones willing to do that. And if your willing to do that, what is doing something similar when your not forced to?

Tictok have agreed to a $92 million settlement for lack of notification to users about data collection. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-owner-agrees-9...

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 identical, it's torture if you don't already know what you want to see/hear.

In short the usual algorithms are tailored to find similar content only, rather than finding novel content several degrees of separation away from what the user has expressed interest in.

Reddit made a change recently (in the last week or so) along these lines, to start injecting new subreddits in to your feed. They've picked up on this too.

Reddit is getting / is pretty good in my opinion

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.

> with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible

First time I heard about it. If it's hidden behind an undiscoverable gesture/tap, it's not accessible.

IIRC it’s among the first things they onboard you about. It’s also in the share menu, you should have seen it if you ever tried to download or share a video, or create a duet, or something. Long press is just an easy way to bring it up. Given the percentage of people commenting on TikTok threads who’ve never used it, “first time I heard about it” doesn’t mean much.

TikTok and HN (to a lesser degree) are the only places that don’t force feed me racial culture war stuff.

"Don't recommend channel" is very effective for me to ignore creators I just don't care about or content I'm at moment not interested in.

YT seems to have made some change to dump regular trending stuff into recommendations.

I really miss the option to tell it that I just really don’t want to see sports.

YouTube recommendations used to be quite good for a brief amount of time when google brain originally took over it I think? Now it’s a mess but it’s clearly due to exec meddling. like their absolutely product destroying migration towards videos 8 minutes or longer; most original content is now fully shit because they are filling it up with garbage to pad the time and release in a cadence. All stupid rules imposed by YouTube, which just takes creativity out of people.

It’s also possible any recommendation system can only stay pure for a few years until everyone from both sides is gaming them so badly for money it just cannot work anymore.

But if the videos are longer then people stay on the site for longer! It must mean that they like it more.

Or, you know, your platform makes me watch ten minutes to find something that would take 30 seconds otherwise, so fuck your platform.

On the other hand, if I ever fall alseep in front of YouTube with the autoplay on, I will more often than not wake up in front of either Tom Scott's unedited video about sending garlic bread to space[1] or Micheal from Vsauce reciting primes for 3 hours[2] (which tends to result in some pretty interesting dreams tho)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAblynZYhI

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEaYbDWyQE

I was trying to show a friend some features of a keyboard I just bought that I’m pretty excited about. It’s still in the mail, so we pull up YouTube on the nearest screen and type in the name of the board. The first and most popular video that came up was 14 minutes long, but looked high quality. As we skim through it, we realize that it’s mostly this guy speaking ad nauseam about himself with very few significant shots of the keyboard. We had to go back to search and go all the way to the long tail keyword-wise to find a video that gave us what we wanted. Yeah, YouTube search isn’t what it used to be, and my experience tracks with your suggestion that it’s executive meddling.

If that’s what YouTube wants to be now, that’s fine. My question is now where do I go to find what YouTube used to be (TikTok, maybe)? It’s ironic too, because it’s like they don’t realize that as a millennial I was drawn to YouTube because it _wasn’t_ TV.

Huh... I guess I never really noticed, but you're right. I used to listen to entire genres on YouTube and let the recommendation engine pick the next video. I discovered some cool songs that way.

Now, maybe I'll type in a song title, listen to the song, and the next video is a live performance of the same song... Followed by a lyric video of the same song.

Same reason why I am absolutely terrified of playing any instrumental music on Spotify. I let one track run till the end and my next 2-3 discover weeklies will be filled only by instrumental music.

I have the same experience with vocal music on YouTube Music, funnily enough. I greatly prefer instrumental music but you listen to one vocal album and suddenly all they recommend is singing.

i used to instinctively turn on private mode every time i opened the spotify app (on desktop at least, since it was easy enough to get at)

with youtube i usually open a video in a incognito tab anytime im watching something random, otherwise it takes weeks of clicking "not interested" just to get rid of some recommendations. sad times

i basically ignore all the recommendations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can use this behavior to your advantage though. I have my browsers set up to delete cookies when they are closed and from the surface this works for Youtube recommendations. If I open the site I only get very generic popular/pushed content.

So after I watch that instrumental music video, there will be a mass recommendation for other instrumental music. And that's nice, because I apparently was in a mood for that. And the next day, I open my browser again and they are all gone! I can dive into the music for the mood of that moment right away.

It's interesting that these companies go into these different product directions, while i assume they're both looking at similar metrics, and optimizing for the same outcome: engagement and number of users.

Somehow YouTube is seeing more engagement by showing more of the same, and TikTok is seeing even more engagement from showing fresh content.

Maybe the risk of an upward trend in outcomes, that blurs the fact that you could see even better trends by done things differently.

this is Hill climbing, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing

Yes. How do you deal with hill climbing in product management? How do you know that a 10% improvement in outcomes is bad, and a different approach could have given you 50% or 100%? More experimentation, more 'how might we'? Google is known for trying different approaches (many shades of blue for a link), but somehow none of their experiments indicated fresh content is important? Or is it just a matter of product management 'playing it safe' at Google, where they know 10% outcome improvement is good enough to keep their job?

My guess is limited time frames within some standard A/B testing protocol. Give people very similar content over a 1-2 week period, and they'll watch more of it. Give people very similar content over a 6 month period, and they'll get bored and leave. If your testing protocol doesn't look for long term effects, you'll never see the longer effect in any of your tests.

For me, YouTube is literally the same - I get the same videos thrown into my feed in repeat. Apparently this converts well for YT and the result is that my feed is maybe 10% genuine discovery. The rest is shit.

YouTube also does this weird thing for me where, for example, I watch a couple of videos of an android related YouTube channel about new phones, and then it’ll recommend me videos from 2008 about phones being released then. Lol

I've been a long-term subscriber to Google Play Music, now YouTube Music, and the change introduced and reinforced what you say. Each time I open the app it's to meet the same recommendations and automatic playlists; barely anything new. About time I got serious about transferring to Spotify.

I interviewed with them last year, and literally everyone I spoke to was brilliant. I think a lot of their magic is in hiring great people and having a very flat org chart. They get out of people’s way, and let them do cool shit.

Are they an American or Chinese company?

Chinese ! So maybe less focused on absolute numbers in terms of profit and able to be more focused on the product ? Even saying that feels so wrong, right, like US companies really cant enjoy building anything anymore ?

Chinese, but they're building recommendations teams in Mountain View and Seattle.

Nothing makes me more depressed than thinking about the amount of human ingenuity dedicated to making teens spend as much time as possible consuming "digital crack".

Definitely don't think about all the ingenuity that's wasted on making you click or buy something then.

Potato potato.

More data beats better algorithms, and Tiktok gets a lot of signals about what you might like based on how long you watch, how many times you watch, what you like, what you comment on, if you go to the profile page of a video you just watched, if you share, etc. Multiply that by all the videos you can see in a single hour, and Tiktok learns more about you than YouTube has in the past 5 years of use.

Absolutely not - I was using youtube for 10 years and every year my feed gets worse. Now the original content creators are dissapearing from my newsfeed and uts fetting invaded eith short clips of family guy. Its also will show me same clip again and again. It shows clips from creators i disliked. New uploads of creators i follow sometimes arent on my feed - its a shitshow. Half of comments are trolls and bots.

Here to say my experience is the exact opposite. My YouTube experience and recommendations have consistently improved over the last decade, and I find so much wonderful, informative stuff there.

TikTok, on the other hand, is a giant waste of my time. I have yet to find a single video I've liked from that platform; very little useful information there.

> family guy

Holy crap literally this happened to me few days ago

I made the mistake of watching a couple, what will happen next :)

You’ve to remember that they have an (ancient == valuable ) source of customer data. They started off as a news aggregator and must have had a decade of customer data to utilise while showing these videos. I remember reading in the book (the attention factory) how fanatical the leadership is towards investing in ML talent

It really does seem like a lot of the magic here is simply the format. The video lengths are a perfect balance between short enough to be addictive, and long enough to enable content more varied and interesting than just short gags.

Instagram and Facebook get bland real quick. Youtube/Netflix videos are often too long to be really addictive - "just one more" isn't as persuasive if "one more" takes 10 min+. With shorter skits like Key & Peele on Youtube you do get a stronger sense of that addictiveness. Twitter is mostly text and much less expressive, and even influencers treat it mostly as a communication/announcement platform, not a content platform.

Vine was hugely popular when it was shut down by Twitter, and I think it'll go down in history as one of the largest corporate mistakes every made. They were so close on the format - they just needed to allow slightly longer videos (which they did with Twitter message lengths around they same time they shut down Vine!!!).

I'm sure Bytedance's secret recommendation sauce is good, but I think much of their success is simply thanks to them being the first competent executor of the next major social media content format.

TikTok has recently introduced 10-minute long videos. Although, I have yet to come across a video that is >3 minutes, or a creator that uses that length of video.

I found the opposite. I took a look at TikTok, but the videos are too short to get into anything interesting. There's lot of interesting stuff on YouTube, however. Some of them could be shortened somewhat, but not down to a few minutes.

> Vine was hugely popular when it was shut down by Twitter, and I think it'll go down in history as one of the largest corporate mistakes every made. They were so close on the format - they just needed to allow slightly longer videos (which they did with Twitter message lengths around they same time they shut down Vine!!!).

Vine's top creators "unionized" and started demanding to be paid a cut. Vine had to be destroyed to defend the principle of not paying social media contributors.

That's somewhat ironic since TikTok pays certain content creators, although apparently not well.

https://youtu.be/jAZapFzpP64

Worth the full watch on video media money. But tldw; TikTok splits a pot of money over the views each video gets. The pot doesn't grow with the revenue they make or total views, so it's pretty exploitative.

What about Instagram Reels? Is that bland too?

The content creators aren’t there. Most of the good stuff is ripped directly from Tiktok.

Also their recommendations aren’t as good but that could just be a side effect of the above.

Focusing on content rather than a social network.

Most videos you see on tiktok are probably not people you are following, while most on Instagram probably are

They test content on a small circle of users, if metrics are good they keep expanding

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-...

> 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).

The thing is, the engine creates the content. Not quite as efficiently as a human producer saying "I want a 30 second video about X", but through the feedback loop of what gets promoted.

Twitter is run by libertarians who prioritise free speech, and therefore what Twitter produces is more and more intense political argument. Once the Tahrir square revolution and the color revolutions happened, that's what the place is locked into.

Instagram created the "influencer": young hyper conventionally attractive women photographed in beautiful locations, advertising products like energy drinks on their own account rather than a traditional modelling agency structure.

Youtube created the "let's play" and the "thirty to 120 minute political rabbithole" and the "shocked face thumbnail" genres.

Tiktok's secret weapon - and I'm not familiar with how it works in detail, but the effects are very clear - is a video editing tool, a content creation system, that is accessible for ordinary people. The evidence of this is that much of the "reels" content on Instagram's Tiktok clone has Tiktok watermarks on it.

I watched my nephew create a training montage for a toy. He takes in some video sequences, adds some music and gets something far more compelling and does so quickly. We just don't have a good natural understanding about what turns raw content into a good video. Tools like this help massively with that.

> Twitter is run by libertarians who prioritise free speech...

Oh wow, I wasn't expecting such a big laugh this early in the morning... thank you!

No other social network lets users send a “dislike signal.

I haven't tried it, but my understanding from reading the experiences that it is about content not the creators.

Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook all about creators and social "connections" or follows to these. So you get the good with all the ugly and horrible. Want insights, art or jokes. Get the horrible political opinions and signalling too... And then see all the fights.

Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing."

So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes?

I'm going to go ahead and guess "pro-unionization rabbit holes." If I'm wrong then the evidence will be me following the link someone gives me of a 2-hour TikTok unionization rabbit hole. I can't lose, internet!

edit: clarification

Your comment is incomprehensible.

You're talking to a transformer language model.

Really? How do you know? I had a look at their other posts and it doesn't seem like it to me.

I'll take another stab at it.

OP's critique seems to be that TikTok caused engagement with their preferred content for a longer duration than desired. That's not an interesting distinction from what happened back in the day with people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. "Digital crack" is hyperbole if all it means is spending longer on the topics one already likes.

My question: is the TikTok algo consistently steering users toward/away from categories of content they would have otherwise had an interest in consuming? E.g., are there pro-unionization users who accidentally spend 2 hours watching pro-unionization TikToks? Or is the recommendation engine steering those users to 2 hours of some less contentious category?

Are you referring to some in-joke that I am not getting?

I think the important distinction in 'do I really want this' becomes whether I chose to do that activity, or if I kind of just got sucker punched into it.

I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.

About a year and a half ago, I acknowledged how negatively some reflexive social media habits impacted my life and managed to extricate myself from them. A year or two before that realization I installed TikTok to see what the fuss was about, checked out the stream for a few minutes, looked up at the clock to realize it had actually been about two hours, and immeditealy uninstalled the app.

Astonishingly good attention and interest manipulation. Terrifyingly good, in fact. I don't moralize about getting lost in trash entertainment, but there's a significant swath of the population for which this format combined with these design patterns is a big problem.

It's AI is kind of terrible for society. Sure, it is impressive technically, but WSJ did an article Tiktok's effect on teenagers:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investig...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-ti...

The first Chinese app with some traction and it blows american ones by being delightful and diverse :D

Wait for them to start doing TV shows with some non-Chinese focus.

I think Chinese cultural exports obviously lag behind those of Japan and Korea because the government censors confine their creatives, leaving them less free to create.

The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon.

I'd love if they proved me wrong.

> Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

On to the next 'hit' then.

The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible.

There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™.

The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs.

Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.

It's just entertainment. You could say the same about books or TV. At least Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social and interactive and encourage people to produce content instead of just consuming passively.

Someone’s who’s read a lot of books is called well read.

Someone who’s watched a bunch of shows is called a binge watcher.

No matter what they’re called, reading specifically requires more active thinking than watching stuff. I wouldn’t say theyre the same.

Someone who read a lot of porn novels wouldn't be called well read, and someone who watch a bunch of college lectures wouldn't be called a binge watcher. What matters is the content, not the form of the content.

It is just that simple content tend to choose easy to digest mediums, there is not much demand for low effort literature today since people just watch movies instead.

I totally agree with you.

Thats why i mentioned reading books also requires more “active” part of the brain rather than passively watching.

I wouldn't call someone "well read" just for reading lots of books. I'd call them a "book worm". "Book worm" still has more positive connotations than "binge watcher" or "couch potato", but "well read" indicates that they read the classics and can talk about them intelligently.

Tiktok also has classics, I presume?

Thanks for clarifying that up, wasn’t aware of book worm vs well read.

My main point really was that reading requires a more active effort than watching which is passive.

> The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user'

Except meanwhile you can't make normal contact with people because everybody is looking at their phone.

One of the best times to start a new product or even promote an existing one (in consumer space) is during the infancy of a new social platform. Not only could there be opportunities to build products around TikTok but advertising on TikTok now could be akin to advertising on FB in 2005, cheap and plenty of chances to make good ROI

But u can’t take advantage of those opportunities unless u become an user first and study what works

I understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP.

Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees.

I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.

I agree though with your last point. I get a lot of queer content and it's usually very welcome. Though some niches in that subset that focus on discussion of harassment of queer people are much more anxiety inducing.

That sucks. Imagine if you worked there and realized that.

Tiktok is the anti-Instagram.

It rejects Instagram’s focus on aesthetics and instead appeals to playfulness and authenticity.

They have good editors that know their audience.

Sure some what you see is supported by "algorithms"; but what you sense ("playful, authentic, and raw" ) is the result of a deliberate editorial policy done by a group of actual humans.

One explanation for the difference between tiktok and instagram could be that tiktok doesn’t have a crystallized business model yet and is just focusing on growing its network as much as possible. Presumably it will end up as bad as every other (profitable) social network over time (apart from twitter, which is more like an internet utility).

Good point

> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc

I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it.

Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever.

What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral?

Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?

These are good questions and I think it’s nowhere near as rosy as OP described.

AFAIK the content is permanent.

There's a website as well as the app.

You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.

In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.

Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".

Then I'll say it has a relatively minor use among the voting-age population. Most users are children.

It seems voting-age adults are in a large majority, with "only" 28% under-18 and therefore 72% over-18 Tiktok users[0].

However, you have more of a point if you look at typical likely-voters instead of all voting-age people.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikT...

I remember hearing similar things about Instagram vs. Facebook many years ago.

Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?

It felt like that for a bit but then they (Tiktok) just pushed a release that removed reposts/memes from the main FYP feed. All of a sudden, it became much more interesting again.

But I agree with the overall point that at some point people will learn how to game it.

> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places.

This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram.

Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live.

Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.

Yes, there is a huge disconnect in the Instagram discovery feed for me as well. I follow friends & family, some astronomy, photography, tech accounts but when I browse Explore it’s full of influencers and fit girls in thighs. It got slightly better a few months ago when I think they did something but only introduced 20% of my tastes rather than 0%.

I had to spend hours training Instagram not to show me endless pictures of hot shirtless guys when I go to the 'explore' feed. I follow one or two pop singers who sometimes post sexy photos, but for the most part I just follow people that I really know. I'm not sure how my feed ended up so sexualized. My theory is that Instagram notices that I spend longer looking at hot guys when they do appear than I do looking at other kinds of photos. (I am happy to stare at hot guys, but it's not what I'm actually looking for when I go to Instagram.)

> I legitimately laugh my ass off

Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky?

Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many diamonds on there! I can easily laugh my ass off every night, because the format is just perfect for a bunch of quick visual gags.

The duet feature and the re-use song feature enable so much absolute hilarity, because of the repetition humour.

Which is why I watched a TikTok of someone putting a 3D-printed magic wand on top of a sea urchin, set to the sound of someone saying "Avadakadavra" in a really high-pitched voice, and I just fucking lost it. It's brilliant! Brilliant!

Because I trust hacker news (somewhat), I just installed tiktok for the first time.

15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested.

I just removed it again for that very reason.

3 days and it’s algorithm can figure out what you like, unstoppable after that, it just freaking knows you, brilliant app.

I’ve tried it twice now and it just doesn’t click for me. I think the most interesting thing it found for me was a video of a person doing some really excellent welding.

Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.

Ah, HN in a nutshell:

"I'm having fun on <popular social media>!"

*downvote*

Is there a way to remove the overlays? By that I mean the crap above the videos? I really can't use it with those, I'm autistic and it's just too much.

Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally.

It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.

Yet, but it will.

Hey, maybe it will stabilize.. surprises happen :)

It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion.

IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics.

At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues.

At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there.

It'll happen to TikTok as well.

God.. beyond the sad but obvious pattern. It seems the web is just a incoherent runaway. New "platform" > bubbly phase > distortion for bad incentives (money, fame, else) > rot > abandonment for next "platform".

It was fun to observe that during the myspace days but it's getting annoying.

Huh it's funny. When you put it that way is sounds like all those same arguments people have been making against crypto - except the fallout from the "rot" phase of crypto will have very significant real world consequences.

It's as if people who have been on the internet since those days can easily see what's coming.

Plausible, except I think crypto ending up as yet another asset class might enjoy a longer life because, allegedly, institutions are playing in it now. They can leave too though.

Imagine all that time spent watching other people do hobbies you would like to have instead be spent actually doing those hobbies. Where would your life be right now and where would it go from there.

Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.

> Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content.

I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds."

Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to make a point, but I don't find the argument compelling that social media really can add value to our lives as long as we ignore the most visible and popular content within it.

On reddit you need to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff, usually by stumbling across good subs from outside the site. TikTok is better at serving you the things you like as you passively consume them.

I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few of them, all tiktoks seem to have the same feel and optimization. They're uncanny valley of authenticity, influencers and singers and actors and wives struggling so very very hard to seem amiable and authentic and real based on same evolving playbook, and I feel too weirded out after 30s or so to keep watching :O.

I think the thing that makes TikTok successful is that it's so uniquely tuned to whoever owns the account, and that it catches up with your personal interests and preferences very quickly. Your experience on TikTok is probably going to be a lot different to your wife's, at least this has been the case for us.

TikTok’s super power is tailoring the feed to the user, so this uncanny valley stuff is what your wife likes.

It really is wild. You can decide exactly what you want to be shown by how long you spend on a video. You can literally feel the algorithm working alongside you, like you're using river currents while paddling in a kayak. Fucking crazy.

Important reminder: don’t talk too much publicly about your (wife’s) TikTok feed, because it says more about you than you’d think.

I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.

This is spot on. One person I know gets pimple popping on a fresh TikTok feed within minutes. I have no idea how the algorithm can converge on that so fast, but its certainly some dark NN magic.

The hard truth. I don't use TikTok right now, but this is the kind of stuff I would see:

https://twitter.com/Vomit_Dragon/status/1506109341484474370

https://twitter.com/WatsyTheOtt/status/1507646007294631941

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1507592587426906114

https://twitter.com/tealeafraccoon/status/150735003807424512...

Some of it is actually from TikTok.

I don’t understand, what does this signal about you personally?

That you (consciously or not) like young dancing girls

This might not be a problem, of course, but in other situations might be something you don’t want to make public?

To be fair, assuming he’s a heterosexual male, isn’t it just assumed he would like young dancing girls?

Young meaning really young.

Not really - just mostly Asian, so perhaps to you they look younger than they are.

Lolll read my message above again!

Most of us get exactly zero Asian girls on our TikTok. You just basically told everyone that TikTok detected that you probably have a (maybe subconscious) attraction to Asian girls.

I don't get those young girls (I mean children as you seem to imply) - but replying to your message, I assume some did. Or rather you did, or else how would you know they are "very young girls"?

It seems really off to accuse random people on the internet to be attracted to kids.

What I was saying is that I was shown young women, but it still annoyed me.

As for attraction - that is what TikTok's algorithm started out with, and I liked some of them, because why not? As I said, they are cute and they put in the effort to do some funny stunts or whatever. I didn't dislike them, so why not press "like"? Doesn't mean I want to see those girls all the time. Also yeah, I am a heterosexual male, so young women are attractive to me.

I probably would have liked a lot of cat videos, too, if TikTok had shown them to me. Doesn't mean I want to see cat videos all the time, either, and also not that I am sexually attracted to cats.

I only tried TikTok for maybe two days, so I really think it is a failure of the algorithm, not a reveal of my subconsciousness.

Since everybody was raving about the TikTok algorithm, which is what made me try it out in the first place, I assumed that I wouldn't have to be super careful in "training" the algorithm. Apparently I assumed wrong.

You confused usernames a bit.

The only revelation here is that you have zero idea how these app algorithms work.

I mean why would you even discuss this openly outside of a scathing criticism that TikTok must be corrupting the young minds of children if the algorithm is starting to pollute your (or your wife’s) feed with young kids emulating highly sexualized dance routines, without you ever training it to do that..

The thing is that you DO train it to do that. Not everyone’s feed is like that. It just depends on what TikTok infers from your usage.

So in a way, saying that TikTok is outrageous is a bit hypocritical: it shows what you seem to like, and surely you calling it outrageous can only be a posture.

Nothing. Crubier is just an absolute clown that doesn't understand Global and Demographic algorithms also exist, and prioritize pushing content that other people have watched for long and consistent periods.

In my case the algorithm decided I should be slowly forwarded into the arms of a pharmacist prescribing a stimulant to help with a bunch of mildly ADHD/ASD quirks in my personality.

TikTok didn't work for me because of the young dancing girls. Yes, I clicked "like" on some of them, because they ARE cute and put in the effort. Doesn't mean I want to see young dancing girls all the time. TikTok showed me stuff and since I liked it, I clicked like. So TikTok shows me more of the same stuff, and not the other stuff which I might also like.

So I guess you have to be super disciplined to get a nice TikTok feed? Or just try it long enough? Or it only works for women, because they may click less on young dancing girls?

Lol. Assuming you’re not trolling, I’d say yes, you have to be aware that any signal from you (including time spent watching each video) is analyzed by TikTok.

So what? I don't know what you are implying? So you never like videos of young women dancing? You go on TikTok and are very disciplined to only click on videos with CSS hacks or something?

I uninstalled it for two days, so I really don't have a guilty conscience of secretly liking young girls or whatever. It was ultimately just annoying.

Yeah that's a problem with all of these things. They scrape SO much data, they seem to do SO many nefarious things... and still, if I ever look up a dishwasher (a once every half a decade purchase), amazon and google will forever assume I'm HUGELY into dishwashers. It seems their fancy profiling algorithm is "last in, first out".

Same with youtube - I want to be able to occasionally watch something without it assuming I want that ALL the time, to exclusion of everything else. Yes, I checked out a video on how to change the filter on my laundry machine; yes I needed to fix my snow blower. These things are not my life now! <slap my face emoji>

Basically, I'm stunned how unsophisticated and unhelpful these algorithms are to me as a consumer, though I suppose they are effective to company who wants to drive "Engagement" without caring any further than that.

P.S. And now that I have kids, oh boy are these systems ever confused :D. If I stop to show my kid something on my phone, that's all I'll see for next 3 weeks.

Young dancing girls is exactly how it was advertised to me, a not-so-young adult, when it was still called Musical.ly. I remember being throughly creeped out by how shameless those musical.ly YouTube ads were.

my fiancée is hopelessly addicted to TikTok and just about everything she shows me from there is wholly devoid of actual authenticity—it's all fake as hell. "cute" moments between couples that were obviously staged and rehearsed instead of being impromptu as implied, young mom's desperately making a big deal out of everything their kids do because she needs Content for the Channel, and more.

I kind of get the feeling that we are passing or have passed some threshold where many, possibly most people can no longer identify Actual Authenticity due to social media overexposure, and I for one find this distressing.

I agree. Especially with younger people, you can really tell they're pushing their faces to display the right amount of emotion.

The staged relationship content is just another niche on TikTok. I skip that content almost immediately so it’s rare for the algo to surface any, but it’s popular because enough people really enjoy it. The same type of content is on YouTube and other platforms.

I don’t know, we’ve had staged content presented as reality for a long time(ie almost all “reality” tv) and we seem to be doing ok. The TikTok content you’re describing doesn’t feel terribly different from that.

“Naturally selected and evolved”

Wow I never thought of this applied to algorithms and AI. Very profound to think about in this context, of users selecting the best videos with their clicks and evolving the naturally selected videos to out compete the other videos, in the same vein as survival of the fittest.

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 sure to click like or add comment on interesting ones, in order to send signals to AI.

I'm not embodying any fake persona, just trying to find what I would find interesting. I just don't get addicting content. I even try searching so that TikTok would get explicit keywords from me.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).

I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally. I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers: I check out mainstream videos on YouTube like MKBHD and even subscribe to his podcast (This is to show I find content for "mainstream consumers" interesting, though I work in tech and know more about tech things than MKBHD's target audience).

Can someone help? Why is the whole world praising TikTok while I am failing repeatedly?

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.

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).

No. Some of the dance content hooked them but they used not interested to get rid of it.

Ah, thanks for correcting my understanding.

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.

> I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers

> I subscribe to a bunch of... RSS feeds

Does not compute

I'll add

> I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally

Liking the "technology industry generally" is closest to mainstream interests, but even then, people like that their new phone is thinner or their new Xbox has better graphics. Regular consumers aren't too worried about ARM vs Intel, MS dropping support for old PCs, or any use of blockchains beyond asset speculation.

When I was using TikTok, it was the first truly openminded social media platform I found. Stuff I was watching on it:

- A girl coder who showed people how she operated her light airplane, flying between different little Midwest cities where she lived.

- A free diver (living in Hawaii?) who could stay underwater for several minutes at a time (and film fun chill videos while at it).

- Good relationship advice from progressive-thinking folks who weren't out to make a political point, or shame one party or another.

- Nifty yoga tricks from someone in SoCal.

- Longboarding cosplayers from Asia (yes, they would dress up... and longboard...).

It was also the first social media platform where I saw plenty of positive representation of folks from different backgrounds – including the country my parents came from. Far, far cry from what I read in the US media, by contrast. Compared to the awful divisive stuff I saw on FB, I thought to myself, it's really odd that the US tried to shut this down. Call it addictive, but it didn't leave me feeling soul-damaged.

How do you find these? I've given up on the app multiple times. Never got beyond being shown teenagers doing teenage things.

Maybe it is a regional problem? Your name sounds German, I'm in Germany and also get a lot of teenagers, and a lot of dressed up people doing staged "funny" things.

I've never seen any interesting tech content, or insightful political content (beyond hot takes on current news), or interesing hobbies and DIY projects (instead I get a lot of people from Asia doing bricklaying or welding).

Maybe we are in the wrong bucket?

(Or maybe it is a scam, and they hired a ton of people to manually pick addictive videos for selected "influcencers", and the silent masses get random videos to please the masses? :-D)

TikTok is vastly different between regions, even when you set a preferred language.

I'm American and live in Germany, and have tested it in both. In Germany, I get tons of those low-quality videos where they copy/paste something from Youtube and it looks "fried".

I think of Tik Tok as being like Pringles - as in, once you pop, you can't stop. Something about being able to easily flip to the next thing, combined with TikTok's excellent recommendation engine, makes for a very addictive experience - for me, at least.

If you're not enjoying it, despite using the product as intended, then I'd just guess you and it aren't a good fit. That doesn't seem to be any huge mystery - all products and services have fans and people who aren't interested.

I think it’s the perfect pavlov machine. I honestly wonder how it affects behavior.

https://dandradebehaviorism.weebly.com/bf-skinner.html

I found it very stressful because I couldn't get rid of the annoying stuff. Swiping it away would just bring up something new that was also annoying.

Just out of curiosity what are you using to read RSS feeds

I'd be more interested about what people subscribe to.

I’ve been interested as well for quite some time. I don’t know how to find websites. That old style of browsing was before my time.

Not to mention, who still actually maintains RSS feeds? To be fair idk if it’s really necessary.

I actually subscribe to YouTube feeds so that I don't have to ever log in. It's really nice.

But on top of that, just small websites that provide RSS. I change it up here and there.

In your experience, is RSS reliable enough to replace Reddit and Facebook as a news feed?

HN RSS does that for me very well.

I still keep Facebook to check on what are my friends been up to recently. But lately it only has part of that content.

Perhaps it is time for friend feed aggregator.

Yeah, I mean if you wanted, you can include reddit (and hacker news) in your RSS feed, so no need for replacement. That said, the entire point of RSS is to curate your own experience so just linking it to reddit (or hackernews) sorta defeats the purpose. I guess its nice to have both in one place.

As for Facebook, I haven't used it since 2008 when it became clear it was a cruddy company led by a misanthrope so I can't speak to that.

I use feedbro on firefox and it's okay

I use a Telegram bot.. I create a channel for each RSS feed (or a bunch of related feeds) and then add the bot to it and use some /commands, and the bot will send posts to it. I can invite other people to the channel too, and Telegram even lets you add a little chat to discuss each submission separately

The bot is @rss2tg_bot, if you don't want channels you can just begin a private chat with it and send a rss url. Or add it to a group and then it sends new posts to the group.

Feedly

Feeder on Android, but nothing yet on PC, because all RSS feeds has ugly, old school UI.

There should be an equivalent to Godwin's law for HN and RSS readers <3

I can relate, but depending on your perspective, maybe even worse because I find the recommendations off-putting. I don't understand what's happening that people like. I can't think of another word: It's just off-putting. Discordant. Dissonant.

It's like being a atheist, raised in an atheist house, in a country full of atheists and then going to church for the first time.

I think it is like licorice, some say they love it but I can't imagine why anyone would want to eat it as the taste is so overwhelming and horrible.

Yeah, some people are monsters. Like those that include black licorice in bags of jelly beans or jubejubes.

Is it because you’re outside of TikTok? You maintain a mental model of the app and its algorithm. The app is in your lab, not the other way around. A like or a share is a calculated action that occurs simultaneously in your mental model and in the app.

Thinking like that kills immersion for me. For example, I was playing Mass Effect 2 on my Framework (with Wine) yesterday and caught myself thinking about whether any significant internal state would change from the conversation Shepard was having. I shut down that line of thought and dove back into the story.

I sometimes wonder if I'm not enjoying TV and movies to the fullest because I get distracted by thinking about where I've seen the actors before, the production process, or how they were able to achieve a particular effect.

I have no trouble finding thoughtful and educational content on TikTok. Digital design is an example of a tech industry-relevant category that is a good fit for TikTok, I regularly find high quality videos there. Since you mentioned MKBHD, there’s of course a world of PC building, laptop/phone/gadget review, etc. over there, which I don’t care much about. The nice thing about TikTok is that the videos are as long as they need to be and no longer, and brevity is rewarded, unlike on YouTube where every other two minute video is artificially stretched to ten minutes.

>I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).

I think we have the same "problem": "content" doesn't engage us, "discussion" does. It's not so much about the exact topic as much as the ability to see other perspectives. All these modern social media platforms are awful for discussion and actively downplay it, despite all the popular ones having some form of commenting features. The closest modern analog would be discord, but discussion is almost as ephemeral as Snapchat once you get even a tiny bit active. small group servers kind of capture the feel, but still isn't meant for longform replies like this one,

Feel free to mention if I missed the mark by a country mile. But I've been thinking about this for a while on why I can browse reddit for hours but can't stand instagram for more than a few minutes (aside from my resistance to give Facebook another account to mine data from). reddit has more discussion than I could ever read (perhaps even too much). Youtube comments are pretty low quality (in both formatting and content) but does the bare minimum needed to post stuff longer than a tweet.

(That said, I've been getting way more into silly cat videos than I ever wanted to, so who knows?)

This is very insightful. I didn't think of it from this angle, but I think you hit it on the nail that I find discussions among people, not unidirectional presentations from a tiktoker, interesting.

Thanks for helping me see this!

that would also explain why (as someone asked in a different subthread) twitter's recommended posts don't get the sort of engagement tiktok does. on twitter you're there to see discussions among people you follow, and pushing random recommendations into the stream just adds noise and clutter.

This is 100% me. If I can't mainline a bunch of people's perspectives within minutes, I'm not interested. Video is waaayyy too slow. Granted, I also have an exception: I watch YouTube regularly, but I have to be doing something with my hands at the same time.

And it's not an attention span thing — I read books. It's about the density of information and the speed with which I can traverse it. I can read as fast as I think, but even 2x speed videos don't get there. So without an additional activity to fill my whole attention space (is there a term for this? ADHD people might have one?) I get bored.

You might be aware, but it's possible to watch YouTube videos at faster speeds by entering certain simple JavaScript snippets into the browser's console. Just in case it helps.

Unfortunately faster than 2x speed starts to overrun my ability to parse human speech =/ Maybe if I practiced...

Wait. Isn’t “discussion” just another form of “content”? How is it really different?

I thought you might be referring to “other people thoughts” outside your bubble? Which could hint to why you don’t like Instagram (they try to keep you in one thought bubble) compared to HN/Reddit.

PS: I’m actually interested in both, content and discussion. Which is bad because you get addicted to all kind of platforms!

Discussion is "content" but in very strong context to some other "content". Feed's next video doesn't broaden that context, it creates a new one. Reply on HN/lobsters/reddit/even 4chan of all places isn't like that.

Discussion feeds off ideas raised in previous posts; whereas the content on Instagram is more stand alone.

>Wait. Isn’t “discussion” just another form of “content”? How is it really different?

yes, which is partially why I used quotes. I don't know a precise term for what I'm describing. "content" in this context tends to focus more on the creator while "discussion" tends to focus more on the topic. They certainly aren't mutually exclusive. I feel an example of the difference is two scenario with a youtube video.

- someone with many subscribers publishing a youtube video on their channel and the resulting comments (people who likely have some personal investment in the creator) skewing towards discussion of the creator's thoughts and ability

- that same video being posted on reddit, with a degree of separation meaning that the discussion usually skews towards the topic, with little mention of the creator specifically.

The both have some mixing of discussion and content, but they have a different flavor to them. modern social media skews even further towards focusing on the creator, even in resulting discussion. Which is fine but perhaps not satifying to a "discussion focused" user who simply wants to figure out the recipe required or the work needed to perform a feat and hoping to hear multiple other voices of people who have tried/made similar things.

>I thought you might be referring to “other people thoughts” outside your bubble? Which could hint to why you don’t like Instagram

well that part varies immensely. Some people do want to try and consider multiple viewpoints, some merely want the "truth" and will inevitably muck through a lot of noise to try and find that. And others still do just want to hear their own viewpoints echoed.

It's a spectrum and I can't pretend that I fit neatly into any of the kinds of categories above. Depends on my mood and the topic. Some topics I have no stakes nor thoughts in and I just wanna see what the conversation is, while others I am pretty set in and I do just inevitably think to myself "does anyone actually know what they are talking about?"

But I think that's on a separate axis on the reason other social media don't engage me. It's not like I want a bunch of people downplaying or contradicting the creator to create "discussion". That's a lose-lose for everyone. But the nature of Instagram means it won't be easy to say, look at a cosplaying longboarder and

- see if other people also cosplay longboard

- read other people's experiences on their own attempts at cosplay longboarding

- get more context on if cosplaying longboarding is some rising trend sweeping a nation

That sorts of info is what personally sends me down the rabbit hole that somehow ends with me knowing way too much trivia on a topic I never even thought of hours later. Otherwise, it's more of a matter of "neat, that's really creative and I never woulda thought of that" and then move on with my day.

you're rich :)

Same feeling - I consume a ton online and keep trying tiktok but I'm consistently bored - just feels like the pop music equivalent of everything else.

"If people have the right to be tempted - and that's what free will is all about - the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold." - Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, "Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, March 2007

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...

Yeah, that's wrong: the market is quite obviously limited by the ability to produce temptation, not consumer's finite ability to buy it.

As in: before TikTok, there was lots of TikTop-Temptation to be sold. Demand didn't change, supply did.

I think that's what the article is saying. The market will continue to innovate to provide greater temptations because that's a competitive and profitable strategy even though it will have some downsides.

And you don't need AI for this. There are lots of media outlets with entertainment news that at best, lack nuance, but most often just spread misinformation in an echo chamber they built.

How and what is LessWrong doing? I haven't heard much about it in years. In a way, it's not a good fit in the 'post-truth' era.

From themselves, via about and a link there "A Brief History of LessWrong" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S69ogAGXcc9EQjpcZ/a-brief-hi...

> In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead. In 2017, a team led by Oliver Habryka took over the administration and development of the site, relaunching it on an entirely new codebase later that year.

> The new project, dubbed LessWrong 2.0, was the first time LessWrong had a full-time dedicated development team behind it instead of only volunteer hours. Site activity recovered from the 2015-2016 decline and has remained at steady levels since the launch.

> The team behind LessWrong 2.0 has ambitions not limited to maintaining the original LessWrong community blog and forum. The LessWrong 2.0 team conceives of itself more broadly as an organization attempting to build community, culture, and technology which will drive intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems.

I'd be curious about their funding

Thank you! That page addresses the question only in the one quoted sentence, "In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead.". This page, which I found via the link in the parent, says much more:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKrrnrCDv6zm4SL9a/why-hasn-t...

I suspect it's connected to the political rejection of post-modernism (in its actual meaning, not the politically loaded meaning) and with it the Enlightement ideas of reason/rationality (replaced by 'winners' - brazenness and aggression), fact (replaced by 'post-truth'), intellect, universal rights and humanitarianism (replaced by nationalism and reactionaryism), and through those things the power and obligation of humans to better their world and themselves. That rejection was widely normalized, I suspect, in the election of 2016, IME. A problem with talking about these things is a factual basis.

More and more I fear this is our generation's 'smoking'

It’s worse

Smoking can't be harnessed to control people, social media can be.

Also, smoking is socially neutral at worst, arguably even positive. You don’t stop seeing your mates because you really want to stay at home chain smoking. In fact, you probably smoke with your mates.

On the other hand, the constant drip feed of dopamine from social media sites does make people care less about real social interactions.

Both things use chemical reactions in the brain to create an addiction. The only difference is that smoking is regulated.

I do not think they are the same. People addicted to social media can be locked in a room for a week, without social media, and show no adverse withdrawal symptoms. If you try the same to people addicted to drugs, they might die.

They’re also not the same thing because one is named “drugs” and the other is named “TikTok”

But putting pointless distinctions aside, an addiction is an addiction. Gambling addicts won’t die if you lock them in a room for a week (with food and water…), but they’ll go back gambling once you let them out.

Same with TikTok and other social media. They’re creating real addictions in people with real consequences. I’m not an expert scientist doctor man, but afaik addictions are bad.

Huh? I do believe they'd act the same as nicotine addicts; that is, irritable, bored, unfocused, antsy

Literally anything you do creates a "chemical reaction in the brain". That's how brains work.

I've tried it a few times. Even ran an account for a project I do.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not the right personality for this stuff but I found it annoying and taxing.

Open it up and you get these obnoxious videos and then have to press a button to make them go away. The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic. Lots of people love it so maybe I'm just too old.

Perhaps they've "cracked some psychological secret" but I believe it's more likely they've replicated whatever makes pop music and television work for a lot of people. I have the same kind of distaste for those I have for tiktok.

But good for them. Entertainment is important antidote to stress. Glad people like it

I'm with you. I assumed it's because I'm older than the target demographic, but maybe it's just because I'm not a 'fun' person - don't sing or dance or party.

My wife loved it to death, and I just found it incredibly annoying and overbearing even just hearing my wife play with it.

Haha please don't use your affinity to TikTok as a measuring stick for how 'fun' you are! Everyone is fun in their own ways, I'm sure you are a hoot.

> I found it annoying and taxing.

You've managed to find the word I've been looking for to describe why I don't like TikTok. It feels taxing. It makes my head spin and after a couple minutes I feel exhausted. Maybe my brain's just too slow and sensitive.

yea, it's incredibly annoying, and "cringe". the feed just doesn't give me anything interesting, or satisfying. i never felt good about using it, during or after. it's just not for me. i also hate that synthesized lady voice

It'll learn. Just pulled up my tiktok account and what I got was:

- A dude from Bermuda making food from the early 1900s: @bdylanhollis

- A delivery guy who meets new dogs on his routes and befriends them: @christhedogguy

- A woman who scratches her ass... donkey: @fortheloveofass

- A dude who owns a septic company telling about his day: @wellandsepticlife

- Random animal facts: @mndiaye_97

- Typesetting and printing: @sachistorymuseum

You see the generic dancing crap and memes at first, but the system will learn pretty quickly.

You ever get the CCP validating content like a guy teaching Mandarin in a fun way?

So teaching Mandarin is validating the CCP? God forbid you take a tiny step outside your own culture and pick up the basics of a different language.

The comedy here is that if I only mentioned the mandarin teachers randomly showing up on the feed, someone would have mentioned the CCP involvement, when the reality is that I'm aware and don't care, so I tried to acknowledge the people that would care, but consensus has already shifted to defending the dopamine stream of TikTok

That's rich

>The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic

I argue that's most modern "social" media, not necessarily a unique point of tiktok. They want the creator to be the focus, not the community surrounding them. Comments are encouraged to keep short enough to keep engagement but not take that attention away, so you'll inevitably just get some shallow encouragement as "top comments".

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not trying to be what HN is.

> it's more likely they've replicated whatever makes pop music and television work for a lot of people.

This seems to be a good explanation. TV commercials have figured out some of these tricks, like using a louder volume than the TV show itself, or using a song that's a cover of a more famous, older song.

I find it irritating, but it probably works because older viewers recognize the song and pay attention, while younger viewers mentally attach the cover version to the product being sold.

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 about it compared to other addictive social media (e.g., saying that users are "obsessed with" $FACEBOOK_PROPERTY instead of describing them as digital addicts.)

I don't believe all those kids using TikTok have the faintest clue it's "a weird Chinese app".

Not even to mention, in what world is TikTok "a weird Chinese app". It's just an improved and iterated upon version of Vine.

I wonder if there's a way Vine could have iterated and TikTok never caught on in the US. Was Vine just before its time, and that alone doomed it?

Twitter just doesn't know how to integrate products.

From what I can gleam, Vine simply had no way to monetize itself (something Twitter struggles with to this day, despite being the top 3 largest platforms), while Snapchat and Instagram could capitalize on that much more quickly as they implemented vine like features into their services.

And that just spelled the death toll. Why would a creator stay on one platform when the other is paying them? Consumers bemoan the constant bombardment of ads and now data tracking, but those are the costs of business if the user isn't directly paying a subscription (something services like Patreon and Onlyfans would take advantadge off around this same time that Vine was struggling. So Vine had potentially more than one way out). And if you don't/can't, some other billion dollar coporation will happily sell their soul for the trillionth time to outcompete.

These things live and die by the recommendation engine. Only fun I remember having with Vine was when someone would compile top 10 vines and put them on YouTube…

I wasn't talking about the kids using TikTok. Most of the discourse I've seen online about TikTok's addictiveness (and origin) has been by young-to-middle-aged adults.

Even if they do, they do not care. The user only cares about what the app can do for them.

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 poor auto moderation.

TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like, and given it’s Chinese ownership, has no political skin in the game. So you tend to see much more diverse views.

Certainly. I had a friend (and TikTok user) describe it as the "Monsters Inc. effect": TikTok is showing that you really can win engagement with honey instead of vinegar, at least in the context of all other social media providing constant negativity.

tik tok is free of a lot of the expectations that twitter and facebook and instagram have to contend with. no one really gets upset if they think tik tok has it's fingers on the scale with regards to what you get to see. people using twitter, facebook and insta get EXTREMELY upset if they even suspect they are missing out on content or getting content "put in their face". look how much outrage erupts every time twitter defaults everyone to the algorithmic timeline

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

It's also full of pornography.. It's the worst thing Thiel got instead of the flying cars he had been promised.

Yes. There are very few things I’m certain of, but I’m certain Twitter is a net negative on society. I view Jack as one of the most dangerous humans of the last decade.

>> TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like

Yes, it absolutely does. Nonviolent social activism, LGBTQ content, and anything judged to be "subversive" is downranked/shadowbanned.

Thinking takes effort, the goal is to make you keep watching videos and to do that the videos need to take no effort. So it makes perfect sense to downrank anything that makes you think.

Oh that’s interesting. An entire platforms that hinges on not trying to social-engineer its users, and being successful.

I’ve also heard that TikTok wasn’t showing the same contents inside China than abroad. It would be flattering the dopamine receptors worldwide, while flattering nationalist values inside China. Is it true? It could easily be that the engine is personalized enough that it does behave a bit differently.

I've heard that too, but I've never been able to verify it. If you find any sources on it, please pass them along.

I first heard about this on JRE and subsequent articles based on JRE.

However, China did pass "Recommendation Algorithm Regulations"[0]. Not sure if enforced.

ByteDance does operate a separate Chinese app specifically for kids[1], which is enforcing the recent anti-gaming regulation (no nighttime access, 40 minutes per day only).

The app also enforces that all kids use their real name, and they stated the following about content[2]:

  In the youth mode, we have also prepared wonderful content for you, such as novel and interesting science experiments, exhibitions in museums and galleries, beautiful scenery all over the country, historical knowledge explanations, etc. I hope these contents can arouse children's interest in a certain field, and they will learn and gain something while watching the video.

[0]: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-passes-sweeping-re...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-20/bytedance...

[2]: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zp43DhzwanDApoPCIgCvJQ

Banning LGBT content is definitely social-engineering its users.

They stopped doing this in 2020. Now you can easily find very popular subversive content

Yeah? Can you post about Tienamman Square?

It seems like it[1], as long as you can spell Tiananmen correctly.

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmensquare

Not my experience of twitter. I follow a few people who provide a stream of high quality insights about 99% of the time. It has materially helped my career for example.

I don’t use it as entertainment, I never tweet anything myself, I don’t read the replies to tweets and I have retweets turned off for almost all of the people I follow. If someone strays into tweeting about politics, culture wars, woke/antiwokeness then I cull them from my follow list.

That makes sense, because you are aggressively tailoring your experience to make sure you only see what you want. No retweets mean you don't get distracted from your main focus, blocking any slightly controversial topics mean you don't expose yourself to the most ornery users. But that isn't how 99+% of users who tweet use twitter.

It's like a discord server where you set "slow mode" to 5 minutes, remove reactions to comments, and require a 500 character limit to any message. That's one way to try and turn a normally chaotic, real time chat program into a sane platform for longform discussion, but few users would describe discord that was just because one niche server retrofitted it.

> Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like.

I suspect that is because TikTok has different goals compared to other social media companies. Their aim (right now) is to serve you better and/or more relevant content. Whereas other social media companies’ goals are to serve you ads and what do they know about you will not be as apparent to you. I would argue Facebook probably knows even more about you, more than just preferences, but social connections etc from its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

Maybe people are using different language to describe it for a reason? Try it and develop your own informed opinion.

The primary difference between TikTok and other social media platforms is about a decade. For example, Development of a Facebook Addiction Scale - 2012. In other words, mostly recency. Another major difference is age group; these days platforms like Twitter will skew much older than TikTok, and "the youth are being corrupted" is really a timeless story.

I think the truth is pretty dark. Until TikTok most recommendation engines placed the most weight on your declared preferences.

TikTok doesn't seem to care about what you "say" you like." They watch your behavior to see what you actually like.

So you can "want" to be shown math videos and like tons of math videos and follow dozens of professors. But if TikTok observes that you are more likely to watch a professional wrestling video to the end, then that is what you'll be shown.

What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.

This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.

TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.

They know that it's important for you to leave so now is the time to show the video that they know you will find most irresistible. So when you try to leave they give you the "ultimate" video which you have been conditioned to expect to be "perfect".

In order to leave, you must fight this conditioning and reaffirm your desire to leave within a tiny span of time (feels like less than a second). If you miss the window and try to exit again, TikTok tries to hack your brain again by changing the video for the next video it thinks you'll stay for, and so on...

None of this seems dark and you're using some very charged language. Showing you a video when you tap back isn't "hacking your brain". It even says "tap twice to exit". Get a grip and give humans more credit.

> Get a grip and give humans more credit.

I started doubtinng that around... 2017 or so. by 2020 is was a complete wrap and I'm 99% convinced that humans truly do need to be told that companies aren't providing a free app for their amusement, and that companies don't care about them.

On top of that, I don't see it productive to cricitize someone for charged language and then say "get a grip". That seems to betray you message. Debate the content, not the user.

The priors say humans should not in fact be given more credit.

>This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.

>TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.

It widely depends. A lot of apps do override the back button behavior too, (especially ones that have lots of state, to avoid you exiting the app when you've filled 9 fields or are deep in a scroll) at the very least, ask if you want to exit. TikTok doesn't display a message, but a second back press closes it anyways.

>What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.

Hilarious. Youtube has been convinced for the past few months that I really want to watch Nurburgring laps because I watched a single F1 reel, and occasionally suggests Jordan Peterson throughout whenever there's even just a single, accidental click on an edgy video. Netflix recommends its own dogshit. Absolutely no engine has good recommendations. At the very least, TikTok is heavily influenced by both their guesses, and by what I do. When I tell tiktok to fuck off with the videos about X, I truly will not get X videos. So, between a shit engine that believes it's better than me at knowing what to watch, and Tiktok's that at least listens when I tell it it's wrong, I4ll take the one I can actually influence.

It's not dark at all.

It seems from the comments that most people think the only way to interact with tiktok is the fyp (main feed) but if you jump over to any hashtag you get a curated list of content on that topic. Some are much better than others of course. Many are replete with interesting content and discussion.

I think most commenting here would be surprised by the wide variety of topics to be found.

If you want to watch math content you go to #mathtok (or whatever) and that's what you see. The app doesn't try to stop you.

As a hint, when you see a video you particularly like, try out all hashtags on it. Using hashtags is how you find, join, and interact with communities on tiktok.

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself.

I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only covered in the most broad sense) didn't really fix that. I'm sure it works better if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter. I think there are some really funny creators and that's where it shines the best - comedy. Everything else is treated in a cursory manner that never really delivers.

The vast majority of videos were a complete waste of time and I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it. It took at least a couple months to find interesting creators, but they are so few and far between that it wasn't worth it.

For me, Livejournal was addictive, forums were addictive, Twitter used to be addictive. Especially when you stumbled on niche communities. I've never tried Instagram, so I'm not sure about that.

Not quite sure how you can call 30min a day for months not a success. The algorithm success is measured by how much time you spend on the app, not whether you enjoyed it.

In that regard, I guess you're right that it was a success. In the 2 - 3 months I used it, it was probably for around 10 - 20 hours total. I was probably shown plenty of ads in that time and now they have a vector of my interests sitting somewhere, selling it to other ad companies.

But I really just kept using it because I wanted to see what people were talking about - which was not about how successful it was, but about how good or addictive it was. I never felt addicted - I felt like I was forcing myself to open the app.

I just kept walking away from it thinking "I didn't get anything out of that and now my eyes are strained". I felt like I wasn't using the app correctly, or that I had to give the "algorithm" enough time to learn. I was actively testing it to see what the phenomenon was all about so I as trying to get the same results that other people were talking about. That's why I kept coming back to it.

And then I uninstalled it once I realized that what people were talking about didn't seem to exist, or at least not in the way I imagined.

I don't understand why there isn't a downvote in TikTok. I tried for maybe 3 hours total just to try and get it to show me a feed I like. To no avail.

Long press > Not Interested.

If they spent 30 min a day to experiment it but was able to stop cold turkey, I wouldn't call it "addictive" like crack at all. You don't "experiment with crack everyday for a month".

I have the same view as them, to be honest. The algorithm isn't really special at all, but the app is where young people live, so there is a shit ton of content.

The point of the algorithm itself however isn't to offer relevant content, it's to offer an infinite amount, with a pittance of actual relevant stuff. You can call this "a success" for TikTok, but the algorithm itself doesn't have any quality at all, IMO, it's hot garbage.

People keep coming because they want to find that 1% content that is gold, but the algorithm doesn't give that. It's as good as a toin coss.

> I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it

But you did just that.

That's true, but I wasn't really addicted. It felt like I was forcing myself to use the app, which I was. I was trying to see what people were talking about (like Karpathy in this post). I wanted to test the app. I uninstalled it and never thought about it again.

On the otherhand, it would be extremely difficult for me to quit reading Hackernews. I load it up multiple times a day, even if there are no posts worth reading. I do feel drawn to Hackernews/message boards/Reddit, even if I don't get enjoyment from reading them all the time. Even on vacations, I still actively read HN and I'm unable to stop myself sometimes.

It seems like they were forcing themselves for the sake of science, but idk.

> if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter

What would you say your hobbies are?

There are obviously some who wouldn't find much of value in TikTok because the nature of the content (3 minute videos) cannot deliver in-depth technical material about a complex topic, for example. The medium is clearly very different from those that you found addictive, so blaming the algorithm for not delivering good content might be a case of blaming apples for not being oranges.

I've had two separate experiences with TikTok - in the first one I ended up as you describe, seeing mostly content that I found boring or useless. The second time I made a mental note to not interact in any way with content that seemed in the same category - I would move on to another video as fast as I could. That helped a lot, and now I enjoy at least every other video I see. But then again, I don't use TikTok for hobbies, it's mostly for generic interesting stuff.

I think some hobbies work really well for the format.

At one point in my life, I was interested in chicken breeding. I could see that being really easy to capture in TikTok format. I'm also a long distance runner - so that's a pretty popular hobby, but I don't know that I'd ever watch a video about it.

But I'm primarily interested in early Christian history and treasure hunting/specific antiquities. I'm interested in virtual worlds like Ultima Online.

There are some accounts that deal with those topics, but I'd mostly get general history videos and gem/mineral hunting videos, which I'm not really interested in - at all.

Like you said, I would occassionally see a video that was outside of my hobbies that I found interesting.

But maybe TikTok is telling me something else: maybe I'm just a very dry boring person these days.

Maybe it's me but tiktok content is boring to me. Videos too short to care. Finding videos by your keyword is difficult. The camera angles are too zoomed and the thin width and increased height creates ugly looking videos. The videos themselves are people picking an action or movement and isolating it for effect.

I wonder how many others haven't been bite by the tiktok bug.

I installed TikTok after seeing the above tweet but all I got was boobs and ass. I don't know if I'm supposed to be actively liking and disliking content but it is a hard pass for me.

That’s the default feed because it’s basically lowest common denominator stuff. Once you watch, like, follow a couple of creators it changes drastically. My FYP went from 80% boobs and ass to 5% in a couple of sessions.

Anyone who would rather watch 1 good 2 hour video rather than 500 random 10 sec videos isn't going to like TikTok. It's the dumbest shit I've ever seen. Half the time I have no idea what the fuck I'm even looking at. Maybe I'm old, but I think maybe the kids are stupid too. Both can be true.

I'm not that young 20-something but I don't find any entretain on it either.

To some Tiktok is the best part of social interactions distilled to its pure form, and that is really addictive.

But to someone who doesn't like those parts of social interactions the whole thing is just boring or even revolting.

Like the sibling comment, I'm in my early 20s. So pretty close to the target audience age. My friend tried hard to get me to create an account on TikTok because he was super into it, and making videos, and wanted me to participate and do them with him. I heeded him, and gave it a shot. Overall, it felt like a chore to try and remember to open it up and scroll through tons of short clips.

I like to learn from long-form content that can go into detail on a topic. That's much more appealing. Then again, I'm on Hacker News, and I think the majority of the people here are the kind of people that prefer long-form content over short-form, otherwise we'd be scrolling through TikTok rather than reading articles and typing multi-paragraph comments.

What I was originally trying to say though is: I don't know that it's old age. I'm young and I don't find it enjoyable.

Comparing things like vine or TikTok or Instagram reels to a 1 or 2-hour long video makes no sense at all. Those are wildly different things and both have their time and place.

I haven’t used TikTok but I do use Instagram reels and the feed is what you make of it. I follow a lot of musicians so I get interesting snippets of songs or things people are working on, or theory/exercise tips etc.

The way tiktok pigeonholes you into content categories can be outright condescending though. No other platform does it that blatently.

OK; you start out with the default german content, if you do no how to mark stuff as not interested on the FYP you might get promoted to german expat content. Don't know if the mainstream US experience is different, but at least for me the new content is not enough to keep me hooked for more the 1h/month.

Might be different, if you have to work through the whole tiktok back catalog first, but to me it's nowhere near twitter or even instagram in addictiveness.

The lack of realtime shared news experience is also a thing, and it's less ephermeral nature than, let's say Insta-stories, the FOMO is less then everywhere else to me. Which is a good thing.

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

- algorithm is good at finding videos you will like

- keeps you up to date on latest trends (improves your social perception)

- easy to make videos. great editor, pick any music

and you can just scroll down forever. i had it about a year but recently deleted it. it was the ultimate time filler. and honestly too good

This is a great insight. I think this might mean tiktok may have in some sense found some alternative to the "winner-takes-all" dynamic we tend to see in social media, like twitter.

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.

I think points 2-4 is one of the most interesting/innovative parts of it. As far as I've read, when someone (or a new account anyway) uploads a new video, they will always run it against a sizable test audience, so content that's engaging is guaranteed to find an audience. On other social media platforms creators need to hustle to get their presence off the ground.

This way, TikTok can sustain a much broader base of content creators and react much quicker to shifting trends without being dependent on any popular creator's opinion.

Yup, you got it. Tiktok is not digital crack. It is digital cocaine. The purest form.(Assuming the purest form is the best).

I'm 35 and I don't understand the allure even 1% - same with Instagram. I'd say the last social media that really made any sense to me was Snapchat, and that was simply because it had a singular purpose and worked well for it (but certainly wasn't something that I'd stare at for hours at a time).

Feel like a bit of an alien at this point (well, what I actually tell myself is that 25s and under are just fucking stupid).

Guess I'm a grandpa at this point.

You're only 35 and you tell yourself "25s and under are just fucking stupid"? You probably have colleagues in that age range - being blithely dismissive of perspectives that are just barely outside of your own doesn't seem to be a useful strategy for moving through the world.

Sorry, it was slightly in jest.

I'm actually in uni at the moment doing a law/science double, so I'm around a lot of 20-23 year olds, many of whom are formidably smart, and much smarter than I. I do, however, think that 25s and under as a generation have a serious attention problem as a result of all the notifications and constant phone spam they get. For those at the top of the bell curve it's manageable (frankly I've seen students at the very top of my Law cohort successfully multitask in ways that conventional neuroscience says unequivocally are impossible), but I do have serious concerns about the rest of them. That inability to think deeply or to properly focus for any real length of time on things is going to be something that we as a species will have to grapple with in the next decade, and I think the effects are going to be terrible. That isn't to say that people over 25, or 45 for that matter, can't be or aren't affected by their phones, but the younger generation has never lived without these kinds of devices around them 24/7 vibrating and lighting up, so I think it's especially deleterious and problematic for them.

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.

In my experience, you have to search for things you like for a few months to give TikTok the data it needs for recommendations.

That’s not people below 40 say. They describe it as an instant drug.

It is scary how easy and willingly we just give up our privacy and data away.

Truly the future is Brave New World, not 1984

Get off it. Asking an app to serve you content isn't giving up privacy. Get some fucking perspective.

Yes, it is kind of weird to say "social media exists = 1984" but I think they were meaning that it's worrying how many people use it without realizing they're basically doing the NSA's job for them.

How else would a recommendation algorithm work? I don’t see why it’s concerning that a company knows that I like to follow musicians, etc.

What’s the alternative? Never finding new things because I refuse to divulge what niches or hobbies I like?

Yeah. It should be obvious that recommendations to work somehow you need to track what you like. Or other alternative is to just recommend the most popular mainstream thing at the moment... Which then get also attacked for various reasons.

I used it for a few days and I can't even really remember the soft porn. I got pretty quick into science, comedy and cute/stupid animal behaviors. I pretty much thought "I understand why people like this" and then quickly stopped using it. I think the fact you can't use it anonymously unlike youtube somewhat disturbed me and I stopped.

> It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content

Is TikTok used equally by men (boys) and women (girls)?

It catches on pretty fast to what you like.

What is the feed like for women?

I'm not on TikTok (I heard about all the data collection and decided I didnt need another one of those in my life), but it does look interesting and good fun.

That being said, what I notice the most is the speed at which people are able to read the captions. I'm not old at all, mid 20's, but whenever my younger brother shows me a tiktok I have to ask him to pause it so I can read the text, whereas he can watch a 3 second clip with text and understand it in realtime.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a slow reader, entirely possible, but it does seem the next generation is, rightfully so, optimising more so for fast data processing rather than retention. When you have limitless information at your finger tips, you don't so much need to keep all that information as you need to process it very quickly... Or I am just a slow reader.

TikTok was nice, but quickly became boring and irrelevant for me. My friend likens it to salt water: it seems to quench your thirst in the moment, but you get thirstier and thirstier as you drink it, eventually dying of dehydration.

I tried it a couple of times, and found most content stupid. 90% was girls trying to be cute. Some DIY ones were OK, but I'd rather watch 40 minutes of Tech Ingredients on YT.

+1 Tech Ingredients. This is why we created the internet.

> 90% was girls trying to be cute

And 90% of those girls have an OnlyFans account. For an app that was first / still is targeted towards children and teenagers I find that extremely predatory and dangerous.

Is it really that big of a deal if a teen sees boobies?

And parents need to be the ones deciding if their kid gets to use an app or not by vetting it themselves. Parental controls are an assistive device, not a panacea.

Calling self-employed sex workers "predatory and dangerous" isn't right, though.

Tricking horny teenagers into using their mommy's credit card is not predatory?

Also I am sure I don't need to tell how porn sets a whole set of unrealistic expectations about sex and intimacy, especially since a young age.

Wait, so you think that sex workers shouldn’t be allowed to use TikTok, because you can’t trust your teenager not to defraud you?

That’s a you problem, not the woman in the bikini’s.

I gave it a shot last night and selected three topics: Comedy, Pets, Science and Technology. It gave me a lot of garbage.

Maybe it requires much more frequent use than the 10 minutes I gave it, or it somehow infers a good jumping off point. I feel like there's something I'm not seeing, or maybe I'm just too old?

It takes more than 10 minutes

It doesn’t need a jumping off point, open it again today and watch a few more videos (or skip the ones you don’t like) it’s Algorithm is impressive.

I tried tiktok for a few months last year. It was refreshing and engaging in a way that nothing else is. The vitality and originality of tiktok really reminds me of Reddit in 2010 or 4chan in 2007. When a ton of dynamic younger people pile their energy into something, it gives that thing a special energy and power that cannot be created artificially.

It’s leading edge in the way it consolidates what came before. All the little optimizations to our memes and videos, all the quirks of online etiquette that have been born in the last 10 years were built into the culture of tiktok from its inception. The result is content that is more frictionless than ever before. Even after tiktok, this is here to stay.

My analysis, without having read the article:

TikTok's greatness is that it's the only happy social network!

There are toxic sides to tiktok just like any other social platform

Obviously. But TikTok/Instagram Reels are orders of magnitude more pleasant than Facebook or Twitter. It’s not really comparable.

Agree it is really good. I’m a 40 year old who generally hates social media but I can burn hours on there watching stupid videos. I keep it off my phone as it’s a total time sink.

Is this just a post linked to the tweet in the headline? How has HN content gone so downhill?

My comment[0] from months ago still holds true.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966595

I find any site that has a long/infinite feed of posts a bit like daydreaming - you don't know what thought is going to come up next, you hop from one thought to the other to the other, thinking about mostly useless things or even things that bring down your mood until you suddenly snap out of it realising how much time has been wasted.

A relative easy fix here is to add some hurdles to seeing feeds in the first place e.g.

- uninstall apps on your phone and bookmarks in your browser.

- install uBlock ad blocker and block pages with feeds like the front pages of reddit, the Youtube front page and recommendations sidebar, all of Facebook etc. Or even block by DNS. You can turn all this off but at least you have to make a decision to do it.

I find when I have to purposely search for things I'm much less likely to get roped into daydreaming through feeds and will make progress on useful things I want to learn more about. At least Hackernews doesn't update that often and isn't full of useless memes.

Glad I am really old. Have zero desire to use tiktok.

Actually age has little to do with this. If you join Tiktok you will see creators of all ages. Your zero desire is more of your personal taste, based on your individuality rather than your age.

TikTok’s great but did y’all never try StumbleUpon? In its golden years, that was easily as addictive as TikTok.

I dare to guess that TikTok's secret is their objective: they want to know what's on your mind and they want to foresee your thoughts and actions. The end goal, I believe, is a database of comprehensive personality profiles on the american youth, so by the time they become adults, CCP will have profiles on them. Those profiles will be so accurate that TikTok will know you better than you know yourself. TikTok's doesn't care about profits, so greed doesn't constrain them. Our big tech, on the other hand, is blinded by greed and by desire to "school" us into thinking the aporoved thoughts. In other words, FB and the like, don't want to understand us - they want to "fix" us, and sell ads in the meantime.

Conspiracy minded delusion say work here.

TikTok shows ads constantly. They know less about you than Google but are well placed to show sponsored content and ads, to the extent that every 5-10 videos is an ad or sponsored content.

It's a money printing machine.

All the music is cut short one beat, or half a loop and one beat. That makes your mind crave for more.

It was for me for a couple of days and then I realized it was the same crap over and over and over and over. Every now and then a new "challenge" comes along and takes over but it's the same dumb stuff.

Must be an age thing; I find it awful. Every time I try it or when others show me the crap on it which is supposed to he funny or informative. Not to mention the massive amount of fake news packed in ‘funny’.

I find it hard to believe that this has to do with the superiority of TikTok's ranking algorithm, and everything to do with the fact that its more popular with younger people.

On the content side, they must have some kind of digital crack making young women want to post thirst traps and live feeds. I don't know what combination of attention and gifts makes a person do that, but Facebook sure doesn't have it.

Is a "thirst trap" some kind of innovation specific to Tik Tok? How are they inducing their providers to post this innovatively addictive type of content?

It really is something else. I saw TikTok on TV a lot and it seemed just an extension of it's previous incarnation, Musical.ly: just being dancing around and singing.

Then I installed it to see. I was blown away. Within minutes we'd got away from the goofy stuff to genuinely awesome content about mental health that was really life-changing for me.

I love TikTok. I reserve 30 mins at bedtime each night for it. Swapping videos we've found by DM is one of the fave things my gf and I do.

I'm kinda finding it hard to believe that fixes for "mental health" can be packed in 30 second videos.

TikTok now allows 10 minute videos, and they've been allowing 3 minute videos for quite a while now.

I have been using Tiktok for the last 2 months. I have also posted some videos of myself talking alone about various subjects. My last serie of videos were about "what I like and what I hate about tiktok". I have even gained some "followers" (around 1200) so I can use the live streaming function of Tiktok (one needs to have more than 1k subscribers to unlock this function). But the more I am using Tiktok the more I am considering leaving this platform! Yes there are some really funny/creative videos that's about 4% or 5% of what I can see and that's pretty much the only reason why I keep browsing Tiktok. But the rest of the content is in my opinion really dumb. Maybe the algorithm got me wrong, but what I see is basically people trying to copy each other with more or less talent again and again, or some accounts posting stolen bits of videos or even movies. That's all. I should mention that most of the content I am watching on Tiktok is in French and I believe made in France maybe US content is more interesting I can't comment on that.

I have had some good laugh watching some tiktok but I haven't learnt anything interesting or meaningful and I don't understand how people claim they learn stuff on this platform since the maximum length of a video is 3 minutes. I personally need more time to warp my head around something. I am a slow learner. I also find there are too much restriction to really enjoy this platform. One example is the 150 characters limit in the comment section. This is really annoying both for people who post content and for people who only watch videos.

I understand Tiktok can be interesting and addictive for a moment , but after a while it become too much repetitive and annoying.

Isn’t TicTok a clone of Vine? Could someone explain why Vine failed and what has TikTok done differently to become so successfull?

tl;dr excellent recommendation algorithm

No wonder Facebook is spooked. They tried to get it banned in the US so as to buy some time, but it didn't work. I actually think Facebook would have banned the previous guy earlier but Peter Theil probably promised he could get TikTok banned in the US. When they couldn't deliver the TikTok ban, facebook didn't need him anymore.

Reality should determine your politics, not the other way around.

I fully agree, the above was just a theory obviously with a large probability window.

In plain English, you're a conspiracy nut.

I think your title is prescient. The algorithm is amazeballs at engaging content, TikTok has been linked to even worse outcomes in teens, and the Chinese govt limits their own youth strictly.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934

It’s much more like a drug (or to lean on the paranoid side, weapon) than normal social media.

US social media companies have clearer objective: sell ads, make money, go public etc.

With Chinese govt involvement ByteDance has murkier intentions, and I can’t help but be reminded by another nation’s foray into social media in 2015-2016.

I have a spare Android tablet I keep around for website testing. I installed TT on it, didn't create an account.

Probably the only good thing about it is that you can jump right in, without a login wall spoiling the fun.

I also don't get the "algorithmic panopticon" effect so many are claiming, but maybe it's because I've already seen the curated, good quality stuff that gets shared on Reddit and Twitter.

In TikTok itself, I feel like I'm having to trudge through a giant pile of garbage first. Imagine if Google/Bing UI made you load and view every single site, instead of just showing a list of page titles.

And this is with human generated content. Wait until computer generated content can be used to optimize human engagement. I've thought about this a lot and it scares me. We may need more regulation.

I guess Mudiji did all Indians a big favor banning this drug then. Btw I just tried to install an apk but the ban is strong with this one.

I tried Windscribe, ClearVPN and more and still couldn't get it to connect.

Either Indian govt has gone above and beyond to ban it or Tiktok doesn't like VPNs. But either way, like the real-drugs which I found incredibly hard to come by here in India (except Goa where they are selling E outside clubs like candy) this is another thing I'll never get to use and strangely I'm okay with it.

Instagram reels still exist. Which is also quite addictive.

Honestly, I enjoy HN more than TikTok.

The engagement in Tiktok is part of what makes it addictive. You post a video and Tiktok gets it in front of people who will engage with it(in many different ways). Then your brain releases dopamine. And the cycle of continues. Which makes me wonder, if someone created a wearable hardware device. Then, when you press a button it tells your brain to produce dopamine. Will this device be made illegal? Because that is exactly what cocaine does to your brain.

Been trying to signup to tiktok for years now every time I get

Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'name')

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwWV3BWXAAQ5cKD?format=png&name=...

When signing up with email. Tried with multiple browsers, multiple email addresses, multiple devices. How are other people signing up?

Might be a browser extension mucking things up? Ad blockers, etc

Never even looked. I think I'll leave it that way, don't want any crack in my life, I'll stay blissfully ignorant I think...

The people in this thread, who are very unimpressed by the tiktok algorithm, should try to disable their privacy guard and let tiktok gather the data before judging it. I suspect that a lot of people have all the privacy features enabled on their devices. And, that's why they can't relate to the general population's addiction of tiktok.

I used TikTok for some weeks in summer. There were lots of home improvement tips, cooking tips, and dancing. I appreciated all of it. Then I did not use it until the past month. Now all that is mostly gone. I now see skiing and Ukraine mostly. Not sure why it changed, but made me realize that it may differ a lot between people?

I find the music & songs, which are perfectly aligned to the dance or steps of the tiktoker, is the main reason for the addictiveness. Instagram Reels & YouTube Shorts are trying to do something similar but they are well behind tiktok's algorithm.

Now-a-days, the new filters & remakes is also very addictive.

I actively try to avoid anything with infinite scrolling now. Youtube Shorts, TikTok, etc.

It is just too addicting. At some point you have seen it all and then you start scrolling even more.

One time I went on vacation and did not use TikTok for a few days and realized how much it stressed me out.

Tiktok is the only app I have ever used that put me in some kind of niche that no other website has been able to before. Extremely small group of people yet they found me and the others in the comments were equally surprised. I wonder how they do it.

I loved this app. But its banned now in India. I really loved the creativity shown by simple average people, sometimes these people were really poor. And their creativity blew away a lot of so called actors, celebs etc.

I my eyes it was a game changer.

Probably a good thing I've never had it installed and never will. I do occasionally stumble upon TikTok videos in other places, but it's the algorithms that make it addictive, not the content itself.

It can’t be reduced like that. If anything it’s a combination of the tools for content creation (sounds, filters, duets, replies, text features etc.), the content itself, the comments system, and the algorithm. Honestly, if you’ve never use the app you have actually no idea what you’re talking about.

TikTok is the first piece of tech that makes me know I'm old, I can't imagine choosing to view any of this garbage at all. The format of short videos itself is so very cringe.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about short videos. Content isn’t inherently good because it’s longer or on a specific medium. Nobody is saying that only one type should exist.

Everything has its place.

> There’s nothing inherently wrong about short videos.

sure, but there seems to be something inherently wrong with people filming them ...

No there is not. Like anything else, there's good and there's bad content, and there's a LOT of content. I'll take a 30-sec or 60-sec video that's straight to the point versus a meaningless 8-10 minute video that's been padded with fluff.

First thing I did was to “Piehole”’d TikTok.

I’ve got better things to do.

Like Brain (of Pinkie and the Brain cartoon) would say: “take over the world” things.

A malware detector for JavaScript, for one.

I knew I had to avoid TikTok otherwise my little lizard brain would get destroyed. Would be great if someone could make good things as addictive.

I had this realization the other day that I felt connected to someone through TikTok. Like I got a real view into their life. It was a woman homeless and traveling with a group of people. And she was scraggly, tattooed, no money, but absolutely in love with life. And its funny, because I have walked by people like her many times, but her TikToks are just about life on the road, the people she has met, and the experience of it all. And it made me so happy that I could just see her life from her perspective.

I tried on multiple occations to get hooked on tik-tok, but each time after spending an hour scrolling through the feed with absolutely nothing interesting appearing I gave up.

Was I doing tik-tok wrong? I am a sociable 23 year old, so it's not like I'm way out of their target audience or anything. I am a bit confused as to why the algorithm seemed to be so poor at finding anything interesting for me, when have needed to disable youtube-recommendations because they take so much of my time.

That’s a strange experience, I think you need to deliberately follow a few people and interact with a few things

And then it will attempt to hook you more

like for example, after writing this comment I just tried creating a new account again (using my facebook to login).

Half the videos are in dutch for some reason (I'm from Denmark, I don't speak dutch nor have I ever lived there). I tried searching on some topics that interested me, and found some of them pretty compelling. Then I went back to the feed, and it just kept showing more dutch content.

Every time I've tried tiktok it's more or less been like this, except with less dutch.

If you long press then press "not interested" on all the Dutch videos I think it would stop showing them.

Same here, I find it bland and annoying. Even after seeding it with contacts and searching for a couple of things I find interesting. Instead, it mostly shows me "sexy" bait and switch videos, cooking videos where I can't tell if it is meant to be appetizing or disgusting, and weird home improvement tips. I assume the algorithm is more hype than anything else.

Social media used to be addicting, before they were social media. When you obsessed about who looked at your profile, whom you are connected with via friends, when you spent hours tweaking your profile to elicit actions from others, and so on. Human social interaction, but without the scary closeness and immediateness, and at the same time amplified.

Yes. For many times I have to remove it from my phone after I realized hours of time spent (not wasted) in the app day after day...

If you believe that, you should not only avoid using it yourself, but also proximity to users. Would you want your social circle to be full of crackheads? If you believe it harms the brain, would you hire someone who uses tiktok? I, for one, would welcome hiring processes that privilege non-users. It's a shame the usual HR is filled with heavy social media users who even use it for hiring, but I believe this error will correct itself eventually.

While I mostly agree, I don’t like the idea of HR having access to anything of mine that is not work related.

i run a tiktok page with 2.1m followers - not huge but mid-level, and it's seriously impacted my mental health

My wife watches it and seems to like it but I cannot find anything to it, it just doesn't interest me.

And likewise I refuse to even try it for the same reason I refuse to even try crack or heroin.

I hate most of the social media, and tiktok is number 1 on that list.

I wonder how long the sweet period will last. Any studies on that?

Wow, this is saying something since it's coming from(the),"Director of AI at Tesla, leading the Autopilot Vision team. Previously OpenAI, CS231n, PhD @ Stanford. I like to train large deep neural nets "

(his Twitter description)

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.

Do you want to back that up?

Although FSD is still between Level 2-3, the ML system and work that has gotten it this far is pretty stellar.

Tesla released a doctored video in 2016 claiming to have a fully-functional system that needed humans only for legal reasons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo...

Over the years, they repeatedly pushed this narrative to sell cars. Tesla promised on several occasions to have millions of fully autonomous "robotaxis" on the road in 2020, making their owners in excess of $30,000 a year. Currently there are, of course, zero.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

Take a look at this video for what Tesla describes as a beta for their "Full Self Driving" system. A beta is, of course, meant to be feature complete software in final testing. Does this look like it's nearly ready to be pushed out to every car on the road?

https://twitter.com/BS__Exposed/status/1449158254081290242

> Do you want to back that up?

A simple question:

Where exactly are the robo-taxis that were promised in 2020 alongside with Level 5 FSD for release in 2019? [0].

[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...

Obviously Tesla lies or is insanely optimistic regarding timelines - but they have made some progress with automated driving.

Even if we gave them more time, it seems that it still doesn't work and is still completely unsafe for Level 5. Compared to other competitors when tested, this is all Tesla has to show for progress? [0]

A very long way to go for the Level 5 'robo-taxi' readiness claim by Tesla.

[0] https://carbuzz.com/news/tesla-model-3-runs-over-kid-dummies...

Obviously they've made some progress. It would be hard for them to have accomplished nothing at all after all they've invested. It's still nowhere near safe for public roads and there's no reason to think it ever will be.

Even their driver assistance features work worse than the competition.

The AI people are doing solid work as far as I can tell. It is the marketing department and the twittering CEO that are scamming.

They continue to work on this project despite knowing it is fraudulent, which makes them complicit.

Besides, I don't see that they're doing solid work. It would be solid work if they ditched pure vision and moved to a system that works. Instead they are putting in heroic efforts on a dead-end technology. That is impressive in the same way that getting Doom running on a TI-84 would be impressive.

I don't know, it depends on what your goal is. If you want to emulate human driving, then pure vision is a viable way to go. After all, humans drive also using pure vision.

But your car has to drive a lot more cautious than with more sensors, like lidar. Can't be 100% sure this white blob is not a truck? Then you have to slow down. With lidar, you can be a bit more robust, but you still need vision to identify objects.

And if your goal is to build a non-human driver, that is one that drives "perfectly" and pushes the speed envelope perfectly, then I think lidar is also only a stop-gap solution. What you'd want is active components in the street and in other cars. In other words, a virtual rail. In that case, you can accelerate and brake as aggressively as the humans inside would tolerate. You could accelerate together with the car in front of you in traffic jams, etc.

> pure vision

Not really. Why are you blatantly drinking that marketing BS cool aid coming from a wack twittering ceo? That so called "pure vision" is backed by our brains trained over decades. This is exactly why you have to be 18+ to be able to drive without any supervision.

>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?

Not all scams are illegal. For example, MLM's are scams but they are fully legal.

Never the less, if someone that works in AI gets impressed by an AI I will take it seriously. I don't use TikTok but the recommendation engine must be outstanding. I think I'll stay away. I don't want to lose any more time to online apps.

Meta and ByteDance are the modern day Philip Morris.

How to get de-addicted to this form of crack?

I tried it a few times, but like the title says I honestly got scared of how much it felt like I got sucked into it, and time just flew by. That eerie feeling kind of like realizing I've befriended a sociopath.

Yeah same. Even when I went through stretches of boring videos, hitting an interesting one felt like winning at slots. Had to uninstall it.

I'm immune. I hate looking at zoomed-in faces, taking 100% of the screen - like some narcissistic stranger is trying to push their face into my private space.

I deleted TikTok 3mins after installing

Anyone else think it's odd a brief post of this nature is voted so highly on HN?

Glad I never installed TikTok nor Facebook nor Instagram on my phone.

TikTok feels like a cesspool of the basest human behavior.

If TikTok can suck in a hyperachiever like this dude, it’s over for us.

TikTok is game over for civilization quite simply. Pure Thunderdome from here on out.

Are there also disabled and poor people? Is that crack working also with them included in feeds?

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.

There you go. It is the same rehashed formula tested on a new generation of billions of people with a different brand attached to it. As you can see in the comments here, they are loving their new digital drugs since Facebook and Twitter appeared. They will soon dislike it and hate it and move to the next hit.

Rinse and repeat.

> Is it because a "thought leader" said it?

Well I said it long ago for the rest of these social networks [0][1][2] even before this person did. So to me, it is once again and unsurprising reaction.

But as always, followers only listen to their master's voice don't they? Listening to their master to feed them their next post, tweet, update and reaction. Like drug addicts, when there are social media addicts, there is always therapy and treatment for this sort of addiction.

Very unhealthy for the mind.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28134863

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397260

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27550997

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21135123

Why no one in here understands TikTok is because ya'll old. Like, I know you don't wanna hear that as the reason, but it's true. Can't ya'll remember some shit your parents didn't understand, but just made sense to you?

Yes, to a certain extent--along with age comes wisdom and experience, which is likely what contributes to the lack of appeal tiktok has to older people.

My parents did not understand why I got a tattoo when I was in high school; lucky for me, all mine are easily hidden.

Age doesn't guarantee wisdom. Kids today get tattoos on their face, they arn't trying to hide them.

Which is to say. They are going to do things, new things, that don't make sense to us... Im not claiming to 'get it', but i get that they are going to do new stuff that confuses me.

Older folks claiming to have wisdom, and shaking a finger at the kids is as old as history.

> Age doesn't guarantee wisdom.

and

> Kids today get tattoos on their face, they arn't trying to hide them.

Not like this. Yeah, we had different tastes in media, but TikTok is to video as radio commercials are to music. It's like you guys are just watching commercials nonstop. It's nearly devoid of actual content.

HN is full of commercials. Some days the ratio of commercial to content is worse than other social media.

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