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Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

TikTok is a cancer on the universe. (In terms of converting its users into the version of the people on Wall-E). -- Go ahead Google "Wall-E people".

I thought Instagram was bad.

Trained or not, there is nothing good about scrolling through stuff for every moment when you're bored.

Boredom is nature's way of making the universe go forward. And it's best when its channeled into creative, industrious or thoughtful pursuits. Instead we have channeled Boredom into watching barely clad teens dance, or women complain about dating misadventures.

And the paradoxical thing about it. Is that the creators vs viewers ratio is still 99% viewers to 1% creator. Creators are the ones that have channeled their boredom (however misplaced) into something that others watch.

But then all of this is human nature anyway. And perhaps I'm railing about nothing. Flame away!

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Your comment assumes there is nothing creative, industrious, or thoughtful on TikTok. The fact that you think it's just dancing teens and "women complaining" (yikes dude) shows that you've never given it a chance. As the article suggests, you _can_ "train" it to give you the content that you want, and it can be more fulfilling.

I'm not saying that it doesn't have issues, and it does feel like it's trying REALLY hard to keep me hooked in some pretty morally ambiguous ways, but it's not as toxic as the media would like you to believe.

I assume you also don't go on Twitter or watch TV or movies when you're bored since then you're not "pursuing" anything. People are allowed to just chill and turn their brain off for a bit.

There is indeed a lot of good content on TikTok. And it's eerily good at showing me things I'm interested in, in a way other social media sites utterly fail at.

But (not having deliberately tried to "train" TikTok), it also shows me plenty of content I find depressing or juvenile. And I am firmly convinced that the experience of continuous scrolling through very short videos damages my brain and attention span much more than watching a traditional TV show or movie.

You do need to train it. It’s very easy to train it to show you stuff you don’t want to see too often. You can mark things as not being interested in to avoid that.

When I had TikTok for the first time - I was like, “is this really for everyone? I don’t get it. I’m getting endless videos of hot women dancing or showing off their figure. I could see why teenage boys get into this but women???” I didn’t even watch many of them but you watch a few (cause boobs) then it can sometimes think that’s the only thing it should show you until forever.

It’s not a perfect algo by any stretch. I was not the only guy who fell victim to this pattern and was interested in TikTok at first but gave it up for a bit because it was showing nothing but booba.

Same with a lot of videos. You watch a few and it decides you should see them forever even if you just had an interest for a few minutes one particular day. It requires specifically saying you’re not interested in order to get it to go away. It requires adjusting.

You don't need to say "not interested" to get rid of a niche that you watched a little bit of a while ago. You just need to stop watching those videos. The "not interested" option certainly speeds up the process, but if you reliably skip past videos of a given type then TikTok will start suppressing them.

I had to uninstall it because this particular format made me quite addicted very fast.

And it might contain creative things but enough is very repetitive.

Oh, I've noticed that too. I'll look into TikTok once every couple of weeks and I have a timed lockout set, so I don't endlessly scroll through it. It's certainly incredibly addictive.

First, I don't want to train a commercial product so that it can make money with me. How crazy is that?

Secondly, I've been told it takes 20 minutes of browsing and it would train automagically. Well after 30 minutes that I regret spending, it was still showing me the most terrible content humanity has ever produced and my eye were bleeding.

I uninstalled the app and won't touch it again. It feels like being a teen forcing oneself to start smoking cigarets.

Do you use Netflix? YouTube? Twitter? Facebook? You're training all of these just by using them. I've seen way worse stuff on Twitter than I ever have on TikTok.

As usual, people love giving opinions about things and products they've never used. It took me maybe 2 minutes of browsing TikTok for the first time for it to stop showing me dancing teens in favor of things I actually wanted to see. The people who complain about this being the only content either never used the app or actually secretly engage with this content.

TikTok quickly realized all I wanted to see was beautiful women (not teens) dancing, and I'm okay with that. Interestingly, I've been getting more and more funny and language/culture-oriented videos that also fit my interests.

Every time I try these apps (Instagram, TikTok), before long all I see are females with large butts and Subarus. I'd rather not even engage.

> (yikes dude)

Bruh, get real. TikTok is filled with women complaining about dating. Why not just admit what is staring you in the face? There is an entire segment of the universe that just responds to those videos.

And there is plenty on TikTok that is good.

But even if you can "train" it, the problem is that it's scientifically engineered to keep your scrolling. I think that part you missed.

Watch Wall-E where everyone sits in special "TikTok" chairs, have food delivered to them and the screen continually scrolls. That movie was before its time man.

Watch here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7WAq_GZY8]

Unfortunately, you will not get the message until you have to go out with friends that are tuned out to you because they're constantly scrolling TikTok on their phones.

(And yes, I have installed TikTok for weeks and months at a time and always ended up deleting it and washing down my phone. Even after "Training" it.)

> Bruh, get real. TikTok is filled with women complaining about dating. Why not just admit what is staring you in the face?

I’ve never see a video with a woman complaining about dating on TikTok. In years of use.

I’m not saying you are not seeing them, just that I have not seen one.

Plenty of guys complaining about dating on TikTok too. It’s an absolutely massive platform and there’s videos on just about anything especially interpersonal relationships (coach industry)

People really seem to miss that complaining about the kind of content on one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet that algorithmically shows you more of what you watch is a huge self-report.

I literally acknowledge its addictiveness in my comment. Spending 30 minutes watching TV or doomscrolling on Twitter or 30 minutes watching TikTok, it's all the same to me. I think if you acknowledge the time that you "waste" and keep it in check, it's fine.

> Unfortunately, you will not get the message until you have to go out with friends that are tuned out to you because they're constantly scrolling TikTok on their phones.

Maybe you need better friends. Or you could try being more assertive and saying something like, "when you are looking at your phone instead of paying attention to me, I feel ignored. If you continue to do that, I will leave and do something else." And then ACTUALLY leave if they don't stop! They will learn quickly that if they want to enjoy your company (if it is indeed enjoyable) then they will need to have self restraint.

I think this idea that creative or thoughtful people don't 'waste time' on tiktok is more of a performative status thing than anything else. I've worked with plenty of incredibly smart scientists who read the very worst pulp fiction, watch youtube for hours or do other 'low status' stuff.

On the other hand there's an entire class of dopamine fasting, knowledge graph generating busybodies who have not output one meaningful thing in their entire career. If anything I feel like this kind of behavior and scoffing at mass entertainment is inversely correlated with having built anything at all.

That aside I found the crew of a cargo container ship vlogging on TikTok who were shipping stuff around central Asia and following them was by far one of the most interesting things I've seen on social media.

I don't think people saying that Tiktok is mostly garbage are doing that to signal, at least not here on HN. I waste a ton of time watching random videos on youtube, because there I can search for all kinds of niche topics and finds plenty of videos about them even from very small creators. On tiktok however I can't even search for mainstream nerd topics that gets many millions of views on youtube, not even a single video shows up since it seems they don't let you search for content, so to me it isn't that I feel I am above Tiktok content, it is just that it doesn't show me anything I want to see and it doesn't offer me any way of finding it.

If you use TikTok for a while the algorithm will quickly figure out what you like to watch. It’s far better than the YouTube algorithm, for example.

But on youtube I can just search for the topics I want to watch. Leys say I want to watch some age of empires games, I just search for age of empires and maybe some civilizations for them to play and I'll find hundreds of videos to watch. How long would it take to get something similar on TikTok? Personally I don't think that will ever happen. And age of empires is still relatively mainstream, many of the other things I regularly watch on youtube just have a few thousands of views per day in the entire world on that topic, how long would it take for TikTok to figure that out?

Just type it into the search box? I just searched for Age of Empires 2 and see lots of videos. There aren't any full multiplayer playthroughs, but TikTok isn't a longform content platform.

Maybe tick tocks search depends on where you live? My searches turned up nothing when I tried, so I didn't see any reason to ever use it again. Localized searches might be good for some things, but it is totally horrible for finding other people interested in less mainstream topics.

This would also explain why people has so wildly different views on the site here.

> On tiktok however I can't even search for mainstream nerd topics that gets many millions of views on youtube, not even a single video shows up since it seems they don't let you search for content

There's a search icon (magnifying glass) in the top right of your home feed.

We can all enjoy a bit of downtime, the same we we can all enjoy a snack.

I’m just wary of entertainment that’s engineered to be addictive. Simple, bite-sized, all sugar and salt, served in a bottomless bag.

I don’t bring certain snacks into my house because I can’t trust myself to snack responsibly. TikTok is the same, but with the flavour expertly tailored to my weaknesses.

TikTok does have some interesting culture to it, there's an immediacy not really found elsewhere in the modern internet.

but I also think its possibly the lowest of the low when it comes to the dominant prevailing culture. Even ignoring that awful synthesized voice.

That being said I'm not sure whether this is just an insight into what I'm now going to literally call the "unwashed masses".

I spend most of my time on the internet in niche communities full of smart people, even shitposters have an intellect to them, most normal people do not, hence awful TikTok spam.

“Unwashed masses” is usually a downward punch on poor people, isn’t it?

Yes. I'm mocking my own sentiment even if I do basically believe in it.

Consuming analytically is a part of creation.

Writing TikTok off as dancing or dating misadventure stories is exactly what the article shows isn’t necessarily correct.

There are TikToks on eigenvectors, Taylor series expansions, making butter blocks for traditional layered pastries, calculus, Kubernetes and how to exit vi.

There are all kinds of creators whose content is worthy of consumption on TikTok: musicians, visual artists, comedians and dancers.

There are book reviews, hints for authors, demonstrations of music theory, memorization tricks, Japanese pitch accent, notes on philology/philately/phillo dough.

It doesn’t have everything, and plenty of interesting topics that are just grist for simple comedy, but it can get better.

> Quickly my For You page was transformed. I saw long thoughtful videos on motivation, psychology, science, and philosophy. I listened to excerpts of lectures on Stoicism or Zen Buddhism, and speeches by enigmatic Indian meditation gurus. It figured out I was a software engineer and showed me many jokes or insights about work. At one point I was hunting for a job and TikTok started showing me interview tips. I witnessed drawings and paintings and animations by countless visual artists. I found myself zooming through trippy 3D fractals while listening to Alan Watts. Instead of watching videos with thousands or millions of views, I was seeing videos with a hundred views or even ten views. The algorithm seemed to be trusting me to deliver an early vote.

This is both inspiring and terrifying to me. We're working toward AI that can almost read your mind and show you videos that are extremely relevant and impactful with nothing more than watch time measurements.

If we gave that kind of power a goal like "make them better people/help them achieve more/find happiness" we could usher in a new golden age of achievement, fulfillment, and mental health.

Unfortunately, right now we've only figured out how to give this power a single goal, "increase watch time/engagement," and I don't want to be turned into a zombie optimized for ad consumption.

Of all the content on social media, I think TikTok is one that feels the best for me. YouTube videos are very often much longer than they need to be and devoid of information. Facebook isn't even worth mentioning. Instagram is mostly just friends and celebrities posting the best parts of their life and nothing worth discussing.

TikTok content is short and typically pretty interesting. You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you and unlike YouTube you don't have to sit through long introduction paragraphs or sponsorships. They also added a progress bar that you can scrub through so if a video seems longer than it needs to then you can skip through it to the interesting part.

You just need to train your brain to put TikTok down instead of constantly scrolling which takes a little self control (but what in life doesn't?)

> You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you

You most definitely can't. The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff.

When I first started using TikTok I felt like I was constantly getting scammed of my time.

I think TikTok is the worst social media platform. It's extremely easy to waste a large amount of time on it and come away with nothing.

> The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff

TikTok added a progress bar so you can skip to the end in those cases and save yourself the time now.

Or, you can just scroll past those videos. Again, the reason they're clickbaity is because your brain thinks there's going to be a payoff, but if you train you brain to instantly scroll past those videos then you'll also train the algorithm to show less of those kinds of videos.

>There are TikToks on eigenvectors, Taylor series expansions, making butter blocks for traditional layered pastries, calculus, Kubernetes and how to exit vi.

So? It's still limited by the ADD format of TikTok and you'll forget about it 3 seconds later. It's garbage.

TikToks loop automatically, they tempt you to view the content again, to notice more, to extract as much as possible from it. In fact, much of TikTok’s content is actually iterations and new ways of seeing existing TikToks.

Sure, this isn’t always good, because then you can have 1000 snowclones of something uninteresting, but it isn’t particularly invasive to the general experience.

YouTube just bumps you to the next video. That’s worse if you’re trying to retain info. Coursera courses usually have short snippets of video throughout the lesson, there’s nothing particularly ‘ADD’ about that.

It’s very common for people to memorize TikToks and I remember the content plenty of the ones I have looked at, despite being diagnosed with ADHD.

Why exactly would I retain information less from TikTok than from a Khan Academy video?

I don't care if your brain is hardwired into a TikTok video and you watch it 10,000 times. It's maximum 3 minutes. You're not learning anything in 3 minutes. You might learn something that is entirely self contained in 3 minutes, but you probably already learned that stuff in the 3rd grade. Taking something large and complex and narrowing it into a short clip doesn't do anything for anyone. I guess you get some information, but you're not getting knowledge, and there is no incentive to study. At best you are trying to arm-wrestle a lion and it's an uphill battle. I'd rather take a book and spend a weekend, then I might have a chance of grasping something.

>Why exactly would I retain information less from TikTok than from a Khan Academy video?

Unless you are watching some sort of structured course type thing that is broken down into... 100's of 3 minute videos? I don't see the point.

The maximum is 10 minutes these days, and multipart videos are common. This is approximately the length of the individual videos in Coursera, eg Andrew Ng’s course on machine learning.

I was in a computer science theory class at a prestigious university, and a number of otherwise extremely intelligent CS majors had a curious difficulty understanding the Pumping Lemma. They would ask the teacher to explain it. This happened a few times since attendance wasn’t mandatory and not everyone was present.

The resulting explanation from the instructor would absolutely fit into a three minute TikTok, plus it would be rewatchable. Unfortunately, there’s no video there that explains it today, but that could be remedied.

Hmm I guess that's fair, it still feels like a poor medium.

My experience is wholly different. The content I see if funny, creative, unique, genuine, wholesome, and supportive. I feel much better about the next generation after seeing some of what they've made on Tiktok. It feels like time for the current geriatric generation (see the average age of US senators) to stop clinging so embarrassingly to power and wealth and make way for what's next.

>I thought Instagram was bad. >Instead we have channeled Boredom into watching barely clad teens dance, or women complain about dating misadventures.

If this is what you see on your TikTok, it's because those are the videos you lingered on the longest. Pro-Tip: Never 'hate watch' on TikTok.

But that is a huge problem with the service. On YouTube I can search for whatever topic or video I want and find high quality videos on interesting topics instantly, so no need to train any algorithm to get good content. There is no hook in TikTok unless you actually like the default feed, since there is no good way to find anything else without first wading through all those default videos.

Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted, but I really can't get into TikTok. I went there, the default feed was 100% uninteresting, I wont wade through that for a week looking for videos that might be there. I searched for some topics, for example "Warhammer", it is a very popular topic and it would be interesting to find more of that, but the search didn't turn up a single video about it. So I don't really see what I am supposed to do then, I am sure they have at least some warhammer videos but if it takes hours or days or weeks of work to find them then I don't see why I should bother with TikTok at all.

Absolutely. After the WSJ article a year or two ago, I gave it shot. Tried to tune the algorithm by selecting super cars related clips. What I got was a first burst of insanely fucked up content from rage including to glibly funny, you know stuff that you find on the bottom rungs of Reddit’s r/WTF pages. Then it got decent at showing car clips but with an occasional vomit inducing pimple popping or some girls dancing in bikinis.

I absolutely could not stand it. Not for intellectual content. Not for entertainment. I will never use it again and will recommend everyone to avoid this epic and monumental failure of human enterprise.

It makes me sad about the human species. This is what most people like to do.

Commenting on this sort of Hacker News article doesn’t exactly rise to Leonardo Da Vinci level either.

TikTok is a triumph, especially in the light of the big social network outrage machines. Even at its worst it still can do things like introducing people to Chopin in a manner rarely seen since the Beethoven ‘Fur Elise’ McDonalds commercial in the 80s.

> Commenting on this sort of Hacker News article doesn’t exactly rise to Leonardo Da Vinci level either.

Why?

You are correct.

I think the saddest thing is how addicted people have become to it. Instagram too.

Just read through the comments on this post, so many people defending it even though the content is just user-generated hot takes with catchy quotes and people saying things they want to hear and want to agree with.

It’s poison.

Be careful. If all you get is what you want to hear, you aren’t training TikTok, TikTok is training you!

And you keep coming back to the feeding tube for more.

> I thought Instagram was bad.

Back in the early 2010s it mainly consisted of hip - actually cool photography feeds.

I don’t recall TikTok not being a cesspool since its early days of operation.

Instagram was initially super awesome. You could look up some totally obscure hashtag about, say, #68040 and find a ton of photos relating to 68040-based computers. Every image with the hashtag was actually directly related. Maybe you still "can" look up such hashtags, but the platform became so overrun with what I would call "noise" (and then got bought by Facebook), so I haven't logged in in years and refuse to now... What I mean by "noise" is, I'd search some seemingly-specific topic only to find that it has of course been appropriated by some pop culture thing that is completely irrelevant to the previously-unique term. I really just want to see stuff related to my totally niche interests, and it started to become impossible to actually do that. Also, any actual on-topic posts became fewer and fewer, I suppose as people like me realized it wasn't the platform for them.

> Trained or not, there is nothing good about scrolling through stuff for every moment when you're bored.

OP here. TikTok doesn't mandate you use it every moment you are bored, that's a choice made by the user. However I agree it is very potent entertainment technology, and I have read about people using it 8 hours a day, and hating what it's doing to them. I have not read the book, but it brings to mind Infinite Jest, a film "so entertaining that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die." The premise of my post is it can be used for good instead of evil, but it does require discipline.

Dissenter in the thread here; rather than read Infinite Jest (which I've also not read, purely out of disinterest in doing so), I would kindly suggest that you read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, the premise of which is that the premise of your post is flawed.

And I really mean it; if you're the sort that has an interest in figuring out how things work, which is clearly the case here - you will find it effortless and fascinating reading.

What I'm mainly saying, I think, is that it's possible to find good content on TikTok, but it takes discipline and effort. You are saying McLuhan would disagree and say it is not possible to find good content on TikTok? I'm lost there.

I'd like to read the book, though. I've never paid much attention to media studies but now with AIs powering things it's becoming more interesting to me. And I know people have been talking about it since the 1960s.

To tell you the truth, I almost don't want to spoil it for you. Your particular interest, at the intersection of media and AI, makes me believe that you would find the book worthwhile.

The structure and exposition of his arguments is what makes the text particularly engrossing, and I am loath to try to summarize what is best experienced within its intended context.

But I'll give you some copied paste from Wikipedia to get you started:

> McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.

The problem with most social media that is “clingy” (non scientific term :) , the ones that manipulate so you keep viewing is that it adds to what is called “fragmentation” (scientific term) where you consciousness is being scattered, instead of flowing. Your brain is constantly being interrupted in the process it was doing. This is especially true when you constantly need to check your phone.

This sums up my views exactly, and it's why I quit using TikTok when I realized the impact it was having. I appreciate the neat summation of the (imo) core issue.

I urge you to go flick through http://pessimistsarchive.org/

I agree, there is rarely any good content on there and it mostly just creates echo chambers. No actual value is really extracted from using Tik tok.

not to mention when people use it around me its just so annoying to listen to in the background. the stupid synthesized voice or loud dumb music just one after another is annoying to say the least.

> TikTok is a cancer on the universe.

For the most part, yes. Though I find it pretty useful while brushing my teeth. You don't need any audio. And my brush time has gone up a bit since I started this viewing habit.

This is a lazy analysis. I don't use it (banned in my country), but from a little interaction I had, it is only social media that doesn't felt on rage inducing for engagement. This comment and lot of other other are example of that, we don't do introspection, deep analysis of rational discussion just rage induced comments.

> And the paradoxical thing about it. Is that the creators vs viewers ratio is still 99% viewers to 1% creator

I don't know if there's a paradox here, TikTok has hundreds of millions of users and therefore (1%) millions of creators making content people enjoy.

That's a cheap shot and you know it. All you said can be equally applied to books.

I truly bemoan the HN algorithm that made you do this for karma.

The duets are marvelous and the dual livestream battles are genius

If they were their own apps you would appreciate it

>still 99% viewers to 1% creator. This wouldn't change without TikTok.

Most bored people do nothing creative. And the creative ones get inspiration by things like TikTok.

dopamine

> Boredom is nature's way of making the universe go forward

I generally agree with your comment but no, this is a ridiculous piece of scientism.

For some Gen Xers and Millennials it seems raging against TikTok is their generation's moral panic.

TikTok does not have anything fundamentally different than other forms of social media. But sure, please keep ranting about how anything you dislike is somehow literally cancer.

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