Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

TikTok isn’t great, but fortunately most of us have the freedom to simply not use it.

The authors conclusion around potential regulation is, though well intentioned, misguided.

Hopefully through more posts like theirs we can have better conversations around addictive technology and teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use.

Since this is a tech forum - some interesting technological solutions to this could be:

1. Headless app use with updates. Some affordance that you can setup that will open the app, take some actions and give you back the summary. In the case of TikTok you could use this to build your own notification. Maybe only go on if this hypothetical tech tells you something is really, really popular.

2. Reset mode. The OS trains a model on your gestures and you can tell it to tell you if you’ve been making a “brainless action” too many times for too long. In the case of TikTok this would be mindlessly swiping up.

For me as an american, i'm just uncomfortable with the most popular app among children being under the control of an adversary. When I hear about the Chinese version of tiktok censoring heavily and promoting positive content about community values and STEM while our version promotes twerking and convinces teens they have mental disorders it makes me want it banned. I get that's antithetical to western values of freedom but it seems like a real threat to me.

I don’t use TikTok but my understanding is that the feed pretty much adjusts to what you promote yourself.

Just like that lever at a casino slot machine. A little dopamine hit each time you press next.

Yes, but all of the media environment in China promotes positive pro-education material - India as well.

Yet India bans tiktok.

But the point was that TikTok reflects the media environment of US. It is similar to TV for example.

China pretty notoriously controls their companies and the content they put out. I think it's wrong to assume they're all of the sudden laissez-faire with Tiktok content.

>When I hear about the Chinese version of tiktok censoring heavily and promoting positive content about community values and STEM while our version promotes twerking and convinces teens they have mental disorders it makes me want it banned

If you're insinuating that this is some nefarious and conscious act of manipulation you haven't been paying attention to American culture in the five decades before tiktok came around. You didn't need the Chinese to send yourselves on a downward celebrity culture spiral with neglect for the sciences, civility and tradition lol.

it's actually more straight foward. China censors to align social media with what they consider socially desirable goals. in America they just don't really censor, what you get is just raw unfettered consumption, that's simply what that looks like.

Both can be true, and it isn't such a stretch what GP is saying. I don't know much about tiktok, but I hear people saying that across the globe information wars are being waged. How would Sun Tzu operate social media?

I think I phrased it poorly. My problem isn't unfettered access to the western cultural id. The problem is an adversary country manipulating what content westerners see to align with their goals.

This tweet is anecdotal but lines up totally with stuff that has come out on CCP handling of tiktok: https://twitter.com/LayahHeilpern/status/1542485631338700800

There are real concerns about Tiktok and its influence, but that focus on an adversary and pushing a bi-polar narrative feels a lot more unhealthy.

Does Facebook/IG get a pass because they're domestic to you ? Are you also outraged when they set global limitations on issues that should only impact the US ?

To me looking at it as a "them vs us" matter just brings in too much tribalism that poisons the discussion.

The US has done and still does plenty of censoring. The land of Playboy and Hustler goes looney every time there's a story about sex or nudity, especially when teenagers are involved. Around the same time period that American culture dominated the world, the FCC had a heavy hand in broadcast content with the implicit intention of aligning said content to socially desirable goals. That's only changed slightly over the past decade and, coincidentally, just as streaming was taking off.

I agree with you that the US doesn't need China's help to destroy itself. For that matter, it doesn't need anyone's help. However, "unfettered consumption" has nothing to do with it. Japan, Korea, and, until recently, Hong Kong are the posterchildren for unfettered consumption and yet the former two still have a stable societies the respects tradition and civility in debilitating excess. All three of these societies invest in education to a point of creating suicide-inducing hyper-competitiveness in their students.

Ultimately, one's values belong to oneself. The best thing about the US is that one is allowed to choose his values and is not obligated to follow the herd. Respect is a conscious decision and neither an edict handed down from high society nor a dictate delivered from the grave.

"Adversary" is such a scare word here. Did Facebook's boosting of alt-right content not adversely affect American culture? Why are American companies trusted to do the right thing but foreign companies not? Why should the government be choosing which platforms are available? People have rejected Facebook because it's not fun or interesting to use, not because it had some moral high ground of being run with American ethical purity.

> Why should the government be choosing which platforms are available?

Exactly. We should let the market decide what the best product is.

I'm as anti-regulation as anyone here, but the government should protect its citizenry from harms that are not always obvious or easy to resist. That's why we regulate highly addictive and harmful substances.

> teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use.

You're talking about the "young an impressionable", the most vulnerable members of our society. You can't just "teach" them how to moderate: they wouldn't listen nor agree with your reasoning.

I can understand a principled position against all regulation (even though the Chinese government is very happy to regulate away any American companies trying to compete in the Chinese market) but let's not pretend we can solve this with zero regulation and just some well-phrased web pages explaining why Tik Tok is bad, mmmkay?

> You're talking about the "young an impressionable", the most vulnerable members of our society. You can't just "teach" them how to moderate: they wouldn't listen nor agree with your reasoning.

The "young" won't stay young forever. They have to learn how to moderate themselves at some point. Impressionability isn't directly related to age, but to lack of experience. An 21 year-old can be just as hooked on Tik-Tok as a 13 year-old.

Anti-regulation could also be put, "society must remain fractured. The actions of the left hand must remain hidden from the right hand".

A unified society sounds pretty good to me. Pitting one half against the other half is pretty bad.

Unlike WeChat in China.

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