Hacker News Reader

Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here.

I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok.

I had TikTok installed for one day and vowed never again.

Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?

View on HN

As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies.

Now in retrospect, I am glad that those regulations, taxes, and judgmental stares slowly nudged me towards quitting.

My guess is that the most TikTok/social-media users don't realize that they are addicts.

EDIT: And yes TikTok is indeed extremely good at giving you dopamine hits. I don't keep the app on my phone but every once in a while if I am extremely bored or feeling very low, I will download it. It makes time go by so fast.

Perhaps the real culprits are the digital "gas stations" that make money hand-over-fist with TikTok's engagement loop. Apple, Google, and to an extent, Microsoft are all complicit in letting people make addictive experiences that promote their respective platforms. Much like the gas station, the smartphone is ubiquitous. Everyone passes by the TikTok aisle on their way to texting their mom or Googling a pie recipe, rich or poor. Worse yet, the guilt they feel for their addiction causes people to hide it. Nobody wants to address it, they just want to scroll their For You Page, enveloped in the comfort of homogeneous content. I normally don't glean empathy from people who make bad choices, but social media just makes me sad.

I think, ultimately, the only solution will be stripping platform owners of their power. Google and Apple have both undeniably abused their market position to promote harmful content and shelter the problems that TikTok causes. We'll either die in the shackles of our own corporations, or live long enough to watch them topple over.

I was just having a chat with my buddy today about how Apple, Microsoft and to a large extent Google are largely the best positioned to profit from any upstream applications. While the likes of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok fight for viewership, these underlying platforms are just counting profits regardless of who reigns supreme on the top. I don't know if Jobs saw this future unfold but here it is.

The gas stations of the digital era are just doing their job, ensuring that there is enough gas supply. What's ironic is that the biggest gas company also created the first automobiles, and basically told the market, everyone is welcome to build an automobile to use my gas as long as you give me 30% of your profits. Oh BTW, your automobile can run only using my gas. Boy, imagine this in the physical world.

If it's any consolation, I'm equally comfortable cussing out Henry Ford as opposed to Steve Jobs.

I'm not seeing the connection between the Google/Apple duopoly and the rise of TikTok or other addictive social media. I spend half or more of my waking hours on one Apple device or another, and if I had only things Apple has pushed at me to go by, I'd not even know TikTok exists. What's the sequence of events you expect from removing Google and Apple's platform power, that'll lead to reduced social media activity on their platforms and/or in general? Apple, for their part, seem to have spent a fair amount of effort developing features that exist only to curb addiction-like smartphone use—I'm not sure why they'd have done that if they were that focused on getting you to use your phone as much as possible.

Now, if we were talking about whale-chasing F2P games, I'd see your point, but I don't see the connection with social media.

>As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies.

If the majority of this cultural change happened during the age of the internet and the leaked info from manufactures around tweaking recipes to be more addictive, falsifying research, etc was being dropped on Twitter, Reddit, etc on a weekly basis, I imagine that would have played out differently

Better or worse? The cigarette companies would've loved the era of "fake news".

I cannot imagine tiktok doing anything good for me given how much instagram videos bore the hell out of me. What is it exactly that gives you a „kick“?

For me, Tiktok somehow shows videos that are just “right”. Maybe it is length of videos and ux. I skip anything boring in first 2-3 seconds and probably that’s how other people use it too. So creators have to make their videos entertaining from the first second.

And also videos somehow are relevant to current situation in my life. For example, if I have a tight deadline at work, Tiktok will show me videos related to work, productivity, mocking deadlines, etc. Not sure if it is just the numbers game since you can go through 10s of videos in a few minutes. And you just remember videos that were right or if their algorithm is really that good.

I also have ADHD and I made the mistake of downloading TikTok once. It ended up costing me a lot of time, money, and a significant chunk of my attention span. It became so bad that I couldn't focus at work because all I could think about was TikTok.

I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I don't feel angry at the company, but I do feel exploited and preyed on. Makes me worried about the kids that use this app and have even less self-control than I do.

What is your thought process about it that allows you to feel exploited and preyed upon, but not feel upset at the group that profited off exploiting you?

I mean that genuinely. I feel like I'd be upset in your shoes. Are you looking at it differently somehow?

I've not been diagnosed with ADHD, though have some symptoms (though honestly, some of those are just standard "human living in 2022"), but I do know I have what I would consider an "addictive personality".

I can't answer how gambling addicts or smokers feel, but I will share a similar experience - I had to uninstall Candy Crush Saga from my phone, because I would literally open it, and then "come to" ~40 minutes later at the end of my drive (carpool, not me driving). This went on for about two weeks before I decided to uninstall the game.

I've never been on TikTok, but I do know that mobile games like Candy Crush are designed specifically to be addictive/habit forming - look up "gamification" for some related aspects, though that's really more about applying those sorts of mechanisms (mostly daily login bonuses / streak rewards, but also carefully spaced repetitions / cooldowns to get you to come back multiple times a day, highly stimulating audio and visual feedback for that "dopamine rush") to form habits around other domains (exercise being a theoretically "positive" application).

All that is to say, good on you for recognizing your negative interaction with that app, and for uninstalling it. I don't know where the balance lies when weighing personal freedom (of both you to install whatever you want, and developers to release whatever they want) vs. legislation and regulation, but I do think awareness of the techniques that are being used (similar to how I learn as much as possible about scams / social engineering) is extremely important on a personal level.

One final note - 2048, a few years after Candy Crush, hit me in a pretty similar way. The interesting thing there is, with no ads, microtransactions or fancy animations, it really was the core gameplay loop that I got hooked on. After finally hitting the titular number, however, I uninstalled it and haven't gone back.

I read a book called "the power of habits" a few years back and there was a few chapters focusing on the gamification and how our brains tend to develop habits (and in some case addiction).

Ever since reading this book, I've noticed patterns in the way apps are developed.

Candy crush and other similar game apps are a bit obvious, but for me the most sticking one for me is the facebook app. They introduced a few years back these emoji that flash in the screen when you received a hearth or a smiley face in the chat. This is almost a direct copy of a technique used by the gambling industry where they flash coins in the screen of a gambling machine. In the book, I believed they explained that by making positive results / feeling of result stronger, you can trigger more deep rooted habits.

I remember when acquaintances at Facebook first saw all of the psychological stuff Candy Crush was doing and how distraught they were about it. So sad that they chose to emulate what they knew was horrible behavior.

If you are interested in viscerally understanding gamification, I suggest you install a free-to-play game with the sole intention of understanding how you are being manipulated. Pay attention to the slow cook, the social pressures, the dopamine hits, the sunk cost. I tried this (The Walking Dead: Survivors) and I learnt a lot.

Question to gamification engineers: do you play addictive “gamified” games, or does the internal knowledge of how the sausage is made ruin the joy?

I understand that having ADHD would make this more diffcult, but I have found it helpful to use the feature on my phone (iOS, but presumably Android has similar) which limits the total amount of time I can use a particular app every day.

When the time limit is up, I can still keep using the app if I want to, but often that is a sufficient reminder ("I've already been using this app for an hour?!") that I can stop.

I appreciate this feature because I can enjoy the app but also still feel in control of my time.

The fact both Youtube and Instagram are now displaying short-form videos within their apps only makes it worse. I know it's hard to fight against it but focus on something else more worthy of your time.

> It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it.

That's most social media and even products in general. Profit comes from consumption, and the best way to keep you consuming is to keep you engaged. Products thrive off of outrage which is why platforms like social media and the news optimize for outraging consumers rather than efficiently delivering information, which is why I actively avoid typical social media or the news. Just don't use it

Or how people with body image issues feel about instagram? Or how people with social injustice fixations feel about facebook? Or how people with porn addictions feel about pornhub?

These platforms are clearly utilizing super-normal stimuli to overwhelm our brains and elicit addiction-like behavior. Is that legal? Yes. Is that moral? Hell no.

The concept of super-normal stimuli, or more specifically, the avoidance thereof, has guided a lot of my parenting decisions. I know I won’t keep him away from all of that forever, but I want to make as much space as possible these early years for his little mind and attention span to develop.

Similar to how the vast majority of people can enjoy alcohol responsibly, most people can and do enjoy social media responsibly.

I like to enjoy a nice beer after a hard day's work. Sometimes I also like to enjoy TikTok for a bit to get my mind off of work and other challenges. Neither company should feel bad about providing a great product that people enjoy just because some folks have a problem enjoying it in moderation.

I left Facebook/Twitter years ago for this reason and then got an ADHD diagnosis shortly after. So yeah, I can relate. I've never downloaded TikTok but I subscribe to two users via my RSS reader, which at least provides insulation from being subject to their algorithm and endless video feeds. That could be a good half-way solution for you.

Nowadays my main vice is Reddit with the occasional YouTube binge. I find I *can* manage using both in moderation but it's a slippery slope. It's even harder if I don't have a healthy outlet to focus on instead, like an interesting project, hobby, or class. But honestly, complete avoidance of those platforms paired with really good internet hygiene ("digital minimalism") are only consistent solutions for me.

I installed it for one day, then I removed it. Came back a few days later, then I removed it again, And I've been in this (vicious) cycle for a while now. Whenever boredom hits, something in me thinks of TikTok. It's impressive. Never had that feeling with other platforms, not even Reddit. To fight TikTok, i'm trying a different approach, getting to know what my bored self really wants and feed it something else.

I’ve given TikTok a try four or five times now and for some reason it just doesn’t click with me. It’s not that I’m immune to this stuff because I really enjoy Instagram and I read HN fairly regularly. It seems that I’m somebody the TikTok algorithm doesn’t know how to serve.

I did see a few interesting videos, but nothing very compelling. How many dog videos or welding videos does one person need to see?

Instagram, on the other hand, is super sticky for me because I know the people I follow and it’s wonderful to see a photo of them and message back and forth once in a while.

I wouldn't take it personal. The reality is we all have much shorter attention spans with or without an ADHD diagnosis. Tiktok as of last year had 1 billion active accounts which means a lot of people like or even prefer content in smaller chunks.

TikTok is an interesting case because on the one hand they have some fantastic content, cooking videos, explainers, etc. On the other hand how that content is delivered is absolute garbage (from the POV of sucking out attention).

Yeah, I wish I could use it. I have friends who send me cool/interesting stuff.

Part of it having that stuff is the reason it's so addicting. I get in a loop of "maybe the next video is The One". That's why short form, title-less videos are such an addicting thing to consume. Especially when you can't see the next until you're playing it and by the time you've played it, the video is over.

> It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away

Have kids. They will claim your agency for themselves, and you’ll have none left for TikTok.

I do have kids.

You could have left the ADHD part out of your comment and your argument would stand just as true.

Yeah, probably. Having ADHD doesn't help the issue.

the Chinese actually call it "spiritual opium".

the CCP probably see it as some sort of poetic revenge for the real opium trade and the ensuing Sino-British war that they see as the start of the "century of humiliation"

They also manufacture most of the precursors for fentanyl, so it's not like the poetic revenge stops at TikTok.

Precurses? They make and market new analogs to pass importation on Alibaba (though they don't pass the Analog act so don't get any ideas it's legal).

It's not only TikTok. To an extent, nearly EVERYTHING entertainment is designed to be sticky. Candy Crush, Sports Betting, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube...all are designed to maximize engagement.

> Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?

More like how gamers feel about modern games. Just gotta swipe…

> I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok.

Well, you are. That's true for all of the "attention economy".

> I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact.

Can you share any evidence that TikTok was designed to exploit people with ADHD? Where do you get such confidence for this claim?

I have metric shit tons of ADHD. All social media will match on to you easily. I don't think TikTok was designed specifically to target us as much as it was geared to target everyone. It's just we fall easily. Most ADHD people have addictive personalities.

This is what I would have expected as well so it was surprising to hear otherwise. I thought perhaps the OP had seen leaked documents or some other form of evidence that indicated TikTok targeted people with ADHD deliberately.

You're being intentionally rude. You know I don't have that. You know I was not implying that I had that.

I'm not being intentionally rude. I'm trying to understand your comment. TikTok was previously discovered to be reading your phone's clipboard on every keystroke: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/tiktok-seems-to-b...

Your claim that TikTok deliberately targeted users with ADHD would be consistent with some of TikTok's previous behavior but I wanted to better understand what evidence you had for it.

You stated that TikTok was _almost certainly_ designed to _directly_ exploit the fact that you ADHD. I realize now that you meant something less direct but please re-read your comment and understand why someone might come to the same conclusion I did.

Yeah but to be fair the internet has been like this for awhile now. TikTok just takes what the internet offers and gives you a respective hit of dopamine or adrenaline to persuade you to swipe more.

It's just a video app, exercise some self-discipline and self-accountability and uninstall the app.

They clearly did uninstall it but "use some some-discipline" is pretty disingenuous given companies are abusing biological mechanisms to get people hooked on their apps. This is especially true for teenagers who are underdeveloped in the self-discipline department.

Replace TikTok with food, porn, or drugs. At some point the individual has to take responsibility for their actions and seek support if it's something they can't do on their own. Or we just ban everything.

I'm not sure what your point is, we do ban some of these (with various successes and failures), so why wouldn't we do the same for social media?

Yes we shouldn't ban everything, but there's a large spectrum of acceptable regulations with different tradeoffs and it's fine to discuss what your society wants in that regard instead of precluding any kind of regulation.

TikTok is not as harmful as drugs (at least I haven't seen anyone end up on skid row over watching too many dancing videos). So if it's to be regulated it would likely be similar to porn or gambling and be age restricted.

OP is clearly an adult capable of making their own decisions, so this regulation wouldn't help them.

So what is your point?

In many countries gambling regulations go beyond age restrictions and companies evolving in that space have to provide safeguards to prevent certain behaviors. I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine similar regulations for things like social media, at least it's a real possibility that exists before simply banning everything.

There is such a thing as shared responsibility. An individual smoker is responsible for quitting; Phillip Morris is responsible for making a harmful and addictive product. In the case of social media, individuals are responsible for how they use them, but Facebook/Tiktok/Twitter are also responsible for building apps that encourage overuse.

Commenter: “I have (insert DSMV behavioral condition) and it makes having X with Y extremely difficult” You: “It’s just Y, have X. Problem solved”

Let me guess, the solution to ending world hunger is..

It’s just hunger, use your wallet, just go buy some food and eat it.

Great if you're able to do that easily. Please understand that some of the most brilliant minds in the world get up in the morning usually somewhere in California, and work many hours in the day, and their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.

reminds me that "the greatest minds at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway" made it harder to open your list of apps on Play Store but never mind

Open the list, select 'TikTok' and click 'Uninstall'

This is not to be demeaning. But if you're having too much trouble disconnecting from it, then that should be the way. You can still see videos in a browser.

Preaching to the choir here, I don't do any social media on my phone at all.

But still, kind of unhelpful. What do we do about them?

this is the personal responsibility or bootstraps argument in a poorly made sheep's clothing.

It's addictive. Many users don't uninstall because they are addicted, and the social media companies exploit this for profit.

Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.

Everyone might get addicted to TikTok for some period. But everyone needn’t stay addicted to TikTok. (Of course I use “TikTok” as a placeholder for any infinitely consumable feed of targeted content.)

Regulation has a place. For example, an obvious and easy win would be to pass a bill requiring any product with a consumable feed to offer and default to an option to sort it in reverse chronological order.

But regulation is a reactive and slow strategy to shrinking a problem that continues to metastasize. There are more proactive social strategies available to us. Education is free. Self-control is free. Unfortunately, they’re only “free” modulo the minutes of attention we can allocate to them from our finite lifetime supply.

I wonder, how many minutes of education or self-introspection is required to prevent one future minute of app usage? I’m optimistic this ratio is favorable, so that once people sufficiently internalize the effect of infinite consumable feeds, they will naturally reduce their self-sabotaging usage of them.

People will adapt. It will just take a while. Sometimes you gotta get burned to learn not to touch the stove. In the meantime, we could require the products to provide resources and tools to reduce addiction (like HN’s noprocrast). And we should also find a way to blunt the impact of social media on those who have not yet begun their journey with its addiction (like children, or people yet to be born into our satirical dystopia of a society). If kids are glamorizing social media before they are old enough to use it, they will not have an easy experience separating themselves from it later in life.

Cigarette smoking rates are way down since twenty years ago when we started convincing children it was gross and uncool. We can do that with social media too.

Your first sentence is wildly and dangerously misguided. Yes, it's slow and difficult but it's also the reason we have underappreciated institutions like the FDA.

> Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality.

Is this a self-serving idea you apply only to the industry you work in, or is this a general principle you apply to all industries? Do you feel this way about the petroleum and chemical industries? The pharmaceutical industries? Food processing? The nuclear industry?

Are all industrial regulations instances of 'victim mentality', or only those that apply to your industry?

I’m not sure where you got the idea that I harbor some absolutist opposition to regulation in any industry, or even in the social media industry for that matter. My comment listed specific examples of social media regulation that I would support.

My goal was simply to highlight the naïveté of thinking regulations alone will solve the problem, unless the USPS is going to send a weekly pill bottle of amphetamines to every citizen who is vulnerable to the dangers of social media addiction.

> Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.

We are responsible for our own choices until we aren't. Until we are deceived, directed, subverted to some choices. If that wasn't true then the whole PR + advertisement industries wouldn't be as massive and effective as they are.

I do recommend watching Adam Curtis' "The Century of the Self" to dispel a little the myth that we are solely responsible for our choices...

We are accountable to them, we suffer the consequences of them but definitely not solely responsible.

"Victim mentality" is too big of a sweeping statement for this case, actually I'd consider it extremely dismissive of pretty complicated human behaviours.

> some of the most brilliant minds in the world

Some of the most brilliant minds in the world are working on anything you could name.

> their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.

I mean sure, but at the end of the day all we're talking about here is an app that shows you a sequence of entertaining videos, it's not streaming directly into your brain stem, it's not fundamentally different from any of the other addictive things that have existed on the internet for years.

Frankly, it's not even that important... So what if you waste your time looking at a bunch of random videos? I personally know people who spend 6+ hours a day on twitch, youtube, minecraft etc, they don't frame themselves as victims being subverted by the insidious machinations of majong, it's understood that they simply enjoy minecraft so they play it a lot, sometimes more than they know they should, but that's just life, there is nothing special about tiktok that merits this subversion of agency narrative.

Let's try it like this -- a disproportionate and extremely high number of the most brilliant minds in the world work in Silicon Valley. Overwhelmingly, that work is essentially "harvesting the behavior and attention of human beings for profit, most often through advertising" That describes all of social media and all of FAANG to various extents.

Those are facts. Up until now I haven't said anything about whether this is good or bad, and I'm still not saying "this means we should shut it down."

But I've seen too much to suggest that it makes sense to hand-wave this phenomenon away and say "it's just life."

No. It's worth studying and doing our best to determine how dangerous this is.

The greatest trick they pulled is convincing people like you that you have no personal autonomy.

It’s one thing to show you stimulating content once you open the app but it’s a whole another level of self-deception to convince yourself that you can’t prevent yourself from opening the app.

It's just poker, show some self-discipline and self-accountability and uninstall the app!

They did.

Imagine something you have struggled with for a very long time. Now apply (the spirit of) your reply. Good luck, I hope it helps!

Some of the brightest minds in the world work tirelessly to develop impossibly advanced algorithms which exploit our monkey-brains' attention mechanisms. It's scary to me that there's people working in the tech industry who would upvote a comment like this-- it shows a lack of respect for the level of power software engineers possess over real people's lives.

Exercise some self-discipline and read what I wrote. I did uninstall it.

Yes, I read that, I am speaking in the general sense with respect to remarks such as "it feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency" and "I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok". I can see why that's not clear though, so fair critique.

I understand you literally removed the app from your phone, but framing yourself as hapless prey without any agency negates the ethos of self accountability and self discipline.

I am not hapless. However I do have a mental disability that makes me especially susceptible to the psychological tricks (and they are tricks) that TikTok employs to keep people scrolling. The fact that I was born with ADHD and can't get rid of it, even if I can curb it, does reduce some of my agency by definition. It sucks, but it's the truth.

I don't use TikTok but even in my mid 40s fell victim to Instagram reels. What's astonishing to me is that I have a level of self control that's way more than the average individual (for instance I have taken cold showers for ever).Even with such an otherwise resilience I fell victim to Instagram reels and their infinite supply of mindless entertainment. It took a week for me to unshackle and get rid of this imbecile nonsense. I still have the app on my phone but am actively not opening it. My hypothesis is that if you can do this for a continued duration, then the existence of the app won't bother you. You can't go around deleting everything from your life. You lead your life on your terms, despite the distractions.

So the addictive forces are quite powerful and for the average individual, it's really hard to get out of this addiction.

Yes and no. I mean, you are correct in a very abstract way, but there is something to be said for an industry that is able to manipulate a large swath of the population by exploiting various human predilections. Saying it is just self-discipline and accountability is limiting the conversation to a frame that benefits those companies without looking at the totality of the reasons behind it.

It’s just a bottle of liquid, exercise some self-discipline and don’t drink it.

I think that comparison makes the opposite point that you intended.

The answer to treating alcoholism actually is some amount of personal responsibility and strengthening of willpower, not blaming the companies that manufacture alcohol.

If an alcoholic goes around making pronunciations about how they lack agency and how they feel like bars are victimizing them, they will be sternly told to exercise some self-discipline and self-accountability at a minimum, likely they will also be told to check into rehab.

Imagine if, guided by your analogy, I were to have instead replied to the OP with "check yourself into rehab". Most likely, I'd have been downvoted for snark, because everyone understands a sequence of entertaining videos is a different kind of thing than a drug which you ingest and become physically dependent on.

I find it hard to try to blame the cigarette (or any) companies in a world where maximizing money is encouraged. Don't hate the player, hate the game. I'm not trying to justify anything, but there would be another tiktok instantly exploiting the opportunity if tiktok would vanish.

I do, in fact, hate the player for doing something bad or evil. The game exists because there are players willing and wanting to play.

Does it help? Would it maybe be more useful to focus on the people that run the game, and try to make them change the game by changing rules?

I'm perfectly happy blaming people for doing immoral things even though they are legal. "I'm doing it unless someone stops me" is not a mark of morality.

I can do both. Hate isn't finite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com