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Comment by initplus | Hacker News Reader

All social media apps have the same goal: soak up as much of your attention as possible to get you to look at ads. But it's a difference of degrees, TikTok is simply so much more successful at soaking up peoples attention than competing platforms.

TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before. Any social media person will tell you how insane the numbers are on TikTok compared to their competitors.

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Facebook was equally as effective when it launched. People were spending all day on Facebook, then spending all day on Farmville, then spending all day on Instagram. People got tired of it. People move on to new things.

> TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before.

What evidence do you have that its effect is worse than other platforms? Perhaps its scale is worse, but is the actual effect on the individual that much worse than it is with Instagram?

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

But this is one wrong done by many different groups, not two wrongs.

If I do a wrong and another person does the same wrong, it’s still two wrongs. We shouldn’t be defending TikTok because some other company did the same thing. This should be obvious to anyone.

I mean obviously TikTok keeps their data close so we only have anecdotes.

But anecdotally for myself and anyone I know who has used TikTok, the app is just so much more addicting than any other social media has been before. I'm not a social media newcomer, I have used social media nearly all my life. I have used instagram in the past.But never before have I felt the same addiction/compulsion that exists with TikTok. I don't think this is that unusual an experience, have you tried using the app yourself?

If you dig around you can find lots of articles on the addictiveness and proposed theories as to why. This is a pretty good article that cites numerous other articles. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6416...

I haven't tried the app, and I appreciate your comments.

From what I've heard it has the hallmarks of a fad: inexplicably engaging, and then dropped by the time it becomes popular enough that I've heard of it. Do you think that is likely here, or does this have something genuinely novel and more enduring?

I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive. Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL content is super short form and shallow, anything longer than 20s is considered long, so it's easy to keep that dopamine cycle going. It's a content graph rather than a social graph, people eventually get bored of whatever uninteresting thing their real life friends are up to. And the recommendations algorithm algorithm is finely tuned to deliver the most addictive content.

I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.

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