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Comment by meindnoch | Hacker News Reader

I can’t bear being in the same room when my fiancé’s niece watches tiktok due to the constant barrage of extremely annoying music snippets. The average time spent on a video is about a dozen seconds, so the creators try to put the most attention-grabbing, dopamine-inducing, annoying music on every video. Imagine the average brostep song from the 2010s, filtered through layers of autotune and pitch-shifting, condensed into 10 seconds.

I can’t stand it. And this is from someone who’s perfectly capable of enjoying genres like breakcore or gabber…

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Very much this. I briefly dated someone who uses tiktok. I hadn't had direct exposure to it until one day she started watching next to me. It drove me absolutely nuts within 10 minutes.

> this is from someone who’s perfectly capable of enjoying genres like breakcore or gabber…

An old person, you mean?

If 31 is considered old, then yes.

Not by me (I'm much older than that), but it's not particularly surprising if somebody who's 31 and enjoys music from 25 years ago isn't down with the kids.

I just mentioned gabber and breakcore (“music from 25 years ago”) because those are genres that people typically consider a bit too much. I could have name-dropped the SVBKVLT label [1] for a contemporary example of electronic music I like, that might be too much for the average listener; but I don’t think it would have rang a bell for most people on HN…

Anyway, I was never really “down with the kids” per se in terms of pop music - I found the genre too vapid for my taste. But it was at least some sort of music. These TikTok soundbytes (I would consider “music” a misnomer) on the other hand are downright sonic torture devices straight from some MKUltra mind-control cookbook.

[1] https://svbkvlt.bandcamp.com/

I think that might be a part of it, but also it is also kind of the equivalent of the guy in the 1980s and 1990s with a boombox making you listen to music on the metro, or in the 2000's/2010s making you listen to his music from his cellphone/bluetooth speaker.. but now its like every single person is cabable of doing this..

My roommates 35 year old brother from russia stayed on our couch for a few months(escaping the draft) and didn't have a laptop, just his iphone.. He would just spend hours watching tiktok with that annoying bro-step/ableton core tik tok crap on his iphone speakers.. completely unphased by it... eventually I got used to hearing it in the background as well. The guy has headphones but this is something that seems to be normalizing. I see this on the bus and train as well

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