Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The main reason TikTok has awesome recommendations is that all the other big players (Facebook, Youtube, etc) realised back in 2017 that training machine learning models to persuade people to spend more time on their platform was unreasonably effective.

Ie. tell ML to trick someone to spend 14 hours watching youtube every day, and for some small percentage of users, it will actually succeed!

For those people, it's as addictive as drugs. They spent all day on youtube rather than going to work, going to school, caring for their kids, eating or even sleeping! Can you imagine the size of lawsuits that would be heading youtubes way when those people realise they've effectively been enslaved by an algorithm??

Leadership of the big companies put an end to that, instead trying to focus on other metrics, and trying to get more users to each spend some time on the platform.

Well it seems TikTok didn't get the memo...

View on HN

I know someone, mid 30's, jobless, who spends 12+ hours a day on TikTok. They don't even post to it - just watch hours and hours of mindless videos about mental health issues.

Maybe not 12+ hours a day, but a good chunk of time and this is my house mate. They watch more Tik Toks about ADHD than they do actually trying to live with ADHD.

I briefly had TikTok.. so much crappy videos about ADHD

You probably engaged positively with some of those videos. The feed tends to give you more of what you engage with.

Mine is full of cats, food, attractive women, and also ADHD content. None of those are remotely surprising to me, except that there's not more ADHD content (though I suppose the feed implicitly is).

I hate this narrative of blaming the user for being served bad content.

It's not "bad" content. It's content you don't want, but which your behavior nonetheless suggests you do. If you're not seeing things you like, search for a hashtag you're interested in.

No, it's objectively bad content. Only due to the way they track and understand user behavior suggests that the content is correct to show to the user. That's not the users fault when they get shown crap stuff

Guess why: https://youtube.com/shorts/rrupUTaCAUY?feature=share

Which is sad, but sans TikTok, would they just be on Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Netflix or Hulu or Disney+ or Paramount+ or HN for 12+ hours instead?

Why expend effort for the dopamine of long-term, delayed gratification when you can just tickle your brain all day for free?

What do they do for income?

They have a partner who pays for everything...

Is there a source to that claim? Seems to me that much rather they started dilluting their feeds with ads to the point where they lost all appeal.

Facebook and Youtube on mobile are so packed with unappealing scams that I stop scrolling after 5min

Well Facebook failed because almost no one i knew using it in 2017 still is. It’s like the normal reaction to an addictive thing is to get captured by it for a while, realize the downsides, and drop it after a time. Some people are bad at this and stay addicted but most people escape and go on with their lives. Optimizing for short term addiction sabotages your product.

My facebook feed is a ghost town. Almost zero people i know posting, a couple of straggling groups that remained relevant, and just bs ad driven nonsense.

People will pick their own poison to fill their free time, in the past it was reading books then it became watching TV all day im sure most millennials are using apps to fill their free time.

I used to fill my free time with world of warcraft spending more time in Azeroth than i did with friends or at school or at work. But i came to the realisation it was just escapism from a boring country/region and a waste of my time. But this is also made me realise how lucky i was to be born in such a boring country/region.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com