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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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