Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

There's one TikTok for me, and one TikTok for thee. The Chinese version promotes educational videos, and has a strict daily time limit. The "export" version is literally designed to make you retarded. Agree that other apps aren't much better though (especially now that they've redesigned themselves after TikTok's model...)

View on HN

Why banning it then? Don’t US/EU have power to force educational content and time limits? This “oh, all feeds are bad, we should think of maybe banning them all” will lead nowhere 100% of times. Feels like China absolutely doesn’t even have to do anything bad because the US don’t know what they want.

>why banning it then?

Because it’s the most logical thing to do and not doing so is a national security nightmare

Why can't we restrict TikTok to the same content only in the west? It's just a matter of regulation, we know it's possible because it's how it's done in China. Now think about it, is it really China here to blame for our regulations?

> The "export" version is literally designed to make you retarded.

Then why does it have so much philosophy content that can reveal the naivete of the many comments like this one reads about "TikTok"?

There is a setting to enable the STEM feed in the export version. Try not to be an ableist.

You can call it "induce cognitive impairment" if you prefer, but it doesn't change what it is.

The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

If calling it what it is helps encourage people to stop doing it to themselves (we are after all emotion-first, rationalization-later!)... then your taking offense on my behalf (for the record, I do have brain damage) will have been an acceptable cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com