She spent her inheritance on TikTok Livestreamers | Hacker News Reader

She spent her inheritance on TikTok Livestreamers

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She spent "$25,000 looking for companionship". It just happened to be on TikTok. I used to read about users (male and female) losing lots more on other, more conventional, dating sites.

From the article, it seems she would have found a way to spend this money eventually on other things:

"spent the year she retired traveling — dining in Dubai, sipping cocktails by the sea in Montego Bay, Jamaica, or strolling among monks in Kathmandu, Nepal."

Is she not partly (or wholly) responsible for this? She's not a young adult (with little life experience) who recently fell into a ton of cash. This is a 65 year old retired insurance investigator.

There should be some personal accountability considering that she was over-spending long before the COVID lock-down.

I realize there's a lot to say about dark patterns. I'm personally angered by how little oversight there is. But, in this case... is she like a gambling addict visiting a gambling site? That is... did she have an obsessive need to fulfill something in her psyche (for lack of a better phrasing)?

Smokers are also self-responsible for every cigarette lit - they should be expelled from insurance and society taking these willing actions and doing harm to the rest of people /s

You do pay more for insurance if you smoke.

So does everyone else. Plenty of people do not willingly self-report their drug use.

> She spent "$25,000 looking for companionship"

Sounds exactly right. People are lonely. The other day I saw my relative who works cybercrime and heard more stories of people taking out home equity loans to send it all to a scammer through bitcoin ATMs or other means.

People are lonely and today's kids are going to have it worse.

Society is moving to extreme individualism wether it wants it or not.

Why does it feel like first story just doesn't add up. All that traveling, and then struggling with spending 25k? Like maybe there is deeper money control issues with some of these people...

Just because it doesnt add up for you doesnt mean its not valid. Also, it is an illustrative example, not general rule for everyone affected. Im sure most users that get into fiscal problems get there with way less spent than 25k.

Yeah, just feel like the story would have been lot better without that setup.

I wonder if state really should limit everything we spend money on...

Since "state" means majority of people, id say is more of a question of what set of rules we want as society. Im also pro drug legalization but towards a different form of regulation there, minimizing harm created by drugs in total. I think writing laws from a CS perspective and with less politics could go a long way.

I spent a stupid amount of money on a phone baseball game in 2020, just because being in a "club" gave me a daily connection with others that I was missing. There are plenty of examples throughout the years of similar. I don't think anything about this is unique to TikTok.

It is horrible that a platform like TikTok exists to help people indulge in this sort of harmful behavior.

However, it is also horrible that something has happened in our society that has created enough completely lonely people that providing a platform for parasocial relationships is, like, a viable and wildly successful business model.

Yeah that's the larger story here imo. How incredibly lonely modern life is for many people, and the internet maybe the greatest communication tool for connecting humans ever is not being used by corporations to help, but basically to hack humans' need for companionship and profit from it.

I think TikTok is merely a symptom of the problem. Religion had solutions to a lot of recently rediscovered problems, like impulse control and lonelieness, it's just that moderns abandoned religion.

TikTok is just filling a hole.

Religion is an interesting one.

I don’t want to throw all religion out with the bathwater so to speak, there are definitely good religions that comfort people out there.

It does seem that, for example, there is a bit of a parasocial, or para…community(?) aspect to televangelism.

There's truth in this.

Places of worship provide more than a dissemination of views and beliefs. They are a communal place where mostly like-minded folks have a consistent opportunity to connect (or at least feel connected) to others around them. Under ideal circumstances, the beliefs in place also assure there is both encouragement of this behavior and means by which discord can be resolved.

Mind you, I also believe this breaks down considerably in larger places (i.e. 'megachurches' in the states) as you hit an inflection point of being able to become anonymous again.

It has to be the right religion. The world's population centres do not have a 1:1 match of religious services to families living there.

Putting humans in the wrong religious grouping leads to more persecution.

Broadly defined, society divides into two camps when faced with stories like this. The first is we need regulation in order to protect people from themselves. The second is that it sucks for these people, but we can't have prohibition.

I'm firmly in the second camp. The root cause of this woman's issue is isolation and loneliness. She found a temporary medicine for her problem, but this medicine cost money. The amount of medicine she purchased exceeded her ability to pay for it, but the pain caused by her loneliness and isolation was so strong that she would rather go broke than face the pain.

If you regulated and banned this TikTok phenomena, it would not have solved her pain. And there are plenty of other forms of pay-for-companionship that could have taken her money as well.

I don’t think anyone believes regulation would fix the root cause of the victims’ psychological issues.

The idea is that the government preventing predatory exploitation of vulnerable individuals, regardless of the specific cause of their vulnerability, is a good thing in and of itself.

If you follow the idea that "the government should prevent predatory exploitation of vulnerable individuals" to its logical conclusion, you create a very authoritarian society that lacks creativity. There isn't a way the government can stop this. Maybe promoting programs and outreach for people to join community groups, churches, bowling leagues, etc. but otherwise there is no fix the government can put in to solve this.

I don’t think your conclusion follows from the premise at all.

What would be your proposed solution for the government to prevent people from paying for products that reduce their loneliness and isolation?

I’m not convinced there’s a problem to solve here. Nobody is advocating for poorly-targeted legislation.

IMO it’s better to focus on “101: how legislation works” before trying to argue in nonspecific ways that legislation fails to work as intended. The devil is always in the details, so unless someone wants to argue that “protecting vulnerable people” is not a good goal, it makes no sense to criticize a hypothetical law we don’t have in front of our eyes.

That’s another way of saying, “Well I have no idea, but in the abstract I want the government to use force to prevent people from doing things that hurt themselves.” And I’m saying that’s impossible, and in trying to do the impossible you will hurt society.

> And I’m saying that’s impossible

That's both a serious failure of the imagination, as well as a failure to recognize that a large number of problems (of the same kind) have been solved successfully across the world by various legislation. There is a mountain of prior art here, a lot of which is totally non-controversial.

I don’t see it either, but exploitation was a big theme of Marxism-Leninism, and maybe one of them argued that fixing the exploitation of vulnerable people required abolishing the “society of the will” and adopting the “society of reason” or something.

But yeah it feels like we can have some reasonable guardrails.

Honestly with gambling and other vices I think a private, at-home genetic screener for behavioral risk factors would be really interesting. That would be a good place for regulation and oversight.

The odds ratios can get quite large—opioid use can be 5x or more IIRC—and having that data could help people who might be otherwise surrounded by less at-risk peers indulging in these kinds of activities.

Two stories:

1. Once I was working at a mobile app shop. We basically had 3 or 4 models of apps and would customize for clients: a clickable map with information for convention center, a menu for restaurants, a service ordering template for hotels and so on. It was the beginning of the tinder fever in Brazil and me and my coworkers were all single male college students. We wanted to hack tinder to maximize matches. In a few hours we were able to "sniff" the requests, understand the payloads and make a rough api in a python script. We noticed that the swipe limit was only on the client. So we basically swiped right all the girls in our city and selected the ones that didn't interested us. We were having burgers when we noticed that the automatic approach isn't always the preferred one: There were acquaintances there that we matched but never had the intention to, which led to many apologies or at least embarrassment. One of the boys actually got very "successful" with this method (sexually) and even started a shade business selling guaranteed matches to lonely guys. He marketed on facebook with very depressing slogans "you are always being rejected? People avoid you? Send me a message" and people actually paid him blindly hundreds of reais before receiving any concrete product or result. Loneliness is indeed a kind of hunger.

2. I have a friend that is a phd in biology (neurobiology and cognitive diseases) and started to make videos on tiktok etc during the pandemic to explain diseases, infection rates etc. She started to get more and more audience, for 3 reasons (we could identify by the comment section): the scientific content, the "lifestyle" content (how to clean your hands, how to use a mask properly etc) in which she added some fashion and organization opinions, and obviously the pervert ones (she is actually very beautiful, is always with makeup on videos etc). Then she started to make lives to answer questions of the chat. Then these lives became routine. Then the lives became more lifestyle-based with her going to the mall or getting her hair done. In a few months she already had some followers that would pay her monthly to just talk to her. Nowadays she is making 6 figures of dollar basically by talking with followers all day, without nudity or anything like that. She continues to do her research but the grants and publishing became irrelevant financially to her. She seems very happy, but concerned when this "season" is going to end. Loneliness is indeed a kind of farm.

another story that i just remembered:

I met a guy, at the time the boyfriend of a friend of mine. We hanged out a few times, mostly in his place. He lived in a giant house with a big garden around it. His family was italian and most of them lived in italy. He didn't work or anything and lived a very lavish lifestyle, going to fancy restaurants and driving sport cars. His older sister (she was like 30 something) came to Brazil for some vacations and was always trying to find a guy in parties or bars or any social situation, in an almost embarrassing way. Not a guy for a 1 night stand but for a serious relationship. She met a guy in a bar and started dating him. She started to pay him meals, go on trips with him etc that was responsible for draining all her money in about 2 months. He even sold her an apartment (he told her that it was an incredible investment opportunity). The guy disappeared with the money shortly after (around 100k dollars). There was a little bit of drama but soon after she went back to italy.

Interesting story about the intersection of UX dark patterns, social media addiction, and parasocial relationships with influencers.

Maybe its time to regulate not on specific actions like "gambling machines" but brain-pathways caused by products. This would also instantly regulate e.g. "legal research chemicals" used as drugs just as some usage pattern designs

She didn't work for the money and has redistributed it into the economy - who cares.

After hearing all the horrible stories about drugs and watching Hoarders, I consider TikTok a least worse substance for the old if they ever need one. The only bad part is it is made in China and Americans can't produce better ones for some reason.

I think at some point we’re going to realize algorithmic addiction is worse than addictions to most drugs.

> realize algorithmic addiction

Is that really relevant to tiktok live?

Yes. TikTok shows live streams that get more engagement to more people. Algorithmically.

I have never been shown a tiktok live that is relevant to anything I've done, sometimes they're not even in English. Are you sure their algorithm isn't a random number generator?

Aside from whatever algorithm they use for serving lives themselves I also want to point out the following:

No one downloads TikTok just to watch lives. You download TikTok because you heard it was entertaining. Or if you were early, because you kept seeing ads for it back when TikTok was buying a lot of ads to promote TikTok.

The algorithms keep you scrolling the normal For You Page (“FYP”).

Every now and then the algorithms put a live stream in the FYP.

So even if the Live algorithm might not be sophisticated (which I don’t know if is true – I don’t work for ByteDance), it is certainly the case that it is the algorithms that draw people into the TikTok live streams in the first place for a lot of people.

And then one day people get unlucky and they are sucked into one of the streams where it seems that everyone is gifting and they get the feeling that the lady in the article talked about when they make an innocent $1 gift, and if they are even more unlucky it spirals out of control for them.

Stopping to watch a random live that pops up on your FYP actually takes you out of the addictive flow of the tiktok algorithm.

Like Twitch, YouTube and strip clubs the addictive nature of tiktok lives has nothing to do with the algorithm feeding content it thinks you'll like. The addictive part is the attention you get from the performer in an exchange for money.

I agree that social media can be a very bad addiction but calling it worse than most drugs is a leap.

Physical drugs damage organs, cause cancer, leave you with lifelong physical cravings, and go as far as causing death directly.

I doubt sitting motionless with your head at a 45* angle for hours is good for your physical well being either to be fair

Much better to drink your fifth of vodka throughout the day, keeps your head upright.

“Addiction is a disease” is something I learned as a child of a (now sober) alcoholic parent.

It’s a strange classification at first because addiction seems like a matter of will and strength.

If we’re going to lump algorithmic addiction in with other addictions there’s a lot of interesting things that would flow from that. For example now that online gambling and sports betting is more common there’s disclaimers and commercials telling people to get help if they have a problem. Should the same thing be true for social media and Candy Crush games?

“Do you have a problem with social media, go to Facebook.com/gethelp for more information”

I mean, I sincerely hope you're not speaking from experience. But have you ever dealt with an alcoholic at home? Or a heroin addict? Seen delirium tremens? Cleaned up the puke after a binge? Had your possessions stolen by a close relation for said drugs? Had to withhold giving them anything of value so they couldn't sell it to further their self-destruction?

I remember one of my grand-uncles used to take off his oxygen mask to take puffs from his cigarettes before whatever illness finally killed him back in the 90s. Having seen a number of addictions from a relatively safe distance I will take algorithms 1000 times.

I saw an alcoholic yesterday. The cognitive decline I saw terrified me because this was a smarter than average person in their prime who was no longer able play a game that children could play.

Alcohol and Tobacco aren't most drugs, but I maybe framed things misleadingly, as I see people use caffeine/addictive pharmaceuticals/psychedelics/cannabis a fair bit and those are all in the category of "drugs" and yet I knew few people with serious problems with those and yet I hardly can enter a room where multiple people aren't addicted to some algorithm.

They must be the most commonly abused substances, no? In any case pardon me for waxing poetic but substance abuse strikes a nerve.

Comparing these types of addictions probably isn't a good idea. Alcoholism, gambling and drug addictions are destructive in a way I doubt those of us who hasn't experienced it can imagine. Social media addictions are destructive in vastly different ways (unless you have family or friends who disappear down a dark conspiracy rabbit hole) and on a much larger scale. So while it isn't as damaging to the individual family as alcoholism, the overall cost of the degradation of society could easily surpass that of any other addiction, simply due to the number of people who are affected at some level.

This is basically my observation, there is an insidious frog boiling effect to social media addiction where I look up and go "holy shit everybody is addicted" when nobody used to be. I used to be the only person using a computer recreationally at all.

I love YouTube, for it's medium to long content. The depth videos and the relaxation I get from spending 30 minutes watching someone repair an old Amiga or Mac is amazing, but YouTube Shorts is freaking scary. Apparently I do not have the self control to handle Shorts and every 30 days I tell YouTube to hide them. If that feature goes away I think I just need to cancel my YouTube Premium subscription and block the site.

In recent days I have also noticed that the YouTube algorithm will move you towards increasingly scary content. The algorithm will quickly move you from weight training to misogynist videos in less than 30 minutes.

I consider myself a savvy and cynical user of the internet, thinking I have some sort of mental protection from dopamine-controlling UX or content.

I have lost literal hours to youtube shorts. It generates the same re-dosing compulsions as cocaine or any other drug I've ever experienced.

It. Is. Fucking. Dangerous.

I watch a fair amount of the YouTube retro computing, electronics and car restoration channels, but because of the hate-crime that is the YouTube recommendation system, have turned off automatic play and shorts. Automatic play because it quickly gets you to the crazies, and shorts because I am not 14.

If YouTube don’t learn to understand that “no” means “no” and not “maybe later” (you can just feel the mid-product-owner energy from that phrase), I too will cease using it. Whether I’ll entirely give up on the content is to be seen.

I reccomend the chrome / FF extension "news feed eradicator" to block youtube feed, and algorithmic content across other sites.

I consume exclusively from my subscription feed (which I review every few months).

In additionu ublock origin element blocker can be used to to remove shorts section in subscriptions - means I haven't seen shorts in a long time.

This just in, "digital fentanyl" worse than actual fentanyl.

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