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Comment by returnInfinity | Hacker News Reader

Without the algorithm, TikTok is not TikTok.

When Tiktok was banned in India, everyone tried to recreate it, include Instagram. Everyone failed to get anywhere close to TikTok for you page.

Once the new algorithm is live, expect massive backlash.

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They’re licensing the TikTok algorithm, although it may diverge in the future

Probably for the better, its incredibly damaging to young brains.

Oh yes, I remember reading the am17an report about that! It was incredibly detailed and definitely not just a single-sentence declarative summary of Haidt's "The Anxious Generation."

It is not even like I disagree with the gist. Sadly, my feelings don't decide fact... or so the lesswrong weirdos keep telling me. If it was incredibly damaging, it would be incredibly easy to show. Instead, it's some poorly picked cherries by someone (Haidt) who should know better. Worse still, the best you can get from the data is a "maybe. I mean it is not immediately dis-proven... which is a start."

The kind of person who doesn’t believe this is bad for children, is the same kind of person who would believe Big Tobacco sponsored studies about how cigarettes don’t cause cancer in the 80s. For the data driven like yourself, I remember a Jeff Bezos anecdote, “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right"

Try spending time with a phone addicted teen and you might have a more sympathetic take.

  > The kind of person...

That's on me, I came in hot and you came back hotter. Apologies.

Let me take the temp down and ask it a different way. You don't feel weird saying there is an epidemic happening to our kids (again, something I’m at least partially convinced of), but we can't really put together a narrative one-tenth as cohesive as what we have for the efficacy of gray-market/off-label Ozempic?

I don't feel weird about it because it's a trillion dollar business, and it's in their best interests to muddy the waters regarding any cohesive argument. But when you just look at these things from first principles, boasting about 1 billion hours of shorts watched in a month or something ridiculous like that, AI generated content on loop, teens/adults getting into status/envy games on these platforms, the "connection" aspect looks like a very small positive.

I don't think your example of off-label Ozempic is isomorphic - the more apt comparison is one I already gave: Why did it take us 30 years to realize cigarettes cause 400k deaths a year? The answer is because there was simply huge amounts of money involved.

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