I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand.
Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.
I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, but the other side of me is like wait where did 2 hours go? And do I really want this?
I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows).
My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.
I think the important distinction in 'do I really want this' becomes whether I chose to do that activity, or if I kind of just got sucker punched into it.
I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.
Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing."
So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes?
I'm going to go ahead and guess "pro-unionization rabbit holes." If I'm wrong then the evidence will be me following the link someone gives me of a 2-hour TikTok unionization rabbit hole. I can't lose, internet!
I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few of them, all tiktoks seem to have the same feel and optimization. They're uncanny valley of authenticity, influencers and singers and actors and wives struggling so very very hard to seem amiable and authentic and real based on same evolving playbook, and I feel too weirded out after 30s or so to keep watching :O.
I think the thing that makes TikTok successful is that it's so uniquely tuned to whoever owns the account, and that it catches up with your personal interests and preferences very quickly. Your experience on TikTok is probably going to be a lot different to your wife's, at least this has been the case for us.
my fiancée is hopelessly addicted to TikTok and just about everything she shows me from there is wholly devoid of actual authenticity—it's all fake as hell. "cute" moments between couples that were obviously staged and rehearsed instead of being impromptu as implied, young mom's desperately making a big deal out of everything their kids do because she needs Content for the Channel, and more.
I kind of get the feeling that we are passing or have passed some threshold where many, possibly most people can no longer identify Actual Authenticity due to social media overexposure, and I for one find this distressing.
Wow I never thought of this applied to algorithms and AI. Very profound to think about in this context, of users selecting the best videos with their clicks and evolving the naturally selected videos to out compete the other videos, in the same vein as survival of the fittest.
> Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.
On to the next 'hit' then.
The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible.
There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™.
The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs.
Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.
One of the best times to start a new product or even promote an existing one (in consumer space) is during the infancy of a new social platform. Not only could there be opportunities to build products around TikTok but advertising on TikTok now could be akin to advertising on FB in 2005, cheap and plenty of chances to make good ROI
But u can’t take advantage of those opportunities unless u become an user first and study what works
It's just entertainment. You could say the same about books or TV. At least Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social and interactive and encourage people to produce content instead of just consuming passively.
> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places.
This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram.
Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live.
Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.
I had to spend hours training Instagram not to show me endless pictures of hot shirtless guys when I go to the 'explore' feed. I follow one or two pop singers who sometimes post sexy photos, but for the most part I just follow people that I really know. I'm not sure how my feed ended up so sexualized. My theory is that Instagram notices that I spend longer looking at hot guys when they do appear than I do looking at other kinds of photos. (I am happy to stare at hot guys, but it's not what I'm actually looking for when I go to Instagram.)
Yes, there is a huge disconnect in the Instagram discovery feed for me as well. I follow friends & family, some astronomy, photography, tech accounts but when I browse Explore it’s full of influencers and fit girls in thighs. It got slightly better a few months ago when I think they did something but only introduced 20% of my tastes rather than 0%.
One explanation for the difference between tiktok and instagram could be that tiktok doesn’t have a crystallized business model yet and is just focusing on growing its network as much as possible. Presumably it will end up as bad as every other (profitable) social network over time (apart from twitter, which is more like an internet utility).
I understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP.
Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees.
I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.
I agree though with your last point. I get a lot of queer content and it's usually very welcome. Though some niches in that subset that focus on discussion of harassment of queer people are much more anxiety inducing.
> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc
I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it.
Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever.
What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral?
Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?
You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.
In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.
Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".
I remember hearing similar things about Instagram vs. Facebook many years ago.
Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?
It felt like that for a bit but then they (Tiktok) just pushed a release that removed reposts/memes from the main FYP feed. All of a sudden, it became much more interesting again.
> Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content.
I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds."
Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to make a point, but I don't find the argument compelling that social media really can add value to our lives as long as we ignore the most visible and popular content within it.
On reddit you need to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff, usually by stumbling across good subs from outside the site. TikTok is better at serving you the things you like as you passively consume them.
Sure some what you see is supported by "algorithms"; but what you sense ("playful, authentic, and raw" ) is the result of a deliberate editorial policy done by a group of actual humans.
Imagine all that time spent watching other people do hobbies you would like to have instead be spent actually doing those hobbies. Where would your life be right now and where would it go from there.
Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.
Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally.
It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.
It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion.
IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics.
At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues.
At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there.
Is there a way to remove the overlays? By that I mean the crap above the videos? I really can't use it with those, I'm autistic and it's just too much.
Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky?
Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many diamonds on there! I can easily laugh my ass off every night, because the format is just perfect for a bunch of quick visual gags.
The duet feature and the re-use song feature enable so much absolute hilarity, because of the repetition humour.
Which is why I watched a TikTok of someone putting a 3D-printed magic wand on top of a sea urchin, set to the sound of someone saying "Avadakadavra" in a really high-pitched voice, and I just fucking lost it. It's brilliant! Brilliant!
Because I trust hacker news (somewhat), I just installed tiktok for the first time.
15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested.
I’ve tried it twice now and it just doesn’t click for me. I think the most interesting thing it found for me was a video of a person doing some really excellent welding.
Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.
I think Chinese cultural exports obviously lag behind those of Japan and Korea because the government censors confine their creatives, leaving them less free to create.
The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon.
I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make sure to click like or add comment on interesting ones, in order to send signals to AI.
I'm not embodying any fake persona, just trying to find what I would find interesting. I just don't get addicting content. I even try searching so that TikTok would get explicit keywords from me.
I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).
I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally. I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers: I check out mainstream videos on YouTube like MKBHD and even subscribe to his podcast (This is to show I find content for "mainstream consumers" interesting, though I work in tech and know more about tech things than MKBHD's target audience).
Can someone help? Why is the whole world praising TikTok while I am failing repeatedly?
>I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).
I think we have the same "problem": "content" doesn't engage us, "discussion" does. It's not so much about the exact topic as much as the ability to see other perspectives. All these modern social media platforms are awful for discussion and actively downplay it, despite all the popular ones having some form of commenting features. The closest modern analog would be discord, but discussion is almost as ephemeral as Snapchat once you get even a tiny bit active. small group servers kind of capture the feel, but still isn't meant for longform replies like this one,
Feel free to mention if I missed the mark by a country mile. But I've been thinking about this for a while on why I can browse reddit for hours but can't stand instagram for more than a few minutes (aside from my resistance to give Facebook another account to mine data from). reddit has more discussion than I could ever read (perhaps even too much). Youtube comments are pretty low quality (in both formatting and content) but does the bare minimum needed to post stuff longer than a tweet.
(That said, I've been getting way more into silly cat videos than I ever wanted to, so who knows?)
This is 100% me. If I can't mainline a bunch of people's perspectives within minutes, I'm not interested. Video is waaayyy too slow. Granted, I also have an exception: I watch YouTube regularly, but I have to be doing something with my hands at the same time.
And it's not an attention span thing — I read books. It's about the density of information and the speed with which I can traverse it. I can read as fast as I think, but even 2x speed videos don't get there. So without an additional activity to fill my whole attention space (is there a term for this? ADHD people might have one?) I get bored.
This is very insightful. I didn't think of it from this angle, but I think you hit it on the nail that I find discussions among people, not unidirectional presentations from a tiktoker, interesting.
Wait. Isn’t “discussion” just another form of “content”? How is it really different?
I thought you might be referring to “other people thoughts” outside your bubble? Which could hint to why you don’t like Instagram (they try to keep you in one thought bubble) compared to HN/Reddit.
PS: I’m actually interested in both, content and discussion. Which is bad because you get addicted to all kind of platforms!
that would also explain why (as someone asked in a different subthread) twitter's recommended posts don't get the sort of engagement tiktok does. on twitter you're there to see discussions among people you follow, and pushing random recommendations into the stream just adds noise and clutter.
When I was using TikTok, it was the first truly openminded social media platform I found. Stuff I was watching on it:
- A girl coder who showed people how she operated her light airplane, flying between different little Midwest cities where she lived.
- A free diver (living in Hawaii?) who could stay underwater for several minutes at a time (and film fun chill videos while at it).
- Good relationship advice from progressive-thinking folks who weren't out to make a political point, or shame one party or another.
- Nifty yoga tricks from someone in SoCal.
- Longboarding cosplayers from Asia (yes, they would dress up... and longboard...).
It was also the first social media platform where I saw plenty of positive representation of folks from different backgrounds – including the country my parents came from. Far, far cry from what I read in the US media, by contrast. Compared to the awful divisive stuff I saw on FB, I thought to myself, it's really odd that the US tried to shut this down. Call it addictive, but it didn't leave me feeling soul-damaged.
> I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally
Liking the "technology industry generally" is closest to mainstream interests, but even then, people like that their new phone is thinner or their new Xbox has better graphics. Regular consumers aren't too worried about ARM vs Intel, MS dropping support for old PCs, or any use of blockchains beyond asset speculation.
I was living in Germany when I started using it and I told myself that it would help with learning the language, since I was being served german language content (oddly it seemed to think I was in Austria). It was a bit dull at first but I guess somehow, I kept using it enough. I'm not a dancer or super into dance but I did get hooked by some of the dancing stuff. Slowly but surely, I now get almost no dance content and it's all explainer/politics/philosophy/cycling/etc. I definitely used the 'not interested in this' feature a lot to train it.
Interesting. So you weren't interested in dance, but you got interested through TikTok? Reminds me of how Pinterest's value prop includes exploration and inspiration (as opposed to searching for what you know you are looking for).
I have no trouble finding thoughtful and educational content on TikTok. Digital design is an example of a tech industry-relevant category that is a good fit for TikTok, I regularly find high quality videos there. Since you mentioned MKBHD, there’s of course a world of PC building, laptop/phone/gadget review, etc. over there, which I don’t care much about. The nice thing about TikTok is that the videos are as long as they need to be and no longer, and brevity is rewarded, unlike on YouTube where every other two minute video is artificially stretched to ten minutes.
Is it because you’re outside of TikTok? You maintain a mental model of the app and its algorithm. The app is in your lab, not the other way around. A like or a share is a calculated action that occurs simultaneously in your mental model and in the app.
Thinking like that kills immersion for me. For example, I was playing Mass Effect 2 on my Framework (with Wine) yesterday and caught myself thinking about whether any significant internal state would change from the conversation Shepard was having. I shut down that line of thought and dove back into the story.
I sometimes wonder if I'm not enjoying TV and movies to the fullest because I get distracted by thinking about where I've seen the actors before, the production process, or how they were able to achieve a particular effect.
I can relate, but depending on your perspective, maybe even worse because I find the recommendations off-putting. I don't understand what's happening that people like. I can't think of another word: It's just off-putting. Discordant. Dissonant.
It's like being a atheist, raised in an atheist house, in a country full of atheists and then going to church for the first time.
I think of Tik Tok as being like Pringles - as in, once you pop, you can't stop. Something about being able to easily flip to the next thing, combined with TikTok's excellent recommendation engine, makes for a very addictive experience - for me, at least.
If you're not enjoying it, despite using the product as intended, then I'd just guess you and it aren't a good fit. That doesn't seem to be any huge mystery - all products and services have fans and people who aren't interested.
I use a Telegram bot.. I create a channel for each RSS feed (or a bunch of related feeds) and then add the bot to it and use some /commands, and the bot will send posts to it. I can invite other people to the channel too, and Telegram even lets you add a little chat to discuss each submission separately
The bot is @rss2tg_bot, if you don't want channels you can just begin a private chat with it and send a rss url. Or add it to a group and then it sends new posts to the group.
"If people have the right to be tempted - and that's what free will is all about - the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold." - Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, "Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, March 2007
> In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead. In 2017, a team led by Oliver Habryka took over the administration and development of the site, relaunching it on an entirely new codebase later that year.
> The new project, dubbed LessWrong 2.0, was the first time LessWrong had a full-time dedicated development team behind it instead of only volunteer hours. Site activity recovered from the 2015-2016 decline and has remained at steady levels since the launch.
> The team behind LessWrong 2.0 has ambitions not limited to maintaining the original LessWrong community blog and forum. The LessWrong 2.0 team conceives of itself more broadly as an organization attempting to build community, culture, and technology which will drive intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems.
I think that's what the article is saying. The market will continue to innovate to provide greater temptations because that's a competitive and profitable strategy even though it will have some downsides.
And you don't need AI for this. There are lots of media outlets with entertainment news that at best, lack nuance, but most often just spread misinformation in an echo chamber they built.
I've tried it a few times. Even ran an account for a project I do.
I don't know. Maybe I'm not the right personality for this stuff but I found it annoying and taxing.
Open it up and you get these obnoxious videos and then have to press a button to make them go away. The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic. Lots of people love it so maybe I'm just too old.
Perhaps they've "cracked some psychological secret" but I believe it's more likely they've replicated whatever makes pop music and television work for a lot of people. I have the same kind of distaste for those I have for tiktok.
But good for them. Entertainment is important antidote to stress. Glad people like it
I'm with you. I assumed it's because I'm older than the target demographic, but maybe it's just because I'm not a 'fun' person - don't sing or dance or party.
My wife loved it to death, and I just found it incredibly annoying and overbearing even just hearing my wife play with it.
>The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic
I argue that's most modern "social" media, not necessarily a unique point of tiktok. They want the creator to be the focus, not the community surrounding them. Comments are encouraged to keep short enough to keep engagement but not take that attention away, so you'll inevitably just get some shallow encouragement as "top comments".
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not trying to be what HN is.
You've managed to find the word I've been looking for to describe why I don't like TikTok. It feels taxing. It makes my head spin and after a couple minutes I feel exhausted. Maybe my brain's just too slow and sensitive.
yea, it's incredibly annoying, and "cringe". the feed just doesn't give me anything interesting, or satisfying. i never felt good about using it, during or after. it's just not for me. i also hate that synthesized lady voice
> it's more likely they've replicated whatever makes pop music and television work for a lot of people.
This seems to be a good explanation. TV commercials have figured out some of these tricks, like using a louder volume than the TV show itself, or using a song that's a cover of a more famous, older song.
I find it irritating, but it probably works because older viewers recognize the song and pay attention, while younger viewers mentally attach the cover version to the product being sold.
Maybe it's because I haven't used it, but a lot of the language around TikTok feels exceptional in ways that aren't justified: Twitter has (tens of?) millions of "terminally online" users, but we don't compare it to "digital crack."
This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk about it compared to other addictive social media (e.g., saying that users are "obsessed with" $FACEBOOK_PROPERTY instead of describing them as digital addicts.)
The primary difference between TikTok and other social media platforms is about a decade. For example, Development of a Facebook Addiction Scale - 2012. In other words, mostly recency. Another major difference is age group; these days platforms like Twitter will skew much older than TikTok, and "the youth are being corrupted" is really a timeless story.
Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like. It’s both scary and extremely impressive.
Twitter on the other hand seems to promote monoculture, and tends to push you towards what everyone else likes. It essentially pushes whatever is popular. Some of the most interesting content and users on Twitter are shadow banned, either intentionally or through poor auto moderation.
TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like, and given it’s Chinese ownership, has no political skin in the game. So you tend to see much more diverse views.
tik tok is free of a lot of the expectations that twitter and facebook and instagram have to contend with. no one really gets upset if they think tik tok has it's fingers on the scale with regards to what you get to see. people using twitter, facebook and insta get EXTREMELY upset if they even suspect they are missing out on content or getting content "put in their face". look how much outrage erupts every time twitter defaults everyone to the algorithmic timeline
Certainly. I had a friend (and TikTok user) describe it as the "Monsters Inc. effect": TikTok is showing that you really can win engagement with honey instead of vinegar, at least in the context of all other social media providing constant negativity.
Not my experience of twitter. I follow a few people who provide a stream of high quality insights about 99% of the time. It has materially helped my career for example.
I don’t use it as entertainment, I never tweet anything myself, I don’t read the replies to tweets and I have retweets turned off for almost all of the people I follow. If someone strays into tweeting about politics, culture wars, woke/antiwokeness then I cull them from my follow list.
> Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like.
I suspect that is because TikTok has different goals compared to other social media companies. Their aim (right now) is to serve you better and/or more relevant content. Whereas other social media companies’ goals are to serve you ads and what do they know about you will not be as apparent to you. I would argue Facebook probably knows even more about you, more than just preferences, but social connections etc from its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
I wasn't talking about the kids using TikTok. Most of the discourse I've seen online about TikTok's addictiveness (and origin) has been by young-to-middle-aged adults.
I think the truth is pretty dark. Until TikTok most recommendation engines placed the most weight on your declared preferences.
TikTok doesn't seem to care about what you "say" you like." They watch your behavior to see what you actually like.
So you can "want" to be shown math videos and like tons of math videos and follow dozens of professors. But if TikTok observes that you are more likely to watch a professional wrestling video to the end, then that is what you'll be shown.
What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.
This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.
TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.
They know that it's important for you to leave so now is the time to show the video that they know you will find most irresistible. So when you try to leave they give you the "ultimate" video which you have been conditioned to expect to be "perfect".
In order to leave, you must fight this conditioning and reaffirm your desire to leave within a tiny span of time (feels like less than a second). If you miss the window and try to exit again, TikTok tries to hack your brain again by changing the video for the next video it thinks you'll stay for, and so on...
It seems from the comments that most people think the only way to interact with tiktok is the fyp (main feed) but if you jump over to any hashtag you get a curated list of content on that topic. Some are much better than others of course. Many are replete with interesting content and discussion.
I think most commenting here would be surprised by the wide variety of topics to be found.
If you want to watch math content you go to #mathtok (or whatever) and that's what you see. The app doesn't try to stop you.
As a hint, when you see a video you particularly like, try out all hashtags on it. Using hashtags is how you find, join, and interact with communities on tiktok.
None of this seems dark and you're using some very charged language. Showing you a video when you tap back isn't "hacking your brain". It even says "tap twice to exit". Get a grip and give humans more credit.
I started doubtinng that around... 2017 or so. by 2020 is was a complete wrap and I'm 99% convinced that humans truly do need to be told that companies aren't providing a free app for their amusement, and that companies don't care about them.
On top of that, I don't see it productive to cricitize someone for charged language and then say "get a grip". That seems to betray you message. Debate the content, not the user.
>This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.
>TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.
It widely depends. A lot of apps do override the back button behavior too, (especially ones that have lots of state, to avoid you exiting the app when you've filled 9 fields or are deep in a scroll) at the very least, ask if you want to exit. TikTok doesn't display a message, but a second back press closes it anyways.
>What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.
Hilarious. Youtube has been convinced for the past few months that I really want to watch Nurburgring laps because I watched a single F1 reel, and occasionally suggests Jordan Peterson throughout whenever there's even just a single, accidental click on an edgy video. Netflix recommends its own dogshit. Absolutely no engine has good recommendations. At the very least, TikTok is heavily influenced by both their guesses, and by what I do. When I tell tiktok to fuck off with the videos about X, I truly will not get X videos. So, between a shit engine that believes it's better than me at knowing what to watch, and Tiktok's that at least listens when I tell it it's wrong, I4ll take the one I can actually influence.
I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself.
I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only covered in the most broad sense) didn't really fix that. I'm sure it works better if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter. I think there are some really funny creators and that's where it shines the best - comedy. Everything else is treated in a cursory manner that never really delivers.
The vast majority of videos were a complete waste of time and I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it. It took at least a couple months to find interesting creators, but they are so few and far between that it wasn't worth it.
For me, Livejournal was addictive, forums were addictive, Twitter used to be addictive. Especially when you stumbled on niche communities. I've never tried Instagram, so I'm not sure about that.
Not quite sure how you can call 30min a day for months not a success. The algorithm success is measured by how much time you spend on the app, not whether you enjoyed it.
In that regard, I guess you're right that it was a success. In the 2 - 3 months I used it, it was probably for around 10 - 20 hours total. I was probably shown plenty of ads in that time and now they have a vector of my interests sitting somewhere, selling it to other ad companies.
But I really just kept using it because I wanted to see what people were talking about - which was not about how successful it was, but about how good or addictive it was. I never felt addicted - I felt like I was forcing myself to open the app.
I just kept walking away from it thinking "I didn't get anything out of that and now my eyes are strained". I felt like I wasn't using the app correctly, or that I had to give the "algorithm" enough time to learn. I was actively testing it to see what the phenomenon was all about so I as trying to get the same results that other people were talking about. That's why I kept coming back to it.
And then I uninstalled it once I realized that what people were talking about didn't seem to exist, or at least not in the way I imagined.
If they spent 30 min a day to experiment it but was able to stop cold turkey, I wouldn't call it "addictive" like crack at all. You don't "experiment with crack everyday for a month".
I have the same view as them, to be honest. The algorithm isn't really special at all, but the app is where young people live, so there is a shit ton of content.
The point of the algorithm itself however isn't to offer relevant content, it's to offer an infinite amount, with a pittance of actual relevant stuff. You can call this "a success" for TikTok, but the algorithm itself doesn't have any quality at all, IMO, it's hot garbage.
People keep coming because they want to find that 1% content that is gold, but the algorithm doesn't give that. It's as good as a toin coss.
> if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter
What would you say your hobbies are?
There are obviously some who wouldn't find much of value in TikTok because the nature of the content (3 minute videos) cannot deliver in-depth technical material about a complex topic, for example. The medium is clearly very different from those that you found addictive, so blaming the algorithm for not delivering good content might be a case of blaming apples for not being oranges.
I've had two separate experiences with TikTok - in the first one I ended up as you describe, seeing mostly content that I found boring or useless. The second time I made a mental note to not interact in any way with content that seemed in the same category - I would move on to another video as fast as I could. That helped a lot, and now I enjoy at least every other video I see. But then again, I don't use TikTok for hobbies, it's mostly for generic interesting stuff.
I think some hobbies work really well for the format.
At one point in my life, I was interested in chicken breeding. I could see that being really easy to capture in TikTok format. I'm also a long distance runner - so that's a pretty popular hobby, but I don't know that I'd ever watch a video about it.
But I'm primarily interested in early Christian history and treasure hunting/specific antiquities. I'm interested in virtual worlds like Ultima Online.
There are some accounts that deal with those topics, but I'd mostly get general history videos and gem/mineral hunting videos, which I'm not really interested in - at all.
Like you said, I would occassionally see a video that was outside of my hobbies that I found interesting.
But maybe TikTok is telling me something else: maybe I'm just a very dry boring person these days.
That's true, but I wasn't really addicted. It felt like I was forcing myself to use the app, which I was. I was trying to see what people were talking about (like Karpathy in this post). I wanted to test the app. I uninstalled it and never thought about it again.
On the otherhand, it would be extremely difficult for me to quit reading Hackernews. I load it up multiple times a day, even if there are no posts worth reading. I do feel drawn to Hackernews/message boards/Reddit, even if I don't get enjoyment from reading them all the time. Even on vacations, I still actively read HN and I'm unable to stop myself sometimes.
Maybe it's me but tiktok content is boring to me. Videos too short to care. Finding videos by your keyword is difficult. The camera angles are too zoomed and the thin width and increased height creates ugly looking videos. The videos themselves are people picking an action or movement and isolating it for effect.
I wonder how many others haven't been bite by the tiktok bug.
Anyone who would rather watch 1 good 2 hour video rather than 500 random 10 sec videos isn't going to like TikTok. It's the dumbest shit I've ever seen. Half the time I have no idea what the fuck I'm even looking at. Maybe I'm old, but I think maybe the kids are stupid too. Both can be true.
Like the sibling comment, I'm in my early 20s. So pretty close to the target audience age. My friend tried hard to get me to create an account on TikTok because he was super into it, and making videos, and wanted me to participate and do them with him. I heeded him, and gave it a shot. Overall, it felt like a chore to try and remember to open it up and scroll through tons of short clips.
I like to learn from long-form content that can go into detail on a topic. That's much more appealing. Then again, I'm on Hacker News, and I think the majority of the people here are the kind of people that prefer long-form content over short-form, otherwise we'd be scrolling through TikTok rather than reading articles and typing multi-paragraph comments.
What I was originally trying to say though is: I don't know that it's old age. I'm young and I don't find it enjoyable.
Comparing things like vine or TikTok or Instagram reels to a 1 or 2-hour long video makes no sense at all. Those are wildly different things and both have their time and place.
I haven’t used TikTok but I do use Instagram reels and the feed is what you make of it. I follow a lot of musicians so I get interesting snippets of songs or things people are working on, or theory/exercise tips etc.
I installed TikTok after seeing the above tweet but all I got was boobs and ass. I don't know if I'm supposed to be actively liking and disliking content but it is a hard pass for me.
That’s the default feed because it’s basically lowest common denominator stuff. Once you watch, like, follow a couple of creators it changes drastically. My FYP went from 80% boobs and ass to 5% in a couple of sessions.
Readit News
Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.
My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.
I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.
Deleted Comment
So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes?
I'm going to go ahead and guess "pro-unionization rabbit holes." If I'm wrong then the evidence will be me following the link someone gives me of a 2-hour TikTok unionization rabbit hole. I can't lose, internet!
edit: clarification
I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.
I kind of get the feeling that we are passing or have passed some threshold where many, possibly most people can no longer identify Actual Authenticity due to social media overexposure, and I for one find this distressing.
Wow I never thought of this applied to algorithms and AI. Very profound to think about in this context, of users selecting the best videos with their clicks and evolving the naturally selected videos to out compete the other videos, in the same vein as survival of the fittest.
On to the next 'hit' then.
The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible.
There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™.
The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs.
Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.
But u can’t take advantage of those opportunities unless u become an user first and study what works
Except meanwhile you can't make normal contact with people because everybody is looking at their phone.
This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram.
Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live.
Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.
Dead Comment
Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees.
I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investig...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-ti...
I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it.
Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever.
What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral?
Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?
There's a website as well as the app.
You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.
Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?
I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds."
Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to make a point, but I don't find the argument compelling that social media really can add value to our lives as long as we ignore the most visible and popular content within it.
Sure some what you see is supported by "algorithms"; but what you sense ("playful, authentic, and raw" ) is the result of a deliberate editorial policy done by a group of actual humans.
Dead Comment
Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.
It rejects Instagram’s focus on aesthetics and instead appeals to playfulness and authenticity.
It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.
IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics.
At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues.
At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there.
It'll happen to TikTok as well.
Deleted Comment
Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky?
Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many diamonds on there! I can easily laugh my ass off every night, because the format is just perfect for a bunch of quick visual gags.
The duet feature and the re-use song feature enable so much absolute hilarity, because of the repetition humour.
Which is why I watched a TikTok of someone putting a 3D-printed magic wand on top of a sea urchin, set to the sound of someone saying "Avadakadavra" in a really high-pitched voice, and I just fucking lost it. It's brilliant! Brilliant!
15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested.
I just removed it again for that very reason.
Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.
"I'm having fun on <popular social media>!"
*downvote*
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Wait for them to start doing TV shows with some non-Chinese focus.
The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon.
I'd love if they proved me wrong.
I'm not embodying any fake persona, just trying to find what I would find interesting. I just don't get addicting content. I even try searching so that TikTok would get explicit keywords from me.
I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).
I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally. I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers: I check out mainstream videos on YouTube like MKBHD and even subscribe to his podcast (This is to show I find content for "mainstream consumers" interesting, though I work in tech and know more about tech things than MKBHD's target audience).
Can someone help? Why is the whole world praising TikTok while I am failing repeatedly?
I think we have the same "problem": "content" doesn't engage us, "discussion" does. It's not so much about the exact topic as much as the ability to see other perspectives. All these modern social media platforms are awful for discussion and actively downplay it, despite all the popular ones having some form of commenting features. The closest modern analog would be discord, but discussion is almost as ephemeral as Snapchat once you get even a tiny bit active. small group servers kind of capture the feel, but still isn't meant for longform replies like this one,
Feel free to mention if I missed the mark by a country mile. But I've been thinking about this for a while on why I can browse reddit for hours but can't stand instagram for more than a few minutes (aside from my resistance to give Facebook another account to mine data from). reddit has more discussion than I could ever read (perhaps even too much). Youtube comments are pretty low quality (in both formatting and content) but does the bare minimum needed to post stuff longer than a tweet.
(That said, I've been getting way more into silly cat videos than I ever wanted to, so who knows?)
And it's not an attention span thing — I read books. It's about the density of information and the speed with which I can traverse it. I can read as fast as I think, but even 2x speed videos don't get there. So without an additional activity to fill my whole attention space (is there a term for this? ADHD people might have one?) I get bored.
Thanks for helping me see this!
I thought you might be referring to “other people thoughts” outside your bubble? Which could hint to why you don’t like Instagram (they try to keep you in one thought bubble) compared to HN/Reddit.
PS: I’m actually interested in both, content and discussion. Which is bad because you get addicted to all kind of platforms!
- A girl coder who showed people how she operated her light airplane, flying between different little Midwest cities where she lived.
- A free diver (living in Hawaii?) who could stay underwater for several minutes at a time (and film fun chill videos while at it).
- Good relationship advice from progressive-thinking folks who weren't out to make a political point, or shame one party or another.
- Nifty yoga tricks from someone in SoCal.
- Longboarding cosplayers from Asia (yes, they would dress up... and longboard...).
It was also the first social media platform where I saw plenty of positive representation of folks from different backgrounds – including the country my parents came from. Far, far cry from what I read in the US media, by contrast. Compared to the awful divisive stuff I saw on FB, I thought to myself, it's really odd that the US tried to shut this down. Call it addictive, but it didn't leave me feeling soul-damaged.
> I subscribe to a bunch of... RSS feeds
Does not compute
> I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally
Liking the "technology industry generally" is closest to mainstream interests, but even then, people like that their new phone is thinner or their new Xbox has better graphics. Regular consumers aren't too worried about ARM vs Intel, MS dropping support for old PCs, or any use of blockchains beyond asset speculation.
Thinking like that kills immersion for me. For example, I was playing Mass Effect 2 on my Framework (with Wine) yesterday and caught myself thinking about whether any significant internal state would change from the conversation Shepard was having. I shut down that line of thought and dove back into the story.
It's like being a atheist, raised in an atheist house, in a country full of atheists and then going to church for the first time.
If you're not enjoying it, despite using the product as intended, then I'd just guess you and it aren't a good fit. That doesn't seem to be any huge mystery - all products and services have fans and people who aren't interested.
https://dandradebehaviorism.weebly.com/bf-skinner.html
The bot is @rss2tg_bot, if you don't want channels you can just begin a private chat with it and send a rss url. Or add it to a group and then it sends new posts to the group.
Dead Comment
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...
> In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead. In 2017, a team led by Oliver Habryka took over the administration and development of the site, relaunching it on an entirely new codebase later that year.
> The new project, dubbed LessWrong 2.0, was the first time LessWrong had a full-time dedicated development team behind it instead of only volunteer hours. Site activity recovered from the 2015-2016 decline and has remained at steady levels since the launch.
> The team behind LessWrong 2.0 has ambitions not limited to maintaining the original LessWrong community blog and forum. The LessWrong 2.0 team conceives of itself more broadly as an organization attempting to build community, culture, and technology which will drive intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems.
I'd be curious about their funding
As in: before TikTok, there was lots of TikTop-Temptation to be sold. Demand didn't change, supply did.
I don't know. Maybe I'm not the right personality for this stuff but I found it annoying and taxing.
Open it up and you get these obnoxious videos and then have to press a button to make them go away. The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic. Lots of people love it so maybe I'm just too old.
Perhaps they've "cracked some psychological secret" but I believe it's more likely they've replicated whatever makes pop music and television work for a lot of people. I have the same kind of distaste for those I have for tiktok.
But good for them. Entertainment is important antidote to stress. Glad people like it
My wife loved it to death, and I just found it incredibly annoying and overbearing even just hearing my wife play with it.
- A dude from Bermuda making food from the early 1900s: @bdylanhollis
- A delivery guy who meets new dogs on his routes and befriends them: @christhedogguy
- A woman who scratches her ass... donkey: @fortheloveofass
- A dude who owns a septic company telling about his day: @wellandsepticlife
- Random animal facts: @mndiaye_97
- Typesetting and printing: @sachistorymuseum
You see the generic dancing crap and memes at first, but the system will learn pretty quickly.
I argue that's most modern "social" media, not necessarily a unique point of tiktok. They want the creator to be the focus, not the community surrounding them. Comments are encouraged to keep short enough to keep engagement but not take that attention away, so you'll inevitably just get some shallow encouragement as "top comments".
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not trying to be what HN is.
You've managed to find the word I've been looking for to describe why I don't like TikTok. It feels taxing. It makes my head spin and after a couple minutes I feel exhausted. Maybe my brain's just too slow and sensitive.
This seems to be a good explanation. TV commercials have figured out some of these tricks, like using a louder volume than the TV show itself, or using a song that's a cover of a more famous, older song.
I find it irritating, but it probably works because older viewers recognize the song and pay attention, while younger viewers mentally attach the cover version to the product being sold.
This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk about it compared to other addictive social media (e.g., saying that users are "obsessed with" $FACEBOOK_PROPERTY instead of describing them as digital addicts.)
Twitter on the other hand seems to promote monoculture, and tends to push you towards what everyone else likes. It essentially pushes whatever is popular. Some of the most interesting content and users on Twitter are shadow banned, either intentionally or through poor auto moderation.
TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like, and given it’s Chinese ownership, has no political skin in the game. So you tend to see much more diverse views.
Yes, it absolutely does. Nonviolent social activism, LGBTQ content, and anything judged to be "subversive" is downranked/shadowbanned.
I don’t use it as entertainment, I never tweet anything myself, I don’t read the replies to tweets and I have retweets turned off for almost all of the people I follow. If someone strays into tweeting about politics, culture wars, woke/antiwokeness then I cull them from my follow list.
I suspect that is because TikTok has different goals compared to other social media companies. Their aim (right now) is to serve you better and/or more relevant content. Whereas other social media companies’ goals are to serve you ads and what do they know about you will not be as apparent to you. I would argue Facebook probably knows even more about you, more than just preferences, but social connections etc from its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
TikTok doesn't seem to care about what you "say" you like." They watch your behavior to see what you actually like.
So you can "want" to be shown math videos and like tons of math videos and follow dozens of professors. But if TikTok observes that you are more likely to watch a professional wrestling video to the end, then that is what you'll be shown.
What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.
This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.
TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.
They know that it's important for you to leave so now is the time to show the video that they know you will find most irresistible. So when you try to leave they give you the "ultimate" video which you have been conditioned to expect to be "perfect".
In order to leave, you must fight this conditioning and reaffirm your desire to leave within a tiny span of time (feels like less than a second). If you miss the window and try to exit again, TikTok tries to hack your brain again by changing the video for the next video it thinks you'll stay for, and so on...
It seems from the comments that most people think the only way to interact with tiktok is the fyp (main feed) but if you jump over to any hashtag you get a curated list of content on that topic. Some are much better than others of course. Many are replete with interesting content and discussion.
I think most commenting here would be surprised by the wide variety of topics to be found.
If you want to watch math content you go to #mathtok (or whatever) and that's what you see. The app doesn't try to stop you.
As a hint, when you see a video you particularly like, try out all hashtags on it. Using hashtags is how you find, join, and interact with communities on tiktok.
I started doubtinng that around... 2017 or so. by 2020 is was a complete wrap and I'm 99% convinced that humans truly do need to be told that companies aren't providing a free app for their amusement, and that companies don't care about them.
On top of that, I don't see it productive to cricitize someone for charged language and then say "get a grip". That seems to betray you message. Debate the content, not the user.
>TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.
It widely depends. A lot of apps do override the back button behavior too, (especially ones that have lots of state, to avoid you exiting the app when you've filled 9 fields or are deep in a scroll) at the very least, ask if you want to exit. TikTok doesn't display a message, but a second back press closes it anyways.
>What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.
Hilarious. Youtube has been convinced for the past few months that I really want to watch Nurburgring laps because I watched a single F1 reel, and occasionally suggests Jordan Peterson throughout whenever there's even just a single, accidental click on an edgy video. Netflix recommends its own dogshit. Absolutely no engine has good recommendations. At the very least, TikTok is heavily influenced by both their guesses, and by what I do. When I tell tiktok to fuck off with the videos about X, I truly will not get X videos. So, between a shit engine that believes it's better than me at knowing what to watch, and Tiktok's that at least listens when I tell it it's wrong, I4ll take the one I can actually influence.
I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only covered in the most broad sense) didn't really fix that. I'm sure it works better if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter. I think there are some really funny creators and that's where it shines the best - comedy. Everything else is treated in a cursory manner that never really delivers.
The vast majority of videos were a complete waste of time and I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it. It took at least a couple months to find interesting creators, but they are so few and far between that it wasn't worth it.
For me, Livejournal was addictive, forums were addictive, Twitter used to be addictive. Especially when you stumbled on niche communities. I've never tried Instagram, so I'm not sure about that.
But I really just kept using it because I wanted to see what people were talking about - which was not about how successful it was, but about how good or addictive it was. I never felt addicted - I felt like I was forcing myself to open the app.
I just kept walking away from it thinking "I didn't get anything out of that and now my eyes are strained". I felt like I wasn't using the app correctly, or that I had to give the "algorithm" enough time to learn. I was actively testing it to see what the phenomenon was all about so I as trying to get the same results that other people were talking about. That's why I kept coming back to it.
And then I uninstalled it once I realized that what people were talking about didn't seem to exist, or at least not in the way I imagined.
I have the same view as them, to be honest. The algorithm isn't really special at all, but the app is where young people live, so there is a shit ton of content.
The point of the algorithm itself however isn't to offer relevant content, it's to offer an infinite amount, with a pittance of actual relevant stuff. You can call this "a success" for TikTok, but the algorithm itself doesn't have any quality at all, IMO, it's hot garbage.
People keep coming because they want to find that 1% content that is gold, but the algorithm doesn't give that. It's as good as a toin coss.
What would you say your hobbies are?
There are obviously some who wouldn't find much of value in TikTok because the nature of the content (3 minute videos) cannot deliver in-depth technical material about a complex topic, for example. The medium is clearly very different from those that you found addictive, so blaming the algorithm for not delivering good content might be a case of blaming apples for not being oranges.
I've had two separate experiences with TikTok - in the first one I ended up as you describe, seeing mostly content that I found boring or useless. The second time I made a mental note to not interact in any way with content that seemed in the same category - I would move on to another video as fast as I could. That helped a lot, and now I enjoy at least every other video I see. But then again, I don't use TikTok for hobbies, it's mostly for generic interesting stuff.
At one point in my life, I was interested in chicken breeding. I could see that being really easy to capture in TikTok format. I'm also a long distance runner - so that's a pretty popular hobby, but I don't know that I'd ever watch a video about it.
But I'm primarily interested in early Christian history and treasure hunting/specific antiquities. I'm interested in virtual worlds like Ultima Online.
There are some accounts that deal with those topics, but I'd mostly get general history videos and gem/mineral hunting videos, which I'm not really interested in - at all.
Like you said, I would occassionally see a video that was outside of my hobbies that I found interesting.
But maybe TikTok is telling me something else: maybe I'm just a very dry boring person these days.
But you did just that.
On the otherhand, it would be extremely difficult for me to quit reading Hackernews. I load it up multiple times a day, even if there are no posts worth reading. I do feel drawn to Hackernews/message boards/Reddit, even if I don't get enjoyment from reading them all the time. Even on vacations, I still actively read HN and I'm unable to stop myself sometimes.
I wonder how many others haven't been bite by the tiktok bug.
I like to learn from long-form content that can go into detail on a topic. That's much more appealing. Then again, I'm on Hacker News, and I think the majority of the people here are the kind of people that prefer long-form content over short-form, otherwise we'd be scrolling through TikTok rather than reading articles and typing multi-paragraph comments.
What I was originally trying to say though is: I don't know that it's old age. I'm young and I don't find it enjoyable.
I haven’t used TikTok but I do use Instagram reels and the feed is what you make of it. I follow a lot of musicians so I get interesting snippets of songs or things people are working on, or theory/exercise tips etc.
But to someone who doesn't like those parts of social interactions the whole thing is just boring or even revolting.