The very aggressive bits are linked to articles supposedly backing their point with more substance, but those are same level think pieces who reference other think pieces who are based on misconceptions, and we never hit any solid ground.
For instance:
> The videos are in autoplay and shown in an endless scroll. These are features known for triggering addictive behavior and there were legislative plans in the United States to ban them.
Following “triggering addictive behavior” goes to thenextweb.com’s rant on autoplay.
which posits autoplay is “hijacking your thought process”, with a link to a medium post
Which on autoplay, explains that “Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore”, linking that analysis on the age old debunked Brian Wansink‘s bowl of cereal experiment.
So many other of these very assertive declarations have 3 to 5 levels of redirection to finally hit some disappointing justification. The general message being vaguely consensual, it’s hard to see what this piece is actually bringing to the table.
Autoplay and endless scroll are also features in Google shorts and Reels, so if that is the case you are making, then you need to go after them as well
Up until now I feel we didn’t reach anything near that because in the generic case autoplay can be disabled (might be by default ?) in browsers, as it’s an overall obnoxious feature.
The case left are specific apps, and for Netflix or other traditional video streaming platforms, proving it’s against the user’s interests would be super tough (even proving it has addictive effects wouldn’t be enough, as the user could be willingly requesting these addictive effects)
Social media could be a separate case, as culturally we put it in a different bucket, but then limitations would probably only apply to specific demographics (basically kids younger than 13 or 18 ?) and clear those older on liberty of choice grounds.
I think the viewer would need to be directly losing money or being in physical harm to see any kind of regulation on these features.
Forced breaks from the intermittent reinforcement loop of online casinos has been used with some success in reducing addictive behavior. This seems analogous to having breaks in auto play.
I think all the arguments "For" TikTok are smoke and mirrors since it boils down to it has a ton of information on its user, TikTok is Mega Big Chinese corp now, and CCP has full control over any corp in China, and have shown they will use that power (see Jack Ma) to do whatever they like. TikTok is the biggest honeypot and information dragnet by a foreign nation in our (USA) history by a huge margin. That's the only "against" that I need to say we need to shut down TikTok in America. There are currently a ton of other options people can move to.
I’m not afraid of the CCP. I will possibly never go to China. I’d shit my pants if the NSA, CIA, or DIA were interested in me and gathering all data on me.
I can’t imagine China or CCP being a danger to 95%+ of westerners. While the vast majority should be weary to some degree of their own security and defense apparatuses having too much data on them.
>TikTok is the biggest honeypot and information dragnet by a foreign nation in our (USA) history by a huge margin. That's the only "against" that I need to say we need to shut down TikTok in America.
As you can imagine, people in other countries are observing this development with great interest.
Ok I’m not saying the OP is wrong, but couldn’t almost all of these arguments be made for Facebook / Instagram / Snapchat / etc as well? In general, social media has all these problems with addiction, platforms actively try to exploit that, and harvest data to monetise upon their users.
From the article:
“With these astounding numbers, TikTok must have something special, right?
“Well it has. It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy.”
Nothing of this list makes TikTok special, the only thing that makes it special is that it’s Chinese, and therefor subjected to more scrutiny (not claiming whether that’s justified or not, that’s another discussion in itself).
I remember the craze about World of Warcraft back in the day that it was incredibly addictive, like no other video game. Where they supposedly tested people's dopamine response to playing the game. Marriages ended over the game and there were countless news articles and segments on how addictive the game is.
As I said in another post, saying that a particular thing drives pleasure or is designed to drive pleasure is obvious. Obviously you would design something so that it is pleasurable, otherwise people wouldn't use it. The difference here is the extent to how addictive it is and without some sort of measurement, it's hard to know if TikTok is any more dangerous than anything else that drives compulsive pleasure.
In short, no. TikTok is the first to have a public feed by default, not based on friends, plus the vertical swiping that forces you to see all the content it suggests. Its design and usage patterns are significantly different from all the others you mentioned.
That is not relevant to the general point. The article punchline is
> It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy.
Facebook / Instagram used manipulative user experience design, even if it didn't manifest as a vertical swipe or public feed. While the details may be different, the overall problem was just as true back then as it is now
I see you're ensuring we understand Facebook and Instagram also optimize for engagement, I think the novelty here, for me at least, was the differences from Facebook and Instagram are quite significant.
And that significant difference is that TikTok is a Chinese company, not an American one. When you let go of the pretense, this is what all these articles and threads are all about.
> And that significant difference is that TikTok is a Chinese company, not an American one
Can't repeat this enough. The Americans in here might see that foreigness and national dick-measuring contest as enough justification for a ban. All while either willingly ignoring or relishing in the fact that they do the same thing in other countries. "But we're your allies!" my arse, I trust your government as much as I trust China's, which is to say I don't, at all.
I can't accurately express with words the anger I derive from the hypocrisy of the SV-types in here arguing for a ban on privacy grounds. And to be clear, I'm not trying to defend TikTok here, they do deserve to be banned from every country on Earth. I just wish American companies would get the same treatment, and die as they all deserve.
This tirade has just the right amount of indignation and outrage.
For someone not from the US I believe China collecting my data is even better because the US might share it with my government. I don't believe in safety trough government surveillance. Imagine the UK that hands out penalties for admittedly offensive posts on social media. Doesn't happen if you post it on a Chinese site. Not yet at least. Best form of legal certainty for average peasants.
In the same regard the surveillance by US tech companies is still not as impactful to me than it is for the average American.
I’m sorry but I just can’t believe that you’re being downvoted so much. It’s the exact same point I was trying to make, is it not obvious - or at least a valid argument of discussion - that the significant difference between TikTok and other social media companies is that they’re Chinese?
Nobody is defending China here I think, but the elephant in the room is that TikTok isn’t that much different from other social media platforms in terms of addictive behaviour, data harvesting, etc. The fact that this is done by a Chinese company, however, is what makes it significantly different.
If anything, the content on TikTok itself is far more inoccuous than what has been already allowed to run amok on other social media platforms. Can anybody honestly argue that the silly dance numbers and "funny" vines on TikTok are more dangerous than the toxic political propaganda on FB, Whatsapp and Youtube?
>I’m sorry but I just can’t believe that you’re being downvoted so much.
I can believe it just fine. It is very predictable behavior.
true patriots use homespun social networks. It might be itchy, but its the price of independence..
Also, the fact that its a chinese company, which in the long run all are owned by the state, could be taken as proof that the state makes a better entrepeneur then private companies.
Which rubs some libertarians here very wrong.. if only we had free market competition, a challenger might emerge then, but we killed it with privatized pension funds taking over whole sectors.
The beds we made, they are horrible to lie in.. oh, what tragedy, anyway...
The algorithmic-only feed is quite a significant difference, to wit, Zuck noted in the last FB all hands that they were ramping this up to compete with TikTok, and were hoping to get Facebook/Instagram to merely ~30% algorithmic content (if memory serves). Use of algorithmic content exacerbates e.g. the intermittent rewards ""features"".
I share your frustration with anyone who would use it as an excuse for xenophobia. I'm not sure why there's this dark cloud over the idea employees in China might be able to access videos that are public, sounds silly.
As someone who has seen close family members with advanced college degrees turn into zombies consuming toxic right-wing propaganda on Whatsapp, Facebook and Youtube non-stop and my country's (India) whole political environment become incredibly toxic and polarized as a result, I have very little sympathy for the argument that TikTok with its little dance skits and stupid humor is exceptionally worse.
YouTube and Facebook push users towards significantly more content that just strives to get a reaction out of people and they do so persistently. Often that content is filled with blatant lies which causes the engagement (to debunk/argue) in the first place. The cycle repeats, the user reacted and then it optimises to get even more such engagement, it shows even more such toxic content. There's really no functional dislike button, you'll keep on seeing shit that aims on riling you up.
That's not to say TikTok won't amplify what you engage with, it absolutely does but it's good at not showing content that makes you feel like shit. Obviously it does test showing new and different content, but it won't show people Fox News willy-nilly. Content can't be too far out of someone's interests. It also won't start an autoplay rabbit hole of conspiracy videos like YouTube does, you'll get your usual feed after the tests, there are plenty of chances to stay on "their side" of TikTok.
I too have very little sympathy vilifying one platform that optimises for content you like and then defending others that optimise for content you engage with. The former really letting people stay away from right-wing propaganda, the latter actively pushing everyone towards it.
> Often that content is filled with blatant lies which causes the engagement (to debunk/argue) in the first place. The cycle repeats, the user reacted and then it optimises to get even more such engagement, it shows even more such toxic content. There's really no functional dislike button, you'll keep on seeing shit that aims on riling you up.
While I cant't deny that that maybe something that could be happening, in my own experience, the more pernicious problem is the creation of filter bubbles where people only see and hear view points of those they already agree with and slowly get pushed into more and more extreme versions of their existing beliefs.
Yes, filter bubbles absolutely have their own downsides. But I don't think platforms (Facebook, YouTube) should attempt to break them with Fox News or previously Infowars. I find that much worse really.
That's one of the ways anti-trust works, yes. If you're just a business doing a thing, no problem. If you get so good you become a de facto monopoly in some area, and start to exploit that dominant position in whatever way, it's time for regulations or a forceful breaking up to constraint you.
No because by this rule TikTok is less problematic, it's just entertainment, it doesn't take the crown from FB/Twitter/YT for doing the most damage to society. Same for surveillance, the surface area is just too small compared to others.
I did a little experiment a while ago,
I've watched only videos of girls using their body to promote their videos. I went into their accounts and watched and liked everything where body parts were a huge deal in the video.
It took me an hour to have my for you page filled with girls showing off.
I let the algorithm go like this for a week and then i changed tactics.
Every video starting with a woman, i would swipe away. I didn't even knew what the video was about.
I combined it with looking up videos about food, plants and life hacks.
After an hour the girls were long gone. For a whole month the algorithm kept showing me only what i was after. Once in every 10 to 15 videos there was an ad or something super viral. Thats it.
You control the algorithm. It shows you what you want to watch not the other way around.
I also took a tcpdump while the app is closed. Oh boy.
Wow this is the best endorsement for the app. I have been afraid to use Tiktok because I probably won’t like much and I’d get tired of swiping quickly after some time. For the algo to adapt that quickly and remain that way is great. YouTube and IG are dumpster fires in terms of their engagement algo for me.
>TikTok wants you hooked since you log in. The first page after you open the app is the “For You” page, where short videos carefully selected to grab your attention will be displayed. The videos are shown in full portrait mode, occupying almost all the device’s interface.
Am I supposed to think this is an unreasonable way for a video app to present its content?
TikTok isn’t great, but fortunately most of us have the freedom to simply not use it.
The authors conclusion around potential regulation is, though well intentioned, misguided.
Hopefully through more posts like theirs we can have better conversations around addictive technology and teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use.
Since this is a tech forum - some interesting technological solutions to this could be:
1. Headless app use with updates. Some affordance that you can setup that will open the app, take some actions and give you back the summary. In the case of TikTok you could use this to build your own notification. Maybe only go on if this hypothetical tech tells you something is really, really popular.
2. Reset mode. The OS trains a model on your gestures and you can tell it to tell you if you’ve been making a “brainless action” too many times for too long. In the case of TikTok this would be mindlessly swiping up.
For me as an american, i'm just uncomfortable with the most popular app among children being under the control of an adversary. When I hear about the Chinese version of tiktok censoring heavily and promoting positive content about community values and STEM while our version promotes twerking and convinces teens they have mental disorders it makes me want it banned. I get that's antithetical to western values of freedom but it seems like a real threat to me.
>When I hear about the Chinese version of tiktok censoring heavily and promoting positive content about community values and STEM while our version promotes twerking and convinces teens they have mental disorders it makes me want it banned
If you're insinuating that this is some nefarious and conscious act of manipulation you haven't been paying attention to American culture in the five decades before tiktok came around. You didn't need the Chinese to send yourselves on a downward celebrity culture spiral with neglect for the sciences, civility and tradition lol.
it's actually more straight foward. China censors to align social media with what they consider socially desirable goals. in America they just don't really censor, what you get is just raw unfettered consumption, that's simply what that looks like.
The US has done and still does plenty of censoring. The land of Playboy and Hustler goes looney every time there's a story about sex or nudity, especially when teenagers are involved. Around the same time period that American culture dominated the world, the FCC had a heavy hand in broadcast content with the implicit intention of aligning said content to socially desirable goals. That's only changed slightly over the past decade and, coincidentally, just as streaming was taking off.
I agree with you that the US doesn't need China's help to destroy itself. For that matter, it doesn't need anyone's help. However, "unfettered consumption" has nothing to do with it. Japan, Korea, and, until recently, Hong Kong are the posterchildren for unfettered consumption and yet the former two still have a stable societies the respects tradition and civility in debilitating excess. All three of these societies invest in education to a point of creating suicide-inducing hyper-competitiveness in their students.
Ultimately, one's values belong to oneself. The best thing about the US is that one is allowed to choose his values and is not obligated to follow the herd. Respect is a conscious decision and neither an edict handed down from high society nor a dictate delivered from the grave.
I think I phrased it poorly. My problem isn't unfettered access to the western cultural id. The problem is an adversary country manipulating what content westerners see to align with their goals.
There are real concerns about Tiktok and its influence, but that focus on an adversary and pushing a bi-polar narrative feels a lot more unhealthy.
Does Facebook/IG get a pass because they're domestic to you ? Are you also outraged when they set global limitations on issues that should only impact the US ?
To me looking at it as a "them vs us" matter just brings in too much tribalism that poisons the discussion.
Both can be true, and it isn't such a stretch what GP is saying. I don't know much about tiktok, but I hear people saying that across the globe information wars are being waged. How would Sun Tzu operate social media?
this comment assumes we always take actions that optimize our life long-term and that our cognition stays invariant as we consume content, TikTok is hacking our cognition my dude. It's a disgusting system.
"Adversary" is such a scare word here. Did Facebook's boosting of alt-right content not adversely affect American culture? Why are American companies trusted to do the right thing but foreign companies not? Why should the government be choosing which platforms are available? People have rejected Facebook because it's not fun or interesting to use, not because it had some moral high ground of being run with American ethical purity.
China pretty notoriously controls their companies and the content they put out. I think it's wrong to assume they're all of the sudden laissez-faire with Tiktok content.
I'm as anti-regulation as anyone here, but the government should protect its citizenry from harms that are not always obvious or easy to resist. That's why we regulate highly addictive and harmful substances.
> teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use.
You're talking about the "young an impressionable", the most vulnerable members of our society. You can't just "teach" them how to moderate: they wouldn't listen nor agree with your reasoning.
I can understand a principled position against all regulation (even though the Chinese government is very happy to regulate away any American companies trying to compete in the Chinese market) but let's not pretend we can solve this with zero regulation and just some well-phrased web pages explaining why Tik Tok is bad, mmmkay?
> You're talking about the "young an impressionable", the most vulnerable members of our society. You can't just "teach" them how to moderate: they wouldn't listen nor agree with your reasoning.
The "young" won't stay young forever. They have to learn how to moderate themselves at some point. Impressionability isn't directly related to age, but to lack of experience. An 21 year-old can be just as hooked on Tik-Tok as a 13 year-old.
There are definitively some interesting points in the article, but it seems to miss the point and subjectively focusing on the everything that is bad. Fearmongering is something we need to watch out.
The fact that a user use ~75 minutes on the app sounds bad, but in my reality it isn't. kids were watching equally much time on MTV in the 90s if not more. A couple of years back you could say the same things about Facebook. Kids will always spend time on something. It is becomes dangerous when someone claims that it is bad on behalf of someone else.
To me, tiktok is a creative platform and as with every thing, you can get addicted. Sure, they data mine my usage in order to retain me as a user - that is what every business is trying to do. I marvel at the knowledge and insight my kids are able to produce on the new technology that is being made available to them.
It is our responsibility as parents to make sure that we actively engage in the world our kids are spending their time in order to teach the right and wrong, good and bad etc so that they can be critical thinkers that can navigate the world and the cyber-world in a safe and secure way.
Also of course it is not perfect, and there are some issues that needs to be figured out. Maybe Tiktok will be able to sort this out themselves, otherwise they will - as every other piece of technology - be replaced by the next big thing.
Like many TikTok reviewers, she's unknowingly broadcasting to the world her own tastes and preferences in describing "what is on TikTok". TikTok is like the Harry Potter mirror, it shows you exactly what you are looking for.
This part is totally wrong, "TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational". I have seen endless informative and educational videos, thousands of them. She says TikTok videos have to be shocking, irreverent, socially awkward, scary --- she says this because she stopped and watched those videos. That's how it works. Like I describe here[1] there is plenty of good content on TikTok, but you do have to diligently and decisively skip of the bad content to see it. It's baffling that someone doing a PhD in "privacy & data protection" spent 30 days using TikTok without figuring that out.
That said, TikTok does contain an infinite amount of junk content, and it's super easy to go down that rabbit hole and never come out. Although... the internet as a whole is the same way: mostly junk, some good stuff you have to work to find.
The suggestion algorithm is surprisingly fine-grained and stable, that seems to keep people addicted. That's both a positive and a negative, it's also not that easy to end up on the "wrong side of TikTok", with the wrong crowd you don't engage with. Unlike with YouTube and Facebook, I haven't seen close relatives end up in the alt-right/bullshit pipeline. No inane "Elsagate" videos or Fox News.
Of these, most require phone number and/or real identity. TikTok doesn't. I can watch videos without logging in. It doesn't even ban me for using a VPN. So I reckon it's better for privacy.
TikTok is manipulative, addictive and I do wonder about privacy, but there are a number of factual errors in this post which make me question what axe the writer has to grind.
There are plenty of videos over a minute long. Yes, many are quite short, and creators aren’t allowed to post longer ones until they’ve have enough followers. However, recently TikTok upped the max time to 10 minutes.
Short videos don’t have a timeline, but longer ones do, so saying “There is no signalization of progress or duration of the experience” is wrong.
“the user cannot scroll up fast and jump a few videos” While you can’t literally avoid a fraction of a second of a video playing if you’re trying to skip, you can skip ahead a few videos pretty quickly. There’s also modes where you look at all of a creators video, or search for something and see a bunch. In those cases you can scroll past many smaller videos at once.
I agree with the author. It is voluntary to use services like TikTok but we should all try try to expose the privacy issues. They should be taken seriuolsy and I believe we need to regulate how TikTok and similar services can harvest and use data. As the author points out this is impossible with TikTok, since it is being run from a dictorial authoritarian regime with no scruples. Everything that is being run from China, Russia or North Korea should worry us, in my opinion. Dismissing problems related to Chinese ownership and surveillance of people is naive.
Regarding TikTok as a channel for meaningful content, this is an extraction from an article I posted on LinkedIn this week on the same topic:
"The constant stream of clickbait headlines, fast pace video clips, simplified texts and meaningless stories are ... acting as a thick fog that blurs our vision and hides all meaningful information.
Social media is good at spreading content, but usually not very meaningful content. Platforms like TikTok are just our time’s linear entertainment TV channels, hyper charged to entertain us a few seconds at a time. Social graph based platforms like Facebook and Twitter are much the same, even though they claim to give us content that fits the interests and activities of the social group we belong to. But regardless of the effect the algorithms the different social media platforms have, they all focus on an attention span of seconds. What they call engagement is often nothing more than a continuous chain of distractions. "
I really like the proposals at https://attentionsettings.com/ for highlighting and creating agency around interacting with manipulative apps.
Last week I installed tiktok for the first time. I lasted one day before deleting my account - the tiktok experience was like being in an interrogation room, or in a social engineering playground. It was very hard to find good content, and I felt I was being coerced into regressing my behaviour to the mean.
Yes but no. It's best to give the knobs for the people to control the algorithm
and it's shown for them. Also make the algorithm transparent to the user
Meh, TikTok is fine. If 83% of users are making posts of their own, that very much contradicts the notion that every user is a passive slack-jawed zombie. If TikTok is more interactive than its competitors and encourages a back-and-forth on popular topics, isn't that a good thing? And while there are certainly topics that demand long-form explaination, there are also an awful lot of cases where the current presentation is just gratuitously long (e.g. when I needed to top up my boiler up to pressure, a 3 second video could absolutely have shown me how to do it, but on YouTube everything is padded to 8 minutes instead). Kids these days are thinking faster and demanding you get to the point more quickly: again, isnt' that a good thing rather than a bad one?
Parents exploiting their children on social media is a problem, but by no means one unique for TikTok. And as a non-American I have zero sympathy for all the handwringing about how a shady foreign intelligence agency can be slurping up your personal information with no oversight; yeah, welcome to how the NSA has been treating the rest of us for our whole lives, a country that bugs the heads of state of their supposed allies has no leg to stand on here.
I really hate China because of their genocide against Uyghurs. But this sentence is pretty unreasonable:
"some employees in China, in charge of clearing internal security protocols, can indeed access certain information from United States-based TikTok, such as public videos and comments."
I mean no one can prevent anyone to have access to "such as public videos and comments", including the public data in other social media platforms.
Other social media platforms are manipulating as well. Including Facebook (Cambridge Analytica) and Twitter (famous journalists accounts blocked in Turkey, for example former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom's tweets can not be seen in Turkey isn't it a manipulation alone? and it has been proven that Turkish Intelligence with Ministry of Internal Affairs using bots to manipulate the social media and Turkish Police regularly posts serious statistics about some hashtags - including the number of tweet belonging to what they call as "terrorists". I mean basically Turkey has more powers on U.S. data than this specific TikTok employee mentioned in the article had).
America is a free country. If we are talking about addictions, parents should use built-in or third party software to control their child's screen time, or their online activity - or block specific social media platform altogether. If this kind of addiction is a serious issue, there should be, both public and private, awareness campaigns. Censoring things always backfire, I never saw a case that it worked as intended.
I think we need to regulate some aspects of the social media apps espesially for the young in the same manner we have rules and regulations for tobacco, gambling and alchol. We see from experience/research that people are less happy after the profilation of social media and if it is harmful to socieicty then there should be more bounderies. I have a 9 year old kid and do not look forward to a world where all the kids are addicted to social media.
I think China shows the way on some possible restrictions with focus on protecting young people.
And then we are probably in a loop to tell our children the same thing, "don't use it" which really depends on how well one can do self-control, but I guess that's one of the hardest parts to many people.
He tried to force a sale to remove the link to the CCP. Here in Taiwan I blocked tiktok because just signing up and scrolling displays anti America content. It’s a platform for pushing the CCP propaganda. How many times do I need to see “covid is caused by america” videos?
How many times do I need to see Covid is caused by China being nefarious? Or rich people worked hard for their money. Or whatever other uptight rigid status quo bullshit permeates most facets of western life.
Since this forum brings out my inner contrarian, I feel compelled to defend TikTok. I can’t really argue with OP’s assessment of the manipulation built into the UX, but the rest misses the point. The point is the culture on TT is amazing. It’s format and anti-features may have something to do with it, or maybe it’s just the people and the momentum they set. It’s a place where polish isn’t expected, where the most popular content is just silly, unedited, and endearing. You’re more likely to see a person laying in bed with poor lighting than a studio. Their strict comment character count, terrible threading, lack of ability to browse user’s comment history, and no cumulative comment likes count all add up to an ephemeral stream of the tightest and cleverest showing up first. It’s stitch, duet, and video response features turn short form videos into a conversation, and I’ve enjoyed traversing many of such asynchronous dialogs. It’s a powerful authoring platform; it’s inline editing, face tracking filters, and media library make it so easy to make polished content. And it’s (musical.ly’s) original innovation of letting creators reuse each other’s sounds has had majestic results. Users can click on a sound and see dozens to thousands of different takes around the same audio; it’s exhilarating to see real diversity and iteration unfold around the same source material.
I disagree that the format is not educational. It has 3-10 min videos which are often richly packed with content and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from historians, reporters, scientists, and enthusiasts. I tend to bounce out to my browser a lot to dig deeper into a subject that I get tipped off about on TikTok.
The infamous FYP algorithm is its most popular and controversial feature. It’s a massive neutral net that tracks an insane amount of parameters, many of which you can only get with a video-feed-only platform. It’s been found to be effective at informally clustering people around medical conditions, sexual and political orientations, and more. It’s power of suggestion is terrifying. I’ve noticed a bias towards the more extreme left-wing views, perhaps as an antidote to YouTube’s alt-right pipeline, perhaps in as a subversive pro-CCP thrust. It’s easy to become entranced in a session and not realize that a post or series of them may have been fed with intent to influence a particular subject.
I’m still looking for the self-hosted, democratized antidote to TikTok; it’s just that it’s raised the bar so high for platform tools and spawned so many parasocial relationships that it feels insurmountable at times.
I would be remiss to not share some content. This video gave me a great chuckle today. Quintessential American TikTok humor, it’s a whole journey:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/
Here is a creator that does a lot of conversational content. He talks about philosophy, category theory, his apartment decor, and queer aesthetic. This kind of eclecticism is mostly normal, and very different than YouTube’s highly thematic channels.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/
Finally, here is one of the news creators I follow. There are many wonderfully talented reporters that bring their own color. This one keeps it really straight: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1
Thank you for voicing this, I really agree that something about the culture growing up around tiktok is special and feels like a breath of fresh air. I think a lot of the doom and gloom talk is coming from people with a totally outside perspective who haven't actually tried to engage with the platform.
One thing that stands out as special to me, since it started out as an app for dance videos, so much of the cultural threads still revolve around that, and so it encourages an embodied way of presenting yourself. It makes text heavy sites like twitter and facebook feel... detached, cerebral, sterile in comparison. Whereas tiktok keeps a playful frivolity that that is so often lacking online. It seems to me a big step towards solving the big challenge with "online culture": considering the human.
There aren’t that many comments on this article yet but most of the comments that are here are pretty shallow and dismissive.
Unlike many posts, I read the entire article. I think the author does a reasonable job of describing how TikTok exploits human biology to increase “engagement”. They aren’t unique in this; Casinos have been doing this for decades; Zynga canonicalized this in games and social media has been lurching this way for over a decade.
TikTok is difficult to disengage from. For some it’s easier than for others. It would be interesting to see statistics to gauge users’ various level of addictive/compulsive behavior in the app.
Here’s a hypothetical question- should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become? We limit nicotine content in cigarettes; we ban or highly regulate many drugs. “Under the hood” the drugs we ban are affecting neural pathways; why should it matter if you’re ingesting a substance vs having similar effects via psychological manipulation?
I don’t claim to have the right answer and in the USA attempts to limit the app will run up against free speech concerns. But I do think that TikTok is bad for humans and bad for society.
> should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become?
Good question. IMO, yes. Drugs are often considered dangerous not only for what they do to users, but how users behave to get their next fix.
If social media can ever get to heroin without the whole death thing, all that's left is the fix problem. A properly addicted person will not be able to hold a job, may have to resort to crime to pay for their data. A stretch, maybe?
Or maybe it becomes like porn addictions where people need more extreme content for their fix.
I'd say either are realistic and scary outcomes.
If I had my way we'd ban smartphones. Yes, the same one I type this comment on. I'd give up this for everyone unplugging, and not being an idiot in public and a danger when driving. Small cost.
The way the world has enforced drugs as crime has been a massive massive failure. The worst thing we have done is be puritanical, judgemental, and ready to throw the book at drug crimes.
Based off that we shouldn’t touch social media or smart phones or anything.
I can see it, but not with myself. Maybe I'm getting old or just depressed into not feeling dopamine anymore but TikTok has the effect of only annoying me. Constant sound streams, fake voices, etc. It reminds me of Vegas in some ways...loads of people love the flashing lights, I just run away.
But I see it with my wife and daughter, it turns them into complete zombies.
All this to say, I don't know what it's like to speak effectively as a 'victim.' But as a bystander, I feel something should probably be done...I just don't know what. Anything this addictive cannot be good for society.
You're quite on the nose. An acquaintance is fond of watching TikTok videos. One day when he's visiting my partner, there's just this weird noise in the house. Somewhere between the sound played by the lottery ticket scanners upon winning, an ice cream truck, a fire alarm, and some 80s video game effect sounds. Gosh it's annoying. It goes away. Then comes back. What is that? TikTok! I've noticed that almost exact same sound fairly often since it came to my explicit awareness, in social media video clips, and sometimes advertisements. I suspect it's about the most attention-grabbing sound, for most people.
I don’t like that it’s compromised by the CCP, but TikTok is in fact fun and enjoyable. People here act like it’s a new phenomenon, rotting children’s brains out. We’ve vegetated in front of TV for generations, and somehow survived.
The fact is, people need some mindless downtime to cope with life, and TikTok is at least entertaining. Ban it and then what? Watch the weird viral factory worker videos on Instagram reels?
Somehow surviving is a pretty low bar. We, as a human race, survived every disaster, horror and mistreatment so far. It doesn't mean that they are okay and that we don't need to take action. As to what that action is, I have no idea.
Seems more like an attack with strong magnetic waves - which is one component used in Havana Syndrome and is used by terrorists with access to microwave weaponry to attack civilians, children included. Real time surveillance of everyone enables oddities like this. Privacy is dead.
I joined for the first time a few days ago using my gmail account and then selected a few tags like animals, comedy, sports. I only watched about 10 cat videos.
Next day I get a notification of a video called "I'm in my 40's, single and I don't have any children". I was shocked.
It's impossible for their algorithm to deduce so many facts about me. Which leads me to think that I already have a shadow profile with my gmail address and/or TikTok is somehow working with Google on this.
Its almost all patterned around dwell time on the videos they feed you. And those tags gave them a really good start TBH. Then they start throwing more Target stuff out and see how you resonate. It’s incredibly clever, but I really don’t think they need 3rd party data to start to infer those things. They don’t even label them like marketers would with traditional categories, it’s graph first and model driven.
TikTok has access to shadow profiles of everyone that includes even their inner speech and body data - all obtained with electromagnetic surveillance using silicon trojans in cell transmitters.
And so does Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, all of Big Tech.
And so does terrorists recruited on 4chan and KiwiFarms - who use this to create school shooters, sell drugs, change elections, corrupt children, threaten human rights defenders, and stop safe competing companies from challenging Silicon Valley's monopolies.
The very aggressive bits are linked to articles supposedly backing their point with more substance, but those are same level think pieces who reference other think pieces who are based on misconceptions, and we never hit any solid ground.
For instance:
> The videos are in autoplay and shown in an endless scroll. These are features known for triggering addictive behavior and there were legislative plans in the United States to ban them.
Following “triggering addictive behavior” goes to thenextweb.com’s rant on autoplay.
which posits autoplay is “hijacking your thought process”, with a link to a medium post
Which on autoplay, explains that “Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore”, linking that analysis on the age old debunked Brian Wansink‘s bowl of cereal experiment.
So many other of these very assertive declarations have 3 to 5 levels of redirection to finally hit some disappointing justification. The general message being vaguely consensual, it’s hard to see what this piece is actually bringing to the table.