8 ms·

TikTok is a cancer on the universe. (In terms of converting its users into the version of the people on Wall-E). -- Go ahead Google "Wall-E people". I thought

TikTok is a cancer on the universe. (In terms of converting its users into the version of the people on Wall-E). -- Go ahead Google "Wall-E people". I thought Instagram was bad. Trained or not, there is nothing good about scrolling through stuff for every moment when you're bored. Boredom is nature's way of making the universe go forward. And it's best when its channeled into creative, industrious or thoughtful pursuits. Instead we have channeled Boredom into watching barely clad teens dance, or women complain about dating misadventures. And the paradoxical thing about it. Is that the creators vs viewers ratio is still 99% viewers to 1% creator. Creators are the ones that have channeled their boredom (however misplaced) into something that others watch. But then all of this is human nature anyway. And perhaps I'm railing about nothing. Flame away!

KVFinn 4y ago
>I thought Instagram was bad. >Instead we have channeled Boredom into watching barely clad teens dance, or women complain about dating misadventures. If this is what you see on your TikTok, it's because those are the videos you lingered on the longest. Pro-Tip: Never 'hate watch' on TikTok.
- Jensson 4y ago
  But that is a huge problem with the service. On YouTube I can search for whatever topic or video I want and find high quality videos on interesting topics instantly, so no need to train any algorithm to get good content. There is no hook in TikTok unless you actually like the default feed, since there is no good way to find anything else without first wading through all those default videos. Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted, but I really can't get into TikTok. I went there, the default feed was 100% uninteresting, I wont wade through that for a week looking for videos that might be there. I searched for some topics, for example "Warhammer", it is a very popular topic and it would be interesting to find more of that, but the search didn't turn up a single video about it. So I don't really see what I am supposed to do then, I am sure they have at least some warhammer videos but if it takes hours or days or weeks of work to find them then I don't see why I should bother with TikTok at all.
mhh__ 4y ago
TikTok does have some interesting culture to it, there's an immediacy not really found elsewhere in the modern internet. but I also think its possibly the lowest of the low when it comes to the dominant prevailing culture. Even ignoring that awful synthesized voice. That being said I'm not sure whether this is just an insight into what I'm now going to literally call the "unwashed masses". I spend most of my time on the internet in niche communities full of smart people, even shitposters have an intellect to them, most normal people do not, hence awful TikTok spam.
- corobo 4y ago
  “Unwashed masses” is usually a downward punch on poor people, isn’t it?
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    Yes. I'm mocking my own sentiment even if I do basically believe in it.
pbw 4y ago
> Trained or not, there is nothing good about scrolling through stuff for every moment when you're bored. OP here. TikTok doesn't mandate you use it every moment you are bored, that's a choice made by the user. However I agree it is very potent entertainment technology, and I have read about people using it 8 hours a day, and hating what it's doing to them. I have not read the book, but it brings to mind Infinite Jest, a film "so entertaining that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die." The premise of my post is it can be used for good instead of evil, but it does require discipline.
- eckza 4y ago
  Dissenter in the thread here; rather than read Infinite Jest (which I've also not read, purely out of disinterest in doing so), I would kindly suggest that you read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, the premise of which is that the premise of your post is flawed. And I really mean it; if you're the sort that has an interest in figuring out how things work, which is clearly the case here - you will find it effortless and fascinating reading.
  - pbw 4y ago
    What I'm mainly saying, I think, is that it's possible to find good content on TikTok, but it takes discipline and effort. You are saying McLuhan would disagree and say it is not possible to find good content on TikTok? I'm lost there. I'd like to read the book, though. I've never paid much attention to media studies but now with AIs powering things it's becoming more interesting to me. And I know people have been talking about it since the 1960s.
    - eckza 4y ago
      To tell you the truth, I almost don't want to spoil it for you. Your particular interest, at the intersection of media and AI, makes me believe that you would find the book worthwhile. The structure and exposition of his arguments is what makes the text particularly engrossing, and I am loath to try to summarize what is best experienced within its intended context. But I'll give you some copied paste from Wikipedia to get you started: > McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.
systemvoltage 4y ago
Absolutely. After the WSJ article a year or two ago, I gave it shot. Tried to tune the algorithm by selecting super cars related clips. What I got was a first burst of insanely fucked up content from rage including to glibly funny, you know stuff that you find on the bottom rungs of Reddit’s r/WTF pages. Then it got decent at showing car clips but with an occasional vomit inducing pimple popping or some girls dancing in bikinis. I absolutely could not stand it. Not for intellectual content. Not for entertainment. I will never use it again and will recommend everyone to avoid this epic and monumental failure of human enterprise. It makes me sad about the human species. This is what most people like to do.
- antiterra 4y ago
  Commenting on this sort of Hacker News article doesn’t exactly rise to Leonardo Da Vinci level either. TikTok is a triumph, especially in the light of the big social network outrage machines. Even at its worst it still can do things like introducing people to Chopin in a manner rarely seen since the Beethoven ‘Fur Elise’ McDonalds commercial in the 80s.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    > Commenting on this sort of Hacker News article doesn’t exactly rise to Leonardo Da Vinci level either. Why?
alex_sf 4y ago
This sums up my views exactly, and it's why I quit using TikTok when I realized the impact it was having. I appreciate the neat summation of the (imo) core issue.
antiterra 4y ago
Consuming analytically is a part of creation. Writing TikTok off as dancing or dating misadventure stories is exactly what the article shows isn’t necessarily correct. There are TikToks on eigenvectors, Taylor series expansions, making butter blocks for traditional layered pastries, calculus, Kubernetes and how to exit vi. There are all kinds of creators whose content is worthy of consumption on TikTok: musicians, visual artists, comedians and dancers. There are book reviews, hints for authors, demonstrations of music theory, memorization tricks, Japanese pitch accent, notes on philology/philately/phillo dough. It doesn’t have everything, and plenty of interesting topics that are just grist for simple comedy, but it can get better.
- zaptrem 4y ago
  > Quickly my For You page was transformed. I saw long thoughtful videos on motivation, psychology, science, and philosophy. I listened to excerpts of lectures on Stoicism or Zen Buddhism, and speeches by enigmatic Indian meditation gurus. It figured out I was a software engineer and showed me many jokes or insights about work. At one point I was hunting for a job and TikTok started showing me interview tips. I witnessed drawings and paintings and animations by countless visual artists. I found myself zooming through trippy 3D fractals while listening to Alan Watts. Instead of watching videos with thousands or millions of views, I was seeing videos with a hundred views or even ten views. The algorithm seemed to be trusting me to deliver an early vote. . This is both inspiring and terrifying to me. We're working toward AI that can almost read your mind and show you videos that are extremely relevant and impactful with nothing more than watch time measurements. If we gave that kind of power a goal like "make them better people/help them achieve more/find happiness" we could usher in a new golden age of achievement, fulfillment, and mental health. Unfortunately, right now we've only figured out how to give this power a single goal, "increase watch time/engagement," and I don't want to be turned into a zombie optimized for ad consumption.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    Of all the content on social media, I think TikTok is one that feels the best for me. YouTube videos are very often much longer than they need to be and devoid of information. Facebook isn't even worth mentioning. Instagram is mostly just friends and celebrities posting the best parts of their life and nothing worth discussing. TikTok content is short and typically pretty interesting. You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you and unlike YouTube you don't have to sit through long introduction paragraphs or sponsorships. They also added a progress bar that you can scrub through so if a video seems longer than it needs to then you can skip through it to the interesting part. You just need to train your brain to put TikTok down instead of constantly scrolling which takes a little self control (but what in life doesn't?)
mdoms 4y ago
> Boredom is nature's way of making the universe go forward I generally agree with your comment but no, this is a ridiculous piece of scientism.
antegamisou 4y ago
> I thought Instagram was bad. Back in the early 2010s it mainly consisted of hip - actually cool photography feeds. I don’t recall TikTok not being a cesspool since its early days of operation.
- amatecha 4y ago
  Instagram was initially super awesome. You could look up some totally obscure hashtag about, say, #68040 and find a ton of photos relating to 68040-based computers. Every image with the hashtag was actually directly related. Maybe you still "can" look up such hashtags, but the platform became so overrun with what I would call "noise" (and then got bought by Facebook), so I haven't logged in in years and refuse to now... What I mean by "noise" is, I'd search some seemingly-specific topic only to find that it has of course been appropriated by some pop culture thing that is completely irrelevant to the previously-unique term. I really just want to see stuff related to my totally niche interests, and it started to become impossible to actually do that. Also, any actual on-topic posts became fewer and fewer, I suppose as people like me realized it wasn't the platform for them.
leach 4y ago
I agree, there is rarely any good content on there and it mostly just creates echo chambers. No actual value is really extracted from using Tik tok. not to mention when people use it around me its just so annoying to listen to in the background. the stupid synthesized voice or loud dumb music just one after another is annoying to say the least.
xnx 4y ago
My experience is wholly different. The content I see if funny, creative, unique, genuine, wholesome, and supportive. I feel much better about the next generation after seeing some of what they've made on Tiktok. It feels like time for the current geriatric generation (see the average age of US senators) to stop clinging so embarrassingly to power and wealth and make way for what's next.
jazzyjackson 4y ago
> And the paradoxical thing about it. Is that the creators vs viewers ratio is still 99% viewers to 1% creator I don't know if there's a paradox here, TikTok has hundreds of millions of users and therefore (1%) millions of creators making content people enjoy.
TranquilMarmot 4y ago
Your comment assumes there is nothing creative, industrious, or thoughtful on TikTok. The fact that you think it's just dancing teens and "women complaining" (yikes dude) shows that you've never given it a chance. As the article suggests, you _can_ "train" it to give you the content that you want, and it can be more fulfilling. I'm not saying that it doesn't have issues, and it does feel like it's trying REALLY hard to keep me hooked in some pretty morally ambiguous ways, but it's not as toxic as the media would like you to believe. I assume you also don't go on Twitter or watch TV or movies when you're bored since then you're not "pursuing" anything. People are allowed to just chill and turn their brain off for a bit.
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  There is indeed a lot of good content on TikTok. And it's eerily good at showing me things I'm interested in, in a way other social media sites utterly fail at. But (not having deliberately tried to "train" TikTok), it also shows me plenty of content I find depressing or juvenile. And I am firmly convinced that the experience of continuous scrolling through very short videos damages my brain and attention span much more than watching a traditional TV show or movie.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    You do need to train it. It’s very easy to train it to show you stuff you don’t want to see too often. You can mark things as not being interested in to avoid that. When I had TikTok for the first time - I was like, “is this really for everyone? I don’t get it. I’m getting endless videos of hot women dancing or showing off their figure. I could see why teenage boys get into this but women???” I didn’t even watch many of them but you watch a few (cause boobs) then it can sometimes think that’s the only thing it should show you until forever. It’s not a perfect algo by any stretch. I was not the only guy who fell victim to this pattern and was interested in TikTok at first but gave it up for a bit because it was showing nothing but booba. Same with a lot of videos. You watch a few and it decides you should see them forever even if you just had an interest for a few minutes one particular day. It requires specifically saying you’re not interested in order to get it to go away. It requires adjusting.
blackoil 4y ago
This is a lazy analysis. I don't use it (banned in my country), but from a little interaction I had, it is only social media that doesn't felt on rage inducing for engagement. This comment and lot of other other are example of that, we don't do introspection, deep analysis of rational discussion just rage induced comments.
ssnistfajen 4y ago
For some Gen Xers and Millennials it seems raging against TikTok is their generation's moral panic. TikTok does not have anything fundamentally different than other forms of social media. But sure, please keep ranting about how anything you dislike is somehow literally cancer.
dpcan 4y ago
You are correct. I think the saddest thing is how addicted people have become to it. Instagram too. Just read through the comments on this post, so many people defending it even though the content is just user-generated hot takes with catchy quotes and people saying things they want to hear and want to agree with. It’s poison. Be careful. If all you get is what you want to hear, you aren’t training TikTok, TikTok is training you! And you keep coming back to the feeding tube for more.
vmception 4y ago
The duets are marvelous and the dual livestream battles are genius If they were their own apps you would appreciate it
croes 4y ago
>still 99% viewers to 1% creator. This wouldn't change without TikTok. Most bored people do nothing creative. And the creative ones get inspiration by things like TikTok.
Barrin92 4y ago
I think this idea that creative or thoughtful people don't 'waste time' on tiktok is more of a performative status thing than anything else. I've worked with plenty of incredibly smart scientists who read the very worst pulp fiction, watch youtube for hours or do other 'low status' stuff. On the other hand there's an entire class of dopamine fasting, knowledge graph generating busybodies who have not output one meaningful thing in their entire career. If anything I feel like this kind of behavior and scoffing at mass entertainment is inversely correlated with having built anything at all. That aside I found the crew of a cargo container ship vlogging on TikTok who were shipping stuff around central Asia and following them was by far one of the most interesting things I've seen on social media.
- Jensson 4y ago
  I don't think people saying that Tiktok is mostly garbage are doing that to signal, at least not here on HN. I waste a ton of time watching random videos on youtube, because there I can search for all kinds of niche topics and finds plenty of videos about them even from very small creators. On tiktok however I can't even search for mainstream nerd topics that gets many millions of views on youtube, not even a single video shows up since it seems they don't let you search for content, so to me it isn't that I feel I am above Tiktok content, it is just that it doesn't show me anything I want to see and it doesn't offer me any way of finding it.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    If you use TikTok for a while the algorithm will quickly figure out what you like to watch. It’s far better than the YouTube algorithm, for example.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      But on youtube I can just search for the topics I want to watch. Leys say I want to watch some age of empires games, I just search for age of empires and maybe some civilizations for them to play and I'll find hundreds of videos to watch. How long would it take to get something similar on TikTok? Personally I don't think that will ever happen. And age of empires is still relatively mainstream, many of the other things I regularly watch on youtube just have a few thousands of views per day in the entire world on that topic, how long would it take for TikTok to figure that out?
radu_floricica 4y ago
That's a cheap shot and you know it. All you said can be equally applied to books. I truly bemoan the HN algorithm that made you do this for karma.
clippablematt 4y ago
I urge you to go flick through http://pessimistsarchive.org/ http://pessimistsarchive.org/
brainzap 4y ago
dopamine
amelius 4y ago
> TikTok is a cancer on the universe. For the most part, yes. Though I find it pretty useful while brushing my teeth. You don't need any audio. And my brush time has gone up a bit since I started this viewing habit.

KVFinn 4y ago

>I thought Instagram was bad. >Instead we have channeled Boredom into watching barely clad teens dance, or women complain about dating misadventures. If this is what you see on your TikTok, it's because those are the videos you lingered on the longest. Pro-Tip: Never 'hate watch' on TikTok.

Jensson 4y ago
But that is a huge problem with the service. On YouTube I can search for whatever topic or video I want and find high quality videos on interesting topics instantly, so no need to train any algorithm to get good content. There is no hook in TikTok unless you actually like the default feed, since there is no good way to find anything else without first wading through all those default videos. Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted, but I really can't get into TikTok. I went there, the default feed was 100% uninteresting, I wont wade through that for a week looking for videos that might be there. I searched for some topics, for example "Warhammer", it is a very popular topic and it would be interesting to find more of that, but the search didn't turn up a single video about it. So I don't really see what I am supposed to do then, I am sure they have at least some warhammer videos but if it takes hours or days or weeks of work to find them then I don't see why I should bother with TikTok at all.

mhh__ 4y ago

TikTok does have some interesting culture to it, there's an immediacy not really found elsewhere in the modern internet. but I also think its possibly the lowest of the low when it comes to the dominant prevailing culture. Even ignoring that awful synthesized voice. That being said I'm not sure whether this is just an insight into what I'm now going to literally call the "unwashed masses". I spend most of my time on the internet in niche communities full of smart people, even shitposters have an intellect to them, most normal people do not, hence awful TikTok spam.

corobo 4y ago
“Unwashed masses” is usually a downward punch on poor people, isn’t it?
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Yes. I'm mocking my own sentiment even if I do basically believe in it.

pbw 4y ago

> Trained or not, there is nothing good about scrolling through stuff for every moment when you're bored. OP here. TikTok doesn't mandate you use it every moment you are bored, that's a choice made by the user. However I agree it is very potent entertainment technology, and I have read about people using it 8 hours a day, and hating what it's doing to them. I have not read the book, but it brings to mind Infinite Jest, a film "so entertaining that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die." The premise of my post is it can be used for good instead of evil, but it does require discipline.

eckza 4y ago
Dissenter in the thread here; rather than read Infinite Jest (which I've also not read, purely out of disinterest in doing so), I would kindly suggest that you read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, the premise of which is that the premise of your post is flawed. And I really mean it; if you're the sort that has an interest in figuring out how things work, which is clearly the case here - you will find it effortless and fascinating reading.
- pbw 4y ago
  What I'm mainly saying, I think, is that it's possible to find good content on TikTok, but it takes discipline and effort. You are saying McLuhan would disagree and say it is not possible to find good content on TikTok? I'm lost there. I'd like to read the book, though. I've never paid much attention to media studies but now with AIs powering things it's becoming more interesting to me. And I know people have been talking about it since the 1960s.
  - eckza 4y ago
    To tell you the truth, I almost don't want to spoil it for you. Your particular interest, at the intersection of media and AI, makes me believe that you would find the book worthwhile. The structure and exposition of his arguments is what makes the text particularly engrossing, and I am loath to try to summarize what is best experienced within its intended context. But I'll give you some copied paste from Wikipedia to get you started: > McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.

systemvoltage 4y ago

Absolutely. After the WSJ article a year or two ago, I gave it shot. Tried to tune the algorithm by selecting super cars related clips. What I got was a first burst of insanely fucked up content from rage including to glibly funny, you know stuff that you find on the bottom rungs of Reddit’s r/WTF pages. Then it got decent at showing car clips but with an occasional vomit inducing pimple popping or some girls dancing in bikinis. I absolutely could not stand it. Not for intellectual content. Not for entertainment. I will never use it again and will recommend everyone to avoid this epic and monumental failure of human enterprise. It makes me sad about the human species. This is what most people like to do.

antiterra 4y ago
Commenting on this sort of Hacker News article doesn’t exactly rise to Leonardo Da Vinci level either. TikTok is a triumph, especially in the light of the big social network outrage machines. Even at its worst it still can do things like introducing people to Chopin in a manner rarely seen since the Beethoven ‘Fur Elise’ McDonalds commercial in the 80s.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  > Commenting on this sort of Hacker News article doesn’t exactly rise to Leonardo Da Vinci level either. Why?

alex_sf 4y ago

This sums up my views exactly, and it's why I quit using TikTok when I realized the impact it was having. I appreciate the neat summation of the (imo) core issue.

antiterra 4y ago

Consuming analytically is a part of creation. Writing TikTok off as dancing or dating misadventure stories is exactly what the article shows isn’t necessarily correct. There are TikToks on eigenvectors, Taylor series expansions, making butter blocks for traditional layered pastries, calculus, Kubernetes and how to exit vi. There are all kinds of creators whose content is worthy of consumption on TikTok: musicians, visual artists, comedians and dancers. There are book reviews, hints for authors, demonstrations of music theory, memorization tricks, Japanese pitch accent, notes on philology/philately/phillo dough. It doesn’t have everything, and plenty of interesting topics that are just grist for simple comedy, but it can get better.

zaptrem 4y ago
> Quickly my For You page was transformed. I saw long thoughtful videos on motivation, psychology, science, and philosophy. I listened to excerpts of lectures on Stoicism or Zen Buddhism, and speeches by enigmatic Indian meditation gurus. It figured out I was a software engineer and showed me many jokes or insights about work. At one point I was hunting for a job and TikTok started showing me interview tips. I witnessed drawings and paintings and animations by countless visual artists. I found myself zooming through trippy 3D fractals while listening to Alan Watts. Instead of watching videos with thousands or millions of views, I was seeing videos with a hundred views or even ten views. The algorithm seemed to be trusting me to deliver an early vote. . This is both inspiring and terrifying to me. We're working toward AI that can almost read your mind and show you videos that are extremely relevant and impactful with nothing more than watch time measurements. If we gave that kind of power a goal like "make them better people/help them achieve more/find happiness" we could usher in a new golden age of achievement, fulfillment, and mental health. Unfortunately, right now we've only figured out how to give this power a single goal, "increase watch time/engagement," and I don't want to be turned into a zombie optimized for ad consumption.
- xmprt 4y ago
  Of all the content on social media, I think TikTok is one that feels the best for me. YouTube videos are very often much longer than they need to be and devoid of information. Facebook isn't even worth mentioning. Instagram is mostly just friends and celebrities posting the best parts of their life and nothing worth discussing. TikTok content is short and typically pretty interesting. You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you and unlike YouTube you don't have to sit through long introduction paragraphs or sponsorships. They also added a progress bar that you can scrub through so if a video seems longer than it needs to then you can skip through it to the interesting part. You just need to train your brain to put TikTok down instead of constantly scrolling which takes a little self control (but what in life doesn't?)

mdoms 4y ago

> Boredom is nature's way of making the universe go forward I generally agree with your comment but no, this is a ridiculous piece of scientism.

antegamisou 4y ago

> I thought Instagram was bad. Back in the early 2010s it mainly consisted of hip - actually cool photography feeds. I don’t recall TikTok not being a cesspool since its early days of operation.

amatecha 4y ago
Instagram was initially super awesome. You could look up some totally obscure hashtag about, say, #68040 and find a ton of photos relating to 68040-based computers. Every image with the hashtag was actually directly related. Maybe you still "can" look up such hashtags, but the platform became so overrun with what I would call "noise" (and then got bought by Facebook), so I haven't logged in in years and refuse to now... What I mean by "noise" is, I'd search some seemingly-specific topic only to find that it has of course been appropriated by some pop culture thing that is completely irrelevant to the previously-unique term. I really just want to see stuff related to my totally niche interests, and it started to become impossible to actually do that. Also, any actual on-topic posts became fewer and fewer, I suppose as people like me realized it wasn't the platform for them.

leach 4y ago

I agree, there is rarely any good content on there and it mostly just creates echo chambers. No actual value is really extracted from using Tik tok. not to mention when people use it around me its just so annoying to listen to in the background. the stupid synthesized voice or loud dumb music just one after another is annoying to say the least.

xnx 4y ago

My experience is wholly different. The content I see if funny, creative, unique, genuine, wholesome, and supportive. I feel much better about the next generation after seeing some of what they've made on Tiktok. It feels like time for the current geriatric generation (see the average age of US senators) to stop clinging so embarrassingly to power and wealth and make way for what's next.

jazzyjackson 4y ago

> And the paradoxical thing about it. Is that the creators vs viewers ratio is still 99% viewers to 1% creator I don't know if there's a paradox here, TikTok has hundreds of millions of users and therefore (1%) millions of creators making content people enjoy.

TranquilMarmot 4y ago

Your comment assumes there is nothing creative, industrious, or thoughtful on TikTok. The fact that you think it's just dancing teens and "women complaining" (yikes dude) shows that you've never given it a chance. As the article suggests, you _can_ "train" it to give you the content that you want, and it can be more fulfilling. I'm not saying that it doesn't have issues, and it does feel like it's trying REALLY hard to keep me hooked in some pretty morally ambiguous ways, but it's not as toxic as the media would like you to believe. I assume you also don't go on Twitter or watch TV or movies when you're bored since then you're not "pursuing" anything. People are allowed to just chill and turn their brain off for a bit.

mikebenfield 4y ago
There is indeed a lot of good content on TikTok. And it's eerily good at showing me things I'm interested in, in a way other social media sites utterly fail at. But (not having deliberately tried to "train" TikTok), it also shows me plenty of content I find depressing or juvenile. And I am firmly convinced that the experience of continuous scrolling through very short videos damages my brain and attention span much more than watching a traditional TV show or movie.
- bradlys 4y ago
  You do need to train it. It’s very easy to train it to show you stuff you don’t want to see too often. You can mark things as not being interested in to avoid that. When I had TikTok for the first time - I was like, “is this really for everyone? I don’t get it. I’m getting endless videos of hot women dancing or showing off their figure. I could see why teenage boys get into this but women???” I didn’t even watch many of them but you watch a few (cause boobs) then it can sometimes think that’s the only thing it should show you until forever. It’s not a perfect algo by any stretch. I was not the only guy who fell victim to this pattern and was interested in TikTok at first but gave it up for a bit because it was showing nothing but booba. Same with a lot of videos. You watch a few and it decides you should see them forever even if you just had an interest for a few minutes one particular day. It requires specifically saying you’re not interested in order to get it to go away. It requires adjusting.

blackoil 4y ago

This is a lazy analysis. I don't use it (banned in my country), but from a little interaction I had, it is only social media that doesn't felt on rage inducing for engagement. This comment and lot of other other are example of that, we don't do introspection, deep analysis of rational discussion just rage induced comments.

ssnistfajen 4y ago

For some Gen Xers and Millennials it seems raging against TikTok is their generation's moral panic. TikTok does not have anything fundamentally different than other forms of social media. But sure, please keep ranting about how anything you dislike is somehow literally cancer.

dpcan 4y ago

You are correct. I think the saddest thing is how addicted people have become to it. Instagram too. Just read through the comments on this post, so many people defending it even though the content is just user-generated hot takes with catchy quotes and people saying things they want to hear and want to agree with. It’s poison. Be careful. If all you get is what you want to hear, you aren’t training TikTok, TikTok is training you! And you keep coming back to the feeding tube for more.

vmception 4y ago

The duets are marvelous and the dual livestream battles are genius If they were their own apps you would appreciate it

croes 4y ago

>still 99% viewers to 1% creator. This wouldn't change without TikTok. Most bored people do nothing creative. And the creative ones get inspiration by things like TikTok.

Barrin92 4y ago

I think this idea that creative or thoughtful people don't 'waste time' on tiktok is more of a performative status thing than anything else. I've worked with plenty of incredibly smart scientists who read the very worst pulp fiction, watch youtube for hours or do other 'low status' stuff. On the other hand there's an entire class of dopamine fasting, knowledge graph generating busybodies who have not output one meaningful thing in their entire career. If anything I feel like this kind of behavior and scoffing at mass entertainment is inversely correlated with having built anything at all. That aside I found the crew of a cargo container ship vlogging on TikTok who were shipping stuff around central Asia and following them was by far one of the most interesting things I've seen on social media.

Jensson 4y ago
I don't think people saying that Tiktok is mostly garbage are doing that to signal, at least not here on HN. I waste a ton of time watching random videos on youtube, because there I can search for all kinds of niche topics and finds plenty of videos about them even from very small creators. On tiktok however I can't even search for mainstream nerd topics that gets many millions of views on youtube, not even a single video shows up since it seems they don't let you search for content, so to me it isn't that I feel I am above Tiktok content, it is just that it doesn't show me anything I want to see and it doesn't offer me any way of finding it.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  If you use TikTok for a while the algorithm will quickly figure out what you like to watch. It’s far better than the YouTube algorithm, for example.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    But on youtube I can just search for the topics I want to watch. Leys say I want to watch some age of empires games, I just search for age of empires and maybe some civilizations for them to play and I'll find hundreds of videos to watch. How long would it take to get something similar on TikTok? Personally I don't think that will ever happen. And age of empires is still relatively mainstream, many of the other things I regularly watch on youtube just have a few thousands of views per day in the entire world on that topic, how long would it take for TikTok to figure that out?

radu_floricica 4y ago

That's a cheap shot and you know it. All you said can be equally applied to books. I truly bemoan the HN algorithm that made you do this for karma.

clippablematt 4y ago

I urge you to go flick through http://pessimistsarchive.org/ http://pessimistsarchive.org/

brainzap 4y ago

dopamine

amelius 4y ago

> TikTok is a cancer on the universe. For the most part, yes. Though I find it pretty useful while brushing my teeth. You don't need any audio. And my brush time has gone up a bit since I started this viewing habit.