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I dislike any politics or clickbait too and it doesn’t come back. I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.

xenophonf 2y ago
You're basically training their advertising model for them, so yay for the Algorithm, I guess.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> I dislike any politics TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political. I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically. But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content. I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  good, they should sprinkle socialist values in. what's the other option, passive acceptance of capitalist exploitation? people need to be educated.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is. People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model. Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure. Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore. But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
    - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
      >People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model... Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
      - ants_everywhere 2y ago
        Yes with the pedantic caveat that those aren't similar in the sense that one is a common confusion and the other is correct. The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism. On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite. It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
        TylerE 2y ago
        Words evolve with time and usage. If someone said they were gonna send you a mail, would you expect an actual paper letter or an email?
        ants_everywhere 2y ago
        These particular words haven't evolved in any meaningful way in the last century or so. If anything socialism now refers exclusively to revolutionary/militant utopian socialism whereas it had more varied meanings long ago. That's probably largely an artifact of the fact that socialism since the early 1900s has mainly been promoted by socialist countries after a revolution. Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g. - https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_is_wrong_with_the_nordic_model/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_... - https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558kq/why_arent_you_a_supporter_of_mixedeconomy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558... - https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_mixed_economies_truly_exist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_... - https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+economy https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+econo... It's harder to search other socialist forums like the darknet ones, but you see the same patterns there
nativeit 2y ago
My only complaint is that it doesn't encourage enough innate curiosity. I am disincentivized from clicking on some things precisely because their recommendation engine is so tightly wound that I'll get bombarded with really tangential content for days or weeks after. Let me click a few videos about a topic before assuming I'd been hiding a lifetime passion for '80's John Deere combine trans-axle repairs that I need itched almost exclusively to within an inch of its life, all because I thought that guy in the thumbnail might get squished, and didn't adhere to my better angels. Besides that, it's pretty, pretty neat. Not great not bad. I can recommend farm machinery repair YouTube--it is a vibrant community of delightful weirdos and incredibly smart folk who talk about software more than you'd think.

xenophonf 2y ago

You're basically training their advertising model for them, so yay for the Algorithm, I guess.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

> I dislike any politics TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political. I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically. But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content. I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.

tehjoker 2y ago
good, they should sprinkle socialist values in. what's the other option, passive acceptance of capitalist exploitation? people need to be educated.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is. People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model. Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure. Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore. But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    >People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model... Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      Yes with the pedantic caveat that those aren't similar in the sense that one is a common confusion and the other is correct. The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism. On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite. It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
      - TylerE 2y ago
        Words evolve with time and usage. If someone said they were gonna send you a mail, would you expect an actual paper letter or an email?
        ants_everywhere 2y ago
        These particular words haven't evolved in any meaningful way in the last century or so. If anything socialism now refers exclusively to revolutionary/militant utopian socialism whereas it had more varied meanings long ago. That's probably largely an artifact of the fact that socialism since the early 1900s has mainly been promoted by socialist countries after a revolution. Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g. - https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_is_wrong_with_the_nordic_model/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_... - https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558kq/why_arent_you_a_supporter_of_mixedeconomy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558... - https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_mixed_economies_truly_exist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_... - https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+economy https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+econo... It's harder to search other socialist forums like the darknet ones, but you see the same patterns there

nativeit 2y ago

My only complaint is that it doesn't encourage enough innate curiosity. I am disincentivized from clicking on some things precisely because their recommendation engine is so tightly wound that I'll get bombarded with really tangential content for days or weeks after. Let me click a few videos about a topic before assuming I'd been hiding a lifetime passion for '80's John Deere combine trans-axle repairs that I need itched almost exclusively to within an inch of its life, all because I thought that guy in the thumbnail might get squished, and didn't adhere to my better angels. Besides that, it's pretty, pretty neat. Not great not bad. I can recommend farm machinery repair YouTube--it is a vibrant community of delightful weirdos and incredibly smart folk who talk about software more than you'd think.