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This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to

by simonw 10mo ago

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.

PeterStuer 10mo ago
"You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever" Biology tends to disagree.
sublinear 10mo ago
[flagged]
- simonw 10mo ago
  I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok! Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/7517727101923953943 https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192... And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362823695638 https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
  - sublinear 10mo ago
    Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking into Chernobyl to practice their parkour. I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.
    - Dylan16807 10mo ago
      If you don't like weird and fun at all, are you sure you're fairly judging whether things are weird and fun?
  - antonvs 10mo ago
    > I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok! This is classic equivocation fallacy.
    - Dylan16807 10mo ago
      Not classic enough. You need to add an actual explanation if you want that comment to work. What are the multiple meanings to the same phrase? Presumably "weird and fun" is what you're calling out? But to me their post looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times.
      - antonvs 10mo ago
        > Presumably "weird and fun" Yes, you figured it out, so apparently I didn't need an "actual explanation". > looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times. That's a fascinating equivalence operator you're using.
        vasco 10mo ago
        Guys it's not that serious
        Dylan16807 10mo ago
        Could you do me a favor and paraphrase the two meanings of "weird and fun" you see? Because we can rewrite the second sentence with a pronoun so you're only parsing "weird and fun" once: "It's all on tiktok!" or to get over the top pedantic in removing any possibility of a double meaning: "The exact thing they say is lacking in quantity is still there on tiktok in full quantity." Those both sound like basically the same as the original to me and they clearly don't have an equivocation fallacy on the phrase "weird and fun". You could complain that putting so much on tiktok rather than other sites ruins the distribution, or something like that. Or you could say they're wrong and there is less. But that's not the equivocation fallacy you're accusing them of.
  - hnfraudswil 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - bigDinosaur 10mo ago
    It's impossible to discuss TikTok in isolation without discussing its algorithm or the whole 'the medium is the message' nature of it - which is precisely what distinguishes it from the era of the weird and bizarre personal website. In other words, it's inherently biased towards one form of content in a way that the general web is not (a website can contain anything, unlike TikTok).
tombert 10mo ago
This is part of why I hate TikTok so much. I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else. I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention. Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.
- squigz 10mo ago
  Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to. https://www.kexp.org/ https://www.kexp.org/ https://somafm.com/ https://somafm.com/
  - keyringlight 10mo ago
    I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.
    - bsder 10mo ago
      The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering. For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this. Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?
dyauspitr 10mo ago
It’s so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits perfectly.
- jaredsohn 10mo ago
  I've started using these platforms for learning (stretch exercises, argentine tango patterns/musicality I might want to lead, etc) and am finding the experience to work better in those kinds of situations. Agree it can be brain rot if using it for entertainment, politics, etc.
  - ericmcer 10mo ago
    It is still doing the same thing, the dopamine hit is just feeling like you learned something instead of seeing something funny/shocking/etc. The idea you can gain any kind of actual experience/knowledge about a thing through a series of 30s clips that are competing with millions of other 30s clips to grab you is folly.
  - xandrius 10mo ago
    Honest question: why wouldn't you simply search for exactly the same things but on longer format platforms such as YouTube?
    - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
      TikTok isn't about searching, it's about tuning the algorithm to find just the things you want, without necessarily being explicit about what you want.
  - dyauspitr 10mo ago
    Why short form though? I’ve always learned much better from long form, more comprehensive videos. Or I guess to put it another way I don’t believe I’ve ever learned anything besides quick hacks on reels/shorts/tiktok. Not even quick guitar licks.
  - jaredsohn 10mo ago
BiteCode_dev 10mo ago
Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch. We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day. I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it. And I deleted it. I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling. In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.
- rmunn 10mo ago
  Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpaste commercial. The juxtaposition, he said, was bad for the human mind, and was going to create a generation that couldn't focus on important things. I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.
  - noahjk 10mo ago
    I've noticed that I can read or see something very emotionally engaging - something that really resonates with me, so much so that I'm maybe even choking up over it - and while I'm still having that emotional response, move onto the next post. I almost always have a moment of meta-reflection that scares me - why wasn't I content to just sit there and process these big emotions? How is the dopamine part of my brain so much more powerful than even the emotional part, that it forces me to continue what I'm doing rather than just feeling?
  - MonkeyClub 10mo ago
andai 10mo ago
>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind. I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
- tstrimple 10mo ago
  Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
  - komali2 10mo ago
    Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.
    - shawn_w 10mo ago
      See also John Barnes' Century Next Door books, where "memes" are basically computer viruses that jump to running on human brains, not just silicon chips. The results are... not pretty.
    - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
      My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end: <quote> What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma? Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs. From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop. </quote> -- [0] - In whatever sense models are "true", i.e. a nice way to describe reality, that's succinct and has good predictive power, or something. [1] - https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rage https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag... [2] - Which is not the same thing as saying it turned out wrong.
ericmcer 10mo ago
There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to think about whether it should watch or not.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  And the other factor is I think the "rat pulling a lever" thing. A rat is in a lab, pulls a lever, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again... no treat. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. This goes on, 10 pulls with no treat, but sometimes something comes out so the rat keeps going. You get the idea. This is a lot of social media. You end up scrolling through a lot of shit, adverts and subtle propaganda, passively absorbing it until you get rewarded with something you genuinely enjoy and get the good hormones from.
kmoser 10mo ago
> This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.
- rossant 10mo ago
  Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling. Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand. Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.
  - sizzle 10mo ago
    That’s really actually hilarious and would probably get your account flagged by AI for showing obscenity or something nowadays.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
ctoth 10mo ago
Attention is all you need, after all. On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  And when propaganda is injected into it - subtly, through many channels and methods - it becomes worse. I'm confident that the western world's rightward shift is down to targeted social media campaigns. It doesn't help that said social media stopped checking for fake news and bent the knees to said rightward shift, because money.
klustregrif 10mo ago
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.
- rrvsh 10mo ago
  Yeah, I instantly disagreed with that point in the comment you replied to - TikTok's algorithm seems to reward sticking to your niche.
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago
  Does TikTok even have persistent personalities of this type? I thought a big part of the service was its recommendation algorithm that will keep recommending you other new stuff, not just reruns of the same influencers.
  - Aryezz 10mo ago
    It's both. Since most videos are a couple minutes long at most, and a TikTok doomscrolling session can last for hours, the algorithm can show you all the new videos you haven't seen of accounts you seem to enjoy (or are following), and a ton of new stuff as well.
- epiccoleman 10mo ago
  This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings. He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche. Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least. [1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention [2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase
amelius 10mo ago
Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.
- nsbk 10mo ago
  There is no lizard brain. The "triune brain" theory has been debunked by modern neuroscience for years.
NedF 10mo ago
[dead]
galkk 10mo ago
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever Hmm. I feel exact opposite. Most of successful channels that i see are using exact same formula/structure/often even style time and time again.
jonnybgood 10mo ago
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it Isn't that the most followed user on TikTok Khaby Lame (his facial expression)? Looks like he just sold his company for $900M.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  Damn, I'm in the wrong industry. I think it's different for tiktok (as a non-tiktok user so take this with a huge grain of salt lmao), people don't watch one creator's videos one after the other, they get put in the big soup of clips that people scroll through for sometimes hours a day. And a lot of that is people sticking to one formula, because for many, the predictability is comforting / puts them in the tiktok brain off frame of mind. Which isn't a new phenomenon - lots of people have "comfort shows" on e.g. Netflix, often the studio series with long seasons like sitcoms. They're comfortable because they often maintain a similar energy or formula over their run time, and missing parts of it (like current-day episodic films) isn't a big issue.
Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
This is leaking to loads of other media too - movie trailers have started with some quick action shots, then BIG text saying "trailer starts now". Like a trailer to a trailer. Which is released after a teaser for a trailer. They even have recurring sound effects (vine boom sounds, but movie trailer edition where every action event (explosion, punch, scene change) is accentuated with a distinct drum boom sound effect, often in time with the dramatized remix of recognisable music). I hate it lol. As for tiktok / other short video clip format content, one trend I've seen is to start the video with the conclusion (e.g. someone falling over), then starting with the buildup. Since these videos are played on loop anyway, they trick the viewer into thinking they missed the buildup.
- sevenseacat 10mo ago
  How I hate the trend of videos like YouTube shorts to almost show the punchline of the video at the start before the full video.
  - Nextgrid 10mo ago
    It's not limited to Shorts, even normal longform videos have had this crap for years now. I hate it too - fortunately SponsorBlock can take care of this, they have optional categories you can enable beyond just sponsors, including the "hook". I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark it) but my DSP skills aren't up to the task (and turns out LLMs are useless for these kinds of novel tasks).
    - andai 10mo ago
      In my experience an LLM could probably handle this. And it's not so novel. They can make an image stitcher which is basically the same problem. It would probably need to download the whole video first though, so I'm not sure it would work as an extension. And analysing all frames would be expensive upfront. (If you're using it interactively and waiting for a video to start playing.) You might be able to get away with just looking for repetition in the audio.
psychoslave 10mo ago
I wonder what proportion of people find things like TikTok, YouTube shorts, and even Twitter for the text counterpart, absolutely repulsive. It's not even disdain as in "I'm too good for this", more like some people can't stand the view of a spider I guess. And other things like HN can definitely hook my mind.
duxup 10mo ago
> You can't just find one hook that works Is that true?
wodow 10mo ago
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever... I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...
- slumberlust 10mo ago
  We have these answers already. At least the successful tubers like Mr. beast do. They ab test everything. That super creepy saturated image of him? Works really really well.
RGamma 10mo ago
This description leaves me feeling blandly horrified.
abustamam 10mo ago
I don't personally use tiktok but I have friends who will send me tiktok videos. I can't stand the dancing ones but the ones I usually end up watching through tend to be the ones that get right to the point. I wouldn't call it a hook, I'd just say it respects the viewer's time, which I like.

by simonw 10mo ago

PeterStuer 10mo ago

"You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever" Biology tends to disagree.

sublinear 10mo ago

[flagged]

simonw 10mo ago
I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok! Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/7517727101923953943 https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192... And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362823695638 https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
- sublinear 10mo ago
  Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking into Chernobyl to practice their parkour. I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.
  - Dylan16807 10mo ago
    If you don't like weird and fun at all, are you sure you're fairly judging whether things are weird and fun?
- antonvs 10mo ago
  > I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok! This is classic equivocation fallacy.
  - Dylan16807 10mo ago
    Not classic enough. You need to add an actual explanation if you want that comment to work. What are the multiple meanings to the same phrase? Presumably "weird and fun" is what you're calling out? But to me their post looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times.
    - antonvs 10mo ago
      > Presumably "weird and fun" Yes, you figured it out, so apparently I didn't need an "actual explanation". > looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times. That's a fascinating equivalence operator you're using.
      - vasco 10mo ago
        Guys it's not that serious
      - Dylan16807 10mo ago
        Could you do me a favor and paraphrase the two meanings of "weird and fun" you see? Because we can rewrite the second sentence with a pronoun so you're only parsing "weird and fun" once: "It's all on tiktok!" or to get over the top pedantic in removing any possibility of a double meaning: "The exact thing they say is lacking in quantity is still there on tiktok in full quantity." Those both sound like basically the same as the original to me and they clearly don't have an equivocation fallacy on the phrase "weird and fun". You could complain that putting so much on tiktok rather than other sites ruins the distribution, or something like that. Or you could say they're wrong and there is less. But that's not the equivocation fallacy you're accusing them of.
- hnfraudswil 10mo ago
  [dead]
- bigDinosaur 10mo ago
  It's impossible to discuss TikTok in isolation without discussing its algorithm or the whole 'the medium is the message' nature of it - which is precisely what distinguishes it from the era of the weird and bizarre personal website. In other words, it's inherently biased towards one form of content in a way that the general web is not (a website can contain anything, unlike TikTok).

tombert 10mo ago

This is part of why I hate TikTok so much. I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else. I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention. Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.

squigz 10mo ago
Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to. https://www.kexp.org/ https://www.kexp.org/ https://somafm.com/ https://somafm.com/
- keyringlight 10mo ago
  I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.
  - bsder 10mo ago
    The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering. For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this. Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?

dyauspitr 10mo ago

It’s so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits perfectly.

jaredsohn 10mo ago
I've started using these platforms for learning (stretch exercises, argentine tango patterns/musicality I might want to lead, etc) and am finding the experience to work better in those kinds of situations. Agree it can be brain rot if using it for entertainment, politics, etc.
- ericmcer 10mo ago
  It is still doing the same thing, the dopamine hit is just feeling like you learned something instead of seeing something funny/shocking/etc. The idea you can gain any kind of actual experience/knowledge about a thing through a series of 30s clips that are competing with millions of other 30s clips to grab you is folly.
- xandrius 10mo ago
  Honest question: why wouldn't you simply search for exactly the same things but on longer format platforms such as YouTube?
  - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
    TikTok isn't about searching, it's about tuning the algorithm to find just the things you want, without necessarily being explicit about what you want.
- dyauspitr 10mo ago
  Why short form though? I’ve always learned much better from long form, more comprehensive videos. Or I guess to put it another way I don’t believe I’ve ever learned anything besides quick hacks on reels/shorts/tiktok. Not even quick guitar licks.
- jaredsohn 10mo ago

BiteCode_dev 10mo ago

Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch. We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day. I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it. And I deleted it. I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling. In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.

rmunn 10mo ago
Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpaste commercial. The juxtaposition, he said, was bad for the human mind, and was going to create a generation that couldn't focus on important things. I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.
- noahjk 10mo ago
  I've noticed that I can read or see something very emotionally engaging - something that really resonates with me, so much so that I'm maybe even choking up over it - and while I'm still having that emotional response, move onto the next post. I almost always have a moment of meta-reflection that scares me - why wasn't I content to just sit there and process these big emotions? How is the dopamine part of my brain so much more powerful than even the emotional part, that it forces me to continue what I'm doing rather than just feeling?
- MonkeyClub 10mo ago

andai 10mo ago

>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind. I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.

tstrimple 10mo ago
Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
- komali2 10mo ago
  Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.
  - shawn_w 10mo ago
    See also John Barnes' Century Next Door books, where "memes" are basically computer viruses that jump to running on human brains, not just silicon chips. The results are... not pretty.
  - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
    My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end: <quote> What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma? Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs. From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop. </quote> -- [0] - In whatever sense models are "true", i.e. a nice way to describe reality, that's succinct and has good predictive power, or something. [1] - https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rage https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag... [2] - Which is not the same thing as saying it turned out wrong.

ericmcer 10mo ago

There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to think about whether it should watch or not.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
And the other factor is I think the "rat pulling a lever" thing. A rat is in a lab, pulls a lever, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again... no treat. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. This goes on, 10 pulls with no treat, but sometimes something comes out so the rat keeps going. You get the idea. This is a lot of social media. You end up scrolling through a lot of shit, adverts and subtle propaganda, passively absorbing it until you get rewarded with something you genuinely enjoy and get the good hormones from.

kmoser 10mo ago

> This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.

rossant 10mo ago
Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling. Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand. Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.
- sizzle 10mo ago
  That’s really actually hilarious and would probably get your account flagged by AI for showing obscenity or something nowadays.
deleted 10mo ago
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ctoth 10mo ago

Attention is all you need, after all. On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
And when propaganda is injected into it - subtly, through many channels and methods - it becomes worse. I'm confident that the western world's rightward shift is down to targeted social media campaigns. It doesn't help that said social media stopped checking for fake news and bent the knees to said rightward shift, because money.

klustregrif 10mo ago

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.

rrvsh 10mo ago
Yeah, I instantly disagreed with that point in the comment you replied to - TikTok's algorithm seems to reward sticking to your niche.
TeMPOraL 10mo ago
Does TikTok even have persistent personalities of this type? I thought a big part of the service was its recommendation algorithm that will keep recommending you other new stuff, not just reruns of the same influencers.
- Aryezz 10mo ago
  It's both. Since most videos are a couple minutes long at most, and a TikTok doomscrolling session can last for hours, the algorithm can show you all the new videos you haven't seen of accounts you seem to enjoy (or are following), and a ton of new stuff as well.
epiccoleman 10mo ago
This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings. He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche. Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least. [1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention [2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase

amelius 10mo ago

Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.

nsbk 10mo ago
There is no lizard brain. The "triune brain" theory has been debunked by modern neuroscience for years.

NedF 10mo ago

[dead]

galkk 10mo ago

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever Hmm. I feel exact opposite. Most of successful channels that i see are using exact same formula/structure/often even style time and time again.

jonnybgood 10mo ago

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it Isn't that the most followed user on TikTok Khaby Lame (his facial expression)? Looks like he just sold his company for $900M.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
Damn, I'm in the wrong industry. I think it's different for tiktok (as a non-tiktok user so take this with a huge grain of salt lmao), people don't watch one creator's videos one after the other, they get put in the big soup of clips that people scroll through for sometimes hours a day. And a lot of that is people sticking to one formula, because for many, the predictability is comforting / puts them in the tiktok brain off frame of mind. Which isn't a new phenomenon - lots of people have "comfort shows" on e.g. Netflix, often the studio series with long seasons like sitcoms. They're comfortable because they often maintain a similar energy or formula over their run time, and missing parts of it (like current-day episodic films) isn't a big issue.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago

This is leaking to loads of other media too - movie trailers have started with some quick action shots, then BIG text saying "trailer starts now". Like a trailer to a trailer. Which is released after a teaser for a trailer. They even have recurring sound effects (vine boom sounds, but movie trailer edition where every action event (explosion, punch, scene change) is accentuated with a distinct drum boom sound effect, often in time with the dramatized remix of recognisable music). I hate it lol. As for tiktok / other short video clip format content, one trend I've seen is to start the video with the conclusion (e.g. someone falling over), then starting with the buildup. Since these videos are played on loop anyway, they trick the viewer into thinking they missed the buildup.

sevenseacat 10mo ago
How I hate the trend of videos like YouTube shorts to almost show the punchline of the video at the start before the full video.
- Nextgrid 10mo ago
  It's not limited to Shorts, even normal longform videos have had this crap for years now. I hate it too - fortunately SponsorBlock can take care of this, they have optional categories you can enable beyond just sponsors, including the "hook". I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark it) but my DSP skills aren't up to the task (and turns out LLMs are useless for these kinds of novel tasks).
  - andai 10mo ago
    In my experience an LLM could probably handle this. And it's not so novel. They can make an image stitcher which is basically the same problem. It would probably need to download the whole video first though, so I'm not sure it would work as an extension. And analysing all frames would be expensive upfront. (If you're using it interactively and waiting for a video to start playing.) You might be able to get away with just looking for repetition in the audio.

psychoslave 10mo ago

I wonder what proportion of people find things like TikTok, YouTube shorts, and even Twitter for the text counterpart, absolutely repulsive. It's not even disdain as in "I'm too good for this", more like some people can't stand the view of a spider I guess. And other things like HN can definitely hook my mind.

duxup 10mo ago

> You can't just find one hook that works Is that true?

wodow 10mo ago

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever... I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...

slumberlust 10mo ago
We have these answers already. At least the successful tubers like Mr. beast do. They ab test everything. That super creepy saturated image of him? Works really really well.

RGamma 10mo ago

This description leaves me feeling blandly horrified.

abustamam 10mo ago

I don't personally use tiktok but I have friends who will send me tiktok videos. I can't stand the dancing ones but the ones I usually end up watching through tend to be the ones that get right to the point. I wouldn't call it a hook, I'd just say it respects the viewer's time, which I like.