3 ms·

Instagram (reels) and tiktok are truly online version of Heroine equivalent. I remember during pandemic time downloading tiktok just to see what's all the hype

Instagram (reels) and tiktok are truly online version of Heroine equivalent. I remember during pandemic time downloading tiktok just to see what's all the hype was about and next thing, I was wasting hours mindlessly scrolling through it. Later on same happened with reels as well. I would open the app thinking maybe just check for 15mins and time just goes by so fast and I would end-up wasting hours on it. Also, the comment sections are the worst. Total brainrot repetitive comments by people just seeking for more likes. Last year I finally deleted tiktok and few weeks ago I've deactivated my instagram account. Since then, I have actually been sleeping much better and also less negativity and stress in my life.

tentacleuno 3mo ago
That's awful, I'm glad I've never actually used either platform. These companies obviously seem to be employing psychologists et. al. to figure out how to make the platforms more addictive; I can't see how they'd get it so damn right otherwise. I keep hearing people talk about it but have never seen the appeal -- it seems like a lot of dopamine-inducing content with little substance. I'll take a longer educational video on YouTube any day.
- sajithdilshan 3mo ago
  They absolutely use some sort of psychological hacks when designing the algorithm. Somehow it finds the correct types of videos to keep you addictive pretty fast
  - Otterly99 3mo ago
    That's kind of the crazy part, there is no actual "psychological" tricks in the sense that they just train their recommendation algorithm to build your feed in a way that makes you spend as much time as possible (basically a glorified A/B testing on a massive scale). With these types of algorithms, massive amount of data usually perform better than any underlying model you could have.
    - mrguyorama 3mo ago
      There's more to it. The short form content "crushes" what options are available, so it becomes much easier to classify you into buckets with similar people. This is what actually drives the "We talked about X and then I got an ad for it" effect. You talked about X because something you were presented with prompted your brain to think about it, and the platform knows that people in your cohort who were presented with that thing often navigated to X later, so it should show it to you to claim an impression for it. It doesn't actually have to figure out any connection of the prompting source to X. But some people are somewhat immune to this populism. I find short form content like TikTok and Twitter/Bluesky to be actively anti-engaging. The format and medium and "Virality" mechanic drive constraints on content that are actively signal negative. Somehow my brain rejects it, even though I'm ADHD and have addictive tendencies for things like Youtube in general, novelty, and used to get extremely addicted to Reddit. I'm pretty snobby about media, so maybe whatever drives me to have that preference makes me likely to bounce off that kind of populism system. Maybe there's a biological component to Hipsterism, like a certain kind of anti-authority issue. I strongly believe that making a product, media, or content more palatable to "General audiences" or similar large cohorts forces you to sand off all the edges, cut out any opinions or takes, and become far less palatable to a different cohort, possibly one that describes itself as having "Taste". So in some sense, the platforms self select for people who are vulnerable to them, which simplifies classification somewhat as well, even though that is the vast majority of people. But TikTok would never find what I like because what I like cannot be found on TikTok. Notably, this includes creators who I follow like a lost puppy on youtube, because the ways you have to change and modify your output to "work" on TikTok make it worse in many ways.
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    I actually doubt it involves a lot of hacks and psychological trickery. Given the concept of short-form videos, some of them will be viewed and shared more than others. Just promote those to everyone. People are not that different in what they find engaging. Maybe use a few broad demographic groupings to fine-tune things a bit.
  - tentacleuno 2mo ago
    I assume that the success of individual parts of the website are predicated on whether or not they contribute to the platform's addictiveness, and that's been gradually improved over time: moving an icon 5px to the left, or slightly increasing the font size of a certain element. It just seems like a psychological war ground designed to entrap and monetize the user's attention, at all costs.
TZubiri 3mo ago
Maybe I misread, but this is not about addictive products like reels at all, it's about child trafficking being advertised through Instagram with public but non explicit photos, and Meta's failure to remove that content.
- stingraycharles 3mo ago
  You’re right, but it seems like the punishments are not really about that, but just a general “protect the children” and age verification system. > Instead, the court ordered Meta to continue to improve its age-assurance tools in New Mexico, which include using artificial intelligence to determine people’s age based on signals such as who their friends are and what types of content they post and consume. Meta must also attempt to develop a dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” in the next two years. I’m sure the results of this will be stellar, being ordered to attempt to develop an AI prediction model… if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order.
  - TZubiri 3mo ago
    > if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order. Probably, but they would be still liable for the additional compensatory and punitive damages of the issues they have set precendent for being liable to.
fergie 3mo ago
To be fair- one of the interesting things about TikTok is how it rewards good commenting. It seems to bury negative commentary and reward positive commentary with the result that the comment field is generally some combination of genuinely insightful and hilarious.
- sajithdilshan 3mo ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever seen any good comment on TikTok. The most liked top comments are always one liner brainrot. Might be funny on the first time, but after seeing the same types of comments over and over get pretty exhausting
- DangitBobby 3mo ago
  TikTok comments are literally bottom of the barrel, worse than any platform I know of, way below YouTube and even X. It's a cesspool.
  - birdostrich 3mo ago
    In my experience, Instagram's comments are the worst of the worst. Can't speak on X though, since I don't use it.
hbn 3mo ago
I get the addictiveness of TikTok and Reels but I don't know what the solution is to the supposed insidiousness. They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff. Are we gonna make laws that say "if you're running a video platform you have to figure out what people DON'T want to watch and regularly shove it in their face so the feed is bad"? That still requires building a deep understanding of every user. Do feeds need to all be Certified Completely Random™ content?
- biophysboy 3mo ago
  Well there are much simpler “algorithms” that do not use reinforcement learning and do not have the same emergent issues at stake here (addiction, ragebait, etc). The argument would be that algorithmic curation makes you an editor, not a passive host, and you should face the risk of reasonable liability if you choose to use more lucrative extractive machine learning tools.
- forlorn_mammoth 3mo ago
  It is very interesting to compare tiktok in China to the US. > In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” a tech expert stated that the U.S. version of TikTok — a Chinese-owned social media platform — is different than the Chinese version of the app, comparing the two experiences to opium and spinach. https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-between-tik-tok-in-china-and-the-us/ https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe... This sounds a bit more advanced than > They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff.
- brailsafe 3mo ago
  > They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff. > you have to figure out what people DON'T want to watch and regularly shove it in their face so the feed is bad They did both, and figured out the perfect delivery mechanism to keep you watching; just the right amount of everything, with an interaction pattern not dissimilar to a casino. YouTube and Instagram are dramatically less addictive if you just download discrete videos. I'm a huge proponent of deleting all of these apps, but if you think you organically really like certain content, download it on the fly from a list of select channels.

tentacleuno 3mo ago

That's awful, I'm glad I've never actually used either platform. These companies obviously seem to be employing psychologists et. al. to figure out how to make the platforms more addictive; I can't see how they'd get it so damn right otherwise. I keep hearing people talk about it but have never seen the appeal -- it seems like a lot of dopamine-inducing content with little substance. I'll take a longer educational video on YouTube any day.

sajithdilshan 3mo ago
They absolutely use some sort of psychological hacks when designing the algorithm. Somehow it finds the correct types of videos to keep you addictive pretty fast
- Otterly99 3mo ago
  That's kind of the crazy part, there is no actual "psychological" tricks in the sense that they just train their recommendation algorithm to build your feed in a way that makes you spend as much time as possible (basically a glorified A/B testing on a massive scale). With these types of algorithms, massive amount of data usually perform better than any underlying model you could have.
  - mrguyorama 3mo ago
    There's more to it. The short form content "crushes" what options are available, so it becomes much easier to classify you into buckets with similar people. This is what actually drives the "We talked about X and then I got an ad for it" effect. You talked about X because something you were presented with prompted your brain to think about it, and the platform knows that people in your cohort who were presented with that thing often navigated to X later, so it should show it to you to claim an impression for it. It doesn't actually have to figure out any connection of the prompting source to X. But some people are somewhat immune to this populism. I find short form content like TikTok and Twitter/Bluesky to be actively anti-engaging. The format and medium and "Virality" mechanic drive constraints on content that are actively signal negative. Somehow my brain rejects it, even though I'm ADHD and have addictive tendencies for things like Youtube in general, novelty, and used to get extremely addicted to Reddit. I'm pretty snobby about media, so maybe whatever drives me to have that preference makes me likely to bounce off that kind of populism system. Maybe there's a biological component to Hipsterism, like a certain kind of anti-authority issue. I strongly believe that making a product, media, or content more palatable to "General audiences" or similar large cohorts forces you to sand off all the edges, cut out any opinions or takes, and become far less palatable to a different cohort, possibly one that describes itself as having "Taste". So in some sense, the platforms self select for people who are vulnerable to them, which simplifies classification somewhat as well, even though that is the vast majority of people. But TikTok would never find what I like because what I like cannot be found on TikTok. Notably, this includes creators who I follow like a lost puppy on youtube, because the ways you have to change and modify your output to "work" on TikTok make it worse in many ways.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  I actually doubt it involves a lot of hacks and psychological trickery. Given the concept of short-form videos, some of them will be viewed and shared more than others. Just promote those to everyone. People are not that different in what they find engaging. Maybe use a few broad demographic groupings to fine-tune things a bit.
- tentacleuno 2mo ago
  I assume that the success of individual parts of the website are predicated on whether or not they contribute to the platform's addictiveness, and that's been gradually improved over time: moving an icon 5px to the left, or slightly increasing the font size of a certain element. It just seems like a psychological war ground designed to entrap and monetize the user's attention, at all costs.

TZubiri 3mo ago

Maybe I misread, but this is not about addictive products like reels at all, it's about child trafficking being advertised through Instagram with public but non explicit photos, and Meta's failure to remove that content.

stingraycharles 3mo ago
You’re right, but it seems like the punishments are not really about that, but just a general “protect the children” and age verification system. > Instead, the court ordered Meta to continue to improve its age-assurance tools in New Mexico, which include using artificial intelligence to determine people’s age based on signals such as who their friends are and what types of content they post and consume. Meta must also attempt to develop a dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” in the next two years. I’m sure the results of this will be stellar, being ordered to attempt to develop an AI prediction model… if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order.
- TZubiri 3mo ago
  > if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order. Probably, but they would be still liable for the additional compensatory and punitive damages of the issues they have set precendent for being liable to.

fergie 3mo ago

To be fair- one of the interesting things about TikTok is how it rewards good commenting. It seems to bury negative commentary and reward positive commentary with the result that the comment field is generally some combination of genuinely insightful and hilarious.

sajithdilshan 3mo ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any good comment on TikTok. The most liked top comments are always one liner brainrot. Might be funny on the first time, but after seeing the same types of comments over and over get pretty exhausting
DangitBobby 3mo ago
TikTok comments are literally bottom of the barrel, worse than any platform I know of, way below YouTube and even X. It's a cesspool.
- birdostrich 3mo ago
  In my experience, Instagram's comments are the worst of the worst. Can't speak on X though, since I don't use it.

hbn 3mo ago

I get the addictiveness of TikTok and Reels but I don't know what the solution is to the supposed insidiousness. They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff. Are we gonna make laws that say "if you're running a video platform you have to figure out what people DON'T want to watch and regularly shove it in their face so the feed is bad"? That still requires building a deep understanding of every user. Do feeds need to all be Certified Completely Random™ content?

biophysboy 3mo ago
Well there are much simpler “algorithms” that do not use reinforcement learning and do not have the same emergent issues at stake here (addiction, ragebait, etc). The argument would be that algorithmic curation makes you an editor, not a passive host, and you should face the risk of reasonable liability if you choose to use more lucrative extractive machine learning tools.
forlorn_mammoth 3mo ago
It is very interesting to compare tiktok in China to the US. > In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” a tech expert stated that the U.S. version of TikTok — a Chinese-owned social media platform — is different than the Chinese version of the app, comparing the two experiences to opium and spinach. https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-between-tik-tok-in-china-and-the-us/ https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe... This sounds a bit more advanced than > They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff.
brailsafe 3mo ago
> They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff. > you have to figure out what people DON'T want to watch and regularly shove it in their face so the feed is bad They did both, and figured out the perfect delivery mechanism to keep you watching; just the right amount of everything, with an interaction pattern not dissimilar to a casino. YouTube and Instagram are dramatically less addictive if you just download discrete videos. I'm a huge proponent of deleting all of these apps, but if you think you organically really like certain content, download it on the fly from a list of select channels.