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.
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.
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.
Secondly, I've been told it takes 20 minutes of browsing and it would train automagically. Well after 30 minutes that I regret spending, it was still showing me the most terrible content humanity has ever produced and my eye were bleeding.
I uninstalled the app and won't touch it again. It feels like being a teen forcing oneself to start smoking cigarets.
And it might contain creative things but enough is very repetitive.
Bruh, get real. TikTok is filled with women complaining about dating. Why not just admit what is staring you in the face? There is an entire segment of the universe that just responds to those videos.
And there is plenty on TikTok that is good.
But even if you can "train" it, the problem is that it's scientifically engineered to keep your scrolling. I think that part you missed.
Watch Wall-E where everyone sits in special "TikTok" chairs, have food delivered to them and the screen continually scrolls. That movie was before its time man.
Watch here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7WAq_GZY8]
Unfortunately, you will not get the message until you have to go out with friends that are tuned out to you because they're constantly scrolling TikTok on their phones.
(And yes, I have installed TikTok for weeks and months at a time and always ended up deleting it and washing down my phone. Even after "Training" it.)
I’ve never see a video with a woman complaining about dating on TikTok. In years of use.
I’m not saying you are not seeing them, just that I have not seen one.
Maybe you need better friends. Or you could try being more assertive and saying something like, "when you are looking at your phone instead of paying attention to me, I feel ignored. If you continue to do that, I will leave and do something else." And then ACTUALLY leave if they don't stop! They will learn quickly that if they want to enjoy your company (if it is indeed enjoyable) then they will need to have self restraint.
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.
I’m just wary of entertainment that’s engineered to be addictive. Simple, bite-sized, all sugar and salt, served in a bottomless bag.
I don’t bring certain snacks into my house because I can’t trust myself to snack responsibly. TikTok is the same, but with the flavour expertly tailored to my weaknesses.
This would also explain why people has so wildly different views on the site here.
There's a search icon (magnifying glass) in the top right of your home feed.
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.
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.
.
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.
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?)
You most definitely can't. The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff.
When I first started using TikTok I felt like I was constantly getting scammed of my time.
I think TikTok is the worst social media platform. It's extremely easy to waste a large amount of time on it and come away with nothing.
TikTok added a progress bar so you can skip to the end in those cases and save yourself the time now.
Or, you can just scroll past those videos. Again, the reason they're clickbaity is because your brain thinks there's going to be a payoff, but if you train you brain to instantly scroll past those videos then you'll also train the algorithm to show less of those kinds of videos.
So? It's still limited by the ADD format of TikTok and you'll forget about it 3 seconds later. It's garbage.
Sure, this isn’t always good, because then you can have 1000 snowclones of something uninteresting, but it isn’t particularly invasive to the general experience.
YouTube just bumps you to the next video. That’s worse if you’re trying to retain info. Coursera courses usually have short snippets of video throughout the lesson, there’s nothing particularly ‘ADD’ about that.
It’s very common for people to memorize TikToks and I remember the content plenty of the ones I have looked at, despite being diagnosed with ADHD.
Why exactly would I retain information less from TikTok than from a Khan Academy video?
>Why exactly would I retain information less from TikTok than from a Khan Academy video?
Unless you are watching some sort of structured course type thing that is broken down into... 100's of 3 minute videos? I don't see the point.
I was in a computer science theory class at a prestigious university, and a number of otherwise extremely intelligent CS majors had a curious difficulty understanding the Pumping Lemma. They would ask the teacher to explain it. This happened a few times since attendance wasn’t mandatory and not everyone was present.
The resulting explanation from the instructor would absolutely fit into a three minute TikTok, plus it would be rewatchable. Unfortunately, there’s no video there that explains it today, but that could be remedied.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I truly bemoan the HN algorithm that made you do this for karma.
If they were their own apps you would appreciate it
Most bored people do nothing creative. And the creative ones get inspiration by things like TikTok.
I generally agree with your comment but no, this is a ridiculous piece of scientism.
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.
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!