Tiktok is the worst of the brain-rotting social media products our world has produced, and that's saying a lot.
I spent many years in the early days of social media building: starting at StumbleUpon, working on early Facebook apps, building companies in the space. It always felt that social media was an unstoppable train, but it seems like the benefits of connecting everyone together outweighed the negatives: the constant address book spamming, content designed to be viral rather than informative, etc.
I suppose that's it's really just the distilled, pure dopamine lever part of all the early stuff we built with everything else stripped out. It was always inevitable that the culture of optimization would strip out the humanity, I suppose.
EDIT: The replies to this comment really have an "I'm not addicted, you just don't understand it" vibe.
TikTok shows you exactly what you like. Which seems like the reason it's both heavily watched and reviled.
My FYP feed is full of golden retrievers, lifting tips, and popsci with some news and comedy/couples sketches thrown in. They even finally learned not to show dancing chicks.
And you can even enable special STEM feed. However, these seem to be largely clips of videos I like more in full on Youtube.
And there is a patchset for TikTok on ReVanvced[1] which allows you to filter out ads, live shows, stories, etc.
[1] https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.zhiliaoapp.musically
Tiktok is what you consume and IMHO it's far better at this than any other social media.
It can be as simple as watching a video that is a "part 1" and if you watch the whole thing, your fyp will almost certainly show you "part 2" without you having to do anything. Your fyp quickly becomes whatever you interact with. I have gone down so many rabbit holes this way like medical residency Tiktok. I'm not a doctor. I won't ever be a doctor. Do I find this fascinating? Absolutely. Same with, say, people rescuing dogs.
Every other platform I've seen is "global" in the sense that all they really end up doing is pushing their top creators down your throat. Tiktok it seems is the only one that has successfully "localized" their content such that there are top creators on Tiktok that I have never seen a video from.
So I'm not sure where this idea that "Tiktok is extreme brainrot" comes from. If you're seeing garbage on Tiktok, I suspect you either barely or have never used Tiktok.
TikTok is young enough that it hasn't completed the full enshittification cycle. The worst is yet to come.
It’s not in China’s interest to go enshittify it, it’s a perfect cyberweapon working exactly as intended.
"If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer." I think this shows the TikTok algorithm makes things look more ubiquitous then they really are, I've never seen anything like this, and half the time when I mention what seems to me to be a big meme like demure and mindful to someone else i know whose on TikTok they'll have no idea what I'm talking about.
Absolutely, that's why I believe politics are the way they are right now, people see content that's more and more extreme of their preferred side and they believe that's the complete representation of the situation, the truth. This makes it hard to take someone else on the opposite side seriously, let alone have a conversation.
I think the big problem is that people use social media and other highly biased sources for important information (political, health, etc). In theory, school reports and experiments requiring citations are supposed to demonstrate the way to scrutinize and select sources of information. It seems that's mostly lost though.
In a lot of cases -- at least in every case I care about -- the opposite side is so different that it is indeed hard to have conversation with them. I don't think this is the result of an algorithm, I think the algorithm just reflects reality.
For example, I believe people should be able to use a doctor to get healthcare, and they believe the government should prevent that. There's no middle ground there, it's a boolean.
Is this meant to be ironic? The example given is a great example of the sort of extremist strawmanning meant to warp people's views to promote a boolean mindset on the issue.
No, not ironic. One side says the government should be involved in the decision (and may tell you that you can't get care). The other says it's up to you. There's no third option.
I know of no proposals that don't involve the government regulation of care. The government can mandate treatment just as they can ban treatments in any of the systems. There are a variety of proposed systems that display these properties to varying degrees.
You can frame it however you want, but there's no common ground between the abortion position of even mainstream Republican politicians and the position of the typical Democratic voter.
Do you think there is at least some amount of overlap/agreement between republicans and democrats on things like:
1) prohibiting late term abortion in non-exceptional cases, and
2) imposing some degree of penalty or liability for assault, including harm to a pregnant woman herself as well as to any potential offspring that are in development?
There may also be some other areas of agreement, even between conservative republicans and democrats, on permitting certain forms of abortion in some cases (e.g. ectopic pregnancies) to save the life of the mother.
That's because the real root questions have been hidden under all the political games. Now we will likely never get answers to these because of how perverted the debate has become.
The issue philosophical boils down to 1) what defines a human life, and 2) when is it acceptable to kill.
If this were merely a philosophical debate then yeah, we could have a lively discussion to come up with some answers that would satisfy us individually. We probably wouldn't all agree and that'd be OK.
But IMO the debate is not really about that -- it's about what we do based on the answer to those questions. It's about what governments can force upon people. Should they be allowed to imprison you if those that write laws believe in something without hard evidence and for which harm is likely unprovable?
"Should they be allowed to imprison you if those that write laws believe in something without hard evidence and for which harm is likely unprovable?"
They do all the time, on a variety of issues. That's part of the social contract of living in a society.
> Should they be allowed to imprison you if those that write laws believe in something without hard evidence and for which harm is likely unprovable?
Should they? Maybe not - penalties that are disproportionate to provable harm seem unjust and opposed to personal liberty.
Do they? Absolutely, because for certain things we've decided (rightly or wrongly) that we should lock people up. For example, a case of attempted murder can result in a life sentence, even if the attempted victim is provably very alive and physically unharmed.
I think you're misunderstanding me, which may be my fault because I'm being a little vague. I'm talking specifically about abortion.
There are those that want abortion banned under all circumstances, allowed, and allowed only in some cases. That third option is deceiving, however, and should for all practical purposes be treated as "banned" because:
a) one must prove they meet the government's requirements
b) the government with such a law is de facto hostile and run by those predisposed to deny requests
c) the government must make their decision quickly (which may be impossible, like if a rape must be proven in court)
It really is as simple as that.
The reason I was being vague is that this applies in a lot of other cases.
Frankly, I think the problem isn't that some algorithm is causing a divide or merely reflecting it. The real problem is that many people aren't used to thinking about the second-order details of their policies, they just respond and vote with their gut.
(Ironically, the same side that wants to ban abortion also tends to argue against policies like UBI because they say if the government can grant it the government can also take it away.)
> I'm talking specifically about abortion.
We know, but notice it took you three posts to actually mention the word. In your other posts you euphemistically used the nicer sounding (and more general) "healthcare" word to make your point. That's what OP is talking about: You're ironically doing the same thing the "other side" does. Using euphemisms and vague, but extreme positions (healthcare itself is under attack) such that it's hard to have conversation.
For what it's worth, I agree with you, but it's hard not to notice you using the same tactics the other side uses.
Like I said later in my post, this applies in other cases. Those that wanted to ban alcohol didn't consider the second order effect of creating powerful criminal organizations. Bans on drugs have done the same thing, and outlawing guns would have the same effect.
Similarly, policies that would outlaw, say, coal burning in our country will just outsource that pollution to other countries because we don't enforce the ban on exporters. Such policies make some folks feel good about themselves because they don't think them through to their logical conclusions.
And with regards to abortion specifically, I didn't even get in to the forms of punishment and tracking being proposed. That's where there's a middle ground -- exclusively between far-right conservatives.
The argument that social media is responsible for political polarization is reductive and ahistorical.
It ignores the thousands of years of division that we've had along ethnic and religious lines.
What we have now is simply the peak of a longstanding trend that's older than the United States: it's white supremacy. That's all it is. Anti-immigrant hysteria? White nativism and white chauvinism.
These things are manifesting now because of deteriorating material conditions and longstanding beliefs, not because of social media (eg [1]).
You contradict yourself very quickly. If we're at "the peak", how did we get there? Couldn't social media be a factor?
Moreover, the idea that white supremacy is at its peak right now is ridiculous and ahistorical in its own right. It's also massively disrespectful to those who lived through things like chattel slavery or the holocaust. To say that seeing some loudmouth spout off on Twitter is worse than either of those is pretty gross.
I should be more specific. By "peaking" I mean a local optimum rather than a global optimum. I would liken it to the reaction of, say, the civil rights era. Put another way: the civil rights era (particularly desegregation) caused a reaction by those who resisted progress and sought to reinstate their desired social order.
What we've seen in the last 10-20 years is a similar reaction to improvements in the rights for various minorities. Combine this with poor material conditions and you have a recipe for reactionary attitudes and violence.
There are many parallels between now and 1930s Germany. The Great Depression hit Germany hard so there's your declining material conditions. One of the earliest targets of the Nazis was what's likely the world's first transgender clinic, Berlin's Institute for Sexual Research [1], complete with book burnings. We also have increasing nationalistic sentiment, currently with the completely invented anti-immigration crime hysteria.
Also in common: this idea of moral decay. Then with "cultural Bolshevism" [2], now with "cultural Marxism" [3]. And the Great Replacement [4].
What's required is a normalized belief system and the right material conditions for this radicalization and polarization to spread. Social media is, well, a medium. It cannot replace or create either of those conditions. It's like blaming radicalization in earlier times on the existence of the printing press.
[1]: https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-in...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-the-great-replaceme...
The Nazis targeted that Institute because its founder and director, Magnus Hirschfeld, was Jewish and homosexual. It had nothing to do with trans.
Seems unlikely, given that May 1933 the attack wasn't just against Hirschfeld, but against the entire Institute, and as a part of the broader "Action against un-German Spirit". FWIW, the US Holocaust Museum specifically says the Nazis hated Hirschfeld not just for being Jewish and for his own sexuality, but for his pacifism and theories about gender - https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hir...
Case in point
These people that posts these links is what makes HN extra good
If you like this article, it's written by Ryan Broderick the guy behind Garbage Day, a newsletter I can't recommend highly enough if you spend rather too much time online:
As someone who's watched tons of these videos, now I know!
I've always wanted to try the software, too bad the author never tracked it down.
Does anybody have a example video instead of thousands words because I quite can't imagine what is he talking about
The title of the article refers to this video. https://youtu.be/6PJxc2B0G0M I believe the YouTube channel is owned by the original creators.
https://youtu.be/BVY20VI259Y?feature=shared
They get repetitive quick
Ever closer to not needing a human in the loop. AI builds the videos, popularity acts as the genetic signal, and we keep fuzzing humans brains
Let's get serious for a second here. You have to be a complete braindead zombie to find those videos entertaining. I can't believe anybody is wasting their time on these.
Did you RTFA?
"This jaundiced real-estate porn is meant to satirize the housing crunch in cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the commenters are all in on the joke"
I come from a cultural background such that I clued in on this when I first encountered the videos. Is the joke overplayed now? Definitely - but it's not braindead, it's equal parts over-the-top satire and wish fulfilment (if ONLY you could knock out your building's walls and extend your coffin apartment, Kowloon Walled City-style)
The mixture of the narrator + common elements between each one (galvanized square steel) + the weird corporatized animations and it all knowing it is satire is what makes it so funny.
Other people have made their own versions [0], which sort of shows all their elements of the meme transplanted into a different context (furry, in this case).