[HN Gopher] TikTok and the Sorting Hat
___________________________________________________________________
TikTok and the Sorting Hat
Author : hardmaru
Score : 230 points
Date : 2020-08-04 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eugenewei.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eugenewei.com)
| taylorhou wrote:
| Fantastic read. Time for Ben of Stratechery to pass the baton :p
| - I'm assuming Eugene is now going to get a gazillion messages of
| employment or consulting requests at the aforementioned FAANG
| companies to help steer the direction of their tiktok ambitions.
| nnao45 wrote:
| hahaha
| mgraczyk wrote:
| > How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run
| circles around U.S. video apps
|
| Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The
| founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California
| when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded
| while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were
| not some random people who didn't understand US culture.
|
| This is important to the article's thesis. At least part of the
| early insight into the US market comes from the founders living
| and working in the US.
| dirtyid wrote:
| IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American /
| western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards
| mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of
| Chinese style censorship.
|
| What you see on TikTok is reflects content that survives the
| crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful"
| opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of
| Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has
| coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while
| elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods
| the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates
| because engaging and challenging controversial topics is how
| toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. The
| last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is
| to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism
| among impressionable audiences, things western social media
| platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in
| China in the first place. Of course, politics and toxicity
| exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered
| / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first
| place. it. It maybe a bad unitary model for governing
| cyberspace policy for an entire country, but it's has merits
| when applied to certain audiences / networks and the west
| should learn from it even if TikTok gets banned.
| thrownblown wrote:
| It's curious comparing that to the more profit motived social
| networks bias towards outrage because that gets engagement
| and clicks?
| wenbin wrote:
| The musicaly people were already veterans in Silicon Valley
| tech scene (not young under silicon valley standard & with
| years of working experience).
|
| They raised money to build education product with short videos
| in it.
|
| The education product was not doing well. So they cut
| everything and kept the short video part.
|
| Sounds familiar?
|
| YouTube was initially a dating website with videos. Then they
| cut the dating part and kept videos.
|
| Instagram was initially a checkin app with photos. Then they
| cut the checkin part and kept photos.
| jehlakj wrote:
| For a second I thought you were going to mention vine.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| With vine twitter went one step further and got rid of
| video part too
| egypturnash wrote:
| Flickr: initially an image management/sharing tool for a 2d
| online game. Cut the game, kept the image sharing.
|
| Slack: initially an internal communication tool for another
| incarnation of the same game. Cut the game, kept the chat.
|
| (An incarnation of this game did briefly exist between these
| two, but only lasted about a year.)
| strombofulous wrote:
| What was the game called?
| aniro wrote:
| Glitch.
| ZeljkoS wrote:
| Fascinating! For curious, here are more details:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Career
| preommr wrote:
| Instead of being amazed that TikTok beat juggernauts, maybe it
| should be reframed that they beat companies that have terrible
| products.
|
| Sine we're talking about niches and customized feeds, let's look
| at reddit. My god is the reddit app absolutely horrendous. It's
| so bad I use the web app in desktop mode because other forms have
| terrible UX. They just don't care.
|
| Or let's talk about another site that was mentioned: youtube.
| It's like Google with all their money, doesn't really care to
| spend real money on trying to solve problems. If they dumped
| something like 100-200 million into better community outreach,
| and actual going in and tagging videos, and dealing with content,
| the service would be so much better. Instead, they made their
| money on search, and now it's spinning it's wheels trying to find
| clever algorithms to solve problems.
|
| We knew there was a market for an app that lets you easily
| create, edit and upload videos. Vine proved the formula worked.
| TikTok stepped in and filled the void.
| tmabraham wrote:
| Very interesting read about why TikTok is succeeding. It makes me
| more curious about how the TikTok curation algorithm works!
|
| I appreciate the comparison of TikTok to other social networks
| like Facebook and Twitter, but I am surprised there is no
| discussion about Reddit? Reddit is interesting in that people
| have to follow topics/communities in the form of subreddits, so
| it only works if the user puts in the effort to find communities
| to subscribe to. Maybe Reddit could also benefit from a better
| curation algorithm.
| peter303 wrote:
| Interesting article in NYTimes a few minutes ago that several
| Trump advisers had to talk him into the MicroSoft compromise just
| before he was to sign the banning order. The advisors were
| horrified they'd lose an angry generation of new voters. In a
| sense this now a win-win for the administration: they punish
| China a little bit and dont overly alienate young voters.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| this doesn't surprise me at all. I work at a consumer company and
| we use neural networks to personalize feeds. Thousands of
| features feed in and each member gets a different feed. It
| doesn't take much / long to personalize.
|
| What I am surprised by is that YouTube or others dont use as
| effectively. Neural networks are very well known. or, is there
| something "next level" that TikTok is using that isn't well
| known?
|
| Also worth calling out that Netflix also used to use personalized
| recommendation engines, but eventually found that "top in the US"
| won out, which I found fascinating. If one person loves action
| movies for example, wouldn't they find a list of those more
| appealing than a generic list of top 10? I sometimes get curious
| about top 10 but rarely actually watch them myself
| ry_co wrote:
| My gut instinct is that Netflix can't use the personalized
| algorithmic approach that TikTok succeeds with because Netflix
| has to pay dearly for its content, where TikTok does not.
| Because of the cost structure of licensing, Netflix cannot
| afford to have the diversity of content that TikTok's user-
| generated approach enables. A small content library makes it
| impossible to build a meaningfully personalized feed.
| est wrote:
| tiktok sometimes do pay for their content, big hit artists
| get a exclusive contract deal. Tiktok is as a matter of fact
| celebrit managing service.
| basch wrote:
| It's also much harder to tell why somebody liked a 2h movie,
| vs a 15 second clip. The 15 second clip only has so many
| properties, where as there's millions of reasons I might like
| one movie but not a similar one. Also, as far as Netflix, id
| rather see more diversity, and not see the same movie made
| over and over again. I would wager TikTok viewers are more
| willing to watch repetitive things play out.
| creeble wrote:
| The article mentions that TikTok owes a lot of its early traction
| to its predecessor, musical.ly. but there's no mention of
| how/whether musical.ly got license for their lip sync music.
|
| Was the success of musical.ly (and by some large extension,
| TikTok) based on the difficult-to-stop (because China) pirating
| of music?
|
| I now unleash the piracy-is-not-theft dogs...
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| They used licensed music
| creeble wrote:
| Musical.ly did? How did they negotiate that license, I
| wonder?
|
| Let me put it another way then: Is the success of musical.ly
| and its successor TikTok really about somehow getting
| licensed music on a platform out the gate? And the sorting
| hat is just a good refinement that wouldn't have a chance to
| exist without the licensing?
| kangnkodos wrote:
| The article didn't have many details about the "For You Page feed
| algorithm". Any guesses as to how it analyzes a video, and which
| properties it looks at?
| whlr wrote:
| Don't know much about this, but I would have thought TikTok
| relies on the watch patterns of its viewers, rather than direct
| video analysis.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| Latent visual features are likely a strong component. I imagine
| if you created a new account and started watching content with
| only blond people in it, the ranking algorithm would pretty
| quickly start showing you only blond people.
| aabhay wrote:
| Yeah I'm imagining a mix of facial features, audio/music
| metadata, and some kind of collaborative filtering between
| viewers and creators. The vast majority of feeds use at least
| geography based personalization to give you content in a
| familiar language, too.
| angel_j wrote:
| The simpler answer is TikTok paid an ample Chinese labor force to
| watch and heart U.S. videos. This gives the users a nice dopamine
| rush and brings them back. It was obvious by the number of likes
| and comments very dumb videos would have.
| balola wrote:
| Chinese who master both English language and US culture are
| quite rare in China.
| angel_j wrote:
| TikTok already admitted they filtered out "poor and ugly"
| people. It's not hard to for a laborer to like a video and
| pick a (suggested) response.
| zerowangtwo wrote:
| Maybe you just don't understand the particular brands of
| irony/satire or the current trends going on at the time those
| videos you've seen were made?
| greeniron wrote:
| that's just plain wrong. if you even used tiktok, you'll
| understand how truly frighteningly powerful their algorithm is
| at finding exactly the kind of content you want to watch. i was
| never the kind of person to scroll my phone right before
| sleeping, but somehow i found myself doing that these days on
| tiktok, mindlessly just swiping up over and over again, not
| able to stop because almost every video seems to appeal
| precisely to my taste, even in the weird humor stuff.
| angel_j wrote:
| Wow I get downvoted to make room for "it's magic".
| codekansas wrote:
| Some really good points. Does anyone have a good explanation for
| why Chinese startups seem to have mastered build AI-centric apps
| while American startups (and large companies) lag behind?
|
| Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why
| has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are
| both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up
| hit despite having top-notch ML engineers.
| dillonmckay wrote:
| Labor costs?
| logicchains wrote:
| ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, pays more for AI
| developers than most western companies:
| https://crm.org/articles/3-million-pay-packages-how-a-
| chines....
| codekansas wrote:
| Speaking entirely anecdotally, I suspect having a bunch of
| people working on an ML algorithm actually does more harm
| than good. It's more important that everyone in the product
| stack is on the same page about the point.
|
| The Facebook Newsfeed UI, for example, has to balance so many
| different signals. Compare that with TikTok's UI, which is
| very efficient at collecting a clear reinforcement signal and
| only has to deal with one homogenous kind of data. It's like
| the entire TikTok team, not just the data scientists, focused
| in on doing ML really well.
|
| I'm really impressed and kind of scared whenever I use
| TikTok. It really does feel like a whole different level of
| ML-powered addictiveness, designed from the ground up rather
| than having the ML part added on.
| dumb1224 wrote:
| Which other chinese startups with machine-learning as its core?
| Do you mind listing some examples?
| codekansas wrote:
| ByteDance and iFlytek have stood out to me. I saw iFlytek's
| universal translator at the airport one time and it was
| really impressive. There's also a number of examples in Kai-
| Fu Lee's book "AI Superpowers" - I guess that's the book that
| put this thought in my head in the first place
| actuator wrote:
| I think he might be referring to companies like SenseTime
| which were in fields like image/video recognition. I think
| for fields like this there is a cultural barrier which
| prevents companies like these from being successful in US.
|
| Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video
| analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you
| would probably have employee mutiny at your hands.
|
| I was seeing a Vice video on the surveillance technologies
| the companies are building in China where the engineer
| building it was so excited to show the technology he had
| built not thinking about how invasively it tracks everything,
| keeps history etc. I would just call it a cultural gap.
| dumb1224 wrote:
| It's true that the lack of awareness of privacy is pretty
| prevalent even in industry. Hence the ease of obtaining
| large amount of highly curated data. But it is also true
| that these details are used as material for sensationalist
| journalism. Sometimes I can tell clearly (by understanding
| what they speak) the interviewees were so innocently
| excited without knowing how they are cut into videos. But I
| could be biased too.
| actuator wrote:
| Yeah, I don't doubt it. It could very well have been
| edited to look like that, either for views or
| sensationalism. Here is the video if you want to see:
| https://youtu.be/CLo3e1Pak-Y
| markus_zhang wrote:
| You also have face recognition used in law enforcement in
| Britain too, though. And from top of my head, Britain was
| the first country to mass roll out CCTV system as well.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/business/facial-
| recogniti...
| actuator wrote:
| But that hasn't been replicated in most Western nations.
| This went to court and you had a lot of scrutiny on this.
|
| In PRC, because of cultural differences I think most
| people accept the crime safety net you get over personal
| freedom restrictions and you can't really meaningfully
| challenge any such move even if you wanted to. Anyway, it
| is the same in Singapore and people seem happy with it
| despite being exposed to all the Western culture too, so
| I think it is a cultural thing.
|
| The thing that British were the first to roll out this
| but we haven't seen any advanced analysis stuff out in
| public after it kind of shows the apprehensiveness around
| it.
| [deleted]
| stevewodil wrote:
| If I had to take a guess, Asia has always focused more on math
| in education than the US. Given that AI/machine learning is a
| lot of math it makes sense (they would have a larger talent
| pool for building the algorithms), but that's just one guess...
| elldoubleyew wrote:
| But I would argue that designing an algorithm that appeals to
| the human psyche in the way that Bytedance as done requires
| more than math skills. Designing the TikTok "For You Page" is
| not a pure ML problem, its a people problem that is being
| solved with ML.
| codekansas wrote:
| Personally I felt the appeal of TikTok is that the _design_
| is ML-centric - clean buttons, very clear signal, not a
| bunch of mixed feedback signals like in other apps.
| Everyone on board seems to understand the importance of the
| underlying ranking algorithm
| actuator wrote:
| A lot of those are employed by US based companies and US
| still can outpay companies in RoW. The only thing limiting is
| access to H1B visas, so I doubt talent pool is the cause
| here.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| IMO, it's likely that Bytedance is just as exceptional in its
| effective use of AI in China as it is in the US. IOW, ask why
| Bytedance is special, not why "Chinese startups" are special.
|
| edit: and Newsdog, from the end of the article. My opinion is
| looking shaky.
| matz1 wrote:
| Elon musk recently said China rocks and the US has become more
| entitled and full of complacement.
|
| I kind a have to agree, even my company starting to shift a lot
| of development work to team in china. Their output and hard
| work has been amazing.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Can't be that hard to do hard work when no one gives a shit
| about the ethics of it.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Very minor correction: you probably mean "complacency" not
| "complacement". And I do agree to an extent; from where I am
| standing the American software industry feels a bit
| bloated/stagnant/wasteful/some word I can't think of that
| covers all three.
| alloai wrote:
| This reminds me a recent story in china: senior ms
| employees complaint against newly hired Huawei employees,
| who voluntarily worked overtime, and even showed off this
| to other senior ms employees.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Big US companies who have troves of user data usually have
| pretty strict policies about not just sticking it all through
| arbitrary ML pipelines for user privacy reasons.
|
| Small US companies don't have access to enough data.
|
| Companies in China have both lots of user data (1B+ internet
| users), and no privacy concerns about running ML experiments on
| that data (and observing user behaviour till they find
| success).
|
| Hence, China will win the next wave of ML-powered social apps.
| actuator wrote:
| Yeah, I have seen firsthand how paranoid big US companies are
| about doing anything with personal data specially media which
| is a good thing for users. This really slows down even simple
| analysis where you were looking at even a Yes/No output and
| makes some features impossible/hard.
|
| But they are competing with companies now which don't have
| the same ideological issues.
| bosswipe wrote:
| Free trade doesn't work between countries with different
| value systems, the values will be exploited as a weakness.
| Same applies with labor and environmental standards.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| How much sorting needs to be done? I'd guess fewer than 20
| questions worth.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| Nice read.
|
| I guess TikTok has taken the quote "users don't know what they
| want" to next level. FB, YT, Twitter, Instagram are trying to use
| the labels/tags/likes/network provided by user while TikTok is
| using user's interactions to categorize user and recommend the
| content which the user himself didn't even knew he/she liked.
| gazelleeatslion wrote:
| Modern day tobacco. 100% unregulated addiction.
|
| FB, TWTR, GOOG, INSTA, everyone switched from timeline to
| personal recommendation engines and TikTok is just doing it so
| much better. Where will things be in 5, 10, 50 years? Terrifying
| and exciting.
|
| Do these tech companies sit on research to suggest that these
| algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-
| and-error? Will they all have their tobacco-causes-cancer moment?
|
| Old-Age Fear: YouTube algorithm sending people down the
| conspiracy rabbit hole
|
| New-Age Fear (Hyper-Efficient): TikTok secretly radicalizing
| individual in X?
|
| The big question strikes: "what is free will?"
|
| Amazing read
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> research to suggest that these algorithms can induce
| behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error?
|
| Cambridge Analytica certainly had that research. Media
| campaigns are no longer about "getting the word out",
| projecting an idea and hoping it sticks. Modern campaigns are
| about changing a narrative, moving individuals from one opinion
| to another through whatever means works best for that
| individual. I cannot see how Facebook wouldn't be studying
| this.
| fsociety wrote:
| Cambridge Analytica was both snake-oil and a wake up call. A
| sign of where things could go if we don't smarten up soon.
| catalogia wrote:
| > _Do these tech companies sit on research to suggest that
| these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through
| trial-and-error?_
|
| Facebook was running mood-manipulation experiments years ago
| and thought it was worth bragging about publicly.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-expe...
| canjobear wrote:
| They found extremely small effects.
| codekansas wrote:
| I've been re-reading Infinite Jest recently and it is amazing
| how prescient David Foster Wallace seems. The deep
| philosophical question - does American individualism mean
| anything in a world where the average person cannot be expected
| to delay gratification?
| smaddali wrote:
| Eugene mentions that the algorithm is the one that built this
| latent interest graph and this algorithm itself is worth a lot of
| money. Given that most personalization is using ML/Deep Learning
| and various video features like scene descriptions, object
| identification in each scene etc, Is it really that proprietary
| to warrant this level of premium. Once the awareness of interest
| graph could be built to this level of efficiency using usual
| techniques, Is the algorithm and approach exclusive to TikTok ?
|
| Awesome Insights from Eugene !!
| melonkidney wrote:
| To pick up on one point from the (fascinating) article:
|
| > In the other direction, the U.S. hasn't made a huge dent in
| China. Obviously, the Great Firewall played a huge role in
| keeping a lot of U.S. companies out of the Chinese market, but in
| the few cases where a U.S. company got a crack at the Chinese
| market, like Uber China, the results were mixed.
|
| I'm genuinely curious to know which non-Chinese apps/services
| have managed to establish themselves in China. I feel like an
| argument could be made for LinkedIn... Are there obvious ones I'm
| missing?
| est wrote:
| microsoft, bing, azure. skype, linkedin, z.cn, kindle, aws
| china, zoom, android, wework.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| Paul Graham's greatest hit: AirBnB
| chvid wrote:
| TikTok really is next-generation social media. Interesting that
| this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are
| seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
| rydre wrote:
| > _Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling
| innovation._
|
| American's will only wake up when it's too late. Zuck will
| bribe the government in the meanwhile. Corrupt countries become
| less competitive over time. America is trending on the path of
| corruption and it's visible to every outsider now, except for
| unfortunately American's themselves.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| I'm sorry, did you just allude to America being more corrupt
| than China?
|
| Granted, I'm American, and thus biased. I _do_ see corruption
| in my government, but from what I can tell it 's a small drop
| in the bucket compared to what goes on in China. Although I
| guess there could be debate on what defines corruption. But I
| still hear tales of basically needing to openly bribe
| officials to get contracts through manufacturing.
| rydre wrote:
| > _I 'm sorry, did you just allude to America being more
| corrupt than China?_
|
| I'm saying that America is relatively in my opinion more
| corrupt than the America of the past.
|
| I'm not comparing it to China, China has a different set of
| systems. Both systems might work.
| groby_b wrote:
| How do you think you get environmental assessments fast
| tracked? (Except we call it a "political donation" and
| "lobbying")
|
| What do you think happens when a place like ALEC flies
| politicians on jaunts to get them to accept pre-written
| legislation?
|
| Outside of political applications, what do you think
| happens when pharma reps take doctors to "conferences" in
| the Caribbean to get them to use their new meds?
|
| On an individual level: What do you think that 'fraternal
| order of police' donation buys you, and what that car
| sticker is for?
|
| It might be a bit more dressed up than a naked bribe, but
| it's still a bribe.
| whoevercares wrote:
| FWIW, many legal political donation in the west will be
| considered bribery in China.
| newen wrote:
| Truth. Legalized corruption is still corruption.
| jhedwards wrote:
| Somewhat anecdotal but the Chinese app game in general seems
| very strong. My wife does video editing on Chinese social media
| and the variety of apps she has for editing videos and photos
| is bewildering. She can add in all kinds of animation and video
| effects, and different apps will provide different editing
| experience and features.
|
| I look in the US apple store for video editing and I just don't
| see that kind of variety in the free/low-cost tier.
| elldoubleyew wrote:
| Because for many young Chinese video editors a cell phone is
| all they have ever had and all they ever want to use.
|
| The wests adoption of the personal computer introduced video
| editing there, and the companies who make the editing
| software have mostly kept it there.
| Cactus2018 wrote:
| Funny that the only tool I've seen is from 'Adobe'.
|
| https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-rush/how-to/premiere-
| rush-f...
| ganfortran wrote:
| TikTok isn't social media
|
| It is the new TV with infinite channels to switch by
|
| Facebook will never be able to match it unless it reinvents
| itself.
| [deleted]
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| > Interesting that this should come out of China and not the
| west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling
| innovation.
|
| I doubt that is the case here, since one could easily make the
| case that China has more monopolies and government control than
| the West. More likely, this has more to do with what makes
| things go viral. TikTok's rise was very much a viral sensation.
| starfallg wrote:
| >TikTok's rise was very much a viral sensation.
|
| The main reason being ByteDance had deep pockets to acquire
| users. The amount of ad spend on user acquisition was unreal
| at $3m a day through 2018 and 2019. Literally billions were
| spent on promoting the app. Any half decent social media app
| would have done well.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
|
| Less monopolies, more so western culture. Many of TikTok's
| algorithms would be subject to great scrutiny if run by a
| western company. YouTube would face riots if it were caught
| openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive,
| or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a
| Chinese company.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-users-v...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tr...
| dilap wrote:
| I feel like this is overblown, because I see ugly and poor
| people in tiktok all the time (if doesn't matter if you're
| ugly or poor -- you can still make compelling content), and I
| occasionally see disabled people too.
|
| Perhaps this is true for the very first content you see, but
| not true once the algo becomes personalized?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It is overblown, and isn't unheard of in the west. Any
| Hollywood casting call involves a US corporation judging
| people according to attractiveness, hiring only the most
| beautiful, but in the realm of social media this has been
| deemed unacceptable corporate behavior. The split is a
| purely cultural phenomena.
| greeniron wrote:
| the entire TikTok India is filled with content from the
| lower caste. like, literally if you check out all the viral
| ones like the cringey indian joker, or the very popular one
| with the 2 really bad acting siblings, they were all shot
| in the slums.
| quicklime wrote:
| I feel like as of late, when China sees some success that the
| US does not, there's a sentiment that they succeeded only
| because they're a lesser society. They have fewer coronavirus
| cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient
| sheeple who hate freedom, or TikTok succeeded because Chinese
| corporations are happy to discriminate against groups that
| western corporations would obviously protect out of the
| goodness of their hearts.
|
| The Slate article you linked talks about Facebook doing a
| similar thing, and facing a similar backlash.
|
| Is it really that hard to believe that a country of over a
| billion people, with a mature domestic tech industry and
| startup scene, would eventually produce something that would
| compete successfully in the west?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> a mature domestic tech industry and startup scene, would
| eventually produce something that would compete
| successfully
|
| Is it too much to also believe that a company subject to a
| radically different regulatory regime, and different
| cultural norms, might field a product that would not be
| considered acceptable elsewhere?
|
| For example: How does TikTok handle children under 13yo?
| That is a real headache for western social media firms.
| Does China enforce similar rules? Would not having to obey
| such rules not represent an advantage for a product aimed
| at young people? The lawsuits and imposed fines suggest
| TikTok is substantially advantaged.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53418077
|
| "The company was fined 186m won (PS123,000) by the Korea
| Communications Commission (KCC). The KCC, the country's
| media watchdog, said TikTok collected data of children
| under 14 years old without the consent of legal guardians."
| oefrha wrote:
| You can start a rule-breaking startup today in whatever
| stringently-regulated regime and worry about fines later
| when you hit it big (and the fines are often peanuts if
| you hit it big, imagine any late stage VC-backed company
| being slapped with a _record_ $5.7m fine). Also, the age
| verification honor system is really pretty much a joke,
| it adds a little bit of annoyance and pretty much zero
| deterrence. Basically it's about knowing to put up that
| page in the sign-up flow. So this "advantage" you're
| talking about is fairly weak.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese
| people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom_
|
| Who made this argument?
| peacefulhat wrote:
| Yeah, it's really more like complete denial that China
| has less covid deaths per capita than USA, let alone 100x
| less. Though I have definitely seen statements like
| "well, this is the price of freedom and democracy."
| horsemessiah wrote:
| My father made this argument to me, almost verbatim. It's
| definitely out there.
| quicklime wrote:
| The idea of Chinese people (and Asians in general) being
| obedient to authority is something that I've heard
| frequently from people and in the news, but I didn't mean
| to imply that sandworm101 made that particular argument.
| tanilama wrote:
| This has some truth to it. And I don't think people
| should take it like it is a bad thing.
|
| Not every country on the planet is so egoistic like
| Americans, where self discipline for greater good means
| communism /s
| jaybeeayyy wrote:
| You can also look at the initial blaming of COVID on
| China in the media...The COVID pandemic was the result of
| either 3rd world-like food markets where poor/dirty
| people sell exotic meats to each other or that COVID got
| out of some underground lab where they do experiments and
| can't contain anything.
|
| No one explicitly said that but it was implied pretty
| heavily especially when you look at how people received
| the news and interpreted it in memes and whatnot. I sent
| pictures of Wuhan to some family/friends and they were
| amazed at how big and impressive of a city it is. They
| thought it was like a small developing village.
|
| It's kind of how we always talk about China though
| (regarding your initial comment) and I'm not sure if/when
| it will ever stop.
| mrkramer wrote:
| What is the origin of Covid-19? Last thing what I heard
| is that it is not wet market. Then Chinese blamed
| American soliders?! I think Wuhan Institute of Virology
| is the source but they will never admit the virus broke
| out of the institute.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> poor/dirty people sell exotic meats
|
| While I wouldn't phrase it that way, the so-called wet
| markets where dozens of live animals are sold in
| unsanitary conditions are a problem. Western nations do
| have a variety of health/hygiene laws that effectively
| make such markets illegal. They are seen as a
| primitive/backwards/dangerous throwback to something
| rightly done away with long ago.
| vkou wrote:
| Western nations don't have those kinds of wet markets,
| but we have plenty of our own unhygienic, dangerous
| practices when it comes to food.
|
| Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of
| antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals.
| Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about
| how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous,
| because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for
| antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
|
| Now, consider what we are doing about shutting down, or
| even mitigating the danger posed by those factory farms.
| Next to nothing - there's a few fringe environmentalist
| groups, there's a small vegan movement, there's a few
| yuppies who make sure to tell everyone that they only
| source organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat that costs
| them $40/lb. But the average person doesn't give two
| damns about it - and the average politician in
| agricultural-heavy ridings is entirely in the pocket of
| those industries. [1]
|
| Disclaimer: I don't buy organic, hand-raised, cruelty-
| free meat, that would cost me $40/lb. I'm part of this
| problem. There's a lot of utility in cheap meat. Meat is
| delicious. But alternatives _do_ exist.
|
| [1] See the popularity of ag-gag laws - intended to
| suppress information, so that the public only gets one
| side of this story.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Hygiene in China is like in medieval Europe, nowadays in
| Europe only big cities are dirty which is in the most
| cases result of mismanagement of mayor/s.
|
| In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The
| thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets
| on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see
| like 30 dogs.
| shard wrote:
| In my travels to about 8~9 cities in China, I don't
| recall seeing anything that was dirtier than, say,
| Amsterdam or New York or Busan. Not having lived in
| Medieval Europe, I can't say exactly how dirty it was,
| but saying China is that dirty seems like an
| exaggeration.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| But those dogs are probably far healthier than they were
| in the past. You don't fear rabies if one of them bites
| you. You aren't going to get a parasite if you pet them.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I certainly saw a lot of people writing things like "they
| only succeeded because they welded people into their
| apartment buildings". I've also read that that only
| happened one time and was strongly criticized within
| China but oh well.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I'm not the GP and therefore I'm not 100% sure the idea of
| Western social-justice mobs stifling innovation was
| intended as a compliment to the West.
|
| Anyway if anyone takes anything at all from this, it's the
| idea that the whole source of TikTok's success is in making
| culture (and therefore culture wars) irrelevant. Want to
| look at videos of disabled, unattractive, poor people all
| day? Have at. Not being flippant there, although now that I
| think about it, I bet there are vast differences between
| some people's publicly-espoused views and their own
| watching habits, were they ever revealed by TikTok's
| algorithm.
|
| Edit: Went off on all sorts of tangents, but yes I totally
| agree with your point. In Trump-era America even success &
| failure fall into the fact-free zone.
|
| We succeed: Of course! We're awesome! So proud!
|
| We fail: It wasn't fair! Everybody had it out for us!
|
| They succeed: Bunch of cheaters! We took the high road!
|
| They fail: Of course! We're just too awesome for 'em!
| Better luck next time!
| 7786655 wrote:
| I don't thing the things GP is talking about are indicators
| of a lesser society. I don't want to look at unattractive
| people, and there is nothing wrong with a social media
| service optimizing for that preference.
| TheDong wrote:
| > there is nothing wrong with a social media service
| optimizing for that preference
|
| I think there is. The world has already reached a point
| where we live in information bubble, surrounded by things
| we want to see and that agree with us. People are
| depressed and feel inadequate.
|
| Formerly reputable news sources have realized that people
| don't want to be informed, they want to be outraged, or
| feel smug and correct, or see pictures of cats, and so
| real news is relegated to a lesser status.
|
| I would much rather websites present me with the truth,
| even if I don't like it as much, than live my life seeing
| only attractive people and reading only good news, but
| ending up woefully depressed and un-informed, with
| feelings of inadequacy and no understanding of what in
| the world is broken.
|
| I think news agencies have a responsibility to society to
| present news accurately, even if people find the news
| less pleasent to read than pictures of cats.
|
| Similarly, I think social media companies have a duty to
| present a semi-accurate view of society where possible. I
| would rather have a realistic view of what people look
| like than have a series of recommendation algorithms and
| feedback loops result in me seeing only "conventionally
| attractive" people.
|
| Of course, we've kinda already screwed ourselves here
| with hollywood/tv/movies. Perhaps it's too late to step
| back.
| 7786655 wrote:
| I never said that sites that present a semi-accurate view
| of society shouldn't exist. But I don't think any
| particular site has an obligation to be fair, as long as
| they aren't misrepresenting their content.
| shard wrote:
| I think it's fine that different social media companies
| target different demographics. There's no need to apply a
| blanket rule to all companies as to what content should
| be promoted on its platform. For example, people go to
| Netflix, Twitch, Youtube, and Pornhub for different types
| of video content, and it wouldn't make sense to require
| that they all present the same semi-accurate view of
| society.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Unattractive people may be saying things worth hearing,
| or doing things worth seeing. You might be missing out.
| young_unixer wrote:
| > or TikTok succeeded because Chinese corporations are
| happy to discriminate against groups that western
| corporations would obviously protect out of the goodness of
| their hearts.
|
| No one believes western companies do it out of the goodness
| of their heart.
|
| They do it in part because of fear of backlash and in part
| because their CEO's (especially Twitter's, Youtube's and
| Reddit's) want to project a philantropist image without
| actually doing good things.
| seemack wrote:
| > there's a sentiment that they succeeded only because
| they're a lesser society
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by "lesser society"?
| [deleted]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing
| or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor
| people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company.
|
| You don't need an algorithm to hide unattractive people. Ever
| seen a modern TV show or a casting contest or seen the latest
| comic adaption in cinema? People voting out the unattractive
| or even unconventionally attractive is an old story, the more
| mainstream the content the more the stars look like models.
| On Youtube it happens with Likes and on TikTok it happens
| through some ML magic, I guess in China there's no fucks
| given about actually baking it into the algorithm directly
| but that's hardly more than a technical detail
| actuator wrote:
| If we were really seeing the effect of monopolies how would
| Tiktok hold ground in US. FB could have actively gone after it
| and not allowed FB authentication or ads of Tiktok on FB. In
| fact, as mentioned in the article Tiktok grew by leveraging the
| dominant platforms like FB, Instagram.
|
| I would still wait and watch on Tiktok phenomenon. It is a
| viral thing but has no moat as such and only $0.5 billion in
| expected revenue for this year. There are enough companies
| which can move in this space and suffocate it.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I think OP's point is that the American startup that could
| have turned into what TikTok is today (Vine) was bought only
| so it could be shut down.
| actuator wrote:
| Vine was acquired pre launch. It was launched and allowed
| to run for a good amount of time before being shut down.
|
| Twitter isn't an example of a well run company considering
| the alienating things they have done to third party devs
| but I wouldn't call this an effect of monopoly. Even
| ByteDance acquired Musical.ly which became Tiktok, they
| just had a clear idea of what to do with it.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Maybe this is too much navel staring but clearly, if the
| central thesis of the article is true, tiktok owes its success
| to prioritizing the content over the individuals. An interest
| graph, not a friend graph.
|
| Besides stagnation... Could it be also an effect of "the West"
| becoming more open to collectivist ideals, where the individual
| is less important, and it's more about what you follow and not
| who you follow?
| rollinggoron wrote:
| Isn't this very similar to Vine, the old video social network?
| Which Twitter bought and properly crash a burned?
| chvid wrote:
| The point is not media format (short video clips) but the
| "sorting hat". That it breaks the traditional social media
| model with a news feed, discussions, a social graph of
| friends.
|
| I think it is completely meaningful to call it next
| generation (or second generation where the social graph model
| is the first generation).
|
| Also notice that this model can be applied to other media
| formats: Text, pictures, audio ...
| Slartie wrote:
| > Also notice that this model can be applied to other media
| formats: Text, pictures, audio ...
|
| Actually, I don't think that this is as easy as you might
| think. The article goes into this a bit when saying that
| short video sequences are well-suited for such an algorithm
| because they provide a high frequency of "inputs" per time
| unit, but I think the article falls short of describing the
| other thing that makes videos particularly suitable (and,
| by extension, makes the assumption that "the TikTok
| algorithm" had a great future in many other places too, of
| which I am a bit more skeptical). This other critical thing
| is that video sequences in general also allow a huge
| variety of inputs to be gathered from consumption that
| text, pictures and audio can't match.
|
| - It is trivial to find out which part of a video a user
| has seen. This is nearly impossible to do reliably with
| textual content (assuming you don't have an eye tracker
| running).
|
| - Instead of a still picture, a video provides much more
| things for the viewer to see. So instead of just knowing
| that in a picture there's a cat and you thus deduce the
| user likes cats, it's basically possible to split a video
| up in slices of which you know where there's a cat, and
| where there's a dog, and where there's whatever else, so
| from just that single video you might deduce info about the
| users' interest in cat/dog/whatever content all at once
| (depending on which parts a viewer has seen, which parts
| were skipped, at which point the viewer aborted, or at
| which point the like button was tapped).
|
| - Video mostly also delivers audio, hence everything that
| you can gather from audio, like whether a user tends to
| prefer female or male voices, or which music style someone
| prefers, comes as a bonus when gathering info from video
| viewing
|
| - If your videos' audio features someone speaking some
| text, you can speech-to-text that content and pump it into
| the usual machine learning modules, from simple sentiment
| analysis over trying to determine the topic someone talks
| about up to full-blown "trying to understand what this
| person is actually trying to say" and take that as an input
| for determining a viewers' interests. This is basically
| text analysis, so it lends itself to textual content as
| well, and audio too, but not so much to pictures.
|
| Video is just really pumping out the maximum of all of
| these content formats in terms of potentially relevant data
| points about someones' interests, and it does so at really
| high frequency, especially if the length of each video is
| as short as on TikTok and thus the content producers have
| already performed the daunting work of condensing lots of
| content into the least number of seconds possible.
| mistermann wrote:
| I'd like to see someone write a blog post taking a shot
| at (speculatively) "reverse engineering" how the TikTok
| algorithm works (or _may_ work)...like what attributes it
| might extract from a video (some of which you 've
| mentioned above) and what it might do with them.
| Basically, how the overall thing _may_ work, as well as
| how it may improve over time, taking into consideration
| current cutting edge ML techniques and speculative future
| capabilities.
| [deleted]
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Did Vine _not_ work that way? I have no idea and the author
| didn 't say either.
| gruez wrote:
| >That it breaks the traditional social media model with a
| news feed, discussions, a social graph of friends.
|
| don't most social networks have the "sorting hat" in the
| form of algorithmic feeds?
| chvid wrote:
| Try downloading it and just play with it for a bit
| without signing up.
|
| Compare that with Instagram.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Well on desktop and even on mobile you can't browse
| Instagram freely without signing up or singing in, it is
| kinda double edge sword which forces you to join or backs
| you off.
| nemothekid wrote:
| The article goes into this - for people just jumping into
| the comments:
|
| The author states that while western algorithms are based
| on your follow graph (e.g. Instagram is relatively
| useless until you follow someone and even then your feed
| is based on your follower graph, like what people you
| follow like), TikTok builds this data on video features.
| This increases TikTok's stickyness because you don't need
| to do anything other than use the app for it adjust to
| your tastes. There's no need to "import" your contacts or
| suggest people you should follow, it just "knows" after
| you watch a couple videos.
| mrkramer wrote:
| YouTube mastered this years ago and that's why it is 3rd
| most visited website in the world and 2nd most used
| search engine in the world.
|
| I see TikTok as a better version of Vine but I still
| can't understand if TikTok is so much popular and so much
| worth why did Twitter shut down Vine? Twitter is like
| modern MySpace it will fail sooner or later if management
| doesn't get replaced and if they don't start thinking
| long term.
| esrauch wrote:
| That sounds just like YouTube and how I presumed Vine
| worked though? E.g. that the majority of users don't set
| up any follow graph, and that most content users view is
| algorithmically-discovered and not like Twitter,
| Facebook, Instagram where most of the content is based on
| an explicit graph?
| catalogia wrote:
| Youtube has been doing this for years. Clear your cookies
| then start watching youtube videos. Youtube will
| immediately begin tuning video suggestions to what you
| watch, no contact importing or channel subscribing
| necessary.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Spotify too.
|
| I'll never forget putting one song into Spotify and
| having it recap my late 90's listening habits over the
| course of an evening.
| casefields wrote:
| Sounds like the algo's that the porn companies have
| started movie to. Stickyness works.
| treis wrote:
| >I think it is completely meaningful to call it next
| generation (or second generation where the social graph
| model is the first generation).
|
| I don't really see it. We've seen the TikTok model before
| in Imgur, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Digg, and
| probably others. It's mostly memes, funny videos, how-tos,
| and attractive women. They've hit a sweet spot of editing
| tools and enforced short format to provide a constant
| stream of quick entertainment. But I don't see anything
| earth shattering or ground breaking there.
| hardtke wrote:
| This thread is completely missing the draw of TikTok, at
| least as it pertains to my teenagers. TikTok makes it fun
| and compelling to create content. My teenagers will
| actually go places with their friends to "make TikToks."
| The reason it is compelling, and this is not true of any
| other current social network, is that good content will get
| eyeballs -- the algorithm seems to be "fair" in terms of
| playing your content to enough people to see if it is any
| good, at which point it can get widely distributed. Most
| social networks start out this way, but eventually good
| user generated content gets drowned out by influencers and
| commercial interests. It remains to be seen if TikTok can
| stay this way.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Yes. Even the vaunted algorithm is merely an improved way
| of doing this. I remember when "the long tail" became a
| slogan. What was meant was that if popularity is a power
| law, then at every level there's a shorter long tail. The
| point was to accentuate this, to find the celebrities in
| each niche and monetize them. The underlying mental model
| has always been the one from broadcasting.
|
| Maybe TikTok comes from China because Communist ideology
| still influences the Chinese; or because they didn't have
| a Dick Cavett and a Frank Sinatra, celebrity TV. The
| ceremonies for the 1980 Moscow Olympics had no
| celebrities, but a diorama of the dozen Soviet cultures
| from the Ukraine to Kirghistan. The 1984 Olympics in the
| US had Lionel Ritchie. But Communists or not, the early
| promise of the internet was that you could participate,
| and it doesn't feel you can participate on Twitter.
| newen wrote:
| Yep, I've come across a couple of times in my for you
| page videos posted with 0 likes from 0 follower, 0
| following accounts. And plenty of low likes and followers
| accounts. It gives anybody a chance and that makes it
| engaging.
| creeble wrote:
| I wonder how much content there would be if they hadn't
| licensed music for people to dance / lipsync to.
|
| I haven't seen that many TikTok videos, but I haven't
| seen many that didn't have music in them, and I don't
| think any of it was original.
|
| Licensing music has never been easy, and I don't get how
| two guys (even from silicon Valley) were able to do it
| from launch.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| The difference which actually changes quite a lot is that the
| maximum video length is much longer (six seconds vs a full
| minute). This lets people put more effort/content into their
| videos, allowing for more expressiveness than just memes. At
| the same time, a minute is short enough that it discourages
| the sort of rambling you might see on a freeform platform
| like YouTube. The outcome is a surprising amount of focused,
| creatively edited videos on a wide range of interests (I'm
| currently pretty deep in both crochet and recipe TikTok).
|
| In my opinion the longer length also allowed audio-based
| trends (which Vine did introduce a year or so before its
| demise) to really take off. For all that older people mock
| TikTok dances, there's something to be said for users
| actively participating in creative trends instead of simply
| passively consuming them (and there are much, much worse
| things a teen could be doing on/for the internet than
| practicing half a minute of choreography).
|
| There is an account I follow that's run by a man who's trying
| to beat a soda addiction. He's posted a video announcing that
| he hasn't drunk any fizzy drinks every day for the past
| fifty-eight days, and he seems to have inspired a lot of
| people to grab a water instead of a soda at least once. I
| wish more of my social media experience was like that.
| mistermann wrote:
| > I'm currently pretty deep in both crochet and recipe
| TikTok
|
| Anyone know if it is possible on TikTok to temporarily
| check out different genres, but not have them become a part
| of your profile? Basically an incognito mode I guess?
| filleduchaos wrote:
| You can watch videos on Tiktok without an account. You
| can't search (on the web, at least - I've never installed
| the app) but simply visiting e.g. tiktok.com/tag/crochet
| will let you go through and watch content without limits.
| I used it for months that way.
| starfallg wrote:
| I think the real difference compared to Vine is the amount
| of money that Bytedance sunk into advertising TikTok in
| past 2 years. All of the sorting hat stuff is nothing new.
| Without the follow graph, it doesn't endure.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Yes, I agree, the form of the content on the platform and
| the community that form of content drives obviously does
| not matter at all.
| actuator wrote:
| I think Vine was follower based still. I haven't used Tiktok
| but based on the article it seems like Vine+YouTube feed.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Similar in the "posting short videos" thing, but some of the
| social features are pretty different from anything that's
| come before, like the ability to easily make a new lipsync
| video with the audio from a previous video, and then make all
| videos sharing an audio trivially searchable.
|
| Am not myself a TikTok user, but my partner is, so I've seen
| a bunch of it second hand.
| eddieplan9 wrote:
| I think the article did a really good job highlighting the
| power of combining a worship-level deference towards algorithm
| and an incredibly deep pocket. In the West, if you are an
| upstart, you don't have the latter - who can spend $1B on paid
| install in a year while seeing uninspiring retention? - and if
| you are big, then you cannot afford the former given the
| immense scrutiny from the public and the press.
|
| Another interesting factor is that ByteDance has unfettered
| access to both the Chinese and the Western markets. This makes
| it attractive to investors who wants to bet on an upstart who
| can fallback to its mature Chinese business.
|
| I personally think TikTok is still unproven outside of China if
| you look beyond the hype. But I also agree the big US companies
| are sleeping at the wheel. But if you are printing money like
| FB, why not?
| oefrha wrote:
| > In the West, if you are an upstart, you don't have the
| latter
|
| In the East, or the North, or the South, if you acquired
| another company for 1B you're certainly not an upstart.
| (Unless you still consider Dropbox, Airbnb, etc. upstarts.)
| op03 wrote:
| Next gen because of what? Being more addictive?
| rvz wrote:
| The grandparent's comement is the exact same growth lead
| hype-cycle rhetoric that was said for Snapchat, Vine,
| Periscope, Yik-Yak and Shots. The hype is from ByteDance's
| VCs.
|
| When they get their massive exit, the hype will deflate and
| the users will grow out of TikTok and find another rockstar
| social network. Rinse and repeat.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I installed TikTok out of curiosity after reading this article. I
| scrolled without stopping for a couple hours and then uninstalled
| the app.
|
| An endless stream of algorithmically curated 30-second videos is
| pure crack to my brain, apparently. I bet a lot of younger folks
| with still-developing brains are also unable to resist.
| reedwolf wrote:
| "On my way in and out of this office, just one of several
| Bytedance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of
| workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open
| floorplan. It resembled what I'd seen at tech giants like
| Facebook in the U.S., but even denser."
|
| --
|
| As much as US devs whine about open offices, it could be worse.
| draw_down wrote:
| Oh, things can always be worse. But it's probably not a great
| idea to wait until they can't get any worse, before you speak
| up.
| Cactus2018 wrote:
| Found photos of Bytedance's open office:
|
| empty: https://officesnapshots.com/2016/07/13/bytedance-
| offices-bei...
|
| full of staff:
| https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-04-22/bytedance-drops-payw...
|
| with a faux ceiling: https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-
| ups/tiktok-parent-e...
| stevesearer wrote:
| I run Office Snapshots (first link) and hadn't seen the faux
| ceiling you linked to -- definitely interesting.
|
| @kakkun My guess is that it would be limit direct sunlight,
| though if that were the case, a shade higher up might look
| better.
|
| I do remember someone telling me that if you go into a Costco
| food court people often gravitate to the tables with an
| umbrella on them even though they are indoors. Their theory
| was that people do like to have something over their heads in
| such a big warehouse-size space.
| kakkun wrote:
| What's the purpose of the faux ceiling? I would have hoped
| the large expansive space and glass ceiling would be used to
| help alleviate feelings of claustrophobia.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Is anyone else here trying to reduce their use of technology
| outside of the workplace? My hobbies are music, painting, and
| woodworking, and it's all I can muster to focus on a screen from
| 9-5. I do comment here on HN and I peruse other websites, but I
| don't actively engage with any social media except HN.
|
| I just find myself questioning the merits of attention spent on
| these social media platforms, given the information quality and
| density is so much lower than HN.
|
| Maybe this is where TikTok has succeeded: short, snappy, quickly
| accessed videos; much more informational content than textual or
| image-based FB or Reddit, not to mention more skillfully
| executed, right? It's like a short-form, Twitter-ified
| entertainment version of YT.
| bdickason wrote:
| I've been getting back into electronic music production and
| there's a growing group of people who previously used ableton,
| logic, etc that are moving to pure hardware production (it's
| called Dawless) to reduce screen time. Many are software
| engineers or work a day job at a tech company.
|
| Interesting trends to keep an eye on.
| kirse wrote:
| Microsoft Launcher for Android comes with a screen-time usage
| widget that takes the place of a normal app icon... After a few
| days I was amazed that what felt like "small looks" and "short
| breaks" on my phone throughout the day added up to 1-2+ hours
| of screen time.
|
| On the plus side I figured this could be steered into spaced-
| repetition flashcards for learning new stuff, but it's tough
| not to take a whiff of that social media crack isn't it.
|
| I figure there's going to be a big market for things like tech-
| free resorts and curing device addictions once Gen-Z makes it
| to their 30s. They have unfortunately come out of the womb with
| a cell-phone in hand and will likely have a much tougher time
| being freed from the separation anxiety.
| mundo wrote:
| > Maybe this is where TikTok has succeeded: short, snappy,
| quickly accessed videos
|
| I think this is precisely backwards. Teens like video apps
| because they have time to sit around watching videos. Adults
| gravitate towards text and images because they require less of
| a time commitment.
| zozin wrote:
| All of these apps are just a gigantic waste of time, and proven
| to be highly manipulative and emotionally draining. I've
| managed to avoid all of them, including FB which I only keep to
| message family members and friends.
|
| The fact that normally astute, rational, intelligent
| individuals find themselves mindlessly clicking through games
| or video apps goes to show how addictive and manipulative these
| apps are. Some of my friends realize this, but they still waste
| time on them as if they cannot stop. It's sad. The top comment
| is correct, it's a modern/high-tech addictive substance.
| Avtomatk wrote:
| Those applications will be a great waste of time, but they
| are there to solve the problem behind all social media:
| loneliness and seeking care. You can distract your mind with
| other things for a while, but sooner or later you will fall
| back on social networks, unless you stop being alone or have
| enough attention.
|
| I think that living beings do not know how to survive alone,
| so being alone is something bad biologically and arouses
| something in us that makes us feel bad ... call it
| "loneliness" or whatever you want, but that thing kills you
| if you stay alone
| tengu20 wrote:
| I think that this level of analysis is really essential.
| It's not enough to say that something is addictive, we need
| to ask why.
|
| Going one step further, I think that when social media came
| on the scene society in general was already fairly isolated
| and looking for some type of connection. Social media
| offered a quick fix, but frankly exacerbated the issue. It
| is a really vicious cycle. It feels even harder to connect
| to the real world around us nowadays.
| Firebrand wrote:
| >At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still
| dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens
| at the time described TikTok as "cringey," usually a kiss of
| death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they
| are about what's cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like
| eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school.
| Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainment staple.
|
| TikTok devs mentioned PewDiePie reacting to these cringey videos
| as a large impact for the company. His massive gamer audience
| downloaded the app to make fun of the early TikTok users too and
| got sucked in. They started making memes instead of lip-sync
| videos and it took off from there.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from
| sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that
| would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a
| different American tech giant.
| [deleted]
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Interestingly, the subreddit r/TiktokCringe is the same - was
| made to make fun of TikTok, but now highlights Redditors
| favorite videos.
| yamrzou wrote:
| _For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called
| "marketplace of ideas," the first generation of large social
| networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal
| with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real
| substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of
| mediating between strangers who disagree with each other, they're
| better off sorting those people apart. The only types of people
| who enjoy being thrown into a gladiatorial online arena together
| with those they disagree with seem to be trolls, who benefit
| asymmetrically from the resultant violence._
|
| This seems to contradict what has been said about Facebook
| exploiting users's attraction to divisiveness and polarization.
| See [1] and [2].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313007
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507
| Nacraile wrote:
| I'm not sure it's as much of a contradiction as you think it
| is. Noting "It manifests itself in the declining visit and
| posting frequency on Facebook across many cohorts", I find it
| entirely plausible that feeding the trolls yielded short term
| lift in target metrics at the expense of (much harder to
| measure and correctly attribute) long-term attrition of non-
| troll users. That hypothesis certainly fits the popular
| perception that FB is dying/dead. It somewhat fits my personal
| experience: I fairly aggressively pruned my news feed of any
| political content, which seems to have kept away the trolling,
| but the personal content that I wanted has dried up and my feed
| is now mostly ads and generic "recommended" clickbait. Why
| bother visiting?
| bsoist wrote:
| Very interesting. We might make real progress as a species if we
| can leverage this more generally as a society.
|
| Also, I expect the "machines" to disrupt the film industry in a
| very similar way.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How will showing people short video clips to create a drug like
| drip of enjoyable chemical reactions in the brain progress the
| species?
|
| > (and yes, one feed that contained the thirst trap photos of
| attractive Indian girls in rather suggestive outfits standing
| under things like waterfalls; some parts of culture are
| universal).
|
| Doesn't sound like any version of progress that I would get
| excited about.
| mistermann wrote:
| > How will showing people short video clips to create a drug
| like drip of enjoyable chemical reactions in the brain
| progress the species?
|
| Possibly (pure speculation here): if you carefully observe,
| at massive scale, how a system [1] _behaves_ , it may provide
| some insights into _how it is implemented_. And based on
| those learnings, iteratively improve how the platform feeds
| tests and analyzes responses to gain deeper understanding of
| the system over time.
|
| [1] In this case, "the system" consists of individual human
| minds, as well as the overall network of minds.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Is there any insight to gain than the already known fact
| that people will sacrifice long term interests for short
| term gratification?
| mistermann wrote:
| I'd bet fairly big $ that there are plenty of them.
| zerowangtwo wrote:
| What's the long term end goal for society? I think one
| feature of such a society would be unlimited entertainment
| available for anyone, which TikTok provides.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I think with most work automated away humans should mostly
| entertain themselves _in person_. Art should be increasing
| interactive as everyone has time to level up beyond passive
| audience.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| What progress as a species can be made? I am not seeing how any
| of this is progress.
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(page generated 2020-08-04 23:00 UTC)