TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

Posted by natalie3p 5 days ago

TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning(www.thenexus.media)

293 points | 211 commentspage 5

rietta 5 days ago|

I HATE short form videos with an abiding passion. As a user, my preference is long form YouTube videos I can listen to while my hands are busy with the dishes, dog walks, etc. I am ventured more into podcasts because even such videos are painfully annoying with ad interruptions that demand skip click. Under no circumstances do I want to interact with the device every 60-90 seconds. That totally defeats the purpose of listening while being productive in the day.

throw0101d 5 days ago||

Are there generational differences? Do (say) Boomers or GenXers use different social media sites/apps than Millennials which are different than Gen Z?

smittywerben 5 days ago||

There's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a two decade streak of innovation and improvement to the world's telecom system.

nottorp 5 days ago||

... but everything was mostly crap and not worth your time even before it was 60 seconds long.

If you spend your days watching "content" it's your fault.

Funes- 5 days ago|

The "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was already a thing a hundred thousand years ago. We have to think about the degree to which something is occurring as well, and how it is taking place, not just try to dismiss it through knee-jerk intended retorts.

nottorp 5 days ago||

You missed my second statement, I think.

How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?

Funes- 4 days ago|||

>You missed my second statement, I think.

I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote.

>social networking has the same effect on a laptop

You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really?

Get real.

nottorp 4 days ago||

... but what makes you pull out the phone while waiting in line at the grocery store?

It's not the device's fault.

alchemical_piss 5 days ago|||

We’ve been trying to “educate” people on nutrition for a long time, but this country is still fat as hell.

wallopinski 4 days ago||

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akk0 4 days ago||

What a shockingly vacuous article, I don't think it says much other than dressing up the idea of people watching 60 second videos in the most cartoonishly alarmist language conceivable. If there actually is a reason to believe that "attention spans" are getting "damaged" by watching silly videos, TFA doesn't show any -- I always just see this stated as fact, but a priori in the absence of evidence I find it a very extraordinary claim.

Then again, if it's effective enough at maximizing psychological grip to hold people's attention for a full hour every day, maybe we should be getting worried... /s

>Song introductions have shortened dramatically, with one study finding average intros fell from more than 20 seconds in the 1980s to just five I expect the decline of radio is the cause of this

throwaw12 5 days ago||

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AfterHIA 4 days ago|

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tomhow 4 days ago||

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

quasse 4 days ago||

> Something or someone really, really wants you to be comfortable with violence.

Instagram started serving me violent content out of the blue recently. My reels feed went from mostly hiking and skiing videos to POV videos from Ukrainian and Russian grenade drones and accelerationist "joke" videos normalizing the idea of war with China.

It was like a switch had flipped with how suddenly the app was like "let's warp this guy's sense of normalcy".