I gave a talk at PyData Berlin on how to build your own TikTok recommendation algorithm. The TikTok personalized recommendation engine is the world's most valuable AI. It's TikTok's differentiation. It updates recommendations within 1 second of you clicking - at human perceivable latency. If your AI recommender has poor feature freshness, it will be perceived as slow, not intelligent - no matter how good the recommendations are.
TikTok's recommender is partly built on European Technology (Apache Flink for real-time feature computation), along with Kafka, and distributed model training infrastructure. The Monolith paper is misleading that the 'online training' is key. It is not. It is that your clicks are made available as features for predicitons in less than 1 second. You need a per-event stream processing architecture for this (like Flink - Feldera would be my modern choice as an incremental streaming engine).
I have to say, it is _extremely_ impressive when a tiktok I watched reminds me of some other tiktok, so I go and search for a very loose description of the tiktok, and the first result is 95% of the time what I wanted to find.
I don't think any single other platform has as good a search feature as TikTok does.
oh wow, you're really lucky. around my friend groups who use tiktok, the main complaint is how bad the search is. unfortunately for us, getting a specific video is almost impossible =(
I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.
I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).
For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise
That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.
Why is it good that you need self control to not get slop? Its much better if you can just turn that off and relax rather than having to stay alert to avoid certain content that it tries to trick you to serve you more slop.
Distancing yourself from temptations is an effective and proven way to get rid of addictions, the programs constantly trying to get you to relapse is not a good feature. Like imagine a fridge that constantly puts in beer, that would be very bad for alcoholics and people would just say "just don't drink the beer?" even though this is a real problem with an easy fix.
Basically, I want to set boundaries in a healthy frame of mind, and have that default respected when my self control is lower because I’m tired, depressed, bored, etc.
It’s because content curation is inherently impossible to reach the same level of relevance as direct feedback from user behavior. You mix in all kinds of biases, commercial interests, ideology of the curator, etc, and you inevitably get irrelevant slop. The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
> The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
Why not let you choose to get a less addictive algorithm? Older algorithms were less addictive, so its not at all impossible to do this, many users would want this.
And that is why these algorithms needs to be regulated. People don't want to pick the algorithm that makes them spend the most time possible on their phones, many would want an algorithm that optimizes for quality rather than quantity on the app so they get more time to do other things. But corporations doesn't want to provide that because they don't earn anything from it.
I just don’t think that the addiction is exclusively due to the algorithm. There’s really a lack of affordable varied options for learning trade and entertainment. We say in Portuguese: You shouldn’t throw the baby away along with the water you used to bathe.
I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"? For example, lets say there is an option to only recommend videos from channels you subscribe to, that would be much less addictive, why isn't that an option? A regulation that forces these companies to add such a feature would only make the world a better place.
>I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"?
consider air travel in the present day. ticketing at essentially all airlines breaks down as: premium tickets that are dramatically expensive but offer comfortable seats, and economy tickets that are cramped and seem to impose new indignities every new season. what could be the harm from legislation that would change that menu?
the harm would be fewer people able to travel, fewer young people taking their first trip to experiencing the other side of the world, fewer families visiting grandma, etc.
As much as people hate the air travel experience, the tickets get snapped up, and most of them strictly on the basis of price, and next most taking into account nonstops. This gives us a gauge as to how much people hate air travel: they don't.
this doesn't mean airlines should have no regulation, it doesn't mean monopoly practices are not harmful to happiness, it doesn't mean that addictions don't drive people to make bad choices, it doesn't mean a lot of things.
I'm just trying to get you to see that subtle but significant harm to human thriving can easily come from regulations.
I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that? I believe we’re out of ideas. TikTok’s crime was just be firmly successful because of good engineering. There’s no evil sauce apart from promotional content and occasional manipulation, which has nothing to do with the algorithm per se.
And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discovery.
> I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that?
Governments saying "if you are a social content platform with more than XX million users you have to provide these options on recommendation algorithms: X Y Z". It is that easy.
> And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discovery.
And some people want to turn off that pushed discovery and just get recommended videos from a set of channels that they subscribed to. They still want to watch some tiktok videos, they just don't want the algorithm to try to push bad content on them.
You are right that you can't avoid such algorithm when searching for new content, but I don't see why it has to be there in content it pushes onto you without you asking for new content.
I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.
But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.
I try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…”
Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.
The right way to look at these networks is that people are being trained by the algorithm, not the other way around. The ultimate goal is to elicit behaviors in humans, normally to spend more time and spend more money in the platform, but also for other goals that may be designed by the owners of the network.
One of my gripes with youtube at the moment is that they break my adblock filters to remove shorts more often than they break the filters stopping the actual ads.
If by features you mean tracking state per user, that stuff can be tracked without Flink insanely fast with Redis as well.
If you re saying they dont have to load data to update the state, I dont see how massive these states are to require inmemory updates, and if so, you could just do inmemory updates without Flink.
Similarly, any consumer will have to deal with batches of users and pipelining.
Flink is just a bottleneck.
If they actually use Flink for this, its not the moat.
Yea, the Monolith paper by Bytedance uses Flink but they only say it's in use for their B2B ecommerce optimization system. Maybe this is intentional ambiguity, but I'd believe that they wouldn't rely on something like Flink for their core TikTok infrastructure.
My hunch is we start to learn a lot more about the core internals as Oracle tries to market to B2B customers, as Oracle is wont to do!
Flink is not really a performance choice, it's bloat to throw software as fast as possible at problems. I don't think there's any benchmark demonstrating insane capabilities per machine. I definitely couldn't get it to any numbers I liked, given other stream processing / state processing engines that exist (if compute and inmemory state management is the goal). Pretty sure any pathway that touches RocksDB slows everything down to 1-10k events per second, if not less.
The problem of finding out which video is next, by immediately taking into account the recent user context (and other user context) is completely unrelated to what Flink does -- exactly-once state consistency, distributed checkpoints, recovery, event-time semantics, large keyed state. I would even say you don't want a solution to any of the problems Flink solves, you want to avoid having these problems.
I'm not a TikTok user, but I'm assuming the recommendation engine is there to keep eyeballs on more ads for longer. Maybe we should be regulating how often and how many ads can be shown on social media, especially to teens and kids.
If it was only network effect, then how did TikTok grow in a space where Instagram and Youtube were already much bigger players? How did they gain that user base?
Network effect helps, but it only explains why they stay big, not how they got big
There really isn't that much making TikTok unique. Yes, their app is well designed. Yes, stitches and video replies make for great social/parasocial features because creators are actually interacting with each other and the community, almost like tumblr. But in my opinion those are reasons number three and two why TikTok is successful. Their recommendation algorithm is number one, by a wide margin.
It also provides different opportunities for growth compared to other social media. A video that gets over half a million views on TikTok may not get 5 thousand on Youtube, or even 10 views on Instagram or Facebook.
I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention?
The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices? If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming, even email notifications.
My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous. It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app. I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.
You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money. And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible.
The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.
That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.
It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.
The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.
But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.
Every country in the world already does tons of intervention combatting addiction. There are already bans and restrictions on gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes etc… Wether we consider social media addiction to be harmful and how to do it is a good question to be asked, but intervention into harmful addiction is generally uncontroversial.
Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are a few things that come to mind which very much go against the idea that we are living in anything like the model of capitalism we learn about in school.
2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.
There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability.
Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time.
If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you can play a few times a week, social media is a slot machine that you carry with you everywhere you go.
I don’t know what personal religious experience you’re speaking from, but my church is a little more oriented toward helping people overcome addictions and personal failings. If you’re in Europe, then I think the messaging in the mosques about consuming alcohol are pretty strict. I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge.
I'm sure your specific church is lovely, but depending on the church, "personal failings" may include such gems as "being gay", depression, autism, PTSD, poverty...
Well sure, they don't want the competition. Churches have naturally evolved to use techniques that keep people coming back. The ones that don't do that die out.
its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal.
The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and may never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build, because they're insulated by being behind the A/B test.
> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns.
Capitalism doesn't mean we start out with the most efficient money extractor, it just moves towards the most efficient money extractor with time unless regulated.
This is well known and a feature, capitalism moves towards efficiency and regulation helps direct that movement so that it helps humanity rather than hurts us. Capitalism would gladly serve you toxic food but regulations ensures they earn more money by giving you nutritious food. Now regulations are lagging a bit there so there is still plenty of toxic food around, but it used to be much worse than now, the main problem with modern food is that people eat too much directly toxic compounds.
You're not describing capitalism, you're describing managerialism with a manager-evaluation function of profit.
Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.
That's a type of capitalism. Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose. Extractive capitalism doesn't get to pretend its all of capitalism, we just assume that because its been active throughout our entire lifespan.
US hegemony has permitted and encouraged shareholder primacy, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts in order to facilitate the growth of its markets. However we'd be blinkered to assume that this is the only way capitalism can be. Its a choice we make and we deserve this outcome where we've enslaved a generation of children to be eye-balls for ad impressions for silicon valley startups.
We could make other choices but then we'd be personally less rich and see less growth. Do we really think those extra zeros in very few people's portfolio's are worth this macabre world we've created?
> Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose.
And those were replaced by profit seeking enterprises, that is capitalism. Sure some try to create such benevolent entities, but the profit seeking ones out-competes and replaces them over time, that is how capitalism works.
So you can temporarily have a nice company here and there, but 50 years later likely it got replaced by a profit seeking one. The only way to get pro social behaviors from these is to make pro social acts the most profitable via regulations, but its still a profit seeking enterprise that doesn't try to be benevolent.
yeah that's because we allowed aggressive takeovers, especially leveraged ones. They got replaced by extractive capitalism due to a lack of regulation, not just because "capitalism".
The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy. Letting that happen is a choice, letting it continue is a choice.
Yet if you advocate for regulation you are immediately attacked by billionaires and massive companies and people who think those two groups benefit them more than the regulations protecting them. These groups bring unbelievable sums of money to bear to influence policy and public perception to make sure they are as under-regulated as possible.
“Regulation” is a four letter word in the US. Look at the hostility we see on HN whenever it comes up with AI .
Which is why our democratic systems need to provide solutions because they're places where we still have power. I'm from the UK and an increasing amount of our economy is locked up in exploitive equity extraction, much of it US based. Its really bad in some fields (e.g. care homes, foster homes), where the entities are straddled with such debt that the orgs "have no choice" but to charge sky high rates while paying peanuts. At some point I'm sure it will break and our politicians will "break the rules" in order to reign in private equity and sour their investments.
It used to be the case that we permitted these excesses because they guaranteed our security, but now that recent US governments have shit the bed on that one; there's considerably less of a need to tolerate it.
It's been going on since forever. The first people the British enslaved were their own kind, they just managed to create a society where citizens enjoyed the authority, and naturally the fruits of pillaging half the world did trickle down back then.
If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.
> The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy
So they did out-compete them? You saying they won using unfair ways doesn't change the fact that they out-competed the other companies.
Capitalism will use any means available to out compete others, I don't understand why you try to argue against this. You just say "but if we restrict the means available its fine", that means you agree with me, so I am not sure what you disagree with.
Having more money doesn't necessarily mean "out-compete". Its not that they're delivering a better product, more loyal customers or better branding. Its simply that they put down more capital at a given point, and were allowed to buy the company, despite its owners not wanting to sell. In most cases they didn't even have money, its simply because they obtained significant financing from money brokers by selling them on plans of sociopathy.
> I don't understand why you try to argue against this.
because you're trying to squash this into "capitalism bad". We get to make choices, we're making shit choices. You don't have to upend the whole system to undo these choices, you just have to have the spine to regulate and break up existing structures.
> because you're trying to squash this into "capitalism bad".
I never said "capitalism bad", I said it optimizes for profits and that it gets better at that over time, that is not bad or good, that is just what it does.
but it does that because of US hegemony empowering its equity to be extractive. We've lost a lot of organisations in the UK due to aggressive and leveraged buyouts. That's not necessarily reflective of capitalism as an abstract but geo-political reluctance in regulating its very worst excesses.
I appreciate your position but I can't help but feel like it's like saying cars are crap because they breakdown too easily, when in practice; you're constantly red lining them.
My point is that it doesn't have to be like this, but its a choice that we as society make, and we could choose to not make it.
> That's not necessarily reflective of capitalism as an abstract but geo-political reluctance in regulating its very worst excesses.
That capitalism needs to be regulated or it results in these toxic outcomes is core to capitalism, yes, that is what we are saying. There is no benevolent capitalism without regulations.
its almost as if its what I've been saying the whole time, but adding the context of where the line is, where MySpace seemed healthy and TikTok is unhealthy. Lean startup culture is an equasion that produces sociopathy, I've always hated it and I think its relatively disgusting how it was embraced at the time.
I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.
> I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.
No, your position earlier was wrong according to what you are saying here, you said Facebook and Myspace didn't have these issues so its not capitalisms fault. But Facebook and Myspace existed under much less regulated circumstances than exists today, so your original statement would make it seem you want less regulations and think things will just sort out themselves.
Or do you really think going back to 2005's regulations would fix things because internet was less toxic then? Internet wasn't less toxic then since capitalism was different, internet was less toxic then since it takes time for capitalism to optimize a system.
> But Facebook and Myspace existed under much less regulated circumstances than exists today
sorry, what regulation are you talking about here? Afaik regulation in the US is pretty much the same back then as it is now. Worst case scenarios are usually slap on the wrists like when Snapchat lied to its users about ephemeral messaging and got fined a pathetic amount.
> No, your position earlier was wrong according to what you are saying here
or how about the idea that you've misunderstood my position and instead are shadow-boxing a monsterised impression of me that isn't real.
I just don't like blaming capitalism in the abstract because it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it.
Also on the off chance you lean considerably left, it might help to understand that I have experience of the USSR. So simply saying "capitalism bad" with an implication that we need to tear down the system isn't good enough for me. Been there done that, ancestors deported to Siberia. We could maybe try regulating first?
> I just don't like blaming capitalism in the abstract because it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it.
But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?
> So simply saying "capitalism bad" with an implication that we need to tear down the system isn't good enough for me
Read my post, I didn't say "capitalism bad", I said its good from the start. Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.
> But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?
Because I'm making the argument that lean startup culture is one of the biggest factors in creating this problem and early Facebook and MySpace were around _before_ lean startup culture.
> Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.
Oh it only works one way round I see. Por que no los dos?
well my mother was born in the USSR, so I don't have to accept Lenin's position because my people suffered his "inevitable outcome of the system" for the choices he made.
I'd rather fix up this existing system then day dream about a glorious socialist revolution that always seems to end in blood.
Citing Lenin for a critique of capitalism's trajectory is a little bit like asking a prosecutor to write the defense's closing argument. He was a smart guy, but he wasn't some disinterested analyst writing a symposium on capitalism versus socialism; he was a revolutionary leader trying to build up support and justification for overthrowing the system.
But even if we overlook his inherent bias, he was just plain wrong. He wrote that capitalism had reached its final stage through imperialism, and that, as you said, state capture via financial oligarchy was inevitable. That was over 100 years ago, and history has produced welfare states, labor protections, financial regulation, the SEC, Germany's codetermination laws, even the Nordic social democracies. None of those should be possible under Lenin's framework for capitalism.
(Disclaimer: I'm all for common sense regulation of capitalism.)
Early Facebook's behavior was what they wanted to do/be. But upon exposure to what others were doing Facebook chose to adopt patterns/techniques that repulsed them originally because Facebook didn't want to be out competed (so Capitalism). Capitalism/competition is what led their behavioral change.
Go back to the recent removal of lead article discussed here. In Capitalism government regulation has to level the playing field or else all players will stoop to poisoning society/the world because if they don't then someone else will gain and advantage. Even hyper rightwing Rayliner agreed Government intervention is the ONLY way to prevent Capitalists from injecting poison into their products if that poison gives a competitive advantage.
What leaded gas was to the boomers brains social media is to current youths' brains.
>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.
So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?
Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?
If only you could reach out of your own experience and ponder what might cause otherwise reasonable people to do so. Young people peer pressure, current marketing landscape, you're forced there if you want to make money as a creative, so many reasons. Great, you can live your life without. Can you live your life without assuming everyone has the privilege of your situation?
You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea and yet for some reason we have very severe punishments for people that distribute it. Why?
Because addictive things are addictive, and addicted people suffer, and everyone can get addicted if their guard slips.
We prefer to regulate highly addictive things instead.
> So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?
Yes, since more people use Tiktok than not. The average person is also fat today, so this shouldn't come as a surprise to you.
People didn't grow fat and addicted to screens due to changes to themselves, its due to companies learning how to get people to eat more and watch more since the they make more money.
Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?
It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.
To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.
Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.
Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.
I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.
---
It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.
I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!
I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.
PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.
Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p
It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.
"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.
(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)
With social media, the cost benefit analysis doesn't deliver marginal results, just less stark/concentrated results. Drink driving is self evidently bad even though 99 times out of 100(?) it does no harm, because one time out of a hundred its consequences are catastrophic. Social media on the other hand is harming essentially 100% of the population in initially milder ways - even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those who pedal digital dopamine and in a democracy being undermined by disinformation. Of course 'initially milder harm' is step one in frog boiling.
> * even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those [...] *
Exactly the same applies to TV but where is all the handwringing about that? Remember those stats about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? Those people need some serious help too. What's happening is clearly just the old mass-media-supported order refusing to yield power to new media used by younger people. Governments couldn't care one bit about false information[1], nor about zoomers getting brainrot, it's all about controlling the flow of information.
[1] ("disinformation", another nice example of framing which ignores the fact that people have agency)
edit: the system is escaping my asterisks automatically now, anyone know how to get italics now?
I remember that website, it was called addictinggames.com and I remember finding that bad grammar offensive. (I was obviously a lot of fun at parties.)
> Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company.
Not so. I think your logic is that engagement often leads to dollars, and the "basic imperative of any company" is to make dollars. There are pro- and anti-social ways to do this. You can create better art for your video games, or you can insert gambling mechanisms. You can spend more time designing your cinematic universe, or you can put a cliffhanger after every episode. You can make a funny skit, or you can say, "wait for it... wait for it... you can't believe what's about to happen!" Optimizing for engagement, for the sake of engagement, is necessarily anti-social. It's trying to redirect attention towards your media without actually making the user experience better in any way.
Legally, the basic imperative of any company is to make dollars, as long as it is prosocial. You should not expect the government to turn a blind eye to scam centers or disfunctional products. The same applies to the media landscape.
Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.
See, "quantity has a quality of its own".
Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?
I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.
I don't think we should allow any form of abusive software, addictive, dark patterns, bait-and-switch. They all need to be robustly regulated.
At the same time I don't think you can demonstrate harm without good evidence.
Making money can not be used as a criteria unless you want to draw the conclusion that no company can turn a profit and be ethical at the same time. It would amount to demanding an outcome that you don't believe us possible.
I think considering overly broad criteria, like say, infinite scroll applied selectively to a few is just arbitrarily targeting candidates for reasons unstated outside the criteria.
The rules need to be evidence based, clear, specific, and apply to all.
Cracking down on ticktok while The Guardian has a bunch of dark patterns. Or the NYT, who is reporting on this while at the same time attracting people with online games that have an increasingly toxic user interface.
Tiktok may suck, but so do a lot of other businesses that escape scrutiny. I worry the harms attributed to TikTok are magnified to allow them to be a whipping boy drawing the focus allowing systemic issues to persist.
Where does a desirable product or experience end and addictive begin though? Pretty much all products or services sold are designed to be desirable. Some things are physically addictive (nicotine, opioids etc), so those are a bit more clear. But when we're talking about psychologically addictive, where do we draw the line between what's ok and what's not?
If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it, that's a good thing. If it's about applying psychological patterns to trigger the addictive behavior that applies to a large swath of marketing.
And I’m so glad they did. Tiktok has brought so many positive changes to my life, and it never would have happened if they hadn’t built a product so good that it’s literally addictive. I don’t want the government to be my parent.
Additionally, Instagram and Facebook have tried their best to make their products as addictive as possible, yet their recommendation algorithm is so absolutely terrible (not to mention their ads) that I barely stay on the platform for five minutes when I use it.
What the TikTok algorithm does for me: surfaces exercises for all my joint problems, finds people exploring local sites and reporting on local issues, helps me discover new music, reveals how we treat prisoners, shows me what it's like to do jobs from sitcom writer to oil rig tech
What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"
> What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"
that's only because the implementation of the law is poor and advertisers drag their heels in having it as a brower-level setting. Not helped by the fact that advertisers run one of the biggest browsers and fund one of the next biggest.
I don't like this narrative. I'm a person, and HN is the only social media I use.I tolerate this one because I find the addictiveness off-putting, but unlike other social media HN doesn't engage in that much.
I'm not some sort of prodigy or anything, just a random schmuck. If I can do it, anyone can. People just really like blaming others for their own vices instead of owning up to having a vice.
HN is a vice too. One of many that I have. And they're all mine. I've chosen them all. In most cases knowing full well that I probably shouldn't have.
Right, but they don't. Not to mention a significant portion of the target market are children whose brains are still developing.
Smoking is a vice. Anyone can stop smoking any time they want. But it was still incredibly popular. Government regulation put warning labels everywhere, tightened regulation to ensure no sales to children, provided support to quit. And then the number of people smoking plummeted. Society is better off for it.
"Anyone can do it" is an ideological perspective divorced from lived reality.
Exactly. It's not that the producers or distributors (of food, content, etc.) are not malicious/amoral/evil/greedy. It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers.
You don't say to a heroin addict that they wouldn't have any problems if those pesky heroin dealers didn't make heroin so damn addictive. You realize that it's gonna take internal change (mental/cultural/social overrides to the biological weaknesses) in that person to reliably fix it (and ensure they don't shift to some other addiction).
I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.
Doesn't the government try to ban heroin?? You have to live in the real world, not your ideal world, and in the real world people are not perfectly rational agents. They make mistakes. Each and every mistake could have been avoided if the individual just had a stronger will, was a little smarter, a little more prudent, or took a little more time to think, but just because mistakes can be avoided and some people are better at avoiding them than others does not change the fundamental issue: drugs, tobacco, gambling, and TikTok are trying to increase the rate at which mistakes are made. Wouldn't you rather live in a society where they aren't out to get you?
I think there's an argument that can be made, like, "well maybe 10% of the time people consuming alcohol is a mistake, but I just use it recreationally. The government shouldn't prohibit all drinking!" And sure. If it is really the case that people would take the same actions even if they had more time to think things through and were in a good mental state, the government should probably not be intervening for the 10% of the cases that doesn't hold. But you have to draw the line somewhere.
> I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.
I can though, that's the whole point. I chose to quit Facebook and Reddit. I chose to stop drinking alcohol. I chose to keep smoking weed. Some choices are better than others, from certain perspectives, that doesn't make them any less my choices!
That feels like it applies to so many things we make illegal, scams of all kind, snake-oil medical sellers, baby powder full of asbestos. Sure, people can handle all of these things, but we've decided, as a society, it's better not to allow them.
So then the question is, is it better to let these things happen, as a society?
False equivalence. Unless you can point to an instance where tiktok claims to cure cancer or erectile dysfunction with their recommendations.
To be clear: I don't like these addictive recommendation engines. That's why I avoid them. Some people do like them. I don't want to take their fun vice away from them. I also don't want them to take my fun vices away from me!
Yes it'd probably be better for my health if I stopped with a few of them. I don't care. I like it. It's my health, and I'm an adult. If I can choose my vices, why shouldn't others be allowed to? Will they make choice I wouldn't have? Of course! That's the point! It's THEIR choice!
This logic does not apply to scams or firearms, there's no informed consent in getting shot. It also doesn't apply to asbestos baby powder(wtf?)
Getting scammed is not a choice. Scammers lie to you. Recommendation engines never claim to do anything other than recommend stuff you're likely to interact with based on previous behaviour. They give you exactly what's on the package label. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want something like that, but I also don't understand why people eat surströmming. I say let them, anyway. I can put up with the stink, it's not the end of the world.
Question, do you have the same feeling about heroin? That people should be allowed to take things which are known to be highly addictive and bad for them?
Sure! They do anyway, or did you think heroin disappeared since it was banned?
It does need to be regulated. Doing it well will be difficult in a lot of places. I'd suggest modeling heroin sales after Nordic alcohol market: there's a single state-owned company that has a legislated monopoly, and no profit goals whatsoever. This makes it available, you can know that it's not mixed with anything cheap and deadly, and you also avoid anyone trying to push people to buy something that is quite obviously bad for them. I'm not saying it's an ideal situation that people do heroin, it is _quite_ destructive. But people do it anyway so let's make the best of that situation.
The harsh truth of reality is that people will make bad choices no matter what you do. Thinking you can ban something out of existence is naive and harmful. Best you can hope for is the entity selling drugs not using peer pressure to push it on kids who were only looking for weed. Which is what we have now if that wasn't clear.
To be perfectly clear, I do not encourage anyone to inject heroine, it's a terrible idea! Don't do it! But I'm realist enough to realise that some people are going to anyway, bans and common sense be damned,and I want to make that bad choice as safe as possible for them. I do not condone throwing drug addicts under the bus as we currently do, pretending that they're less than human and that they have no place in our society. I don't think the "outcast" status has ever helped anyone quit, in fact I'm quite sure it makes it harder. For example in Sweden being under the influence is illegal, so you could get in trouble for seeking help with your addiction. No wonder the druggies hide!
Well out of sight != Out of mind. At least not for me.
You should model yourself as a rational agent that makes mistakes sometimes. Suppose it is the case that, if you had heroin on your shelf at home, you would inject it on 0.1% of days. Maybe because you are especially sad/sick/in pain once every few years. If this were the case, you would not want to buy heroin and put it on your shelf at home. 99.9% of the time you will have the willpower to not inject it, but you still expect yourself to be addicted within a decade. The point of bans is to decrease that to 0.0001%, except for those who are actively seeking it.
This is such a normie perspective and shows just how unfamiliar you are with addiction. Yes, some people can avoid becoming addicted. Yes, some addicts can break the habit and detox and stay clean. At the same time, a larger number of addicts can detox but relapse in a relatively short time. There are also addicts that have not yet admitted they have a problem, and there are addicts that are okay with being an addict. Just because you have the emergency stop button that you can hit does not mean everyone else is the same way. Your lack of empathy is just gross
> They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's [how they make money.] ... what people want.
Fixed that for you.
Your argument is basically the same as saying that Banana Ball should be banned because they are intentionally making the experience as fun as possible, because that's how they make money.
You're suggesting that it doesn't matter what children are exposed to / become addicted to because companies should be able to sell what children want? So there's no limits to that in your mind? Should every child be given cocaine because they ask for it? They're certainly given candy, right? You must believe there's no difference between cocaine and candy, I can assure you there is a difference and show you evidence to the contrary, if you're that dense.
sigh... he is saying that addictiveness itself is not a justification to ban something. exercising is addictive to some people, sex is addictive, reading is addictive for some people. everything worth doing in life is addicting.
what matters is the negative consequences of doing something. so the justification for banning tiktok is that it destroys childrens attention spans for life and lets them get propagandized by a hostile foreign government, NOT that its addictive.
Tiktok hasn't been around long enough for the claim that it "destroys childrens attention spans for life" to make any sense.
And children get propagandized by hostile foreign governments everywhere online. And by their own government. The premise that TikTok was somehow more dangerous in this regard than Facebook or Twitter or even Discord is based entirely on sinophobia.
The government could spend effort on making a documentary and funding a study on brain scans and a little campaign to show everyone the damage and educate rather than just wielding the ban hammer. Especially because it’s often possible that they can have a different motive for ban hammering even if the reason given is valid.
I’d love to think of myself as an exceptional individual because I don’t use Facebook or TikTok, but most likely I’m not exceptional at all, and other people could also just not use TikTok.
I find it pretty hypocritical that the same people who push for e.g. legal marijuana would go for banning social media apps. Don't get me wrong, I use neither and think both are mentally, physically, and morally corrosive. I would not care to have either present in the community where I live, nor for my future children to use them.
That does not mean it is the province of the state to ban them.
Weed isn't designed to be anything, but it certainly is addictive in the same sense that social media is. There is no physical addiction (which is also true for TikTok), but there are definitely people that are hooked on it.
did you see what happened when we tried to decriminalise hard drugs in Vancouver? Feel good for yourself that you have the discipline to have self control, other do not and need help.
You are free to not use TikTok yourself, no one is stopping you.
Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.
And it’s also mostly targeting children/teenagers.
As a parent you can add limitations on cinema, binging series. You can’t on TikTok.
I’m quite glad that there is a form of control preventing a company from a different part of the world that don’t really care about the mental health or wellbeing of my kids to creep into their life like that…
As a parent, it’s not a fair fight and I should not have to delegate that to another private company
Probably a bit of both but I don’t know any other hardware that is that addictive…
Social network are not necessarily bad, even for teens. The issue here is the effort to make any user into a scrolling machine combined to a medium always in your pocket.
> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?
Spoiler: There is no line. Societies (or more accurately, communities) attempt to self-regulate behaviors that have perceived net-negative effects. These perceptions change over time. There is no optimal set of standards. Historically, this has no consideration for intelligence or biology or physics (close-enough-rituals tended to replace impractical mandates).
Short form video has been a total break from previous media and social media consumption patterns. Personally I would support a ban on algorithmic endless short form video. It's purely toxic and bad for humanity
People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.
Even most liberal societies tend to ban addictive things. Alcohol, smoking, gambling, drugs, they are regulated almost everywhere, in one form or another.
I think that algorithmic social media should be likewise regulated, with at the very minimum ban for minors.
Note that my focus here on the "algorithmic" part. I'm fine with little or no regulation for social media where your feed is just events in chronological order from contacts that you are subscribed to, like an old bullettin board, or the original Facebook.
Also, I think we should consider companies that provide algorithmic social media responsible for what they publish in your feed. The content may be user generated, but what is pushed to the masses is decided by them.
It's way more complex than "no self control". Social media is addictive by design and is peddled at such scale that it is literally impossible to ignore. It's also backed by billions upon billions of dollars.
Pitting the average person up against that, then blaming them for having "no self control" once they inevitably get sucked in is not a remotely fair conclusion.
People keep saying this and yet, I have never used any of these short form video services or really any social media outside of desktop websites like hackernews and reddit. Even on reddit I just subscribe to a few niche and mostly technical subreddits. It seems extremely easy to ignore it all.
Considering the median amount of time people spend on social media daily, it sure does not seem to be so easy for the average person (as was implied in the comment you replied to). I've got a pretty good self control when it comes to the common vices, but I can't see why that would generalise to everyone else.
It's easy for you and me. At the same time, it doesn't seem right to make a business of intentionally going after the people who get addicted to this, like flavored cigs meant to appeal to teenagers. And these social media companies have a paper trail of internal research on user engagement.
But I'm still wary of the motives behind these bans because they seem to be about controlling information, not addiction.
> People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.
Europe wants to ban algorithmic recommendation. You attack a straw-man: banning all the content from creators. If you have any valid argument you should bring them to the discussion instead of creating imaginary enemies.
Banning harmful design patterns is a must to protect citizens even if it ruffles the feathers of those profiting from their addiction.
> A subset of the population doesn't have self control?
please fix this to
A subset of the population who has not yet reached the age of consent
I think society broadly accepts that there are different expectations for children and adults; the line is currently officially drawn somewhere around 18-21 years old.
> But in Europe you can drink at 14. Age of consent is also 14.
That is hilariously general. You're conflating a lot of different nations there. In practice; its different depending on the nation, consent is usually 16 and alcohol is ~18.
The thing is, people who live in Europe actually like that companies aren't allowed take advantage of people in every way concievable.
I have an ideia, if you don't like regulation that protects people why don't you fuck off to your own country and advocate for it in whatever dystopian hellhole you came from?
1. The reactions to banning drunk driving: "It's kind of getting communist when a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11 to 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink one or two beers."
2. Mandatory seatbelts: "This is Fascism"
You're going to balk at just about anything that comes down the line - I guarantee it.
The videos are the entertainment, not the endless recommendation algorithm.
Additionally, this is not about self control. The claim is that the algorithm is designed to exploit users. Insiders (including a designer of infinite scroll!) have admitted as much going back years: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959
We should be uncomfortable with companies spending huge amounts of money to research and implement exploitative algorithms. We did something about cigarette companies advertising to kids. This action is along those lines.
I would much rather people not break things down into false dichotomies. Also, we should strive to give our children at least "good" options, and not settle for "less bad".
When most of the market using it is abusive, and a source of abuse, preventing the abuse to continue while it's being investigated, or better apprehended by the population/generations at large, makes sense.
The "subset of the population" is not small, and there is no easy way to protect the most vulnerable.
> it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives
I don't think we should be rewarding those who make a living by creating "content" that serves for nothing but a dopamine rush, and you can bet that those who who put it in the effort to create valuable content would prefer to have one less channel where they are forced to put out content just to satisfy the algorithm overlords.
It's not about the content, but the format and the economic pressure that corporations exert over everyone.
If you want to distribute short videos on a website that let's you choose what you want after search and deliberately clicking on a button to play it, by all means feel free to do it. But the current Tik-Tok mechanism removes all agency and are an extreme version of mind pollution.
One way is criminalizing the victims, another is going after the platforms. I'm willing to wager a bet on who will be the ones receiving the enforcements here :)
To that end, there's no logical reason entertainment exists at all. There's a biological advantage to finding community members entertaining, but anything that broadcasts that entertainment to another community is just exploiting human nature.
By the logic of the court decision, anything that is entertaining should be banned, from movies to TV shows to any news that makes any analysis whatsoever.
The best way for tiktok to respond to this , is to add some "cooling down" delay between videos. The EU commision will boast about this achievement, but effectively tiktok users will spend MORE time on their app.
It's not about banning design patterns. It's about removing the harmful results they produce.
Can you imagine if gambling were allowed to be marketed to children? Especially things like slot machines. We absolutely limit the reach of those "design patterns".
You could make the same argument about sugary beverages, that you can't legislate intelligence, yet every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board. This of course omits a lot of nuance, but the main takeaway remains the same. We all have that monkey brain inside us and sometimes we need guardrails to defend against it. It's the same reason we don't allow advertising alcohol and casinos to kids, and many other similar examples. (Or at least we don't allow it where I'm from, maybe the laws are different where you're from.)
>every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board
Is there strong evidence for that? The first study that pops up if I search this suggests otherwise, that it could increase consumption of sugar-substitutes and overall caloric intake. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.019
>we need guardrails to defend against
There is no "we". You say that I and others need it, and you want to impose your opinion by taxing us.
This is honestly a very silly take. You could make the same counterargument about any tax of any kind, or really any law of any kind. Like it or not, we do need both taxes and laws to function as a society.
I don’t think the addictive argument is being made in good faith. Any platform with an infinite scroll feed and titillating content is intentionally made to be like a slot machine. Just keep swiping and maybe you’ll get that little dopamine hit. The idea that TikTok is dangerous, but Twitter, Instagram, porn, alcohol, and Doritos are fine doesn’t come across as an internally consistent argument. I think that the reality is that those who have an actual say in legislation perceive these platforms as a mechanism of social control and weapon. Right now the weapon isn’t in the “right“ hands.
My preferred solution would be to subsidize tools that allow people to better identify and resist compulsive behaviors. Apps like Opal and Freedom that allow you to monitor your free time and block apps or websites you have a troubled relationship with would probably see more use if everybody was given a voucher to buy a subscription. Funding more basic research into behavioral addictions like gambling, etc (ideally research that couldn’t be used by casinos and sports gambling apps on the other side). Helping fund the clinical trials for next Zepbound and Ozempic.
I'd go as far as saying every film ever made should have to have a concrete ending and stand on it's own. I am however much less into "freedoms" as I get older and see people become crackheads for apps and the worst form of capitalism possible where market breaking hoarders and resellers get rich denying people both necessities and wants in equal measure. I'm also radical enough to think that it should be illegal to own more than one house, more than one car for every licensed member of a household, and reselling anything for profit. I guess put simply, I hate resellers. I hate hanging threads, and I hate people that design things to constantly leave people wanting or "needing" more.
Gambling mechanics are also banned for certain ages and in some countries for everyone. We don’t say that it’s just a game, and people should just control themselves. Without going into the specifics of this case, design pattern intervention have existed for a long time and it has been in most cases desirable.
And there are grey areas for gambling that have been settled on, like how video game "loot boxes" were recently reconsidered as gambling in some places (besides just being stupid).
Yeah, I think that's the new thing these days. Companies have always been trying to make things addictive, but now they can target each and every individual. I wonder if we had strong privacy laws, if it were illegal for TikTok to have this private information about you.
The only reason the US and Europe are targeting TikTok is because they don't own the platform. Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by Meta) are responsible for so much hate politics and social unrest around the world (Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ). Amazon, Google and Microsoft helped the Israelis conduct the genocide in Gaza with their AI tools (UN Calls Out Google and Amazon for Abetting Gaza Genocide - https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o... ). But all that's OK.
Yeah, I don't like the reason either. They should've just banned TikTok day 1 as reciprocity with China banning our sites. Instead it was allowed until it started promoting wrongthink.
The US government would have to demonstrate improving people's lives to get votes if they couldn't campaign entirely on hate politics. Obviously they prefer the hate politics and ragebait attention algorithms. That way they can funnel billions of dollars to themselves and their buddies instead of wasting it on services supporting US citizens.
> Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine
I mean, that's specifically fine because we have ample evidence to suggest it's just kind of a shit way to watch shows, and Netflix continually taking their own business model out back and shooting it doesn't really warrant government intervention
> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app
I think there's a wide regulatory spectrum between those extremes--one that all sorts of governments already use to regulate everything from weapons to software to antibiotics.
It's easy to cherry-pick examples where regulation failed or produced unexpected bad results. However, doing that misses the huge majority of cases where regulation succeeds at preventing harms without imposing problematic burdens on people. Those successes are hard to see because they're evidenced by bad outcomes failing to happen, things working much as they did before (or getting worse at a slower rate than otherwise might happen).
It's harder to point to "nothing changed" as a win than it is to find the pissed-off minority who got denied building permits for reasons they disagree with, or the whataboutists who take bad actions by governments as evidence that regulation in unrelated areas is doomed to failure.
More and more businesses are shifting their operations and outreach to IG and TikTok, so deciding how to live in a society is increasingly becoming "live under a rock" or "enter the casino and hope to not get swallowed up by the slop".
>I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling.
The argument against tiktok (and smartphones in general) is not that experiences above a certain threshold of compellingness are bad for you: it is that filling your waking hours with compelling experiences is bad for you.
Back when he had to travel to a theatre to have them, a person was unable to have them every free minute of his day.
> people might overuse them ... cliffhangers and sequels
I once heard some try to understand pornography addiction by asking if it was comparable to a desire to eat a lot of lemon cookies. To quote Margaret Thatcher, "No. No. No."
> Where do we draw the line
Just because it's hard to find a principled place to draw the line doesn't mean we give up and draw no line. If you are OK with the government setting speed limits, then you're OK with lines drawn in ways that are intended to be sensible but are, ultimately, arbitrary, and which infringe on your freedom for the sake of your good and the public good.
> trust adults
Please do not forget the children.
> You can't legislate intelligence
Your implication is that people who are addicted to TikTok or anything else are unintelligent, dumb, and need to be educated. This is, frankly, an offensive way to engage the conversation, and, worse, naive.
> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?
We do it for alcohol and cigarettes already: taxes, ads & marketing restrictions, health warning mandated communication.
> didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling
Apples to oranges.
I can’t make meth in my basement as a precursor to some other drug then complain that my target product had a shitty design.
Real life experience shows that TikTok is harmfully addictive and therefore it must be controlled to prevent negative social outcomes. It’s not rocket science, we have to be pragmatic based on real life experience, not theory.
I am just as uncomfortable with this banning of ideas, or to look at it another way, banning designing it this way simply because it’s effective. I assume this exact same design would not be made illegal if it were terrible at increasing engagement. However I also have to acknowledge that I already can’t stand what TikTok and its ilk have done to attention spans and how addictive they are even across several generations. People just end up sitting there and thumb-twitching while the algorithm pipes handpicked slop into their brains for hours a day. I really don’t want a world where everything is just like this, but even more refined and effective. So, it’s tough to argue that we should just let these sociopaths do this to everyone.
Arguably, the best reason for the government to care is that whoever controls this algorithm, especially in a future when it’s twice as entrenched as it is today, has an unbelievably unfair advantage in influencing public opinion.
> I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them.
I used to be opposed, now I'm not. I strongly believe human specialization is the important niche humans have adapted, and that should be encouraged. Another equally significant part of human nature is, trust and gullibility. People will abuse these aspects of human nature to give themselves an unfair advantage. If you believe lying is bad, and laws should exist to punish those who do to gain an advantage. Or if you believe that selling an endless, and addictive substance should restricted. You already agree.
There's are two bars in your town, and shady forms of alcohol abound. One bar is run by someone who will always cut someone off after they've had too many. And goes to extreme lengths to ensure that the only alcohol they sell is etoh. Another one is run by someone who doesn't appear to give a fuck, and is constantly suggesting that you should have another, some people have even gone blind.
I think a just society, would allow people to specialize in their domain, without needing to also be a phd in the effects of alcohol poisoning, and which alcohols are safe to consume, and how much.
> Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention?
Yes, the dopamine feedback loop of short form endless scrolling has a significantly different effect on the brain's reward system. I guess in line with how everyone shouldn't need to be a phd, you also need people to be able to believe the conclusions of experts as well.
> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?
It's not as linear of a distinction. We don't have to draw the line of where we stop today. It's perfectly fine to iterate and reevaluate. Endless scroll large data source algorithm's are, without a doubt, addictive. Where's the line on cigarettes or now vapes? Surely they should be available, endlessly to children, because where do you draw the line?
(It's mental health, cigarettes and alcohol are bad for physical health, but no one (rhetorical speaking) gives a shit about mental health)
> If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming,
I'd love to ban micro transactions and loot boxes (gambling games) for children.
> even email notifications.
reductive ad absurdism, or perhaps you meant to make a whataboutism argument?
> My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous.
Camels and Lucky Strike are both illegal for children to buy.
> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app.
We clearly do. Companies are taking advantage of the natural dopamine system of the brain for their advantage, at the expense of the people using their applications. Mental health deserves the same prioritzation and protection as physical health. I actually agree with you, banning some activity that doesn't harm others, only a risk to yourself, among reasonably educated adults is insanely stupid. But that's not what's happening.
> I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.
I'd rather see companies that use an unfair disparity of power, control, knowledge and data, be punished when they use it to gain an advantage over their consumers. I think dark patterns should be illegal and come with apocalyptic fines. I think tuning your algorithm's recommendation so that you can sell more ads, or one that recommends divisive content because it drives engagement, (again, because ads) should be heavily taxed, or fined so that the government has the funding to provide an equally effective source of information or transparency.
> You can't legislate intelligence...
You equally can't demand that everyone know exactly why every flavor of snake oil is dangerous, and you should punish those who try to pretend it's safe.
Especially when there's an executive in some part of the building trying to figure out how to get more children using it.
The distinction requiring intervention isn't because these companies exist. The intervention is required because the company has hired someone who's job is to convince children to use something they know is addictive.
Yeah, prohibition is a terrible policy for everyone except the cops, jailers (including private, for-profit jailers), government spooks, smugglers, arms dealers, hitmen, chain and shackle manufacturers, etc. who make a living from it. I'm taxed to pay some of the world's most odious people to stop a small percentage of the supply of these drugs. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the supply makes it through and causes untold suffering for addicts, often thanks to other (or the same) taxpayer-funded bad guys and an onramp provided by the legal pharmaceutical industry. In the impoverished countries where the supply comes from, all this revenue funds hellish slave/feudal economies where a small violent elite terrorize, torture, and kill working people. Even in the developed world, addicts are weaponized by others for all kinds of violence (drug gangs, human trafficking rings, etc.) and net-negative property crime (stripping copper from abandoned houses, stealing catalytic converters, etc.).
In short, banning hard drugs is very very obviously a losing policy that serves only to enrich the world's worst people at the expense of everyone else.
Yes, many intelligent people DO think we should not ban any drugs/substances and that the best way to deal with them is instead regulate and set up societal structures and frameworks that support the issues around abuse.
The science tends to back these ideas up. Banning does not stop people from doing what they want.
Education and guard rails are always better than hard control.
The headline overstates what actually happened. Ironic that they’re using clickbait headlines on an article about a service using tricks to get people to engage with something.
They haven’t concluded anything yet. It’s early in the process and they’re opening the process of having TikTok engage and respond.
The article starts with a headline the makes it sound like the conclusion was already made, then the more you read the more it becomes clear that this is the early part of an investigation, not an actual decision.
> Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful are likely illegal.
> No timeline was given on when authorities will make a final decision in the case.
I don't understand the legal side, but after gaining and kicking a Tiktok addiction during and after COVID, I believe it. I was there 4-8 hours a day and tried to scroll videos while washing dishes (and during nearly any other activity).
When it's a streaming service, it might be equally worse IMO, but a bit less so if it's music you own. But anyways, I call these folks "electro autists" (with apologies to real autists) as they are rarely reachable for social interactions. Saying "good morning" in the elevator? No chance. Nor recognizing people left or right.
Or in the gym, where they block machines for many minutes, i.e. much more than the one or two minutes of resting in between sets, while paging through social media in between sets. Asking them to unblock a machine in the gym? Some are reachable there if you stand in front of them and wave your hands.
And walking the dog, or strolling with kids while on "social" media. I often observe them to neither recognize when either dog or kid try to show them things or events. I sometimes wonder (aloud and near them ;-), if they phone with their companions.
Oldie but Goldie: Charlene Guzman's video "I forgot my phone" from 12 years ago:
I like music and I like videos, but I also learned to concentrate on the task at hand and/or the people besides me.
Disclaimer: listening to music while doing chores like washing dishes is OK. But I prefer a dish washer and connect to people while the dish washer is running.
> When it's a streaming service, it might be equally worse IMO, but a bit less so if it's music you own.
That's what I was thinking about when I mentioned teleological arguments. A stream is programmed by somebody else and who knows if they are trying to please me or their partners. I do use music streaming services, but these days I try to listen to entire albums.
I get what you are saying about wearing headphones in public places. I have ear buds that have a fantastic transparent mode where I get a mix of music and outside noises sent to my ears. As soon as I start talking, it pauses the music. In theory, you would be able to ask me to press the elevator button for you but having ear buds in usually communicates do-not-disturb.
That video is great and I hadn't seen it before. Thanks for linking it.
> A stream is programmed by somebody else and who knows if they are trying to please me or their partners.
That's one problem, yes. The other, more subtle, might be that one cannot really develop a personal taste. If you have a CD (or nowadays Vinyl ;-) you can listen to it even when the artist isn't in the stream any more.
I'm a fan of J. J. Cale's music for example, and have a number of his CDs (ripped for convenient mobile handling, of course) so can mix my own "stream" to take with me and listen to it when I'm in the mood. I'm a fan of Bach, Händel, Telemann too, own a number CDs of course, and when I'm in the mood for a relaxing bit of classic I can "stream" my own selection. So I decide what to listen to and I decide when to do it, depending on my mood.
Just some days ago I learned that many people sell their CD collection and you can find them in cheap batches on Ebay. When I suddenly remember a long forgotten artist (forgotten by me as time goes by), I will be able to grab a CD, rip it and listen to things I remember. Doing that with a streaming service? Tough thing, I suppose.
I do listen to music new to me (mainly on Youtube) every now and then, and learn about artists I didn't know, but if I really like enough of their work, I'll get a CD. Which, BTW, is not always easy for certain niche artists which either publish a limited set of vinyl and/or downloadable collections only nowadays.
I would say it's slightly worse but they're both not great, as someone who was addicted to being fed something at all times, I was really avoiding every having to spend time with myself if that makes sense. That being said, it's mostly about intention. Are you excited to finally listen to that amazing album or audiobook on your walk after work? That's usually more healthy than when I would scroll on tiktok during my day to avoid feeling anything other than dopamine and avoid bad feelings. It's really about self awareness for me.
I have headphones on 24/7 and while outside, but if I didn't have them I wouldn't exactly mind, I'd probably widh I wouldn't have to hear the loud noises (cars, bus engine sound etc)
I feel like with Tikatok etc. its really just that your entire attention both audio and visual is stuck in that thing, it's not an auxiliary activity
Not sure if its worse but you are point rings a bell for me cause I feel that I can no longer do any task without having something being bombarded in my head, be it podcast, music or audiobook.
> Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog?
If you think about cognitive load, then I would say yes.
Listening to music or even talking with headphones does consume some of your brain power, but you are able to execute physical tasks reasonably well. For example I am able to do DIY (apart from measuring) whilst listening to audiobooks. I can do all the household chores too (washing up, clothes, tidying vaccuming etc)
I cannot do that with short videos playing. firstly I have to hold the device, secondly I'm not looking at what I am doing, thirdly, moving pictures attract my attention.
In the same way that that most people are utterly unable to do "thinking work" (ie stuff that requires inner monologue and visualisation [sorry aphantasia people]) with a TV within visual range. I know that some people are able to do ironing infront of the TV, but I'd struggle with that to do a good job
I wasn’t able to stomach the idea of Larry Ellison being able to silently nudge my political views so I just deleted the app. Without the allure of China being able to influence my opinion I lost interest.
The android app scrollguard helped me. Stops YouTube short, reels and TikTok from being clicked on. It has massive permissions to survey my phone which could be scary. But as an addict you have to admit when you need to check yourself into rehab. And the phone is the drug.
uninstall the app. Works really well to me. The conscious effort of reinstalling it is enough to prevent me from doing it. Whereas using the awfully implemented screentime guards, I just find myself clicking on "Allow for 15 minutes" before I even understand what I do.
I think im just less prone to doomscroll type addictions, but i found myself sitting on the toilet for longer than normal when youtube shorts became something tougher to easily remove from the base youtube experience on their app.
This caused me to disable the youtube app(literally can't uninstall it on a pixel stock os), and if i ever utilize youtube on my phone its through firefox instead.
I also got the extension unhook on my desktop/laptop, and now my youtube experience is more reminiscent of the early 2010s where I would just use it to look up sports highlights or music videos, and if i don't have a video or subject in mind im not force fed one.
This also just kinda shows me how terrible the search experience is on youtube. Feel like all of their effort is on their doomscroll / suggested content, rather than their search results.
personally I haven't used tiktok ever but Instagram reels are the real thing
however, I must say that youtube shorts is the worst of the bunch, even if I'm trying to be entertained, it's full of just slop spam and "top 5" or something that I'm not interested in, while reels are actually funny
I remember I'd sometimes try and get into it, scrolling just to see if I can find one thing that's actually good and just quitting because I got frustrated.
it's truly the worst of the bunch in my opinion.
and they've definitely made the overall experience worse on youtube while focusing all efforts on shorts and funneling you to it.
Tiktok, Instagram reels, Facebook reels/shorts, YouTube Shorts ... to me these are all equally bad. I'm sure there are many other sources of attention destruction.
It's bad I can't say that I did it with willpower alone but Brick helped immensely. Their product is great, not a subscription, and even though there are competitors or you could build something like this for your phone, they're good with customer service and I would recommend their product.
Also, Unhook for removing suggestions/comments/etc from Youtube, you can basically turn everything off until it becomes a search bar and your subscriptions.
Get a good website blocking browser extension.
Remove anything that resembles a "recommendation" or avoid it like the plague.
But beyond that, the most compelling content was probably the best all time videos which I’ve exhausted. Plus half the videos now seem to cut off before they answer whatever question they posed. Very frustrating.
I deleted the account, made a new one from a different location at a later date and then scrolled for a few minutes and realised I would need multiple hours of scrolling through absolute shit content I genuinely despise to train the ai back to what it was. And I gave up on that and deleted the app forever.
Not OP, but my favorite book of all time is Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I quit every drug, stopped playing video games, quit social media for 3 years, started exercising daily.
I'm only back on social media because it actually made my life worse being off it.
In the depths of it, it's the last thing before I fell asleep, and the first thing I did in the morning, so the first thing was to break that cycle. Forced myself to have an independent thought for myself in the morning before I checked TikTok/Reels/YouTube shorts/Reddit/Hacker News. Then, not bringing my phone to bed at night, then just https://xkcd.com/386/ letting people be wrong on the Internet. Unless it affects my offline life in some way, it's just not as big a deal anymore.
Short form video content in general is ludicrously addictive. All infinite scroll is addictive but there’s something particularly strong when it’s short videos that each deliver some kind of hook or punch line.
I landed on YouTube shorts once and started scrolling. Hours later I genuinely felt like I’d been drugged. It was shocking and surreal how powerful the effect was. Made it a point since then to never go there. I’ve never touched TikTok but I’ve heard stories of people spending every waking second on that thing.
Obviously some people are going to be more prone to it than others.
> At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll' over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks', including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.
Most of these seem concretely doable, and maybe effective. But the core of the addictiveness comes from the "recommender system", and what are they supposed to do there? Start recommending worse content? How much worse do the recommendations have to be before the EC is satisfied?
> Most of these seem concretely doable, and maybe effective. But the core of the addictiveness comes from the "recommender system", and what are they supposed to do there? Start recommending worse content? How much worse do the recommendations have to be before the EC is satisfied?
I agree with you, this is rather odd. And sort of missing the problem.
All apps are about attention. The percentage of the time spent using the app when it shows you your good content (Whatever it is that you're interested in) determines how addictive it is. And the percentage of time it's showing you bad content (Ads, 'screen time breaks', manual scroll time, more ads, loading screens, sponsor ads, filler content (youtube for instance is full of this), etc) counteracts the addictive properties because nobody likes it.
What's the end goal here? Right now TikTok is winning the attention economy race against the other apps because it's more focused on the user's preferred content. Is that what we want to reduce? To show more uninteresting other stuff on the screen? Like blank 'wait 5 minute' statics? Or just more ads?
I get that we don't want a generation of socially inept phone addicts, but this won't solve anything I fear. People will still want the good content, forcing the most customer friendly (it feels wrong to say that about TikTok) app to become more enshittified is a bewildering solution.
"non-addictive" isn't a well-defined thing. It's like telling McDonalds that their food must be "healthy". There's a lot of regulation affecting the food that McDonalds serves (and that's probably a good thing), but it's all based on measurable things.
Idk how to feel about this specifically but I kind of hope they come for Duolingo next. They are up to some similar mind hacking shit to keep people from leaving. There's the downright abusive streak management tactics that have become a major part of their brand and PR, and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub. They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them, as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again. I don't know what the solution is but I've known multiple people now who've gotten frustrated and blamed themselves for not being able to advance their skills with a language, but Duolingo's business model, like Tinder's, is completely opposed with the goals of their users. If Duolingo R&D discovered a magical new method of making you fluent in a language overnight, they would not sell it to you. Tinder R&D might have discovered the actual honest-to-God formula for True Love years ago and burned it because they can make more if you swipe forever.
Funnily all of Duolingo's retention mechanisms (formemost streaks and leagues) have the exact opposite effect on me. I am only moderately encouraged by success and extremely discouraged by failure. That means keeping the streak up is stress for me and failing a streak leads to a big negative impact on my motivation for the failure and a positive reinforcement of not doing it because then the stress goes away and that is nice. They literally train my brain not to use their app.
Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.
People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.
I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.
This is pretty much everything in business these days. Medicine too. Nobody is interested in solving your problems for a price. They are interested in selling you a never-ending service or subscription that you pay for over and over.
duolingo is pretty bad overall, sadly most better alternatives [zB: anki flashcards] are a bit less shiny and more difficult to set-up for less tech-oriented people
There may be a very fine line between reward-hacking for the user's benefit vs. building a facsimile of language learning on top of a nuclear-powered Gacha loop. I've looked at other learning apps (including I think Anki but I haven't tried it) trying to help people out of the Duolingo pit and they do all seem much more clinical in comparison. Not automatically a bad thing for an educational tool but it's also not hard to see why they don't get the same traction.
yeah, the issue is that there really can't be one "do-it-all" tool. even duolingo doesn't really teach grammar iirc [which really means one can't become fluent tbh]. one kinda has to set up the parts by oneselves, but that's a bit difficult to get used to
Devil's advocate here (not associated with Duolingo, and in fact I haven't even used it):
> They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them
The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development.
I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the answer is that there is no easy answer. Every solution sucks in a way.
> as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again
Anki does the same, calls it "spaced repetition" and says it's a feature. Should we ban Anki now?
I concede that repetition is a valuable part of learning and that there's no easy answer, but they way Duolingo does it seems pretty intentional given the level of polish they have in the app generally. When prior lessons reset, it can interrupt your progress on your current lesson and will actively block you from making further progress until you go back and do those lessons again, unless you "skip" them, which they use their weird sad owl to discourage. Often the lessons haven't changed very much and redoing it is just busywork, seeing the first couple words of a question you've seen before and remembering what the answer is before its even finished writing it out, which doesn't seem like it reinforces learning the language, just learning how to salivate when Duo rings the bell.
I haven't used Anki either and I'm not suggesting anybody ban either one, though I would be curious how Anki's spaced repetition implementation differs from Duos. In general I don't think bans usually have the intended effect, and trying to ban or discourage dark user patterns seems almost impossible to define usefully, let alone enforce even if it were the right thing to do. I'm not much of a gambler, but I live in one of the holdout US states that doesn't allow sports betting apps, which is an entire ecosystem of human-hacking dark patterns, and it bothers me that I'm disallowed from participating in the name of protecting other people from their own poor self-control. Duolingo has all the time in the world to defeat that kind of thing with loopholes and it would make it even harder for an alternative service to compete with them.
actually language learning is complex enough that they could build new products/ features to retain users and still deliver value. But for some reason they don't
> and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub
They don't need to design for that. If you want to become proficient in the language, you'll have to use the language for something. Whatever lessons Duolingo provides, they won't get you to become proficient in a language.
Duolingo is a shitty company, they don’t care about education, only retention mechanics and dark patterns. The CEO called his employees communists because they wanted to make the product beneficial for users instead of a money extraction machine.
I'm too late but I'm surprised HN crowd treats tiktok as some weaponized addiction machine. Youtube used to have a working recommendation system and it was usable too. Is it really bad to give me woodworking and learning chinese videos if that's what I'm interested in at the moment? If somebody is not interested in anything specific and just want to zone out, is it really different if he scrolls through tiktok or watches the same thing put into longer videos on TV or some other site? I see zero rational argument being made here. Should we ban bikes if they are the most efficient transportation mode in given area because people get addicted to them?
People do get addicted to bikes. Not even questionable. But of course that's not a charitable interpretation, and on that - yes I don't think personalized content is comparable to heroin. What is so evil about personalized content?
I'm sincerely trying to understand. Your whole argument here is based on the premise that TV is OK because it's not personalized.
Yes my entire argument is that recommendation algorithms are designed to cause addiction. Some incredibly smart people have been working on this and they have succeeded wildly. And without personalised content the problem goes away. And that the problem is most acute in short form video platforms like tiktok, instagram shorts and youtube reels. And yes I do consider it closer to drugs than ..... bikes.
OK, but is it a problem if you get recommended repos on github? What I mean that perhaps it's not the good recommendation algorithm that is the problem? It seems like banning tcp/ip because porn is bad.
In China for example (IIRC) below 18 you cannot use these apps past some hour and not above some time limit per day. That seems far from correct solution but seems better than banning it outright and seems to be addressing most concerns.
Personalized content is crucial for functioning information platforms. Imagine if usenet had a single group only. The information sea is vast and the ways to browse and access it seem to only be diminishing. Relaying solely on LLMs outputs does not seem like a safe bet. We've been living off black boxes outputs since altavista, but it's nice to at least have many different black boxes to chose from.
(HN is very much a FYP, it's just that.we like similar stuff)
Sincerely want to understand it, now that there's more comments it seems I'm not the only one but in minority. Currently most interesting dimension to me is how big part of HN is effectively against open access to information and supporting censorship but of course within this discussion context that's me misrepresenting those people who only want to save lives.
Suriously though, decent part of posters probably were around when WWW was effectively born. Tell me it was not addictive and not full of harmful content. I'm pretty happy it was not banned despite, unlike TV, providing personalized information that you were seeking.
Maybe I don't get addicted easily, but after 30 minutes of forcing myself to watch tiktok, I just uninstalled it. Friends told me I didn't give it enough time to learn my tastes but... How could it, given that literally 100% of the videos in my interest areas were trash?
The algorithm is pretty simple, it'll show you a selection of videos that are from the n most popular genres of videos, then depending on your dwell time, it'll A/B test categories that are related, or sub categories.
That bit isn't that difficult or new. the special sauce is the editorialising and content categorisation. being able to accurately categorise videos into genres, subjects and sub subjects (ie makeup video, 25 year olds, woman, straight, new york, eyeglitter) and then creating a graph of what persona likes what.
The second secret sauce is people going through and finding stuff and promoting it. TikTok (used to) editorialise/pay highly for content.
I did the same... even faster. I installed it, suggested me some local crap. I wanted ltt, mkbhd, etc. searched those 2, added them, after that first 2 videos were the same crap. uninstall. even youtube is better. It's so much content on youtube that It's impossible to watch it all in a lifetime even at 5x speed. And 10x better content.
I'm in the same boat. I have a TikTok account so my wife and friends can send me videos (mostly cute dogs). It's funny when people probe why I don't use TikTok and they think it must be because I'm against the Chinese/Larry Ellison influence or other common reason. No, I just don't like the format.
I did the same, but because I realized it could become addicting. Too bad Instagram f'ed me by copying TikTok. Now I'm addicted to Reels and I can't uninstall Instagram because my friends message me on it.
Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design. If removing pointless interruptions is illegal, we might as well throw every designer in prison. And why stop there? Why not force TikTok to add other pointless barriers, like making the user solve a puzzle before watching another video? What about other uninterrupted experiences, like watching TV?
I find twitter more addictive then TikTok. Should it be forced to make me click "next" before seeing another tweet?
Banning recommendation engines is also incredible. Is it really the EU's case that they're all illegal, from the youtube recommendation engine to amazon's "people who bought this also bought" to twitter's "who to follow"? Is TikTok's just too good?
> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violated European Union laws for online safety.
The European Commission bases its investigation on the rules laid down in the Digital Services Act (DSA). This European legislation, introduced in 2022, imposes strict requirements on companies offering digital services in Europe.
In addition to TikTok, the social media company Meta, Facebook's parent company, is also under the investigation.
Quoting:
>The Commission is concerned that the systems of both Facebook and Instagram, including their algorithms, may stimulate behavioural addictions in children, as well as create so-called 'rabbit-hole effects'. In addition, the Commission is also concerned about age-assurance and verification methods put in place by Meta.
And before someone mentions the other?
X - the everything app formally known as Twitter - is also under the Commission's scrutiny. It was fined approximately 120 million euro at the end of last year.
To explain it in a little bit better: Digital Services Act designates websites as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) based on the number of monthly active users within the EU (>45 million, roughly 10% of all EU citizens).
Once the website is designated as such, you're looked at with more scrutiny, have to comply to higher standards, and the exact remediation steps are decided on a case-by-case basis. All of the cases are chugging along, but not all of them are on the same stage.
If your website is not popular enough to be designated as VLOP, this law basically doesn't exist. It's not like GDPR in a sense that it defines some things everyone has to follow, regardless of your audience size.
it may not be. but it's common to fight a legal battle against one perpetrator first, then see for the rest. gotta start somewhere, why not start at what's arguably the most toxic and obvious case, even if (or exactly because) it's been around for less long.
Apparent hypocrisy and injustice in government policy is an ugly thing in the world that should be pointed out and eliminated through public awareness and scrutiny.
It matters because everyone - people, companies, countries - is supposed to be equal in front of the law. Selective application of the law shows this not to be the case and shows that there are other factors in play which decide whether someone - a person, a company, a country - gets to violate some law without legal consequences while someone else is prosecuted for the same violation.
If you now think "they have to start somewhere in prosecuting these violations" you're partly correct but also partly mistaken. Sure they have to start somewhere but they could - and if they are really serious about their claims should - have started prosecuting all those other companies which did this way before TikTok or even its predecessor Musically was a thing. Algorithm-driven endless scroll designs to keep user's eyes glued to the screen have been a thing from very early on in nearly all 'social' app-site-things and the warning signs about addictive behaviour in users have been out for many years without the law being thrown at the proprietors of those entities. As to why this has not happened I'll leave for the reader to decide. There are plenty of other examples to be found in this regard ranging from the apprehension of the Telegram CEO to the sudden fervour in going after X-formerly-known-as-Twitter which seem to point at politics being at play in deciding whether a company gets to violate laws without being prosecuted or not.
So what's the solution you ask? As far as I can see it is to keep these companies from violating user's rights by keeping them in line regardless of who owns or runs the company and regardless of whether those owners or proprietors are cooperative on other fronts. Assuming that these laws were written to stem the negative influence these app-things have on their users they should have gone after many other companies much earlier. Had they done so it might even have led to TikTok realising that their scheme would not work in the EU. They might not have launched here or they might have detuned their algorithmic user trap, they might have done many things to negate the negative effects of their product. They might just have decided to skip the whole EU market altogether like many other companies have done and do. I'd have thought 'good riddance', what you?
Are they consistent? As a North American, I find it difficult to take EU/European countries’ stances on addiction seriously when they seem to be decades behind on reducing the prevalence of smoking and drinking, which almost certainly cause more practical harm than TikTok ever could.
> seem to be decades behind on reducing the prevalence of smoking and drinking,
the EU isn't a federal government. the UK, when it was in the EU did a full smoking inside ban, and tightened it after leaving.
It however had a massive problem with binge drinking and sorta didn't do much to stop that, apart from make it more expensive.
the netherlands has a smoking ban, but it was brought in later (I think). they had a different drinking culture so didn't have the same issues as the UK for drink.
That kind of issue is usually left to member states.
So social media is pure 'poison' with 0 positive impact but other addictive media like video games are tools with noble utility?
The World Health Organization has reached the exact opposite conclusion.
The ICD-11 doesn't include 'social media addiction.' It doesn’t exist clinically. What they did include is 'Gaming Disorder', classifying your 'sword' alongside substance abuse and gambling.
My point is governments could just as easily justify video game crack-downs with this same logic. Is that something we should be cheering on? Really?
The problem I have with the way the EU doles out these punishments is that they like to spring them on tech companies after years and years of radio silence and then suddenly it’s “hey TikTok, we just determined you’ve been breaking the law for years, pay us a couple billion please.”
Like, where were they years ago saying “hey TikTok, we think your design is addictive and probably illegal, you need to change or face penalties.” If TikTok continues to operate in the same manner despite a warning, sure, throw the book at them. Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years. Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.
Tiktok spend a lot of money talking to EU regulators. They know shits coming down the track because these directives have to be put into law by eu members. that takes time.
> Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.
But thats not the point, companies shouldn't be doing stuff they know is harmful. Thats literally the point of regulation.
> Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years.
Lol. It's never like this.
These companies are given plenty of warnings and deadlines. After years and years of ignoring them these companies get slapped with a fine and start playing the victim.
BTW at this point DSA has been in effect for three years
Seems to be the same as Facebook, and a bunch of others, so hopefully they're all looking into ways of stop breaking the law, if their lawyers have flagged this preliminary decision to them yet.
It's not any different. Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, all are in the same boat. Explicitly designed, tested and benchmarked to hack human reward circuits most effectively to maximize ad revenue.
So, I think many will reach the conclusion that TikTok's design is
addictive. No problem here.
But, when I go to Youtube - owned by Google - and use those shorts (video shorts), I kind of "swipe down". Even on my desktop computer. This is also
addictive until I eventually stop.
Why isn't Google also fined? Where does the fine approach stop? I
am all for punishing corporations exploiting humans, so that is all
fine by me. But I don't quite understand the rationale. It is not
addictive like a drug, right? The behaviour solely origins via
visual feedback. That's different to e. g. taking LSD. It's a bit
strange to me. When is something addictive? Where is the boundary?
One could also say this is simply good design that gets people's
attention. Ads are also like that. Why are ads not made illegal?
I would be in favour of that. So why aren't ads made illegal? They
can contain addictive elements. They manipulate the viewer. They
try to sell an image. Why is that not forbidden?
We don't need to know the exact boundaries of what's acceptable to recognize obviously harmful behavior and make efforts to stop it on a societal level.
This is the classic "perfect is the enemy of the good" type scenario.
Let's make imperfect progress if that is what we're currently capable of.
Again, the most problematic in this is how vague and handwavy the regulation is.
> The Commission's investigation preliminarily indicates that TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.
> For example, by constantly ‘rewarding' users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into ‘autopilot mode'. Scientific research shows that this may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users' self-control.
> Additionally, in its assessment, TikTok disregarded important indicators of compulsive use of the app, such as the time that minors spend on TikTok at night, the frequency with which users open the app, and other potential indicators.
This is comically unscientific language. It's entirely subjective what is adequate when framed like that. This is another law aimed at suing megacorps to extract fines, although i m not sure how they hope to get those fines from China.
You're quoting the NYT article. If you're going to criticize the Commission's language for being "vague and handwavy", you should quote the original source.
Give a kid a phone with TikTok on it and observe them for a while. It's genuinely upsetting.
They'll spend hours with their heads down just silently looking at the thing. All desire to do anything else just vanishes. Then they freak out when you try to take it away from them.
The only obvious difference between them and someone on fent is the verticality of their posture.
Had they invented Ice Cream in the 2020s, lawmakers of Europe would find it illegal for it's addictive properties. They'd also decree a universal milk fat percentage, perhaps even a law calling dairy farming slavery.
I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of media in general is to keep you around. Television channels try to display content their viewers enjoy, but they can only target broadly. The web allows sites to have way more personal recommendations, but banning it is essentially banning sites because people enjoy it too much.
I think short form content especially is basically brain rot, but I also don't know how you ban something simply because it's too good at providing content people enjoy. The result would just be a worse experience across the board, is that a win?
I guess a forced 5s video saying take a break after 20 minutes of doom scrolling wouldn't be the end of the world, but truely making it illegal doesn't make sense.
Reddit once told me to take a break (i was on the sick for a foot injury).
So I did.
I now check in once a week, for one hour, max.
Ahhh, creatures of habit, that we are.
The trick bit is that addiction and showing people what they want to see are near indistinguishable. It's optimizing for same thing basically and don't think it'll be possible to legislate a clear distinction
There's a big difference between healthy wants and addiction. The latter involves compulsion and craving. The clearest sign anyone is addicted to something is that they use something precisely when even they don't want to.
I'd even say it's orthogonal to the content and what someone wants to see. You can design an app full of crap that's addictive purely because of its reward mechanisms, and on the other hand you can design something that discourages addiction while having high quality content, it's not optimizing for the same thing. People get addicted to mechanisms, not to content, the same way you can enjoy a nice scotch but the addict goes for the five dollar handle of vodka. The latter doesn't want the vodka, he wants the alcohol.
Addiction in many ways erodes genuine higher-order wants and only leaves stimulation. I'd not be surprised if people who watch 8 hours of TikTok a day don't even care what they watch any more.
This kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.
But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.
It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.
The point of the absolutism is that the line will be drawn not where society broadly agrees it should, but where governments find it most useful, and that line will always move in the direction of increasing censorship and propaganda. If Hacker News becomes enough of a threat to the regime it will be classified as "social media" and all of a sudden it will be illegal to moderate without a court order or some nonsense. This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights. Social media intersects with free speech. I know people here don't want to admit that, but it's true.
It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good. For some reason when it comes to social media we're suddenly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even banning algorithmic feeds is a problem. Do those feeds push harmful and extremist content? Yes. But they push everything else as well. Making it more difficult to find related content of any kind is a kind of censorship.
"Government" isn't an external actor; most governments exist on the spectrum between "a big chunk of the public is OK with or supports what they're doing" and "directly influenced by public opinion" (democratic states).
And yeah, they abuse power a lot! So do corporations, tribes, religions, etc.--governments are just the "big group with violence capability and power" we put in that role during this chapter in history. There's no magical "autonomy is theoretically possible and therefore it's OK" line between letting a corporation that everyone is hooked on control what content people see, and letting a state restrict what content can be shown. The technicality that "people could choose to watch something else" for the corporation is just that--a technicality, and just as specious as the "if you don't like it here, then you can move" argument against participation in a state.
> This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights.
Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body? Aren't both protections trying to draw a line between preserving autonomy and preventing harm? That's not whataboutism--I see that as a very similar regulatory space: personal choice and trust versus behavioral likelihood/distrust + negative externalities.
> It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good.
It used to be felt within hacker counterculture that some government influence over speech was bad. Then counterculture expanded into a regular subculture (whether you call it eternal september or just popularity). Some popular opinions about speech restrictions changed (whether you call it orchestrated frog-boiling or just shifting opinions). And even in the '70s-'80s, few hackers believed that a free-speech-absolutist position would scale.
We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane. Things like the MPAA had widespread public support. Pearl-clutching was at a high level. Hell, the CDA in many ways had more teeth to restrict outlets back then, and a centralized social network sure looks a lot more like an outlet than a Usenet server does. I'm as thankful for section 230 as the next person, but even I have to admit that it is looking more and more like a technicality-shield every day.
Like, you and I probably agree extensively on the specifics of what counts as government overreach and the strong need to protect against that. I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed belief that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.
>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it!
And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs." Banning drugs only makes black markets and cartels more effective.
>As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body?
Cigarettes aren't speech. Speech has value, even if it can do harm. Social media, being a means of effecting speech, has value even if it can do harm. Cigarettes have no value and can only do harm.
>We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane.
Sure. The argument for regulating broadcast tv and radio was the spectrum being a limited resource - but the web is not a limited resource. No matter how big Facebook or Twitter get, we're not going to run out of internets for new platforms.
>I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed believe that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.
I don't believe my position is necessarily absolutist - although it gets interpreted as such - I believe that social media platforms have the right and the moral duty to police themselves and deplatform dangerous and extremist content. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence nor does it oblige you a platform. I just don't believe that having governments step into that role is a good idea, and I think recent history in the US and UK back me up in that regard.
And yes, social media platforms may (and will) get things wrong, but they can't send men with guns to shoot me in the head.
But staking out extreme positions to the contrary is sometimes necessary when confronted with extreme positions. I consider the position that social media is more addictive and dangerous than heroin to be extremist, that algorithms need to be banned, that social media platforms need to be nationalized, all of that hyperbole is getting ridiculous to me, and it smacks of a moral panic. But almost no one seems willing to push against it or even question it.
Advertising is speech by corporations, so there's a public interest in regulating it. What's the public interest in regulating your speech, or mine, just because we're on a platform that has an arbitrarily high userbase or uses algorithmic sorting?
Why should it be illegal for me to like fishing videos, and want to be shown more fishing videos if I watch fishing videos?
Or to post at all online without a license and account tied to my real identity?
If I run a car forum, why should it be illegal for me to ban Nazis just because Nazi speech is legal in the US?
Or if my forum gets some arbitrarily large userbase, why should I be forced to give control of my forum to the government to be regulated as a utility?
All of these are rational, likely results of policies that people on HN have advocated, along with banning social media entirely (which would destroy one of the few truly free hypermedia and communication models out there.)
I don't trust the intentions of people who want to regulate social media and I absolutely don't trust the intentions of governments.
He does not say stop everything, but instead offers realistic tips to reduce one's dependency, e.g. he suggests to take breakes and training to stay offline for certain intervals (e.g. half an hour, or an hour)
Imagine having a government that demands a company like TikTok stop abusing its users instead of checks notes forcing its sale to your cronies so you can silence your critics. Must be nice.
I think algorithmic content recommendations must be banned from social media. Its too powerful wrt influencing the masses. People should go back to just seeing content from their friends.
I use X almost entirely from the desktop where I have an extension installed that lets me whitelist my follows, and see nothing else. I recently browsed the same feed on mobile ... and it was entirely different! I think I spent a half hour and saw zero content from my follows, just one ticktok style video after another. For those who find these services without value, I now understand. But I feel revolted rather than addicted. Will I now experience a mysterious compulsion to view the naked feed?
> I recently browsed the same feed on mobile ... and it was entirely different! I think I spent a half hour and saw zero content from my follows
At the top of the mobile app there’s a “For You” tab and a “Following” tab. You must have been on the “For You” tab.
Switch to the “Following” tab.
If you start scrolling the “For You” tab and do it for half an hour straight, you’re basically signaling that this the content you wanted to see and will continue getting more of it.
> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violated European Union laws for online safety.
How is this any different from Reddit? From Instagram? Why single out TikTok?
Applying laws unevenly is a form of discrimination.
What other instances of "we did our job as little too well" are there?
I can think of tabacco and other drugs, but that's not really the same. Monopolistic behavior doesn't really fit either. Maybe Kleenex marketing doing so well their name became interchangeable with the word "tissue"?
Nah man, I'm glad for you that you live in country X where you do Y instead, but at the same time as an European I'm pretty satisfied regulating big shitty companies
Just curious for anyone who pays more attention to this than me: is the company being sanctioned by the EU for this behavior the one that US law forced an ownership change of or does that company only operate in the US?
The simple fact the back button while on the main screen doesn't exit the app is something that honestly should be illegal and is not permitted in the app stores.
TikTok has a lot of issues, such as privacy, dubious content, 'brainrot', etc. I don't want to seem like I'm necessarily defending TikTok specifically here.
But this really just stinks of Regulatory Capture to me. Their main argument is that the consumers like to use the app too much?
Why? Because it's smarter and not as enshittified as the competitors?
I'm sure if youtube, facebook, reddit, etc reduced the number of ads, and started showing more relevant content that people actually cared about, they too would start being "more addictive". Do we really want to punish that?
European regulators and courts have placed a lot of scrutiny on big US tech companies, with frequent fines for privacy violations and potential anti-competitive behavior. Also as noted upthread, they're investigating Meta and Twitter on this specific issue.
You’re getting downvoted but seriously, it took them this long to figure this out? I also suspect they won’t outright ban TikTok, but instead levy a multi-billion dollar fine and let it continue operating.
Good. I feel like since cracking down on smoking in the 90s we've become really complacent to the dangers of addiction. Just like with smoking you'll get people inside the industry defending it too (like in this very comment section).
doom scrolling is not so much an addiction as it is a disease * , as heroin has fully functioning addicts who live very normal
office work lives over a complete career.
doom scrolling renders the patient unable to fully partisipate in society or do meaningfull work or interact in ways that promote there self interest.
I get emails daily from people looking for work, which are clearly written by someone/thing, other than the person, and when I insist on turning a call into there job interview, they freeze up, and hang up after any request for detail.
Waste products and they never even got the chance to get ripped out of there minds and have a wild good time first.
Might be a generational thing, but I never understood the "shorts" (in any format on any social network).
I can watch a 9 hour video on GTA games without problems (not in one sitting, but in parts), but 3 'shorts' in a row with not enough info and explanation to be interesting makes me close any of the 'shorts' apps (tiktok, youtube shorts, instagram....).
You likely weren’t wired into it while your brain was developing.
There’s clear scientific evidence that these shorts trigger addiction-like behavior[1]. The detrimental effects on a kid’s brain development can be inferred[2]. A reasonable argument could made that it’s not so different from things like nicotine, alcohol or other drugs when it comes to child brain development. I believe these companies know this and willfully push it on kids anyway.
Edit: And I think it’s really telling that China has some of the strictest state-led anti-addiction and youth protection policies globally[3].
actually the study does not show a trigger by shorts, instead they hypothesize the addiction exists based on previous studies done on internet/video game addictions.
I think one of the things that short form videos do really well is that they punish creators who pad their videos with unnecessary filler content. On TikTok for example (Not necessarily a fan of the app but it's a good example) no videos start with all that empty jabbering you often see on YouTube ("Welcome to my channel...", "Today we will...", "Please Like and Subscribe...", "This video is sponsored by...", etc), because if they tried any of that crap the viewers would just swipe the content away. So, instead they always get straight to the point. That part is really refreshing.
i can't really concentrate well on long video content outside of specific cases, so there's that. honestly though i feel like shorts aren't the solution, there should just be more text content [eg: tutorials] in addition to video things. [every time someone says something is "only communicateable through video/audio" i die a little bit inside...]
I used to feel, despite knowing how much harm the US has caused around the world, that I was lucky to be born American. Shamefully, I knew that deep down it was better to be born in the US than in a slum in Rio or Calcutta.
Now, I question that, because I know that American companies will never step in and regulate themselves, nor other "foreign run" companies like TikTok (I know it is really murky right now). I know Trump, who owns his own social media company, and Elon Musk, who has invaded the government and owns his own propaganda machine, will never be on the right side of history. My kids are forcibly addicted to their phones and these companies are racing to a bottom I don't think exists. I watch them consume in horror and helplessness.
Spare me your thoughts, childless commentators. You have no idea what kids these days are facing. You have no idea how hard I have fought. It is so horrible. And, the only parents who winning are Amish, Waldorf or home school kids. Every single friend in my kids life is even worse off than mine, so it is pushers everywhere. 13 year old brains were never designed to survive this kind of assault.
https://archive.is/V1NPt
I gave a talk at PyData Berlin on how to build your own TikTok recommendation algorithm. The TikTok personalized recommendation engine is the world's most valuable AI. It's TikTok's differentiation. It updates recommendations within 1 second of you clicking - at human perceivable latency. If your AI recommender has poor feature freshness, it will be perceived as slow, not intelligent - no matter how good the recommendations are.
TikTok's recommender is partly built on European Technology (Apache Flink for real-time feature computation), along with Kafka, and distributed model training infrastructure. The Monolith paper is misleading that the 'online training' is key. It is not. It is that your clicks are made available as features for predicitons in less than 1 second. You need a per-event stream processing architecture for this (like Flink - Feldera would be my modern choice as an incremental streaming engine).
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skZ1HcF7AsM
* Monolith paper - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663
I have to say, it is _extremely_ impressive when a tiktok I watched reminds me of some other tiktok, so I go and search for a very loose description of the tiktok, and the first result is 95% of the time what I wanted to find.
I don't think any single other platform has as good a search feature as TikTok does.
oh wow, you're really lucky. around my friend groups who use tiktok, the main complaint is how bad the search is. unfortunately for us, getting a specific video is almost impossible =(
I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.
I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).
For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise
That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.
Why is it good that you need self control to not get slop? Its much better if you can just turn that off and relax rather than having to stay alert to avoid certain content that it tries to trick you to serve you more slop.
Distancing yourself from temptations is an effective and proven way to get rid of addictions, the programs constantly trying to get you to relapse is not a good feature. Like imagine a fridge that constantly puts in beer, that would be very bad for alcoholics and people would just say "just don't drink the beer?" even though this is a real problem with an easy fix.
Basically, I want to set boundaries in a healthy frame of mind, and have that default respected when my self control is lower because I’m tired, depressed, bored, etc.
“The algorithm” of social media is the opposite.
I think your reply has me convinced. You really can’t expect to have such self control all of the time. Damn.
It’s because content curation is inherently impossible to reach the same level of relevance as direct feedback from user behavior. You mix in all kinds of biases, commercial interests, ideology of the curator, etc, and you inevitably get irrelevant slop. The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
> The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
Why not let you choose to get a less addictive algorithm? Older algorithms were less addictive, so its not at all impossible to do this, many users would want this.
They're optimizing for time spent on the platform.
And that is why these algorithms needs to be regulated. People don't want to pick the algorithm that makes them spend the most time possible on their phones, many would want an algorithm that optimizes for quality rather than quantity on the app so they get more time to do other things. But corporations doesn't want to provide that because they don't earn anything from it.
I just don’t think that the addiction is exclusively due to the algorithm. There’s really a lack of affordable varied options for learning trade and entertainment. We say in Portuguese: You shouldn’t throw the baby away along with the water you used to bathe.
For the record, almost the exact same expression exists in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_throw_the_baby_out_wit...
I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"? For example, lets say there is an option to only recommend videos from channels you subscribe to, that would be much less addictive, why isn't that an option? A regulation that forces these companies to add such a feature would only make the world a better place.
>I don't see any harm that could come from saying "a less addictive algorithm needs to be available to users"?
consider air travel in the present day. ticketing at essentially all airlines breaks down as: premium tickets that are dramatically expensive but offer comfortable seats, and economy tickets that are cramped and seem to impose new indignities every new season. what could be the harm from legislation that would change that menu?
the harm would be fewer people able to travel, fewer young people taking their first trip to experiencing the other side of the world, fewer families visiting grandma, etc.
As much as people hate the air travel experience, the tickets get snapped up, and most of them strictly on the basis of price, and next most taking into account nonstops. This gives us a gauge as to how much people hate air travel: they don't.
this doesn't mean airlines should have no regulation, it doesn't mean monopoly practices are not harmful to happiness, it doesn't mean that addictions don't drive people to make bad choices, it doesn't mean a lot of things.
I'm just trying to get you to see that subtle but significant harm to human thriving can easily come from regulations.
I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that? I believe we’re out of ideas. TikTok’s crime was just be firmly successful because of good engineering. There’s no evil sauce apart from promotional content and occasional manipulation, which has nothing to do with the algorithm per se.
And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discovery.
> I agree, but what would be the actual mechanism that would allow that?
Governments saying "if you are a social content platform with more than XX million users you have to provide these options on recommendation algorithms: X Y Z". It is that easy.
> And about whitelisting, I honestly don’t think you’re comparing apples to apples. The point of the algorithm is dynamically recommending new content. It’s about discovery.
And some people want to turn off that pushed discovery and just get recommended videos from a set of channels that they subscribed to. They still want to watch some tiktok videos, they just don't want the algorithm to try to push bad content on them.
You are right that you can't avoid such algorithm when searching for new content, but I don't see why it has to be there in content it pushes onto you without you asking for new content.
Fair enough. I’m not really a fan of regulation. The capitalist State is a total mess, but I really think we should try your idea.
We're allowed to create laws to avoid a result we don't like, regardless of how many good intentions paved the road that brought us to that result.
I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.
But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.
4chan is nothing like TikTok, though yes I agree heavy moderation is necessary for both.
I try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…” Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.
They built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive UX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Facebook does the same. The longer I dwell on an image post, the more likely the next batch of posts would be similar
The right way to look at these networks is that people are being trained by the algorithm, not the other way around. The ultimate goal is to elicit behaviors in humans, normally to spend more time and spend more money in the platform, but also for other goals that may be designed by the owners of the network.
Is amazon using the same thing??? I can't count the number of times I am getting recommended the EXACT same type of product I just purchased.
One of my gripes with youtube at the moment is that they break my adblock filters to remove shorts more often than they break the filters stopping the actual ads.
I use an addon for firefox called "Hide shorts for Youtube™". Works just fine.
I naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.
You can't turn it off entirely, but if you keep using "show less shorts" from the 3 dot menu it eventually goes away, mostly...
If you're on android it's better to just use revanced or something
I've been insta-skipping tennis video's for months now. Still getting Federer on a daily basis.
Thanks for the Feldera shoutout Jim.
For anyone else, if you want to try out Feldera and IVM for feature-engineering (it gives you perfect offline-online parity), you can start here: https://docs.feldera.com/use_cases/fraud_detection/
Flink is too slow for this.
If by features you mean tracking state per user, that stuff can be tracked without Flink insanely fast with Redis as well.
If you re saying they dont have to load data to update the state, I dont see how massive these states are to require inmemory updates, and if so, you could just do inmemory updates without Flink.
Similarly, any consumer will have to deal with batches of users and pipelining.
Flink is just a bottleneck.
If they actually use Flink for this, its not the moat.
Yea, the Monolith paper by Bytedance uses Flink but they only say it's in use for their B2B ecommerce optimization system. Maybe this is intentional ambiguity, but I'd believe that they wouldn't rely on something like Flink for their core TikTok infrastructure.
My hunch is we start to learn a lot more about the core internals as Oracle tries to market to B2B customers, as Oracle is wont to do!
Flink is not really a performance choice, it's bloat to throw software as fast as possible at problems. I don't think there's any benchmark demonstrating insane capabilities per machine. I definitely couldn't get it to any numbers I liked, given other stream processing / state processing engines that exist (if compute and inmemory state management is the goal). Pretty sure any pathway that touches RocksDB slows everything down to 1-10k events per second, if not less.
The problem of finding out which video is next, by immediately taking into account the recent user context (and other user context) is completely unrelated to what Flink does -- exactly-once state consistency, distributed checkpoints, recovery, event-time semantics, large keyed state. I would even say you don't want a solution to any of the problems Flink solves, you want to avoid having these problems.
I’m happy to see that Flink is in this stack, I wish that Pulsar was as well instead of Kafka.
It is not only recommender though. These guys [1] seem to be able to react pretty quickly and not to create addicts on the way ;(
[1] https://recombee.com
It's interesting to how they found out the "lifetime" of features is a feature by itself. Meta features is real.
apache flink is so good. i think netflix used it heavily in 2018. not sure about now.
TikTok's differention is the userbase of all teenagers in the world.
But go just one layer deeper to 'why is every teenager using Tiktok' and the primary answer once again becomes 'Tiktok's recommendation engine'
I'm not a TikTok user, but I'm assuming the recommendation engine is there to keep eyeballs on more ads for longer. Maybe we should be regulating how often and how many ads can be shown on social media, especially to teens and kids.
They are arguing its not the recommender that is unique it is the network effect.
If it was only network effect, then how did TikTok grow in a space where Instagram and Youtube were already much bigger players? How did they gain that user base?
Network effect helps, but it only explains why they stay big, not how they got big
There really isn't that much making TikTok unique. Yes, their app is well designed. Yes, stitches and video replies make for great social/parasocial features because creators are actually interacting with each other and the community, almost like tumblr. But in my opinion those are reasons number three and two why TikTok is successful. Their recommendation algorithm is number one, by a wide margin.
No the primary answer is "teenagers do what other teenagers do". Remember we are advanced apes no more no less.
There is this curious word "influencer" which everyone uses but few ever think about what it really means.
That didn’t by accident though.
It also provides different opportunities for growth compared to other social media. A video that gets over half a million views on TikTok may not get 5 thousand on Youtube, or even 10 views on Instagram or Facebook.
Isn't the inverse true though? it's not as if nobody's watching youtube, it's just that different videos are popular there.
Great insight. Any thoughts on RisingWave?
That, too, and materialize. Feldera is my favourite, though.
I thought was secret information. How long as it been publicly known?
I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention? The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices? If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming, even email notifications. My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous. It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app. I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.
You can't legislate intelligence...
You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money. And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible.
The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.
It is, quite simply, not a fair fight.
That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.
It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.
The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.
But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.
Every country in the world already does tons of intervention combatting addiction. There are already bans and restrictions on gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes etc… Wether we consider social media addiction to be harmful and how to do it is a good question to be asked, but intervention into harmful addiction is generally uncontroversial.
Though capitalism is to blame for plenty of problems, I don't agree with this take, and I see it repeated quite often.
Economies, capitalist or otherwise, are very much defined by needs and wants. (With this, I presume, you agree already.)
But addiction is another topic altogether from everyday needs and wants like oil, aspirin, or cinema tickets.
Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are a few things that come to mind which very much go against the idea that we are living in anything like the model of capitalism we learn about in school.
2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.
"The entire economy" here being a pseudonym for marketing and advertising?
There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability.
Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time.
If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you can play a few times a week, social media is a slot machine that you carry with you everywhere you go.
I don’t know what personal religious experience you’re speaking from, but my church is a little more oriented toward helping people overcome addictions and personal failings. If you’re in Europe, then I think the messaging in the mosques about consuming alcohol are pretty strict. I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge.
> personal failings
I'm sure your specific church is lovely, but depending on the church, "personal failings" may include such gems as "being gay", depression, autism, PTSD, poverty...
Well sure, they don't want the competition. Churches have naturally evolved to use techniques that keep people coming back. The ones that don't do that die out.
Are you sure churches are a natural phenomenon rather than a cultural one?
Culture is a natural phenomenon.
Yup. It's capitalism that's the core problem. Social media is just a particularly nasty outgrowth.
its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal.
The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and may never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build, because they're insulated by being behind the A/B test.
> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns.
Capitalism doesn't mean we start out with the most efficient money extractor, it just moves towards the most efficient money extractor with time unless regulated.
This is well known and a feature, capitalism moves towards efficiency and regulation helps direct that movement so that it helps humanity rather than hurts us. Capitalism would gladly serve you toxic food but regulations ensures they earn more money by giving you nutritious food. Now regulations are lagging a bit there so there is still plenty of toxic food around, but it used to be much worse than now, the main problem with modern food is that people eat too much directly toxic compounds.
You're not describing capitalism, you're describing managerialism with a manager-evaluation function of profit.
Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.
That's a type of capitalism. Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose. Extractive capitalism doesn't get to pretend its all of capitalism, we just assume that because its been active throughout our entire lifespan.
US hegemony has permitted and encouraged shareholder primacy, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts in order to facilitate the growth of its markets. However we'd be blinkered to assume that this is the only way capitalism can be. Its a choice we make and we deserve this outcome where we've enslaved a generation of children to be eye-balls for ad impressions for silicon valley startups.
We could make other choices but then we'd be personally less rich and see less growth. Do we really think those extra zeros in very few people's portfolio's are worth this macabre world we've created?
> Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose.
And those were replaced by profit seeking enterprises, that is capitalism. Sure some try to create such benevolent entities, but the profit seeking ones out-competes and replaces them over time, that is how capitalism works.
So you can temporarily have a nice company here and there, but 50 years later likely it got replaced by a profit seeking one. The only way to get pro social behaviors from these is to make pro social acts the most profitable via regulations, but its still a profit seeking enterprise that doesn't try to be benevolent.
yeah that's because we allowed aggressive takeovers, especially leveraged ones. They got replaced by extractive capitalism due to a lack of regulation, not just because "capitalism".
The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy. Letting that happen is a choice, letting it continue is a choice.
Yet if you advocate for regulation you are immediately attacked by billionaires and massive companies and people who think those two groups benefit them more than the regulations protecting them. These groups bring unbelievable sums of money to bear to influence policy and public perception to make sure they are as under-regulated as possible.
“Regulation” is a four letter word in the US. Look at the hostility we see on HN whenever it comes up with AI .
Which is why our democratic systems need to provide solutions because they're places where we still have power. I'm from the UK and an increasing amount of our economy is locked up in exploitive equity extraction, much of it US based. Its really bad in some fields (e.g. care homes, foster homes), where the entities are straddled with such debt that the orgs "have no choice" but to charge sky high rates while paying peanuts. At some point I'm sure it will break and our politicians will "break the rules" in order to reign in private equity and sour their investments.
It used to be the case that we permitted these excesses because they guaranteed our security, but now that recent US governments have shit the bed on that one; there's considerably less of a need to tolerate it.
It's been going on since forever. The first people the British enslaved were their own kind, they just managed to create a society where citizens enjoyed the authority, and naturally the fruits of pillaging half the world did trickle down back then.
If you think about PFI etc. and how those contracts were crafted, it's no different to what happened to the UK's oil. That didn't eventually go to the citizens like Norway. Every last bit of the UK is being extracted now.
> The extractive profit seeking entities don't "out-compete" they just use their capital in unregulated conditions to strip mine economies and poison capitalism to become sociopathy
So they did out-compete them? You saying they won using unfair ways doesn't change the fact that they out-competed the other companies.
Capitalism will use any means available to out compete others, I don't understand why you try to argue against this. You just say "but if we restrict the means available its fine", that means you agree with me, so I am not sure what you disagree with.
> So they did out-compete them?
Having more money doesn't necessarily mean "out-compete". Its not that they're delivering a better product, more loyal customers or better branding. Its simply that they put down more capital at a given point, and were allowed to buy the company, despite its owners not wanting to sell. In most cases they didn't even have money, its simply because they obtained significant financing from money brokers by selling them on plans of sociopathy.
> I don't understand why you try to argue against this.
because you're trying to squash this into "capitalism bad". We get to make choices, we're making shit choices. You don't have to upend the whole system to undo these choices, you just have to have the spine to regulate and break up existing structures.
> because you're trying to squash this into "capitalism bad".
I never said "capitalism bad", I said it optimizes for profits and that it gets better at that over time, that is not bad or good, that is just what it does.
I judge a system by what it does, not by what it's proponents say it could theoretically do.
Extractive capitalism is real-world capitalism.
but it does that because of US hegemony empowering its equity to be extractive. We've lost a lot of organisations in the UK due to aggressive and leveraged buyouts. That's not necessarily reflective of capitalism as an abstract but geo-political reluctance in regulating its very worst excesses.
I appreciate your position but I can't help but feel like it's like saying cars are crap because they breakdown too easily, when in practice; you're constantly red lining them.
My point is that it doesn't have to be like this, but its a choice that we as society make, and we could choose to not make it.
> That's not necessarily reflective of capitalism as an abstract but geo-political reluctance in regulating its very worst excesses.
That capitalism needs to be regulated or it results in these toxic outcomes is core to capitalism, yes, that is what we are saying. There is no benevolent capitalism without regulations.
> yes, that is what we are saying
its almost as if its what I've been saying the whole time, but adding the context of where the line is, where MySpace seemed healthy and TikTok is unhealthy. Lean startup culture is an equasion that produces sociopathy, I've always hated it and I think its relatively disgusting how it was embraced at the time.
I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.
> I guess I needed to rail against every type of capitalism at the start for you to appreciate my position earlier.
No, your position earlier was wrong according to what you are saying here, you said Facebook and Myspace didn't have these issues so its not capitalisms fault. But Facebook and Myspace existed under much less regulated circumstances than exists today, so your original statement would make it seem you want less regulations and think things will just sort out themselves.
Or do you really think going back to 2005's regulations would fix things because internet was less toxic then? Internet wasn't less toxic then since capitalism was different, internet was less toxic then since it takes time for capitalism to optimize a system.
> But Facebook and Myspace existed under much less regulated circumstances than exists today
sorry, what regulation are you talking about here? Afaik regulation in the US is pretty much the same back then as it is now. Worst case scenarios are usually slap on the wrists like when Snapchat lied to its users about ephemeral messaging and got fined a pathetic amount.
> No, your position earlier was wrong according to what you are saying here
or how about the idea that you've misunderstood my position and instead are shadow-boxing a monsterised impression of me that isn't real.
I just don't like blaming capitalism in the abstract because it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it.
Also on the off chance you lean considerably left, it might help to understand that I have experience of the USSR. So simply saying "capitalism bad" with an implication that we need to tear down the system isn't good enough for me. Been there done that, ancestors deported to Siberia. We could maybe try regulating first?
> I just don't like blaming capitalism in the abstract because it doesn't have to be like this. We can change it.
But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?
> So simply saying "capitalism bad" with an implication that we need to tear down the system isn't good enough for me
Read my post, I didn't say "capitalism bad", I said its good from the start. Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.
> But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?
Because I'm making the argument that lean startup culture is one of the biggest factors in creating this problem and early Facebook and MySpace were around _before_ lean startup culture.
> Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.
Oh it only works one way round I see. Por que no los dos?
Lenin described this exact process a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage...
The 'choice' is an illusion. To quote Lenin, the state becomes the 'executive committee of the financial oligarchy.'
The refusal to regulate isn't a a choice or a policy failure; it's the inevitable outcome of the system.
well my mother was born in the USSR, so I don't have to accept Lenin's position because my people suffered his "inevitable outcome of the system" for the choices he made.
I'd rather fix up this existing system then day dream about a glorious socialist revolution that always seems to end in blood.
What if this current system also always ends in blood, as history has shown so far?
I'd just like us to try regulation first?
Citing Lenin for a critique of capitalism's trajectory is a little bit like asking a prosecutor to write the defense's closing argument. He was a smart guy, but he wasn't some disinterested analyst writing a symposium on capitalism versus socialism; he was a revolutionary leader trying to build up support and justification for overthrowing the system.
But even if we overlook his inherent bias, he was just plain wrong. He wrote that capitalism had reached its final stage through imperialism, and that, as you said, state capture via financial oligarchy was inevitable. That was over 100 years ago, and history has produced welfare states, labor protections, financial regulation, the SEC, Germany's codetermination laws, even the Nordic social democracies. None of those should be possible under Lenin's framework for capitalism.
(Disclaimer: I'm all for common sense regulation of capitalism.)
Early Facebook's behavior was what they wanted to do/be. But upon exposure to what others were doing Facebook chose to adopt patterns/techniques that repulsed them originally because Facebook didn't want to be out competed (so Capitalism). Capitalism/competition is what led their behavioral change.
Go back to the recent removal of lead article discussed here. In Capitalism government regulation has to level the playing field or else all players will stoop to poisoning society/the world because if they don't then someone else will gain and advantage. Even hyper rightwing Rayliner agreed Government intervention is the ONLY way to prevent Capitalists from injecting poison into their products if that poison gives a competitive advantage.
What leaded gas was to the boomers brains social media is to current youths' brains.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865275
>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.
So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?
Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?
If only you could reach out of your own experience and ponder what might cause otherwise reasonable people to do so. Young people peer pressure, current marketing landscape, you're forced there if you want to make money as a creative, so many reasons. Great, you can live your life without. Can you live your life without assuming everyone has the privilege of your situation?
You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea and yet for some reason we have very severe punishments for people that distribute it. Why?
Because addictive things are addictive, and addicted people suffer, and everyone can get addicted if their guard slips.
We prefer to regulate highly addictive things instead.
> So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?
Yes, since more people use Tiktok than not. The average person is also fat today, so this shouldn't come as a surprise to you.
People didn't grow fat and addicted to screens due to changes to themselves, its due to companies learning how to get people to eat more and watch more since the they make more money.
Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?
It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.
To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.
Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.
Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.
I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.
---
It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.
I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!
I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.
PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.
Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p
It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.
"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.
(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)
With social media, the cost benefit analysis doesn't deliver marginal results, just less stark/concentrated results. Drink driving is self evidently bad even though 99 times out of 100(?) it does no harm, because one time out of a hundred its consequences are catastrophic. Social media on the other hand is harming essentially 100% of the population in initially milder ways - even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those who pedal digital dopamine and in a democracy being undermined by disinformation. Of course 'initially milder harm' is step one in frog boiling.
> * even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those [...] *
Exactly the same applies to TV but where is all the handwringing about that? Remember those stats about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? Those people need some serious help too. What's happening is clearly just the old mass-media-supported order refusing to yield power to new media used by younger people. Governments couldn't care one bit about false information[1], nor about zoomers getting brainrot, it's all about controlling the flow of information.
[1] ("disinformation", another nice example of framing which ignores the fact that people have agency)
edit: the system is escaping my asterisks automatically now, anyone know how to get italics now?
I remember that website, it was called addictinggames.com and I remember finding that bad grammar offensive. (I was obviously a lot of fun at parties.)
> Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company.
Not so. I think your logic is that engagement often leads to dollars, and the "basic imperative of any company" is to make dollars. There are pro- and anti-social ways to do this. You can create better art for your video games, or you can insert gambling mechanisms. You can spend more time designing your cinematic universe, or you can put a cliffhanger after every episode. You can make a funny skit, or you can say, "wait for it... wait for it... you can't believe what's about to happen!" Optimizing for engagement, for the sake of engagement, is necessarily anti-social. It's trying to redirect attention towards your media without actually making the user experience better in any way.
Legally, the basic imperative of any company is to make dollars, as long as it is prosocial. You should not expect the government to turn a blind eye to scam centers or disfunctional products. The same applies to the media landscape.
Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.
See, "quantity has a quality of its own".
Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?
I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.
I don't think we should allow any form of abusive software, addictive, dark patterns, bait-and-switch. They all need to be robustly regulated.
At the same time I don't think you can demonstrate harm without good evidence.
Making money can not be used as a criteria unless you want to draw the conclusion that no company can turn a profit and be ethical at the same time. It would amount to demanding an outcome that you don't believe us possible.
I think considering overly broad criteria, like say, infinite scroll applied selectively to a few is just arbitrarily targeting candidates for reasons unstated outside the criteria.
The rules need to be evidence based, clear, specific, and apply to all.
Cracking down on ticktok while The Guardian has a bunch of dark patterns. Or the NYT, who is reporting on this while at the same time attracting people with online games that have an increasingly toxic user interface.
Tiktok may suck, but so do a lot of other businesses that escape scrutiny. I worry the harms attributed to TikTok are magnified to allow them to be a whipping boy drawing the focus allowing systemic issues to persist.
Where does a desirable product or experience end and addictive begin though? Pretty much all products or services sold are designed to be desirable. Some things are physically addictive (nicotine, opioids etc), so those are a bit more clear. But when we're talking about psychologically addictive, where do we draw the line between what's ok and what's not?
If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it, that's a good thing. If it's about applying psychological patterns to trigger the addictive behavior that applies to a large swath of marketing.
You really must be able to understand the difference between liking a thing and being addicted to a thing?
If not it’s probably worth just starting with basic definitions of addiction.
And I’m so glad they did. Tiktok has brought so many positive changes to my life, and it never would have happened if they hadn’t built a product so good that it’s literally addictive. I don’t want the government to be my parent.
Additionally, Instagram and Facebook have tried their best to make their products as addictive as possible, yet their recommendation algorithm is so absolutely terrible (not to mention their ads) that I barely stay on the platform for five minutes when I use it.
What the TikTok algorithm does for me: surfaces exercises for all my joint problems, finds people exploring local sites and reporting on local issues, helps me discover new music, reveals how we treat prisoners, shows me what it's like to do jobs from sitcom writer to oil rig tech
What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"
> What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"
that's only because the implementation of the law is poor and advertisers drag their heels in having it as a brower-level setting. Not helped by the fact that advertisers run one of the biggest browsers and fund one of the next biggest.
What's illegal about intentionally making money for being addictive? "Unfair"? Maybe. But not illegal.
I don't like this narrative. I'm a person, and HN is the only social media I use.I tolerate this one because I find the addictiveness off-putting, but unlike other social media HN doesn't engage in that much.
I'm not some sort of prodigy or anything, just a random schmuck. If I can do it, anyone can. People just really like blaming others for their own vices instead of owning up to having a vice.
HN is a vice too. One of many that I have. And they're all mine. I've chosen them all. In most cases knowing full well that I probably shouldn't have.
> If I can do it, anyone can.
Right, but they don't. Not to mention a significant portion of the target market are children whose brains are still developing.
Smoking is a vice. Anyone can stop smoking any time they want. But it was still incredibly popular. Government regulation put warning labels everywhere, tightened regulation to ensure no sales to children, provided support to quit. And then the number of people smoking plummeted. Society is better off for it.
"Anyone can do it" is an ideological perspective divorced from lived reality.
Exactly. It's not that the producers or distributors (of food, content, etc.) are not malicious/amoral/evil/greedy. It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers.
You don't say to a heroin addict that they wouldn't have any problems if those pesky heroin dealers didn't make heroin so damn addictive. You realize that it's gonna take internal change (mental/cultural/social overrides to the biological weaknesses) in that person to reliably fix it (and ensure they don't shift to some other addiction).
I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.
Doesn't the government try to ban heroin?? You have to live in the real world, not your ideal world, and in the real world people are not perfectly rational agents. They make mistakes. Each and every mistake could have been avoided if the individual just had a stronger will, was a little smarter, a little more prudent, or took a little more time to think, but just because mistakes can be avoided and some people are better at avoiding them than others does not change the fundamental issue: drugs, tobacco, gambling, and TikTok are trying to increase the rate at which mistakes are made. Wouldn't you rather live in a society where they aren't out to get you?
I think there's an argument that can be made, like, "well maybe 10% of the time people consuming alcohol is a mistake, but I just use it recreationally. The government shouldn't prohibit all drinking!" And sure. If it is really the case that people would take the same actions even if they had more time to think things through and were in a good mental state, the government should probably not be intervening for the 10% of the cases that doesn't hold. But you have to draw the line somewhere.
> I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.
You haven't chosen anything. That's the point - the illusion of choice and agency.
If you can't stop cold at any time if/when you decide to, you don't have the agency to make a free choice.
I can though, that's the whole point. I chose to quit Facebook and Reddit. I chose to stop drinking alcohol. I chose to keep smoking weed. Some choices are better than others, from certain perspectives, that doesn't make them any less my choices!
That feels like it applies to so many things we make illegal, scams of all kind, snake-oil medical sellers, baby powder full of asbestos. Sure, people can handle all of these things, but we've decided, as a society, it's better not to allow them.
So then the question is, is it better to let these things happen, as a society?
False equivalence. Unless you can point to an instance where tiktok claims to cure cancer or erectile dysfunction with their recommendations.
To be clear: I don't like these addictive recommendation engines. That's why I avoid them. Some people do like them. I don't want to take their fun vice away from them. I also don't want them to take my fun vices away from me!
Yes it'd probably be better for my health if I stopped with a few of them. I don't care. I like it. It's my health, and I'm an adult. If I can choose my vices, why shouldn't others be allowed to? Will they make choice I wouldn't have? Of course! That's the point! It's THEIR choice!
This logic does not apply to scams or firearms, there's no informed consent in getting shot. It also doesn't apply to asbestos baby powder(wtf?)
Getting scammed is not a choice. Scammers lie to you. Recommendation engines never claim to do anything other than recommend stuff you're likely to interact with based on previous behaviour. They give you exactly what's on the package label. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want something like that, but I also don't understand why people eat surströmming. I say let them, anyway. I can put up with the stink, it's not the end of the world.
Question, do you have the same feeling about heroin? That people should be allowed to take things which are known to be highly addictive and bad for them?
Sure! They do anyway, or did you think heroin disappeared since it was banned?
It does need to be regulated. Doing it well will be difficult in a lot of places. I'd suggest modeling heroin sales after Nordic alcohol market: there's a single state-owned company that has a legislated monopoly, and no profit goals whatsoever. This makes it available, you can know that it's not mixed with anything cheap and deadly, and you also avoid anyone trying to push people to buy something that is quite obviously bad for them. I'm not saying it's an ideal situation that people do heroin, it is _quite_ destructive. But people do it anyway so let's make the best of that situation.
The harsh truth of reality is that people will make bad choices no matter what you do. Thinking you can ban something out of existence is naive and harmful. Best you can hope for is the entity selling drugs not using peer pressure to push it on kids who were only looking for weed. Which is what we have now if that wasn't clear.
To be perfectly clear, I do not encourage anyone to inject heroine, it's a terrible idea! Don't do it! But I'm realist enough to realise that some people are going to anyway, bans and common sense be damned,and I want to make that bad choice as safe as possible for them. I do not condone throwing drug addicts under the bus as we currently do, pretending that they're less than human and that they have no place in our society. I don't think the "outcast" status has ever helped anyone quit, in fact I'm quite sure it makes it harder. For example in Sweden being under the influence is illegal, so you could get in trouble for seeking help with your addiction. No wonder the druggies hide!
Well out of sight != Out of mind. At least not for me.
You should model yourself as a rational agent that makes mistakes sometimes. Suppose it is the case that, if you had heroin on your shelf at home, you would inject it on 0.1% of days. Maybe because you are especially sad/sick/in pain once every few years. If this were the case, you would not want to buy heroin and put it on your shelf at home. 99.9% of the time you will have the willpower to not inject it, but you still expect yourself to be addicted within a decade. The point of bans is to decrease that to 0.0001%, except for those who are actively seeking it.
> just a random schmuck
if you've even on this website you're a tiny niche of the population. You like text? Check out the weirdo over here... oh wait that's all of us.
> If I can do it, anyone can.
This is such a normie perspective and shows just how unfamiliar you are with addiction. Yes, some people can avoid becoming addicted. Yes, some addicts can break the habit and detox and stay clean. At the same time, a larger number of addicts can detox but relapse in a relatively short time. There are also addicts that have not yet admitted they have a problem, and there are addicts that are okay with being an addict. Just because you have the emergency stop button that you can hit does not mean everyone else is the same way. Your lack of empathy is just gross
> They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's [how they make money.] ... what people want.
Fixed that for you.
Your argument is basically the same as saying that Banana Ball should be banned because they are intentionally making the experience as fun as possible, because that's how they make money.
You're suggesting that it doesn't matter what children are exposed to / become addicted to because companies should be able to sell what children want? So there's no limits to that in your mind? Should every child be given cocaine because they ask for it? They're certainly given candy, right? You must believe there's no difference between cocaine and candy, I can assure you there is a difference and show you evidence to the contrary, if you're that dense.
sigh... he is saying that addictiveness itself is not a justification to ban something. exercising is addictive to some people, sex is addictive, reading is addictive for some people. everything worth doing in life is addicting.
what matters is the negative consequences of doing something. so the justification for banning tiktok is that it destroys childrens attention spans for life and lets them get propagandized by a hostile foreign government, NOT that its addictive.
Tiktok hasn't been around long enough for the claim that it "destroys childrens attention spans for life" to make any sense.
And children get propagandized by hostile foreign governments everywhere online. And by their own government. The premise that TikTok was somehow more dangerous in this regard than Facebook or Twitter or even Discord is based entirely on sinophobia.
Yeah! Or cigarettes!
The government could spend effort on making a documentary and funding a study on brain scans and a little campaign to show everyone the damage and educate rather than just wielding the ban hammer. Especially because it’s often possible that they can have a different motive for ban hammering even if the reason given is valid.
Do they though?
I’d love to think of myself as an exceptional individual because I don’t use Facebook or TikTok, but most likely I’m not exceptional at all, and other people could also just not use TikTok.
I hate this age of zero personal accountability. It's so easy to just not doomscroll, but I should be allowed if I want to.
It's also super easy not to use hard drugs, yet that's not a reason to stop restricting them.
If something's harmful it should be controlled.
I find it pretty hypocritical that the same people who push for e.g. legal marijuana would go for banning social media apps. Don't get me wrong, I use neither and think both are mentally, physically, and morally corrosive. I would not care to have either present in the community where I live, nor for my future children to use them.
That does not mean it is the province of the state to ban them.
To give them some credit, they support both positions because they were told to support them by the same people and never put much thought into it.
weed isn't designed to be addictive. You'll find most people would be cautious about legalising heroin, meth or crack.
Weed isn't designed to be anything, but it certainly is addictive in the same sense that social media is. There is no physical addiction (which is also true for TikTok), but there are definitely people that are hooked on it.
it is habit forming, but its not designed to be, by some of the brightest minds of a generation.
did you see what happened when we tried to decriminalise hard drugs in Vancouver? Feel good for yourself that you have the discipline to have self control, other do not and need help.
You are free to not use TikTok yourself, no one is stopping you.
Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.
> Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.
Was that spike a true spike in new users, or existing users just coming out of the shadows?
Personal accountability is contrary to human nature.
We are primates dominated by our primitive urges.
And it’s also mostly targeting children/teenagers. As a parent you can add limitations on cinema, binging series. You can’t on TikTok.
I’m quite glad that there is a form of control preventing a company from a different part of the world that don’t really care about the mental health or wellbeing of my kids to creep into their life like that…
As a parent, it’s not a fair fight and I should not have to delegate that to another private company
This strikes me as potentially a hardware problem more than a software problem.
Probably a bit of both but I don’t know any other hardware that is that addictive…
Social network are not necessarily bad, even for teens. The issue here is the effort to make any user into a scrolling machine combined to a medium always in your pocket.
> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?
Spoiler: There is no line. Societies (or more accurately, communities) attempt to self-regulate behaviors that have perceived net-negative effects. These perceptions change over time. There is no optimal set of standards. Historically, this has no consideration for intelligence or biology or physics (close-enough-rituals tended to replace impractical mandates).
Short form video has been a total break from previous media and social media consumption patterns. Personally I would support a ban on algorithmic endless short form video. It's purely toxic and bad for humanity
People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.
Even most liberal societies tend to ban addictive things. Alcohol, smoking, gambling, drugs, they are regulated almost everywhere, in one form or another.
I think that algorithmic social media should be likewise regulated, with at the very minimum ban for minors.
Note that my focus here on the "algorithmic" part. I'm fine with little or no regulation for social media where your feed is just events in chronological order from contacts that you are subscribed to, like an old bullettin board, or the original Facebook.
Also, I think we should consider companies that provide algorithmic social media responsible for what they publish in your feed. The content may be user generated, but what is pushed to the masses is decided by them.
It's way more complex than "no self control". Social media is addictive by design and is peddled at such scale that it is literally impossible to ignore. It's also backed by billions upon billions of dollars.
Pitting the average person up against that, then blaming them for having "no self control" once they inevitably get sucked in is not a remotely fair conclusion.
People keep saying this and yet, I have never used any of these short form video services or really any social media outside of desktop websites like hackernews and reddit. Even on reddit I just subscribe to a few niche and mostly technical subreddits. It seems extremely easy to ignore it all.
Considering the median amount of time people spend on social media daily, it sure does not seem to be so easy for the average person (as was implied in the comment you replied to). I've got a pretty good self control when it comes to the common vices, but I can't see why that would generalise to everyone else.
It's easy for you and me. At the same time, it doesn't seem right to make a business of intentionally going after the people who get addicted to this, like flavored cigs meant to appeal to teenagers. And these social media companies have a paper trail of internal research on user engagement.
But I'm still wary of the motives behind these bans because they seem to be about controlling information, not addiction.
> A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment
Like gambling?
or cigarettes?
Or drugs?
Or coffee?
The drug so popular no one thinks of it as a drug any more.
Or sugar?
"One of these things is not like the others..."
What are the harmful effects of a full blown coffee addiction? Headaches?
> People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.
Europe wants to ban algorithmic recommendation. You attack a straw-man: banning all the content from creators. If you have any valid argument you should bring them to the discussion instead of creating imaginary enemies.
Banning harmful design patterns is a must to protect citizens even if it ruffles the feathers of those profiting from their addiction.
> You attack a straw-man: banning all the content from creators.
They didn't say this.
> A subset of the population doesn't have self control?
please fix this to
A subset of the population who has not yet reached the age of consent
I think society broadly accepts that there are different expectations for children and adults; the line is currently officially drawn somewhere around 18-21 years old.
But in Europe you can drink at 14. Age of consent is also 14.
So, no, there is no official line at 18-21. Especially in the EU.
> But in Europe you can drink at 14. Age of consent is also 14.
That is hilariously general. You're conflating a lot of different nations there. In practice; its different depending on the nation, consent is usually 16 and alcohol is ~18.
I was referring to Germany, the largest EU nation. But sure let's look at percentages.
40% of the EU has age of consent 14 or lower. (Germany, Italy, Portugal, etc.) 78% of the EU has it at 15 or lower (France, Sweden, Denmark, etc.)
No 'official line' at 18-21.
The thing is, people who live in Europe actually like that companies aren't allowed take advantage of people in every way concievable.
I have an ideia, if you don't like regulation that protects people why don't you fuck off to your own country and advocate for it in whatever dystopian hellhole you came from?
See:
1. The reactions to banning drunk driving: "It's kind of getting communist when a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11 to 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink one or two beers."
2. Mandatory seatbelts: "This is Fascism"
You're going to balk at just about anything that comes down the line - I guarantee it.
[https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/americans-react-drink-dr...] [https://www.history.com/articles/seat-belt-laws-resistance]
I prefer my water with extra PFAS and my sports bets 10x leveraged. It's my "choice"!
The videos are the entertainment, not the endless recommendation algorithm.
Additionally, this is not about self control. The claim is that the algorithm is designed to exploit users. Insiders (including a designer of infinite scroll!) have admitted as much going back years: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959
We should be uncomfortable with companies spending huge amounts of money to research and implement exploitative algorithms. We did something about cigarette companies advertising to kids. This action is along those lines.
I see what you're saying, but I would much rather my 9-year old spends an hour on TikTok than an hour smoking Marlboros.
I would much rather people not break things down into false dichotomies. Also, we should strive to give our children at least "good" options, and not settle for "less bad".
When most of the market using it is abusive, and a source of abuse, preventing the abuse to continue while it's being investigated, or better apprehended by the population/generations at large, makes sense.
The "subset of the population" is not small, and there is no easy way to protect the most vulnerable.
> it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives
I don't think we should be rewarding those who make a living by creating "content" that serves for nothing but a dopamine rush, and you can bet that those who who put it in the effort to create valuable content would prefer to have one less channel where they are forced to put out content just to satisfy the algorithm overlords.
It shouldn't be the job of governments to decide what content has value and what doesn't.
It's not about the content, but the format and the economic pressure that corporations exert over everyone.
If you want to distribute short videos on a website that let's you choose what you want after search and deliberately clicking on a button to play it, by all means feel free to do it. But the current Tik-Tok mechanism removes all agency and are an extreme version of mind pollution.
how do you feel about self control in the face large companies that are spending billions of dollars to intentionally trick you into not having it?
you can't even be aware of what they're doing, because the algorithms they're using to do it are black boxes
youtube algorithms have shown evidence that they've lead to radicalization
would you not draw a line on any of this?
Any good research papers on the impact of short form video on the human brain? This is a major cause for the attention crisis we're facing IMO.
Your short form comment is in violation of EU Directive 20.29A. Agents have been dispatched to your home to collect your devices.
One way is criminalizing the victims, another is going after the platforms. I'm willing to wager a bet on who will be the ones receiving the enforcements here :)
Yeah like X was raided in France 2 days ago. For different reasons by the way. I do think the enforcement will be focused on the platforms too.
To that end, there's no logical reason entertainment exists at all. There's a biological advantage to finding community members entertaining, but anything that broadcasts that entertainment to another community is just exploiting human nature.
By the logic of the court decision, anything that is entertaining should be banned, from movies to TV shows to any news that makes any analysis whatsoever.
The best way for tiktok to respond to this , is to add some "cooling down" delay between videos. The EU commision will boast about this achievement, but effectively tiktok users will spend MORE time on their app.
It's not about banning design patterns. It's about removing the harmful results they produce.
Can you imagine if gambling were allowed to be marketed to children? Especially things like slot machines. We absolutely limit the reach of those "design patterns".
This argument falls apart in the EU though. Where it's legal for 14 year olds to drink alcohol.
That's not because EU countries want people to make their own decisions, it's because not so many people in EU think alcohol is bad for kids.
You could make the same argument about sugary beverages, that you can't legislate intelligence, yet every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board. This of course omits a lot of nuance, but the main takeaway remains the same. We all have that monkey brain inside us and sometimes we need guardrails to defend against it. It's the same reason we don't allow advertising alcohol and casinos to kids, and many other similar examples. (Or at least we don't allow it where I'm from, maybe the laws are different where you're from.)
>every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board
Is there strong evidence for that? The first study that pops up if I search this suggests otherwise, that it could increase consumption of sugar-substitutes and overall caloric intake. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.019
>we need guardrails to defend against
There is no "we". You say that I and others need it, and you want to impose your opinion by taxing us.
Your link is _not_ about a country that _actually_ imposed a sugar tax.
This is honestly a very silly take. You could make the same counterargument about any tax of any kind, or really any law of any kind. Like it or not, we do need both taxes and laws to function as a society.
And for most it would be a valid point. Nozick makes the best case for this.
I don’t think the addictive argument is being made in good faith. Any platform with an infinite scroll feed and titillating content is intentionally made to be like a slot machine. Just keep swiping and maybe you’ll get that little dopamine hit. The idea that TikTok is dangerous, but Twitter, Instagram, porn, alcohol, and Doritos are fine doesn’t come across as an internally consistent argument. I think that the reality is that those who have an actual say in legislation perceive these platforms as a mechanism of social control and weapon. Right now the weapon isn’t in the “right“ hands.
My preferred solution would be to subsidize tools that allow people to better identify and resist compulsive behaviors. Apps like Opal and Freedom that allow you to monitor your free time and block apps or websites you have a troubled relationship with would probably see more use if everybody was given a voucher to buy a subscription. Funding more basic research into behavioral addictions like gambling, etc (ideally research that couldn’t be used by casinos and sports gambling apps on the other side). Helping fund the clinical trials for next Zepbound and Ozempic.
I'd go as far as saying every film ever made should have to have a concrete ending and stand on it's own. I am however much less into "freedoms" as I get older and see people become crackheads for apps and the worst form of capitalism possible where market breaking hoarders and resellers get rich denying people both necessities and wants in equal measure. I'm also radical enough to think that it should be illegal to own more than one house, more than one car for every licensed member of a household, and reselling anything for profit. I guess put simply, I hate resellers. I hate hanging threads, and I hate people that design things to constantly leave people wanting or "needing" more.
Gambling mechanics are also banned for certain ages and in some countries for everyone. We don’t say that it’s just a game, and people should just control themselves. Without going into the specifics of this case, design pattern intervention have existed for a long time and it has been in most cases desirable.
And there are grey areas for gambling that have been settled on, like how video game "loot boxes" were recently reconsidered as gambling in some places (besides just being stupid).
I'm skeptical about banning sales of tobacco and alcohol products to children because children may (over)use them.
Also do we trust adults prescribed oxytocin to manage their use?
We are speaking of weaponized addiction at planetary scale.
You can regulate power imbalances though, which is what every individual has versus a multinational with vast resources.
You should be able to pick your own algorithm. It’s a matter of freedom of choice.
Yeah, I think that's the new thing these days. Companies have always been trying to make things addictive, but now they can target each and every individual. I wonder if we had strong privacy laws, if it were illegal for TikTok to have this private information about you.
So I choose an entirely chronological one, containing only that content created by my close friends and family.
Except, I'll never be given that choice.
The only reason the US and Europe are targeting TikTok is because they don't own the platform. Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by Meta) are responsible for so much hate politics and social unrest around the world (Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ). Amazon, Google and Microsoft helped the Israelis conduct the genocide in Gaza with their AI tools (UN Calls Out Google and Amazon for Abetting Gaza Genocide - https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o... ). But all that's OK.
Yeah, I don't like the reason either. They should've just banned TikTok day 1 as reciprocity with China banning our sites. Instead it was allowed until it started promoting wrongthink.
The US government would have to demonstrate improving people's lives to get votes if they couldn't campaign entirely on hate politics. Obviously they prefer the hate politics and ragebait attention algorithms. That way they can funnel billions of dollars to themselves and their buddies instead of wasting it on services supporting US citizens.
> You can’t legislate intelligence
Au contraire
> Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine
I mean, that's specifically fine because we have ample evidence to suggest it's just kind of a shit way to watch shows, and Netflix continually taking their own business model out back and shooting it doesn't really warrant government intervention
> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption
HA!
> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app
I think there's a wide regulatory spectrum between those extremes--one that all sorts of governments already use to regulate everything from weapons to software to antibiotics.
It's easy to cherry-pick examples where regulation failed or produced unexpected bad results. However, doing that misses the huge majority of cases where regulation succeeds at preventing harms without imposing problematic burdens on people. Those successes are hard to see because they're evidenced by bad outcomes failing to happen, things working much as they did before (or getting worse at a slower rate than otherwise might happen).
It's harder to point to "nothing changed" as a win than it is to find the pissed-off minority who got denied building permits for reasons they disagree with, or the whataboutists who take bad actions by governments as evidence that regulation in unrelated areas is doomed to failure.
More and more businesses are shifting their operations and outreach to IG and TikTok, so deciding how to live in a society is increasingly becoming "live under a rock" or "enter the casino and hope to not get swallowed up by the slop".
> You can't legislate intelligence...
That’s why we ban harmful things.
>I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling.
The argument against tiktok (and smartphones in general) is not that experiences above a certain threshold of compellingness are bad for you: it is that filling your waking hours with compelling experiences is bad for you.
Back when he had to travel to a theatre to have them, a person was unable to have them every free minute of his day.
I'm also skeptical about banning products like opium or methamphetamine, just because people might overuse them.
> people might overuse them ... cliffhangers and sequels
I once heard some try to understand pornography addiction by asking if it was comparable to a desire to eat a lot of lemon cookies. To quote Margaret Thatcher, "No. No. No."
> Where do we draw the line
Just because it's hard to find a principled place to draw the line doesn't mean we give up and draw no line. If you are OK with the government setting speed limits, then you're OK with lines drawn in ways that are intended to be sensible but are, ultimately, arbitrary, and which infringe on your freedom for the sake of your good and the public good.
> trust adults
Please do not forget the children.
> You can't legislate intelligence
Your implication is that people who are addicted to TikTok or anything else are unintelligent, dumb, and need to be educated. This is, frankly, an offensive way to engage the conversation, and, worse, naive.
> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?
We do it for alcohol and cigarettes already: taxes, ads & marketing restrictions, health warning mandated communication.
> didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling
Apples to oranges.
I can’t make meth in my basement as a precursor to some other drug then complain that my target product had a shitty design.
Real life experience shows that TikTok is harmfully addictive and therefore it must be controlled to prevent negative social outcomes. It’s not rocket science, we have to be pragmatic based on real life experience, not theory.
I am just as uncomfortable with this banning of ideas, or to look at it another way, banning designing it this way simply because it’s effective. I assume this exact same design would not be made illegal if it were terrible at increasing engagement. However I also have to acknowledge that I already can’t stand what TikTok and its ilk have done to attention spans and how addictive they are even across several generations. People just end up sitting there and thumb-twitching while the algorithm pipes handpicked slop into their brains for hours a day. I really don’t want a world where everything is just like this, but even more refined and effective. So, it’s tough to argue that we should just let these sociopaths do this to everyone.
Arguably, the best reason for the government to care is that whoever controls this algorithm, especially in a future when it’s twice as entrenched as it is today, has an unbelievably unfair advantage in influencing public opinion.
> I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them.
I used to be opposed, now I'm not. I strongly believe human specialization is the important niche humans have adapted, and that should be encouraged. Another equally significant part of human nature is, trust and gullibility. People will abuse these aspects of human nature to give themselves an unfair advantage. If you believe lying is bad, and laws should exist to punish those who do to gain an advantage. Or if you believe that selling an endless, and addictive substance should restricted. You already agree.
There's are two bars in your town, and shady forms of alcohol abound. One bar is run by someone who will always cut someone off after they've had too many. And goes to extreme lengths to ensure that the only alcohol they sell is etoh. Another one is run by someone who doesn't appear to give a fuck, and is constantly suggesting that you should have another, some people have even gone blind.
I think a just society, would allow people to specialize in their domain, without needing to also be a phd in the effects of alcohol poisoning, and which alcohols are safe to consume, and how much.
> Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention?
Yes, the dopamine feedback loop of short form endless scrolling has a significantly different effect on the brain's reward system. I guess in line with how everyone shouldn't need to be a phd, you also need people to be able to believe the conclusions of experts as well.
> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?
It's not as linear of a distinction. We don't have to draw the line of where we stop today. It's perfectly fine to iterate and reevaluate. Endless scroll large data source algorithm's are, without a doubt, addictive. Where's the line on cigarettes or now vapes? Surely they should be available, endlessly to children, because where do you draw the line?
(It's mental health, cigarettes and alcohol are bad for physical health, but no one (rhetorical speaking) gives a shit about mental health)
> If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming,
I'd love to ban micro transactions and loot boxes (gambling games) for children.
> even email notifications.
reductive ad absurdism, or perhaps you meant to make a whataboutism argument?
> My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous.
Camels and Lucky Strike are both illegal for children to buy.
> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app.
We clearly do. Companies are taking advantage of the natural dopamine system of the brain for their advantage, at the expense of the people using their applications. Mental health deserves the same prioritzation and protection as physical health. I actually agree with you, banning some activity that doesn't harm others, only a risk to yourself, among reasonably educated adults is insanely stupid. But that's not what's happening.
> I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.
I'd rather see companies that use an unfair disparity of power, control, knowledge and data, be punished when they use it to gain an advantage over their consumers. I think dark patterns should be illegal and come with apocalyptic fines. I think tuning your algorithm's recommendation so that you can sell more ads, or one that recommends divisive content because it drives engagement, (again, because ads) should be heavily taxed, or fined so that the government has the funding to provide an equally effective source of information or transparency.
> You can't legislate intelligence...
You equally can't demand that everyone know exactly why every flavor of snake oil is dangerous, and you should punish those who try to pretend it's safe.
Especially when there's an executive in some part of the building trying to figure out how to get more children using it.
The distinction requiring intervention isn't because these companies exist. The intervention is required because the company has hired someone who's job is to convince children to use something they know is addictive.
What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?
Yeah, prohibition is a terrible policy for everyone except the cops, jailers (including private, for-profit jailers), government spooks, smugglers, arms dealers, hitmen, chain and shackle manufacturers, etc. who make a living from it. I'm taxed to pay some of the world's most odious people to stop a small percentage of the supply of these drugs. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the supply makes it through and causes untold suffering for addicts, often thanks to other (or the same) taxpayer-funded bad guys and an onramp provided by the legal pharmaceutical industry. In the impoverished countries where the supply comes from, all this revenue funds hellish slave/feudal economies where a small violent elite terrorize, torture, and kill working people. Even in the developed world, addicts are weaponized by others for all kinds of violence (drug gangs, human trafficking rings, etc.) and net-negative property crime (stripping copper from abandoned houses, stealing catalytic converters, etc.).
In short, banning hard drugs is very very obviously a losing policy that serves only to enrich the world's worst people at the expense of everyone else.
> So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?
Is this a serious question? Have you been asleep since 70s and are not aware on how the War on Drugs has been going?
There is a gulf of difference between banning hard drugs and criminalizing their use
Yes, many intelligent people DO think we should not ban any drugs/substances and that the best way to deal with them is instead regulate and set up societal structures and frameworks that support the issues around abuse.
The science tends to back these ideas up. Banning does not stop people from doing what they want.
Education and guard rails are always better than hard control.
are hard-drugs a design pattern?
The headline overstates what actually happened. Ironic that they’re using clickbait headlines on an article about a service using tricks to get people to engage with something.
They haven’t concluded anything yet. It’s early in the process and they’re opening the process of having TikTok engage and respond.
The article starts with a headline the makes it sound like the conclusion was already made, then the more you read the more it becomes clear that this is the early part of an investigation, not an actual decision.
> Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful are likely illegal.
> No timeline was given on when authorities will make a final decision in the case.
Which headline are you referring to?
The headline on the article is,
> Europe Accuses TikTok of ‘Addictive Design’ and Pushes for Change
What's overstated about that?
The headline I see on HN is "TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be llegal in Europe"
They might be referring to the headline of the hn post which I would agree is a pretty severe misrepresentation.
Based on the URL, the HN title is probably the original and it was changed.
For reference in case it also gets changed here, it's currently: "TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe"
I don't understand the legal side, but after gaining and kicking a Tiktok addiction during and after COVID, I believe it. I was there 4-8 hours a day and tried to scroll videos while washing dishes (and during nearly any other activity).
Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog?
I think it is, but it's hard for me to articulate without getting into teleological judgments.
When it's a streaming service, it might be equally worse IMO, but a bit less so if it's music you own. But anyways, I call these folks "electro autists" (with apologies to real autists) as they are rarely reachable for social interactions. Saying "good morning" in the elevator? No chance. Nor recognizing people left or right.
Or in the gym, where they block machines for many minutes, i.e. much more than the one or two minutes of resting in between sets, while paging through social media in between sets. Asking them to unblock a machine in the gym? Some are reachable there if you stand in front of them and wave your hands.
And walking the dog, or strolling with kids while on "social" media. I often observe them to neither recognize when either dog or kid try to show them things or events. I sometimes wonder (aloud and near them ;-), if they phone with their companions.
Oldie but Goldie: Charlene Guzman's video "I forgot my phone" from 12 years ago:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8
I like music and I like videos, but I also learned to concentrate on the task at hand and/or the people besides me.
Disclaimer: listening to music while doing chores like washing dishes is OK. But I prefer a dish washer and connect to people while the dish washer is running.
> When it's a streaming service, it might be equally worse IMO, but a bit less so if it's music you own.
That's what I was thinking about when I mentioned teleological arguments. A stream is programmed by somebody else and who knows if they are trying to please me or their partners. I do use music streaming services, but these days I try to listen to entire albums.
I get what you are saying about wearing headphones in public places. I have ear buds that have a fantastic transparent mode where I get a mix of music and outside noises sent to my ears. As soon as I start talking, it pauses the music. In theory, you would be able to ask me to press the elevator button for you but having ear buds in usually communicates do-not-disturb.
That video is great and I hadn't seen it before. Thanks for linking it.
> A stream is programmed by somebody else and who knows if they are trying to please me or their partners.
That's one problem, yes. The other, more subtle, might be that one cannot really develop a personal taste. If you have a CD (or nowadays Vinyl ;-) you can listen to it even when the artist isn't in the stream any more.
I'm a fan of J. J. Cale's music for example, and have a number of his CDs (ripped for convenient mobile handling, of course) so can mix my own "stream" to take with me and listen to it when I'm in the mood. I'm a fan of Bach, Händel, Telemann too, own a number CDs of course, and when I'm in the mood for a relaxing bit of classic I can "stream" my own selection. So I decide what to listen to and I decide when to do it, depending on my mood.
Just some days ago I learned that many people sell their CD collection and you can find them in cheap batches on Ebay. When I suddenly remember a long forgotten artist (forgotten by me as time goes by), I will be able to grab a CD, rip it and listen to things I remember. Doing that with a streaming service? Tough thing, I suppose.
I do listen to music new to me (mainly on Youtube) every now and then, and learn about artists I didn't know, but if I really like enough of their work, I'll get a CD. Which, BTW, is not always easy for certain niche artists which either publish a limited set of vinyl and/or downloadable collections only nowadays.
I would say it's slightly worse but they're both not great, as someone who was addicted to being fed something at all times, I was really avoiding every having to spend time with myself if that makes sense. That being said, it's mostly about intention. Are you excited to finally listen to that amazing album or audiobook on your walk after work? That's usually more healthy than when I would scroll on tiktok during my day to avoid feeling anything other than dopamine and avoid bad feelings. It's really about self awareness for me.
I have headphones on 24/7 and while outside, but if I didn't have them I wouldn't exactly mind, I'd probably widh I wouldn't have to hear the loud noises (cars, bus engine sound etc)
I feel like with Tikatok etc. its really just that your entire attention both audio and visual is stuck in that thing, it's not an auxiliary activity
Not sure if its worse but you are point rings a bell for me cause I feel that I can no longer do any task without having something being bombarded in my head, be it podcast, music or audiobook.
> Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog?
If you think about cognitive load, then I would say yes.
Listening to music or even talking with headphones does consume some of your brain power, but you are able to execute physical tasks reasonably well. For example I am able to do DIY (apart from measuring) whilst listening to audiobooks. I can do all the household chores too (washing up, clothes, tidying vaccuming etc)
I cannot do that with short videos playing. firstly I have to hold the device, secondly I'm not looking at what I am doing, thirdly, moving pictures attract my attention.
In the same way that that most people are utterly unable to do "thinking work" (ie stuff that requires inner monologue and visualisation [sorry aphantasia people]) with a TV within visual range. I know that some people are able to do ironing infront of the TV, but I'd struggle with that to do a good job
Similar, but at least headphones uses fewer of your senses
How'd you kick it?
I wasn’t able to stomach the idea of Larry Ellison being able to silently nudge my political views so I just deleted the app. Without the allure of China being able to influence my opinion I lost interest.
The android app scrollguard helped me. Stops YouTube short, reels and TikTok from being clicked on. It has massive permissions to survey my phone which could be scary. But as an addict you have to admit when you need to check yourself into rehab. And the phone is the drug.
Get a life that's more interesting than dish washing 4-8 hours a day.
uninstall the app. Works really well to me. The conscious effort of reinstalling it is enough to prevent me from doing it. Whereas using the awfully implemented screentime guards, I just find myself clicking on "Allow for 15 minutes" before I even understand what I do.
I think im just less prone to doomscroll type addictions, but i found myself sitting on the toilet for longer than normal when youtube shorts became something tougher to easily remove from the base youtube experience on their app.
This caused me to disable the youtube app(literally can't uninstall it on a pixel stock os), and if i ever utilize youtube on my phone its through firefox instead.
I also got the extension unhook on my desktop/laptop, and now my youtube experience is more reminiscent of the early 2010s where I would just use it to look up sports highlights or music videos, and if i don't have a video or subject in mind im not force fed one.
This also just kinda shows me how terrible the search experience is on youtube. Feel like all of their effort is on their doomscroll / suggested content, rather than their search results.
personally I haven't used tiktok ever but Instagram reels are the real thing
however, I must say that youtube shorts is the worst of the bunch, even if I'm trying to be entertained, it's full of just slop spam and "top 5" or something that I'm not interested in, while reels are actually funny
I remember I'd sometimes try and get into it, scrolling just to see if I can find one thing that's actually good and just quitting because I got frustrated.
it's truly the worst of the bunch in my opinion.
and they've definitely made the overall experience worse on youtube while focusing all efforts on shorts and funneling you to it.
Tiktok, Instagram reels, Facebook reels/shorts, YouTube Shorts ... to me these are all equally bad. I'm sure there are many other sources of attention destruction.
It's bad I can't say that I did it with willpower alone but Brick helped immensely. Their product is great, not a subscription, and even though there are competitors or you could build something like this for your phone, they're good with customer service and I would recommend their product.
Also, Unhook for removing suggestions/comments/etc from Youtube, you can basically turn everything off until it becomes a search bar and your subscriptions.
Get a good website blocking browser extension. Remove anything that resembles a "recommendation" or avoid it like the plague.
https://getbrick.app/
For me it’s kicking itself lately. The content has gotten way less interesting over the past few months.
Maybe it just has to run its course.
Are you in the US? Lots of people have reported that the forced sale "ruined" their algorithm.
That’s definitely part of it for sure.
But beyond that, the most compelling content was probably the best all time videos which I’ve exhausted. Plus half the videos now seem to cut off before they answer whatever question they posed. Very frustrating.
I deleted the account, made a new one from a different location at a later date and then scrolled for a few minutes and realised I would need multiple hours of scrolling through absolute shit content I genuinely despise to train the ai back to what it was. And I gave up on that and deleted the app forever.
Not OP, but my favorite book of all time is Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I quit every drug, stopped playing video games, quit social media for 3 years, started exercising daily.
I'm only back on social media because it actually made my life worse being off it.
In the depths of it, it's the last thing before I fell asleep, and the first thing I did in the morning, so the first thing was to break that cycle. Forced myself to have an independent thought for myself in the morning before I checked TikTok/Reels/YouTube shorts/Reddit/Hacker News. Then, not bringing my phone to bed at night, then just https://xkcd.com/386/ letting people be wrong on the Internet. Unless it affects my offline life in some way, it's just not as big a deal anymore.
Short form video content in general is ludicrously addictive. All infinite scroll is addictive but there’s something particularly strong when it’s short videos that each deliver some kind of hook or punch line.
I landed on YouTube shorts once and started scrolling. Hours later I genuinely felt like I’d been drugged. It was shocking and surreal how powerful the effect was. Made it a point since then to never go there. I’ve never touched TikTok but I’ve heard stories of people spending every waking second on that thing.
Obviously some people are going to be more prone to it than others.
The press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
> At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll' over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks', including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.
Most of these seem concretely doable, and maybe effective. But the core of the addictiveness comes from the "recommender system", and what are they supposed to do there? Start recommending worse content? How much worse do the recommendations have to be before the EC is satisfied?
> Most of these seem concretely doable, and maybe effective. But the core of the addictiveness comes from the "recommender system", and what are they supposed to do there? Start recommending worse content? How much worse do the recommendations have to be before the EC is satisfied?
I agree with you, this is rather odd. And sort of missing the problem.
All apps are about attention. The percentage of the time spent using the app when it shows you your good content (Whatever it is that you're interested in) determines how addictive it is. And the percentage of time it's showing you bad content (Ads, 'screen time breaks', manual scroll time, more ads, loading screens, sponsor ads, filler content (youtube for instance is full of this), etc) counteracts the addictive properties because nobody likes it.
What's the end goal here? Right now TikTok is winning the attention economy race against the other apps because it's more focused on the user's preferred content. Is that what we want to reduce? To show more uninteresting other stuff on the screen? Like blank 'wait 5 minute' statics? Or just more ads?
I get that we don't want a generation of socially inept phone addicts, but this won't solve anything I fear. People will still want the good content, forcing the most customer friendly (it feels wrong to say that about TikTok) app to become more enshittified is a bewildering solution.
I think the chinese version of tiktok has most of these guards on for children
the subtext here is the eu is just teeing up to fine tiktok, x and other social media
Worse enough it isn't addictive. The goal is non-addictive, whatever changes to whatever part are necessary to hit that goal.
"non-addictive" isn't a well-defined thing. It's like telling McDonalds that their food must be "healthy". There's a lot of regulation affecting the food that McDonalds serves (and that's probably a good thing), but it's all based on measurable things.
We could measure it for cocaine and cigarettes couldn't we.
Idk how to feel about this specifically but I kind of hope they come for Duolingo next. They are up to some similar mind hacking shit to keep people from leaving. There's the downright abusive streak management tactics that have become a major part of their brand and PR, and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub. They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them, as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again. I don't know what the solution is but I've known multiple people now who've gotten frustrated and blamed themselves for not being able to advance their skills with a language, but Duolingo's business model, like Tinder's, is completely opposed with the goals of their users. If Duolingo R&D discovered a magical new method of making you fluent in a language overnight, they would not sell it to you. Tinder R&D might have discovered the actual honest-to-God formula for True Love years ago and burned it because they can make more if you swipe forever.
Funnily all of Duolingo's retention mechanisms (formemost streaks and leagues) have the exact opposite effect on me. I am only moderately encouraged by success and extremely discouraged by failure. That means keeping the streak up is stress for me and failing a streak leads to a big negative impact on my motivation for the failure and a positive reinforcement of not doing it because then the stress goes away and that is nice. They literally train my brain not to use their app.
> a positive reinforcement of not doing it because then the stress goes away and that is nice.
I may be similarly wired, and I've found abandoning Duolingo streaks on my own terms to be very rewarding.
This is precisely why I stopped using it
I think you're giving Duolingo too much credit.
Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.
People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.
I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.
This is pretty much everything in business these days. Medicine too. Nobody is interested in solving your problems for a price. They are interested in selling you a never-ending service or subscription that you pay for over and over.
duolingo is pretty bad overall, sadly most better alternatives [zB: anki flashcards] are a bit less shiny and more difficult to set-up for less tech-oriented people
There may be a very fine line between reward-hacking for the user's benefit vs. building a facsimile of language learning on top of a nuclear-powered Gacha loop. I've looked at other learning apps (including I think Anki but I haven't tried it) trying to help people out of the Duolingo pit and they do all seem much more clinical in comparison. Not automatically a bad thing for an educational tool but it's also not hard to see why they don't get the same traction.
yeah, the issue is that there really can't be one "do-it-all" tool. even duolingo doesn't really teach grammar iirc [which really means one can't become fluent tbh]. one kinda has to set up the parts by oneselves, but that's a bit difficult to get used to
This is the owl image I got when I finally made it to the “delete my account” page: https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg
Devil's advocate here (not associated with Duolingo, and in fact I haven't even used it):
> They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them
The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development.
I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the answer is that there is no easy answer. Every solution sucks in a way.
> as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again
Anki does the same, calls it "spaced repetition" and says it's a feature. Should we ban Anki now?
I concede that repetition is a valuable part of learning and that there's no easy answer, but they way Duolingo does it seems pretty intentional given the level of polish they have in the app generally. When prior lessons reset, it can interrupt your progress on your current lesson and will actively block you from making further progress until you go back and do those lessons again, unless you "skip" them, which they use their weird sad owl to discourage. Often the lessons haven't changed very much and redoing it is just busywork, seeing the first couple words of a question you've seen before and remembering what the answer is before its even finished writing it out, which doesn't seem like it reinforces learning the language, just learning how to salivate when Duo rings the bell.
I haven't used Anki either and I'm not suggesting anybody ban either one, though I would be curious how Anki's spaced repetition implementation differs from Duos. In general I don't think bans usually have the intended effect, and trying to ban or discourage dark user patterns seems almost impossible to define usefully, let alone enforce even if it were the right thing to do. I'm not much of a gambler, but I live in one of the holdout US states that doesn't allow sports betting apps, which is an entire ecosystem of human-hacking dark patterns, and it bothers me that I'm disallowed from participating in the name of protecting other people from their own poor self-control. Duolingo has all the time in the world to defeat that kind of thing with loopholes and it would make it even harder for an alternative service to compete with them.
actually language learning is complex enough that they could build new products/ features to retain users and still deliver value. But for some reason they don't
The AI video call feature is kinda neat, even though it's pretty buggy.
> and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub
They don't need to design for that. If you want to become proficient in the language, you'll have to use the language for something. Whatever lessons Duolingo provides, they won't get you to become proficient in a language.
I uninstalled duo lingo in a day recently. The actual app icon changes to a red faced angry owl if you wait too long to refresh your daily activity.
I switched my launcher so I could customize the icon, but Duolingo overwrites it.
This is not a toggle feature.
Damn them, so it's gone now.
Duolingo is a shitty company, they don’t care about education, only retention mechanics and dark patterns. The CEO called his employees communists because they wanted to make the product beneficial for users instead of a money extraction machine.
I'm too late but I'm surprised HN crowd treats tiktok as some weaponized addiction machine. Youtube used to have a working recommendation system and it was usable too. Is it really bad to give me woodworking and learning chinese videos if that's what I'm interested in at the moment? If somebody is not interested in anything specific and just want to zone out, is it really different if he scrolls through tiktok or watches the same thing put into longer videos on TV or some other site? I see zero rational argument being made here. Should we ban bikes if they are the most efficient transportation mode in given area because people get addicted to them?
> tiktok as some weaponized addiction machine
It is.
> Is it really bad to give me woodworking and learning chinese videos if that's what I'm interested in at the moment?
Youtube shorts is pretty similar to tiktok imo.
> is it really different if he scrolls through tiktok or watches the same thing put into longer videos on TV or some other site?
Yes because TV is just stuff shown to everyone. You aren't getting personalised content.
> Should we ban bikes if they are the most efficient transportation mode in given area because people get addicted to them?
Do people get addicted to bikes? People do get addicted to drugs. Maybe we should ban drugs? Oh wait we do.
People do get addicted to bikes. Not even questionable. But of course that's not a charitable interpretation, and on that - yes I don't think personalized content is comparable to heroin. What is so evil about personalized content?
I'm sincerely trying to understand. Your whole argument here is based on the premise that TV is OK because it's not personalized.
Yes my entire argument is that recommendation algorithms are designed to cause addiction. Some incredibly smart people have been working on this and they have succeeded wildly. And without personalised content the problem goes away. And that the problem is most acute in short form video platforms like tiktok, instagram shorts and youtube reels. And yes I do consider it closer to drugs than ..... bikes.
OK, but is it a problem if you get recommended repos on github? What I mean that perhaps it's not the good recommendation algorithm that is the problem? It seems like banning tcp/ip because porn is bad.
In China for example (IIRC) below 18 you cannot use these apps past some hour and not above some time limit per day. That seems far from correct solution but seems better than banning it outright and seems to be addressing most concerns.
Personalized content is crucial for functioning information platforms. Imagine if usenet had a single group only. The information sea is vast and the ways to browse and access it seem to only be diminishing. Relaying solely on LLMs outputs does not seem like a safe bet. We've been living off black boxes outputs since altavista, but it's nice to at least have many different black boxes to chose from.
(HN is very much a FYP, it's just that.we like similar stuff)
Are you a sophist, or have you made any actual attempt to understand the concerns here?
Sincerely want to understand it, now that there's more comments it seems I'm not the only one but in minority. Currently most interesting dimension to me is how big part of HN is effectively against open access to information and supporting censorship but of course within this discussion context that's me misrepresenting those people who only want to save lives.
Suriously though, decent part of posters probably were around when WWW was effectively born. Tell me it was not addictive and not full of harmful content. I'm pretty happy it was not banned despite, unlike TV, providing personalized information that you were seeking.
Maybe I don't get addicted easily, but after 30 minutes of forcing myself to watch tiktok, I just uninstalled it. Friends told me I didn't give it enough time to learn my tastes but... How could it, given that literally 100% of the videos in my interest areas were trash?
The algorithm is pretty simple, it'll show you a selection of videos that are from the n most popular genres of videos, then depending on your dwell time, it'll A/B test categories that are related, or sub categories.
That bit isn't that difficult or new. the special sauce is the editorialising and content categorisation. being able to accurately categorise videos into genres, subjects and sub subjects (ie makeup video, 25 year olds, woman, straight, new york, eyeglitter) and then creating a graph of what persona likes what.
The second secret sauce is people going through and finding stuff and promoting it. TikTok (used to) editorialise/pay highly for content.
I did the same... even faster. I installed it, suggested me some local crap. I wanted ltt, mkbhd, etc. searched those 2, added them, after that first 2 videos were the same crap. uninstall. even youtube is better. It's so much content on youtube that It's impossible to watch it all in a lifetime even at 5x speed. And 10x better content.
I'm in the same boat. I have a TikTok account so my wife and friends can send me videos (mostly cute dogs). It's funny when people probe why I don't use TikTok and they think it must be because I'm against the Chinese/Larry Ellison influence or other common reason. No, I just don't like the format.
I did the same, but because I realized it could become addicting. Too bad Instagram f'ed me by copying TikTok. Now I'm addicted to Reels and I can't uninstall Instagram because my friends message me on it.
It's a constant stream of makeup & dogs. I just stick to Michael Penn on YT.
Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design. If removing pointless interruptions is illegal, we might as well throw every designer in prison. And why stop there? Why not force TikTok to add other pointless barriers, like making the user solve a puzzle before watching another video? What about other uninterrupted experiences, like watching TV?
I find twitter more addictive then TikTok. Should it be forced to make me click "next" before seeing another tweet?
Banning recommendation engines is also incredible. Is it really the EU's case that they're all illegal, from the youtube recommendation engine to amazon's "people who bought this also bought" to twitter's "who to follow"? Is TikTok's just too good?
> Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design.
If infinite scroll is good design.
> we might as well throw every designer in prison
No, we might as well convict every manager/boss that assign those goals to the designers.
Designers don't dream these patterns out of thin air, they have incentives to.
> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violated European Union laws for online safety.
How is that any different to Facebook?
The European Commission bases its investigation on the rules laid down in the Digital Services Act (DSA). This European legislation, introduced in 2022, imposes strict requirements on companies offering digital services in Europe.
In addition to TikTok, the social media company Meta, Facebook's parent company, is also under the investigation.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
Quoting: >The Commission is concerned that the systems of both Facebook and Instagram, including their algorithms, may stimulate behavioural addictions in children, as well as create so-called 'rabbit-hole effects'. In addition, the Commission is also concerned about age-assurance and verification methods put in place by Meta.
And before someone mentions the other? X - the everything app formally known as Twitter - is also under the Commission's scrutiny. It was fined approximately 120 million euro at the end of last year.
To explain it in a little bit better: Digital Services Act designates websites as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) based on the number of monthly active users within the EU (>45 million, roughly 10% of all EU citizens).
Once the website is designated as such, you're looked at with more scrutiny, have to comply to higher standards, and the exact remediation steps are decided on a case-by-case basis. All of the cases are chugging along, but not all of them are on the same stage.
If your website is not popular enough to be designated as VLOP, this law basically doesn't exist. It's not like GDPR in a sense that it defines some things everyone has to follow, regardless of your audience size.
Thanks.
Let's hope they don't chicken out.
it may not be. but it's common to fight a legal battle against one perpetrator first, then see for the rest. gotta start somewhere, why not start at what's arguably the most toxic and obvious case, even if (or exactly because) it's been around for less long.
Maybe it isn't any different to Facebook, I don't know. Why would if matter if Facebook isn't any different from TikTok in the context of this news?
Apparent hypocrisy and injustice in government policy is an ugly thing in the world that should be pointed out and eliminated through public awareness and scrutiny.
Facebook are also under investigation, it just hasn't concluded yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912263
It matters because everyone - people, companies, countries - is supposed to be equal in front of the law. Selective application of the law shows this not to be the case and shows that there are other factors in play which decide whether someone - a person, a company, a country - gets to violate some law without legal consequences while someone else is prosecuted for the same violation.
If you now think "they have to start somewhere in prosecuting these violations" you're partly correct but also partly mistaken. Sure they have to start somewhere but they could - and if they are really serious about their claims should - have started prosecuting all those other companies which did this way before TikTok or even its predecessor Musically was a thing. Algorithm-driven endless scroll designs to keep user's eyes glued to the screen have been a thing from very early on in nearly all 'social' app-site-things and the warning signs about addictive behaviour in users have been out for many years without the law being thrown at the proprietors of those entities. As to why this has not happened I'll leave for the reader to decide. There are plenty of other examples to be found in this regard ranging from the apprehension of the Telegram CEO to the sudden fervour in going after X-formerly-known-as-Twitter which seem to point at politics being at play in deciding whether a company gets to violate laws without being prosecuted or not.
So what's the solution you ask? As far as I can see it is to keep these companies from violating user's rights by keeping them in line regardless of who owns or runs the company and regardless of whether those owners or proprietors are cooperative on other fronts. Assuming that these laws were written to stem the negative influence these app-things have on their users they should have gone after many other companies much earlier. Had they done so it might even have led to TikTok realising that their scheme would not work in the EU. They might not have launched here or they might have detuned their algorithmic user trap, they might have done many things to negate the negative effects of their product. They might just have decided to skip the whole EU market altogether like many other companies have done and do. I'd have thought 'good riddance', what you?
Maybe because FB are getting away with the same thing?
I doubt they would if this becomes illegal.
EU laws are slow, sometimes stupid, but consistent.
Are they consistent? As a North American, I find it difficult to take EU/European countries’ stances on addiction seriously when they seem to be decades behind on reducing the prevalence of smoking and drinking, which almost certainly cause more practical harm than TikTok ever could.
> seem to be decades behind on reducing the prevalence of smoking and drinking,
the EU isn't a federal government. the UK, when it was in the EU did a full smoking inside ban, and tightened it after leaving.
It however had a massive problem with binge drinking and sorta didn't do much to stop that, apart from make it more expensive.
the netherlands has a smoking ban, but it was brought in later (I think). they had a different drinking culture so didn't have the same issues as the UK for drink.
That kind of issue is usually left to member states.
Packaging however is more the EU's purview
what is more damaging, a hammer, a sword, or poison?
i hope i don’t have to go out of my way to explain the analogy.
So social media is pure 'poison' with 0 positive impact but other addictive media like video games are tools with noble utility?
The World Health Organization has reached the exact opposite conclusion.
The ICD-11 doesn't include 'social media addiction.' It doesn’t exist clinically. What they did include is 'Gaming Disorder', classifying your 'sword' alongside substance abuse and gambling.
My point is governments could just as easily justify video game crack-downs with this same logic. Is that something we should be cheering on? Really?
It is not about that. There is surely lots of hypocrisy in particular around alcohol. In most parts of the world TBH.
The discussion is whether companies are treated equally with regards to a particular law.
Ya that's my point. The particular law in question - 'Online platforms that are creating any negative effects on mental wellbeing, like addiction'
This is Fortnite, Minecraft, Netflix, Online Shopping, Dating Apps etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
The problem I have with the way the EU doles out these punishments is that they like to spring them on tech companies after years and years of radio silence and then suddenly it’s “hey TikTok, we just determined you’ve been breaking the law for years, pay us a couple billion please.”
Like, where were they years ago saying “hey TikTok, we think your design is addictive and probably illegal, you need to change or face penalties.” If TikTok continues to operate in the same manner despite a warning, sure, throw the book at them. Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years. Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.
Its never really like this.
Tiktok spend a lot of money talking to EU regulators. They know shits coming down the track because these directives have to be put into law by eu members. that takes time.
> Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.
But thats not the point, companies shouldn't be doing stuff they know is harmful. Thats literally the point of regulation.
> Like, where were they years ago saying “hey TikTok, we think your design is addictive and probably illegal, you need to change or face penalties.”
That is basically what happened today. No penalties have been issued at this point.
Also Commission had sent various requests for information to TikTok in 2023 before they opened these proceedings in early 2024 (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...) - this didn't come out of the blue.
You answered it yourself. They can't extract billions if the company is still small.
Fines on US tech companies bring in more money to the EU than the EU's entire tech industry combined.
Haha you may be right.
But instead you may see it as a discount on the money these companies are making from European citizens.
> Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years.
Lol. It's never like this.
These companies are given plenty of warnings and deadlines. After years and years of ignoring them these companies get slapped with a fine and start playing the victim.
BTW at this point DSA has been in effect for three years
Let me rephrase your question: "But if it's illegal for TikTok to do this, shouldn't Meta also be sued over it?"
The answer is "Yes".
Not to mention Instagram. It is almost indistinguishable from TikTok now.
Seems to be the same as Facebook, and a bunch of others, so hopefully they're all looking into ways of stop breaking the law, if their lawyers have flagged this preliminary decision to them yet.
It's not any different. Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, all are in the same boat. Explicitly designed, tested and benchmarked to hack human reward circuits most effectively to maximize ad revenue.
So, I think many will reach the conclusion that TikTok's design is addictive. No problem here.
But, when I go to Youtube - owned by Google - and use those shorts (video shorts), I kind of "swipe down". Even on my desktop computer. This is also addictive until I eventually stop.
Why isn't Google also fined? Where does the fine approach stop? I am all for punishing corporations exploiting humans, so that is all fine by me. But I don't quite understand the rationale. It is not addictive like a drug, right? The behaviour solely origins via visual feedback. That's different to e. g. taking LSD. It's a bit strange to me. When is something addictive? Where is the boundary? One could also say this is simply good design that gets people's attention. Ads are also like that. Why are ads not made illegal? I would be in favour of that. So why aren't ads made illegal? They can contain addictive elements. They manipulate the viewer. They try to sell an image. Why is that not forbidden?
You prosecute one case at a time. A judgement against TikTok (arguably the largest example) will make similar judgements against others easier.
Also, LSD isn't addictive in any sense of the word.
We don't need to know the exact boundaries of what's acceptable to recognize obviously harmful behavior and make efforts to stop it on a societal level.
This is the classic "perfect is the enemy of the good" type scenario.
Let's make imperfect progress if that is what we're currently capable of.
No, one branch of the EU (not European) government has said it is likely (there has been no ruling) that its illegal.
Its a good thing, but its not what the title says it is
Again, the most problematic in this is how vague and handwavy the regulation is.
> The Commission's investigation preliminarily indicates that TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.
> For example, by constantly ‘rewarding' users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into ‘autopilot mode'. Scientific research shows that this may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users' self-control.
> Additionally, in its assessment, TikTok disregarded important indicators of compulsive use of the app, such as the time that minors spend on TikTok at night, the frequency with which users open the app, and other potential indicators.
This is comically unscientific language. It's entirely subjective what is adequate when framed like that. This is another law aimed at suing megacorps to extract fines, although i m not sure how they hope to get those fines from China.
You're quoting the NYT article. If you're going to criticize the Commission's language for being "vague and handwavy", you should quote the original source.
No, that is actually the EU's press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
Give a kid a phone with TikTok on it and observe them for a while. It's genuinely upsetting.
They'll spend hours with their heads down just silently looking at the thing. All desire to do anything else just vanishes. Then they freak out when you try to take it away from them.
The only obvious difference between them and someone on fent is the verticality of their posture.
Using this logic the government should regulate Minecraft too.
I only tried it once and like 30 mins passed in the blink of an eye. Never again.
I hope they go after Whatnot, Youtube shorts, and LinkedIn as well.
LinkedIn has become such a pit of force-fed self-help vitriol it’s completely lost its purpose.
Had they invented Ice Cream in the 2020s, lawmakers of Europe would find it illegal for it's addictive properties. They'd also decree a universal milk fat percentage, perhaps even a law calling dairy farming slavery.
Anything but be competitive
I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of media in general is to keep you around. Television channels try to display content their viewers enjoy, but they can only target broadly. The web allows sites to have way more personal recommendations, but banning it is essentially banning sites because people enjoy it too much.
I think short form content especially is basically brain rot, but I also don't know how you ban something simply because it's too good at providing content people enjoy. The result would just be a worse experience across the board, is that a win?
I guess a forced 5s video saying take a break after 20 minutes of doom scrolling wouldn't be the end of the world, but truely making it illegal doesn't make sense.
>I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of media in general is to keep you around.
I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of casinos/bars/opium dens in general is to keep you around.
Reddit once told me to take a break (i was on the sick for a foot injury). So I did. I now check in once a week, for one hour, max. Ahhh, creatures of habit, that we are.
On YouTube I seem to mostly get ads for gambling apps that emphasise the controls and safety measures they have.
I've never gambled let along used a gambling app.
The trick bit is that addiction and showing people what they want to see are near indistinguishable. It's optimizing for same thing basically and don't think it'll be possible to legislate a clear distinction
There's a big difference between healthy wants and addiction. The latter involves compulsion and craving. The clearest sign anyone is addicted to something is that they use something precisely when even they don't want to.
I'd even say it's orthogonal to the content and what someone wants to see. You can design an app full of crap that's addictive purely because of its reward mechanisms, and on the other hand you can design something that discourages addiction while having high quality content, it's not optimizing for the same thing. People get addicted to mechanisms, not to content, the same way you can enjoy a nice scotch but the addict goes for the five dollar handle of vodka. The latter doesn't want the vodka, he wants the alcohol.
Addiction in many ways erodes genuine higher-order wants and only leaves stimulation. I'd not be surprised if people who watch 8 hours of TikTok a day don't even care what they watch any more.
So what's next, Hacker News is illegal because the point system encourages retention?
This kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.
But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.
It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.
Drugs and alcohol are explicit substances with an explicit definition.
The point of the absolutism is that the line will be drawn not where society broadly agrees it should, but where governments find it most useful, and that line will always move in the direction of increasing censorship and propaganda. If Hacker News becomes enough of a threat to the regime it will be classified as "social media" and all of a sudden it will be illegal to moderate without a court order or some nonsense. This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights. Social media intersects with free speech. I know people here don't want to admit that, but it's true.
It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good. For some reason when it comes to social media we're suddenly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even banning algorithmic feeds is a problem. Do those feeds push harmful and extremist content? Yes. But they push everything else as well. Making it more difficult to find related content of any kind is a kind of censorship.
And that kind of absolutism isn't helpful either!
"Government" isn't an external actor; most governments exist on the spectrum between "a big chunk of the public is OK with or supports what they're doing" and "directly influenced by public opinion" (democratic states).
And yeah, they abuse power a lot! So do corporations, tribes, religions, etc.--governments are just the "big group with violence capability and power" we put in that role during this chapter in history. There's no magical "autonomy is theoretically possible and therefore it's OK" line between letting a corporation that everyone is hooked on control what content people see, and letting a state restrict what content can be shown. The technicality that "people could choose to watch something else" for the corporation is just that--a technicality, and just as specious as the "if you don't like it here, then you can move" argument against participation in a state.
> This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights.
Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body? Aren't both protections trying to draw a line between preserving autonomy and preventing harm? That's not whataboutism--I see that as a very similar regulatory space: personal choice and trust versus behavioral likelihood/distrust + negative externalities.
> It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good.
It used to be felt within hacker counterculture that some government influence over speech was bad. Then counterculture expanded into a regular subculture (whether you call it eternal september or just popularity). Some popular opinions about speech restrictions changed (whether you call it orchestrated frog-boiling or just shifting opinions). And even in the '70s-'80s, few hackers believed that a free-speech-absolutist position would scale.
We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane. Things like the MPAA had widespread public support. Pearl-clutching was at a high level. Hell, the CDA in many ways had more teeth to restrict outlets back then, and a centralized social network sure looks a lot more like an outlet than a Usenet server does. I'm as thankful for section 230 as the next person, but even I have to admit that it is looking more and more like a technicality-shield every day.
Like, you and I probably agree extensively on the specifics of what counts as government overreach and the strong need to protect against that. I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed belief that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.
>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it!
And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs." Banning drugs only makes black markets and cartels more effective.
>As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body?
Cigarettes aren't speech. Speech has value, even if it can do harm. Social media, being a means of effecting speech, has value even if it can do harm. Cigarettes have no value and can only do harm.
>We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane.
Sure. The argument for regulating broadcast tv and radio was the spectrum being a limited resource - but the web is not a limited resource. No matter how big Facebook or Twitter get, we're not going to run out of internets for new platforms.
>I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed believe that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.
I don't believe my position is necessarily absolutist - although it gets interpreted as such - I believe that social media platforms have the right and the moral duty to police themselves and deplatform dangerous and extremist content. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence nor does it oblige you a platform. I just don't believe that having governments step into that role is a good idea, and I think recent history in the US and UK back me up in that regard.
And yes, social media platforms may (and will) get things wrong, but they can't send men with guns to shoot me in the head.
But staking out extreme positions to the contrary is sometimes necessary when confronted with extreme positions. I consider the position that social media is more addictive and dangerous than heroin to be extremist, that algorithms need to be banned, that social media platforms need to be nationalized, all of that hyperbole is getting ridiculous to me, and it smacks of a moral panic. But almost no one seems willing to push against it or even question it.
Advertising is speech and it's often heavily regulated.
Advertising is speech by corporations, so there's a public interest in regulating it. What's the public interest in regulating your speech, or mine, just because we're on a platform that has an arbitrarily high userbase or uses algorithmic sorting?
Why should it be illegal for me to like fishing videos, and want to be shown more fishing videos if I watch fishing videos?
Or to post at all online without a license and account tied to my real identity?
If I run a car forum, why should it be illegal for me to ban Nazis just because Nazi speech is legal in the US?
Or if my forum gets some arbitrarily large userbase, why should I be forced to give control of my forum to the government to be regulated as a utility?
All of these are rational, likely results of policies that people on HN have advocated, along with banning social media entirely (which would destroy one of the few truly free hypermedia and communication models out there.)
I don't trust the intentions of people who want to regulate social media and I absolutely don't trust the intentions of governments.
Here's a reading and listening tip for handling social media addiction:
Frank Possemato: How to Live an Analog Life in a Digital World: A Workbook for Living Soulfully in an Age of Overload
How to live an analog life in a digital world | Frank Possemato | TEDxBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEMffdUgWCk
He does not say stop everything, but instead offers realistic tips to reduce one's dependency, e.g. he suggests to take breakes and training to stay offline for certain intervals (e.g. half an hour, or an hour)
Imagine having a government that demands a company like TikTok stop abusing its users instead of checks notes forcing its sale to your cronies so you can silence your critics. Must be nice.
I think algorithmic content recommendations must be banned from social media. Its too powerful wrt influencing the masses. People should go back to just seeing content from their friends.
I use X almost entirely from the desktop where I have an extension installed that lets me whitelist my follows, and see nothing else. I recently browsed the same feed on mobile ... and it was entirely different! I think I spent a half hour and saw zero content from my follows, just one ticktok style video after another. For those who find these services without value, I now understand. But I feel revolted rather than addicted. Will I now experience a mysterious compulsion to view the naked feed?
> I recently browsed the same feed on mobile ... and it was entirely different! I think I spent a half hour and saw zero content from my follows
At the top of the mobile app there’s a “For You” tab and a “Following” tab. You must have been on the “For You” tab.
Switch to the “Following” tab.
If you start scrolling the “For You” tab and do it for half an hour straight, you’re basically signaling that this the content you wanted to see and will continue getting more of it.
> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violated European Union laws for online safety.
How is this any different from Reddit? From Instagram? Why single out TikTok?
Applying laws unevenly is a form of discrimination.
What other instances of "we did our job as little too well" are there?
I can think of tabacco and other drugs, but that's not really the same. Monopolistic behavior doesn't really fit either. Maybe Kleenex marketing doing so well their name became interchangeable with the word "tissue"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food , One could argue about the plastic usage of the Coca-Cola company, etc
Good call. Maybe the US needs a food score system on the label like they have in some European countries. Obviously that system has it's flaws though
Condoms or contraceptives (if they correlate with the drop of fertility
Europeans really need to get their heads out of their butts. Their solution to every problem is nanny state regulation.
> Europeans really need to....
Which country, or countries are you talking about? Are you including the UK?
Unlike the States, with one language, we have many.
What's your solution to the current problem? Because the free market ain't working.
Nah man, I'm glad for you that you live in country X where you do Y instead, but at the same time as an European I'm pretty satisfied regulating big shitty companies
They should do the same with Instagram and Youtube shorts... but wait, they are not chinese, they are allowed to mine us...
It's such an odd request to make something less enjoyable. If the EU wants a time limit on app use they should just impose it themselves.
I think you dont consider that this is politics and why it s conducted through press releases
Who runs their European operations? Is it the Chinese and not Oracle?
Casually waiting for a legislative body to muster the courage of their convictions and just ban social media outright.
The ultimate flex as a product designer would be to put "Designed product UX so addictive that it was banned in Europe" on my resume.
Just curious for anyone who pays more attention to this than me: is the company being sanctioned by the EU for this behavior the one that US law forced an ownership change of or does that company only operate in the US?
In the US it is now legal because it was completely taken over by the hydra.
The simple fact the back button while on the main screen doesn't exit the app is something that honestly should be illegal and is not permitted in the app stores.
We are essentially saying that our kids should be allowed to smoke cigarettes and not doing anything about it.
If cigarettes didnt have health effects it would be great (they may even be good for their brains who knows)
Which country? Europe is a continent, with many different countries and many different laws.
Can Europe stop messing with TikTok & Apple and start fixing the mental health issues caused by Teams?
are you sure you want them to fix it?
Very glad that my country India banned this vile rabid TikTok long ago, along with other suspicious/spyware/disruptive apps like PUBG. Good riddance.
Kind of funny coming from people who levy taxes on tobacco products all the time
Isn't this exactly the same with Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.?
What makes TikTok different?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912263
Nothing will happen. It is the EU. We bark and then roll over.
Direct link to EU Commission's statement: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
So will they also go after youtube?
Nothing will happen.
This is generational warfare. Imagine if we said boomers cannot watch TV anymore...
ok sooo, youtube in general I can watch 8h streams. I watch it insane. what about that
Infinite scroll is banned on this phone. Using NextDNS.
They will pay upfront or put some geopolitical pressure https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g8v6qr1mo
TikTok has a lot of issues, such as privacy, dubious content, 'brainrot', etc. I don't want to seem like I'm necessarily defending TikTok specifically here.
But this really just stinks of Regulatory Capture to me. Their main argument is that the consumers like to use the app too much?
Why? Because it's smarter and not as enshittified as the competitors?
I'm sure if youtube, facebook, reddit, etc reduced the number of ads, and started showing more relevant content that people actually cared about, they too would start being "more addictive". Do we really want to punish that?
What's the end goal here?
Regulatory capture that benefits whom?
This is typical "EU populism" signaling
Funny how Europe's "concern" for digital health only kicks in when a non US platform starts winning
European regulators and courts have placed a lot of scrutiny on big US tech companies, with frequent fines for privacy violations and potential anti-competitive behavior. Also as noted upthread, they're investigating Meta and Twitter on this specific issue.
You’re getting downvoted but seriously, it took them this long to figure this out? I also suspect they won’t outright ban TikTok, but instead levy a multi-billion dollar fine and let it continue operating.
The fines are typically accompanied with a requirment to change the illegal behaviour.
Good. I feel like since cracking down on smoking in the 90s we've become really complacent to the dangers of addiction. Just like with smoking you'll get people inside the industry defending it too (like in this very comment section).
Probably, but it's hard to take them seriously after the EU cookie debacle.
Am I the only one who does not know what tiktok is or does?
doom scrolling is not so much an addiction as it is a disease * , as heroin has fully functioning addicts who live very normal office work lives over a complete career. doom scrolling renders the patient unable to fully partisipate in society or do meaningfull work or interact in ways that promote there self interest. I get emails daily from people looking for work, which are clearly written by someone/thing, other than the person, and when I insist on turning a call into there job interview, they freeze up, and hang up after any request for detail. Waste products and they never even got the chance to get ripped out of there minds and have a wild good time first.
* juvinile dimentia
Might be a generational thing, but I never understood the "shorts" (in any format on any social network).
I can watch a 9 hour video on GTA games without problems (not in one sitting, but in parts), but 3 'shorts' in a row with not enough info and explanation to be interesting makes me close any of the 'shorts' apps (tiktok, youtube shorts, instagram....).
(eg, the 9 hour video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faxpr_3EBDk )
You likely weren’t wired into it while your brain was developing.
There’s clear scientific evidence that these shorts trigger addiction-like behavior[1]. The detrimental effects on a kid’s brain development can be inferred[2]. A reasonable argument could made that it’s not so different from things like nicotine, alcohol or other drugs when it comes to child brain development. I believe these companies know this and willfully push it on kids anyway.
Edit: And I think it’s really telling that China has some of the strictest state-led anti-addiction and youth protection policies globally[3].
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
[3] https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/kids-no-phones-dinne...
actually the study does not show a trigger by shorts, instead they hypothesize the addiction exists based on previous studies done on internet/video game addictions.
I think one of the things that short form videos do really well is that they punish creators who pad their videos with unnecessary filler content. On TikTok for example (Not necessarily a fan of the app but it's a good example) no videos start with all that empty jabbering you often see on YouTube ("Welcome to my channel...", "Today we will...", "Please Like and Subscribe...", "This video is sponsored by...", etc), because if they tried any of that crap the viewers would just swipe the content away. So, instead they always get straight to the point. That part is really refreshing.
Of course, there are other issues instead.
i can't really concentrate well on long video content outside of specific cases, so there's that. honestly though i feel like shorts aren't the solution, there should just be more text content [eg: tutorials] in addition to video things. [every time someone says something is "only communicateable through video/audio" i die a little bit inside...]
I used to feel, despite knowing how much harm the US has caused around the world, that I was lucky to be born American. Shamefully, I knew that deep down it was better to be born in the US than in a slum in Rio or Calcutta.
Now, I question that, because I know that American companies will never step in and regulate themselves, nor other "foreign run" companies like TikTok (I know it is really murky right now). I know Trump, who owns his own social media company, and Elon Musk, who has invaded the government and owns his own propaganda machine, will never be on the right side of history. My kids are forcibly addicted to their phones and these companies are racing to a bottom I don't think exists. I watch them consume in horror and helplessness.
Spare me your thoughts, childless commentators. You have no idea what kids these days are facing. You have no idea how hard I have fought. It is so horrible. And, the only parents who winning are Amish, Waldorf or home school kids. Every single friend in my kids life is even worse off than mine, so it is pushers everywhere. 13 year old brains were never designed to survive this kind of assault.
Europe is so stupid.