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I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand. Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.

Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, but the other side of me is like wait where did 2 hours go? And do I really want this?
I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few of them, all tiktoks seem to have the same feel and optimization. They're uncanny valley of authenticity, influencers and singers and actors and wives struggling so very very hard to seem amiable and authentic and real based on same evolving playbook, and I feel too weirded out after 30s or so to keep watching :O.
> Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

On to the next 'hit' then.

The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible.

There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™.

The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs.

Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.

> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places.

This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram.

Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live.

Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.

One explanation for the difference between tiktok and instagram could be that tiktok doesn’t have a crystallized business model yet and is just focusing on growing its network as much as possible. Presumably it will end up as bad as every other (profitable) social network over time (apart from twitter, which is more like an internet utility).
I understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP.

Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees.

I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.

It's AI is kind of terrible for society. Sure, it is impressive technically, but WSJ did an article Tiktok's effect on teenagers:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investig...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-ti...

> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc

I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it.

Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever.

What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral?

Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?

In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.
I am having difficulty finding TikTok's addictiveness. My job depends on understanding consumer apps, so in the past 1.5 years, I've been trying TikTok anew every 3 months, each day at least trying to spend 10 minutes on it no matter how uninteresting I find the content to be, but end up giving up after 3 to 7 days each time I try. I swipe quickly past uninteresting content, stay on mildly interesting ones, and make sure to click like or add comment on interesting ones, in order to send signals to AI.

I'm not embodying any fake persona, just trying to find what I would find interesting. I just don't get addicting content. I even try searching so that TikTok would get explicit keywords from me.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list).

I like software engineering, business, product management, marketing, and technology industry generally. I don't believe I am so far from regular consumers: I check out mainstream videos on YouTube like MKBHD and even subscribe to his podcast (This is to show I find content for "mainstream consumers" interesting, though I work in tech and know more about tech things than MKBHD's target audience).

Can someone help? Why is the whole world praising TikTok while I am failing repeatedly?

"If people have the right to be tempted - and that's what free will is all about - the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold." - Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong, "Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, March 2007

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...

I've tried it a few times. Even ran an account for a project I do.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not the right personality for this stuff but I found it annoying and taxing.

Open it up and you get these obnoxious videos and then have to press a button to make them go away. The user-base and interaction is worthless and toxic. Lots of people love it so maybe I'm just too old.

Perhaps they've "cracked some psychological secret" but I believe it's more likely they've replicated whatever makes pop music and television work for a lot of people. I have the same kind of distaste for those I have for tiktok.

But good for them. Entertainment is important antidote to stress. Glad people like it

Maybe it's because I haven't used it, but a lot of the language around TikTok feels exceptional in ways that aren't justified: Twitter has (tens of?) millions of "terminally online" users, but we don't compare it to "digital crack."

This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk about it compared to other addictive social media (e.g., saying that users are "obsessed with" $FACEBOOK_PROPERTY instead of describing them as digital addicts.)

I think the truth is pretty dark. Until TikTok most recommendation engines placed the most weight on your declared preferences.

TikTok doesn't seem to care about what you "say" you like." They watch your behavior to see what you actually like.

So you can "want" to be shown math videos and like tons of math videos and follow dozens of professors. But if TikTok observes that you are more likely to watch a professional wrestling video to the end, then that is what you'll be shown.

What you want to watch and what you actually "feel" like watching are not the same thing. Other engines show you what you want to watch but don't feel like watching, TikTok shows you what you feel like watching but not what you want to watch.

This same philosophy is observable when you try to exit the app. If you are on the screen the app opens to, the expected behavior of the back button is to exit the app.

TikTok however, doesn't care that you "want" to leave.

They know that it's important for you to leave so now is the time to show the video that they know you will find most irresistible. So when you try to leave they give you the "ultimate" video which you have been conditioned to expect to be "perfect".

In order to leave, you must fight this conditioning and reaffirm your desire to leave within a tiny span of time (feels like less than a second). If you miss the window and try to exit again, TikTok tries to hack your brain again by changing the video for the next video it thinks you'll stay for, and so on...

I found the opposite. People kept telling me how good the algorithm is, etc. I believe all that is a complete myth now, potentially spread by TikTok itself.

I installed TikTok as a test and found that it's garbage. If I watched it for 30 minutes a day for a couple months, I would encounter maybe one video per day where I might think "huh, that's neat". Even following/interacting with my interests (which are only covered in the most broad sense) didn't really fix that. I'm sure it works better if your hobbies are really popular like rock climbing or craft beer or Harry Potter. I think there are some really funny creators and that's where it shines the best - comedy. Everything else is treated in a cursory manner that never really delivers.

The vast majority of videos were a complete waste of time and I'm blown away that people can spend more than a few minutes per day watching it. It took at least a couple months to find interesting creators, but they are so few and far between that it wasn't worth it.

For me, Livejournal was addictive, forums were addictive, Twitter used to be addictive. Especially when you stumbled on niche communities. I've never tried Instagram, so I'm not sure about that.

Maybe it's me but tiktok content is boring to me. Videos too short to care. Finding videos by your keyword is difficult. The camera angles are too zoomed and the thin width and increased height creates ugly looking videos. The videos themselves are people picking an action or movement and isolating it for effect.

I wonder how many others haven't been bite by the tiktok bug.

The way tiktok pigeonholes you into content categories can be outright condescending though. No other platform does it that blatently.

OK; you start out with the default german content, if you do no how to mark stuff as not interested on the FYP you might get promoted to german expat content. Don't know if the mainstream US experience is different, but at least for me the new content is not enough to keep me hooked for more the 1h/month.

Might be different, if you have to work through the whole tiktok back catalog first, but to me it's nowhere near twitter or even instagram in addictiveness.

The lack of realtime shared news experience is also a thing, and it's less ephermeral nature than, let's say Insta-stories, the FOMO is less then everywhere else to me. Which is a good thing.

tiktok has great features that make its content more addicting to return to than any other platform:

- it’s all video means it’s higher quality than an image

- every video is guaranteed views which lets anyone go viral

- when anyone can go viral you get more organic content. depends on your patterns but i think most people see majority videos by regular people. the content is much more relatable

- no need to follow

- algorithm is good at finding videos you will like

- keeps you up to date on latest trends (improves your social perception)

- easy to make videos. great editor, pick any music

and you can just scroll down forever. i had it about a year but recently deleted it. it was the ultimate time filler. and honestly too good

I'm 35 and I don't understand the allure even 1% - same with Instagram. I'd say the last social media that really made any sense to me was Snapchat, and that was simply because it had a singular purpose and worked well for it (but certainly wasn't something that I'd stare at for hours at a time).

Feel like a bit of an alien at this point (well, what I actually tell myself is that 25s and under are just fucking stupid).

Guess I'm a grandpa at this point.

I didn’t found TikTok addictive but rather utterly juvenile and amateurishly unsophisticated in recommendation algos. It kept inserting a lot of borderline soft-porn type content which I think keeps younger audience glued more than anything else. I would conclude that it doesn’t take a lot to create recommendation algos to grab attention of below 40 age group.
I'm not on TikTok (I heard about all the data collection and decided I didnt need another one of those in my life), but it does look interesting and good fun.

That being said, what I notice the most is the speed at which people are able to read the captions. I'm not old at all, mid 20's, but whenever my younger brother shows me a tiktok I have to ask him to pause it so I can read the text, whereas he can watch a 3 second clip with text and understand it in realtime.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a slow reader, entirely possible, but it does seem the next generation is, rightfully so, optimising more so for fast data processing rather than retention. When you have limitless information at your finger tips, you don't so much need to keep all that information as you need to process it very quickly... Or I am just a slow reader.

TikTok was nice, but quickly became boring and irrelevant for me. My friend likens it to salt water: it seems to quench your thirst in the moment, but you get thirstier and thirstier as you drink it, eventually dying of dehydration.
I tried it a couple of times, and found most content stupid. 90% was girls trying to be cute. Some DIY ones were OK, but I'd rather watch 40 minutes of Tech Ingredients on YT.
I gave it a shot last night and selected three topics: Comedy, Pets, Science and Technology. It gave me a lot of garbage.

Maybe it requires much more frequent use than the 10 minutes I gave it, or it somehow infers a good jumping off point. I feel like there's something I'm not seeing, or maybe I'm just too old?

I tried tiktok for a few months last year. It was refreshing and engaging in a way that nothing else is. The vitality and originality of tiktok really reminds me of Reddit in 2010 or 4chan in 2007. When a ton of dynamic younger people pile their energy into something, it gives that thing a special energy and power that cannot be created artificially.

It’s leading edge in the way it consolidates what came before. All the little optimizations to our memes and videos, all the quirks of online etiquette that have been born in the last 10 years were built into the culture of tiktok from its inception. The result is content that is more frictionless than ever before. Even after tiktok, this is here to stay.

My analysis, without having read the article:

TikTok's greatness is that it's the only happy social network!

Agree it is really good. I’m a 40 year old who generally hates social media but I can burn hours on there watching stupid videos. I keep it off my phone as it’s a total time sink.
Is this just a post linked to the tweet in the headline? How has HN content gone so downhill?
I find any site that has a long/infinite feed of posts a bit like daydreaming - you don't know what thought is going to come up next, you hop from one thought to the other to the other, thinking about mostly useless things or even things that bring down your mood until you suddenly snap out of it realising how much time has been wasted.

A relative easy fix here is to add some hurdles to seeing feeds in the first place e.g.

- uninstall apps on your phone and bookmarks in your browser.

- install uBlock ad blocker and block pages with feeds like the front pages of reddit, the Youtube front page and recommendations sidebar, all of Facebook etc. Or even block by DNS. You can turn all this off but at least you have to make a decision to do it.

I find when I have to purposely search for things I'm much less likely to get roped into daydreaming through feeds and will make progress on useful things I want to learn more about. At least Hackernews doesn't update that often and isn't full of useless memes.

Glad I am really old. Have zero desire to use tiktok.
TikTok’s great but did y’all never try StumbleUpon? In its golden years, that was easily as addictive as TikTok.
I dare to guess that TikTok's secret is their objective: they want to know what's on your mind and they want to foresee your thoughts and actions. The end goal, I believe, is a database of comprehensive personality profiles on the american youth, so by the time they become adults, CCP will have profiles on them. Those profiles will be so accurate that TikTok will know you better than you know yourself. TikTok's doesn't care about profits, so greed doesn't constrain them. Our big tech, on the other hand, is blinded by greed and by desire to "school" us into thinking the aporoved thoughts. In other words, FB and the like, don't want to understand us - they want to "fix" us, and sell ads in the meantime.
All the music is cut short one beat, or half a loop and one beat. That makes your mind crave for more.
It was for me for a couple of days and then I realized it was the same crap over and over and over and over. Every now and then a new "challenge" comes along and takes over but it's the same dumb stuff.
Must be an age thing; I find it awful. Every time I try it or when others show me the crap on it which is supposed to he funny or informative. Not to mention the massive amount of fake news packed in ‘funny’.
I find it hard to believe that this has to do with the superiority of TikTok's ranking algorithm, and everything to do with the fact that its more popular with younger people.
It really is something else. I saw TikTok on TV a lot and it seemed just an extension of it's previous incarnation, Musical.ly: just being dancing around and singing.

Then I installed it to see. I was blown away. Within minutes we'd got away from the goofy stuff to genuinely awesome content about mental health that was really life-changing for me.

I love TikTok. I reserve 30 mins at bedtime each night for it. Swapping videos we've found by DM is one of the fave things my gf and I do.

I have been using Tiktok for the last 2 months. I have also posted some videos of myself talking alone about various subjects. My last serie of videos were about "what I like and what I hate about tiktok". I have even gained some "followers" (around 1200) so I can use the live streaming function of Tiktok (one needs to have more than 1k subscribers to unlock this function). But the more I am using Tiktok the more I am considering leaving this platform! Yes there are some really funny/creative videos that's about 4% or 5% of what I can see and that's pretty much the only reason why I keep browsing Tiktok. But the rest of the content is in my opinion really dumb. Maybe the algorithm got me wrong, but what I see is basically people trying to copy each other with more or less talent again and again, or some accounts posting stolen bits of videos or even movies. That's all. I should mention that most of the content I am watching on Tiktok is in French and I believe made in France maybe US content is more interesting I can't comment on that.

I have had some good laugh watching some tiktok but I haven't learnt anything interesting or meaningful and I don't understand how people claim they learn stuff on this platform since the maximum length of a video is 3 minutes. I personally need more time to warp my head around something. I am a slow learner. I also find there are too much restriction to really enjoy this platform. One example is the 150 characters limit in the comment section. This is really annoying both for people who post content and for people who only watch videos.

I understand Tiktok can be interesting and addictive for a moment , but after a while it become too much repetitive and annoying.

Isn’t TicTok a clone of Vine? Could someone explain why Vine failed and what has TikTok done differently to become so successfull?
No wonder Facebook is spooked. They tried to get it banned in the US so as to buy some time, but it didn't work. I actually think Facebook would have banned the previous guy earlier but Peter Theil probably promised he could get TikTok banned in the US. When they couldn't deliver the TikTok ban, facebook didn't need him anymore.
I think your title is prescient. The algorithm is amazeballs at engaging content, TikTok has been linked to even worse outcomes in teens, and the Chinese govt limits their own youth strictly.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934

It’s much more like a drug (or to lean on the paranoid side, weapon) than normal social media.

US social media companies have clearer objective: sell ads, make money, go public etc.

With Chinese govt involvement ByteDance has murkier intentions, and I can’t help but be reminded by another nation’s foray into social media in 2015-2016.

I have a spare Android tablet I keep around for website testing. I installed TT on it, didn't create an account.

Probably the only good thing about it is that you can jump right in, without a login wall spoiling the fun.

I also don't get the "algorithmic panopticon" effect so many are claiming, but maybe it's because I've already seen the curated, good quality stuff that gets shared on Reddit and Twitter.

In TikTok itself, I feel like I'm having to trudge through a giant pile of garbage first. Imagine if Google/Bing UI made you load and view every single site, instead of just showing a list of page titles.

And this is with human generated content. Wait until computer generated content can be used to optimize human engagement. I've thought about this a lot and it scares me. We may need more regulation.
I guess Mudiji did all Indians a big favor banning this drug then. Btw I just tried to install an apk but the ban is strong with this one.

I tried Windscribe, ClearVPN and more and still couldn't get it to connect.

Either Indian govt has gone above and beyond to ban it or Tiktok doesn't like VPNs. But either way, like the real-drugs which I found incredibly hard to come by here in India (except Goa where they are selling E outside clubs like candy) this is another thing I'll never get to use and strangely I'm okay with it.

Honestly, I enjoy HN more than TikTok.
The engagement in Tiktok is part of what makes it addictive. You post a video and Tiktok gets it in front of people who will engage with it(in many different ways). Then your brain releases dopamine. And the cycle of continues. Which makes me wonder, if someone created a wearable hardware device. Then, when you press a button it tells your brain to produce dopamine. Will this device be made illegal? Because that is exactly what cocaine does to your brain.
Been trying to signup to tiktok for years now every time I get

Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'name')

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwWV3BWXAAQ5cKD?format=png&name=...

When signing up with email. Tried with multiple browsers, multiple email addresses, multiple devices. How are other people signing up?