I'm pretty sure Google and Facebook know the same. This isn't really news.
Google Chrome's FLOC I believe sorts people into 5000 person groups with similar interests. I assume google picked this number for a reason. I imagine you can probably sort the world's population into groups of 5000 people with almost exactly the same interests and motivations.
If that’s what they’ve been doing with YouTube recommendations then it’s definitely nowhere close to identifying interests or motivations. Whatever they started changing in 2016 has been making the recommendations less and less personally relevant and increasingly generic and boring. Probably helping a whole lot of people spend less time on YouTube though.
"We programmed bots to go down rabbit-holes. Watch as TikTok's algorithm makes our bots go down rabbit holes!"
Not saying TikTok isn't spooky. But:
The effort that went into making the viewer feel anxious while watching this was extreme; and the effort that went into actual explanation of the TikTok algorithm was minimal.
Yes this was a disappointing watch - they seemed to have gone to some effort to simulate a lot of accounts with interests, and testing some handwaving unspecified theories. But then they only detailed _one_ of those fake accounts, and it showed some pretty unsurprising results. If you hover over videos of X, it shows more of that - Kentucky, depression, romance etc.
The only real discovery was the disparity between the TikTok spokesperson (who said that 7% of anyone's feed should be trying to broaden your interests) and their observation that those videos were in fact mostly adverts.
And (sorta) that hitting Dislike doesn't seem to do much, if you counter than signal by watching/liking other videos. But it was all very vague given how much data they said they'd gathered.
I agree I don't think the algorithm is particularly clever, or works towards any other goal than for users to spend more time with the app Which is the assumption I was starting from.
I think the underlying point is that platforms are gearing their algorithms towards manipulation, and that a new user account has a pre-set path towards being rabbit holed to where most of the content they see can trap them into certain mindsets...
This worries me a lot, because people generally think they are choosing what they want to see, but the platform can shape the world views of many people all at once.
If you trap someone in a room and play violent videos for them all day long, when you let them out, they might come out thinking they'll have to fight for survival, just as an example.
Governments can encourage political chaos through subjecting people to certain types of videos through these platforms over time, and as another example, they can influence certain regions to start a riot or vote a certain way.
Behavioral psychologists are involved in algorithm development now just as much as developers and that's a big problem that most of the world, especially government regulators are totally unaware of.
I have a TikTok account, but only use it in really small doses because I found the suggestive content really was not good for my mental health. I hope more people realize that this is happening, and also understand the lies about potential for sharing independent work on platforms because the platforms are really not geared towards discovery of new content, they have very specific agendas and money making at the foremost behind them.
Perhaps it would be more useful if WSJ told us how they made "dozens of automated accounts". Everyone should be doing this. Why not. We could all be "investigating". Think of what we might learn. Automation is the future. Everyone should be learning it.
I doubt TikTok's algorithm is really so awesome. It's a legend they promote to hype up their brand. I know I'm not their target demographic as I'm in my 30s, but it fails completely to show me interesting stuff. Instead, it shows what it thinks I could like. I get a lot of odd videos that start of sexualized and then turn into a prank (its a TikTok genre apparently). Or videos of woodworking. Or asian cooks. It is very odd and not very fun.
Facebook videos does the same, I get a lot of videos about Resin art and Woodworking and Streetfood, which are at best mildly interesting. I also wonder who pays for that or what their business model is since I see no ads. But maybe resin and wood tools are so expensive that it pays off for them to promote the videos.
I wanted to provide a quick counter point here. For my use, the TikTok algorithm feels much better than anything I have used on other social media. I feel like I have to train it like a pet. You have so few, but useful feedback mechanisms that whenever you see something you don't like if you scoll (or long press "not interested") It seems to make a really big impact on the content.
I get some funny stuff but most of it is some real deep in the weeds nerd stuff. Programming, Ops, Sci-Fi book reviews, Dungeons and Dragons tips. I've seen other people's TikTok's occasionally and it never looks like mine. Even a friend of mine who works in tech and has similar interests, his looks completely different.
With all that being said it's at the cost of it being literally spyware. I've tried YouTube shorts. If someone could 10x that algorithm, or start a startup where it's TikTok but now with 20% less spying that would be awesome!
Oh and it's hyper addictive like other social media. Although I will say for at least my feed it's much more positive than social media normally is. I don't feel terrible after using it. Just feels like I wasted my time. To that end I uninstall it when I'm done and try to use it only once a week or so. But at the end of the once a week session I usually have a list of books and new tech related concepts to look up.
My experience of TikTok is essentially like a video hacker news that also cracks me up occasionally.
In the beginning I felt the same, like TikTok was able to figure out what kind of content I wanted from the signals I was giving it.
But lately I’m getting bored with it. I feel like TikTok has put me into too narrow of a type of interests. And now for every fun or interesting video that I see, there is like five or ten videos that are too much of the same as what I’ve seen a million times already.
Idk, maybe I’ve just been spending too much time on TikTok lately and it was bound to happen regardless. Maybe even it’s not TikTok maybe it’s just me. That I am tired of watching videos in general, except for the ones that I can use for something. I’m gonna take a break from TikTok.
The only place I've ever heard about the TT algorithm is in news pieces attempting to explain why it took off the way it did. For years we were hearing that social media startups were DOA due to FB and IG domination.
And then BAM, TT swooped in sometime in 2018 and became huge.
I'm in the same age group as you and TT is also not of interest to me. It's possible that I just don't get it for the same reason I didn't get the concept of 'subscribe to this Youtuber'. That kind of amateur video style where you're staring into a camera from your bedroom or your car is just not for me.
> The only place I've ever heard about the TT algorithm
It's talked about quite frequently on TT itself by people who are not programmers, and more well understood by those people then most people here on HN.
I'd be wary of applying anything you think you know to the community of people using TT today. You aren't familiar with it enough to make any judgement. You don't get it, and it has nothing to do with your age or anything other than your unfamiliarity with TT.
Well they acquired musical.ly (buying it's very young audience).
from the wiki:
"TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it only became available worldwide after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018."
Non Chinese in general didn't realize the ferocious competition between video apps companies like Bytedance and Kuaishou. When tiktok emerged it was already very strong.
TikTok doesn't promote this "legend" whatsoever. Indeed, 99% of the time I've read about TikTok's algorithm, it has been naysayer conspiring about how it's an evil addiction engine.
I've seen zero articles technically praising TikTok.
Like everything, it probably isn't for everyone (as an aside -- it seems like a considerable portion of TikTok's base now are middle aged...they aren't targeting any particular demographic), but personally I get a wonderful selection of FYP videos. I only use the app every week or so, but when I do it is one of the most interesting, entertaining digressions available.
Social media algorithms are rather simplistic now, and only geared towards taxonomy, but things will get a lot worse if people don't begin to properly contextualize the process of mental manipulation that carries on behind these closed doors. Entire platforms, any of them, can become corrupt and geared towards encouraging very bad things.
That statement is not geared towards TikTok specifically, all of them are already dedicated towards encouraging users to create content in hopes of success, but these platforms and even advertisers on the platforms can engineer massive campaigns that influence a lot of people to do potentially very bad things... They really don't care about independent content, and there's very little chance of being discovered, that content just allows them to cover up the underlying motives more perhaps.
I'm in my 30s, and my TikTok feed is amazing. It's mostly STEM folks spreading their expertise, with the occasional funny/viral video. If you hold down on a video you don't like, you can select "not interested" to get less videos like that.
Well the ones hyping the algorithm are the users here heavily addicted to the TikTok videos manufactured by the influencers on it. They are clever at crafting these videos as they take multiple attempts created at 'hype houses' and get their viewers addicted to wasting their time on it to the point where they think it is 'worth it'.
Replace 'TikTok' with 'Google' and the 'algorithm' is nothing more than 'personalisation' with mass data collection; Gamed by the influencers to compete for your attention and the same dark patterns used to track your actions and attention. No different to any other social network which the exception of the number of users on there. Nothing has changed.
They are all working for the algorithm and that governs whatever is seen or unseen on the platform. When TikTok decides to change that, well the users will complain once again as they did on other platforms.
It's generally true for the first 30 min. Unless you show signs of interest at the videos you find uninteresting, it'll do a decent job of stabilizing over time.
For me tiktok is so depressing. I am single 25+ guy and seeing all those beautiful girls my age or younger makes me so sad. Than I can go to Tinder and match with pretty but not stunning girls and feel like I am getting robbed. And according to my friends I am easily in top 20% of attractiveness. Feel bad for rest of guys
I guess this is life in 21 century. Governed by algorithms and feeling empty inside
These responses get boring pretty quick. None of this is the real world. Start participating in the world off-screen. Start something new, drop bad habits and eventually you will fill that emptiness inside you.
It's the same for everything people get hooked on, it changes you perception but in reality it's all in your mind.
I don’t disagree with you on a personal level, but it is worth noting that “social disgust” is what has driven down tobacco rates as a population, even if it’s perhaps less effective for any one individual than empathy, etc.
Boohoo he's having a difficult time because his ego is so high he feels entitled to perfect little 15 year old Tik Tok girls to the point where he thinks women who are interested in him are "beneath him."
World's smallest violin for the gross pervert misogynist.
It's not "brushing off" to suggest that someone use their phone less. If picking up the phone is an automatic behaviour to fill moments of dullness, then that's a problem.
All the empathy in the world won't save anyone here. On one side of that screen is you, alone. On the other side are an army of designers, developers and behavioural experts whose job it is to keep you looking at the screen for as long as possible.
I think this is a huge problem for many people born in the past 30 years. We see all these amazing people on (social) media and compare ourselves to them if they're the same sex, or feel attracted to them. I can only imagine what it does to the body image of 14yo girls. In a somewhat similar vein, boys in puberty masturbate to porn that sets completely unrealistic expectations with regards to their partners and experiences in real life. It is a huge, and I think not often-enough talked about, problem. I hope we will find a solution some day, but I have no idea what it could be.
Its not just tech companies fault. There are a lot of fathers that dont teach their sons about sex and relationships. Often they just hope for the best. That is not how you raise a son to be effective in the dating world.
Evolutionarily, can you consider them a failure though? They've procreated. That checks the box for being "successful" but it doesn't mean your offspring will be.
Really doesn't help that American porn imports a lot of the ideas from Japan, wager its not a coincidence they're dealing with a more severe version of the same "gender gap" issue here amongst people under 35.
Created throwaway account just to provide some insight.
In terms of attractiveness, what you see on the internet is usually the top 1% of females, as there's strong effects of "winner takes all" when it comes to attention from the opposite sex.
Now, highly ranking females on the internet are getting hit on by hundreds or even thousands of possible male suitors, and the ones with blue ticks, fame/money/clout are the ones taking those girls on dates. Again, winner takes all dynamic.
On the flip side you can argue that it's not mentally healthy for those girls and their relationships, but internet addiction does bad things to ones brain. For young guys/girls it makes them depressed as it paints unrealistic standards and tricks the brain into believing lies.
My humble advice for men is to work on themselves, improve one's sexual marketplace value and then look for a partner. My advice for attractive females is to be careful of capitalizing too much on their juvenile looks... Once accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, it's depressing when eventually one comes down from the pedestal.
"Male" and "female" sound clinical; they're terms you apply to animals. When applied to humans, not only does it sound demeaning, but it sounds deliberate -- as if trying to present a false objectivity.
If nothing else, note that words do have shades of meaning. Even if you don't know what they are, you should assume that people "making a big deal" out of it are being honest about it. If you start with the assumption that they're doing so just to hurt you, then that relationship is in a dangerous place before you've even begun it.
They may not even be able to explain why they think the word is a problem. They mostly just know that they've heard the word before in unpleasant contexts. Look up any incel group and you'll hear them talk about "females" in a derogatory way, presenting them as the enemy -- as a separate group to be treated with distance. People know what words are used by people who dislike them, and that taints those words in other contexts.
So whether you get it or not, just trust that they do. Use the words they prefer, and avoid the ones they don't. It's just friendly and polite. If corrected say, "Oops, I didn't mean to do that," and then move on with the word they've asked for. It doesn't have to be a big deal if you don't make it a big deal; it can be over with just a quick change. It becomes hostile if you assume it's hostile.
The difference between pretty and stunning is a lot of work with makeup, lighting, dressing and so on. I dated a model briefly, she could change from and 8 to a 10 depending on how much effort and time she wanted to put in. This is true for guys too.
And front-facing cameras now come with face-smoothing features right out of the box. I have a Galaxy A51 (2020 phone) and even with the default settings, the FFC photos are much more generous in smoothing out your skin, than the regular rear camera.
Wait what, is this for real? Do phones automatically beautify photos taken with the selfie cam? Why is this legal?! Isn't this a surefire recipe to create a generation of adolescents with insecurity/body issues?
Every time you take a selfie it subtly confronts you with what could be better about you. It's like a fridge that whispers "you're a fatty" every time you open it.
I finally realized it after wondering why I looked 'worse' in photos with friends, when the rear camera is being used to take the picture. That's when I did a rear v front photo comparison.
The face smoothing effect is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as extreme as "filters" that can basically change your skin tone and texture.
And it's possible that Samsung does this and not others. My last Samsung phone had this as well, and I usually buy from them.
It's real. In some cases it's turned on by default and some are not
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/digital-wellbeing/m... has some information (not affiliated, just found this a while ago) . I can't find any info right now about apple or samsung or any of the other big vendors.
I think the impact is fairly damaging. I'm surrounded by people with body image issues, and the impact their issues are having on them is heartbreaking.
Sadly when I discuss this with some folks from that industry they pushed me to an academic debate about "well everything is post-processed after the sensor anyway".
There's probably some debate to be had again about whether this is creating issues, exacerbating existing body image issues, or actually just not having any impact one way or another. But I find myself believing that it is both creating and exacerbating.
And for a while I thought these were "first world issues" but many, if not most, of my friends are not part of the "first world" and they still have them.
There's an insidious element present even at the optical hardware level: the limited arms-length distance necessitates wide-angle lenses, which exaggerates the foreground elements and caused an uptick of people thinking their noses were bigger than they "actually" are (at typical viewing distances with our own organic eyeballs) [1]. Perhaps the aggressive smoothing is an attempt to rectify this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some automatic computational photography pincushion warping to compensate for the larger-than-reality nose effect.
I sometimes ponder over the alternate timeline where front-facing cameras selfie cams were never invented.
Yeah I think the infamous Jenna Marbles video where she puts on makeup really was the first time it opened my eyes to it. She goes from average or less to amazing in short time.
Link for those who haven't seen it. Can't believe it's been 11 years...
I'm gonna go out on a limb but if this comment is reflective of your attitude, I don't think Tik Tok or algorithms are your biggest problem in establishing relationships with women.
TikTok could be exacerbating this attitude in men who are already predisposed to feeling helpless in their dating efforts. I notice that I feel worse about my appearance when I've spent more time on TikTok. I also notice that I see more extremely conventionally attractive people on TikTok.
I see the issue being more so with dating app algorithms, though. Those companies/algorithms are incentivized to keep men in the dating pool and paying Bumble/Tinder for dates. The best way to do this is to make those men think that they need to pay to win the game and will lose otherwise.
At the risk of dating myself, can I give you some advice my Dad gave me in my early twenties? Shallowness is highly addictive and the more often you turn to it, the stronger the addiction gets.
The whole point of this post is that this is just TikTok reflecting your own desires back to you. Some part of you wants to obsess, ruminate over and feel bad about digitally enhanced and literally unattainable girls dancing to a camera on the other side of the world, you engage with Tiktok on that content, and then they show you more! The definition of a personal problem. Even though it is quite different than yours, my TikTok feed says a lot of things about me too, to the point that I am reluctant to scroll through it in someone else's presence.
in my past I have dated a women of a wide range of attractiveness and of all those girls the less attractive ones are actually the ones I'd put the most effort into getting back with...
If the girl I'm with is pleasing to look at I'm content with that. How pleasing hardly matters
Quit judging partners by looks alone. Looks fade, character that clicks with you likely won't.
The relationships I've had and hate most in my life are almost perfectly inversely proportional to how much time they spent trying to look 'beautiful.'
Influencing dreams was one theme I read about that they are trying to pursue. But not only TikTok. Do you also feel like TikTok is making over-night buzz for relatively silly topics, vs Instagram and Facebook.
What incentive is there to explicitly influence dreams versus other means of driving engagement and ad revenue? How do you measure 'dream influence'? Sure, it could be a bi-product, but I doubt this is something TikTok is trying to do.
I ran my own ghetto experiment. Despite resisting (I'm still not going to install it on mobile), it was Plebbit that brought me to Tiktok. Without having visited Tiktok, I've seen thousands of tiktoks that were scraped out and hosted on other platforms. Over the course of the year, I collected well over a hundred videos.
I went back to the source for each of these and started Liking them. I'd check every so often to see if the "For You" feed improved. It did improve, considerably, but it still doesn't beat the signal-to-noise ratio of having humans pick them out for me. I can scroll through 200 videos on Tiktok and not find a single video worth a Like (I've found one so far from Tiktok's recommendations, and that was from a channel of a video I had previously liked). Perhaps I've misused the algorithm that does the real work for picking out content that will capture my attention, but I'm pretty disappointed. I bet the information they have about me does tell them a great deal, but it's not clear they're going to be able to keep me engaged.
i'm not sure if this is some super duper AI. it look like TiTok just give you what you are interested in like YouTube.
i watch a lot of YouTube video without logging into my Google account. if i watch a digital camera review then Youtube will server up a lot of camera related content on the front page. TikTok seem to do the same.
Maybe this isn't a substantive comment that really adds anything, but just wanted to echo a few other commenters- I don't find anything special about the TikTok algorithm, or TikTok in general. It's.... fine. I signed in via Apple ID initially, and it clearly didn't have much info on me, so it just served up what it thought I'd like based on my age & rural location at the time (basically, tractors & Trump). Later it got a little better, but I just don't see the 'scary' or 'addictive' algorithm that people rave about. It's.... it's just OK. Eg I liked one funny video of the Hispanic guy pronouncing various states, it now shows me a bunch more by the same guy- doesn't exactly seem like superhuman AI. YouTube has more relevant content for me, personally
What's special about tiktoks algo is timing IMO. The general segmentation/profiling probably isn't as special as people suggest.
Like all social apps, the engagement is key. TikTok already has a simple UX, and there is zero burden for users to watch videos, vs figure out what tweet you want to write, or click through a bunch of pages on any other social app.
One swipe every however many seconds to 3min (used to be one min) is all you need for instant reward ... video plays.
TikTok needs to schedule some series of videos in advance,which includes video timing. Im sure videos themselves are a key part as well... videos where users lost interest within 3 seconds are probably ghosted.
TikTok has to keep all of this in mind along with the user profile. From there the user is being navigated by the algo which is trying to keep only one thing true -- keep the user engaged and measure the risk of a user leaving, when a user seems to be on the path of exiting the app, thats when you notice the algo throwing more random content out.
TBH ... Im not sure if TikTok cares about the information propagated. Its such a mix of culture, politics, whatever, and its all generally crowdsourced. A lot less innocent that Twitter.
I suspect given their emphasis on hashtags that was the primary transversal method.
When I watched the video my fist thought was "ok but how are their bots determining what kind of video they're watching?"
While maybe the best you can do in an automated way, I don't think it's representative of how a real human uses social media. ("I'm feeling depressed, guess I'll check out the depressed hashtag.")
> TBH ... Im not sure if TikTok cares about the information propagated.
They don't care unless it affects the interests of the shareholders waiting for the IPO of the parent company ByteDance.
As for the algorithm itself, I won't be surprised to see the complaints from many users as a result of changing the algorithm down the line since it is already gamed by the large users on the platform; just like how YouTube was.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadGoogle Chrome's FLOC I believe sorts people into 5000 person groups with similar interests. I assume google picked this number for a reason. I imagine you can probably sort the world's population into groups of 5000 people with almost exactly the same interests and motivations.
Not saying TikTok isn't spooky. But:
The effort that went into making the viewer feel anxious while watching this was extreme; and the effort that went into actual explanation of the TikTok algorithm was minimal.
The only real discovery was the disparity between the TikTok spokesperson (who said that 7% of anyone's feed should be trying to broaden your interests) and their observation that those videos were in fact mostly adverts.
And (sorta) that hitting Dislike doesn't seem to do much, if you counter than signal by watching/liking other videos. But it was all very vague given how much data they said they'd gathered.
I agree I don't think the algorithm is particularly clever, or works towards any other goal than for users to spend more time with the app Which is the assumption I was starting from.
This worries me a lot, because people generally think they are choosing what they want to see, but the platform can shape the world views of many people all at once.
If you trap someone in a room and play violent videos for them all day long, when you let them out, they might come out thinking they'll have to fight for survival, just as an example.
Governments can encourage political chaos through subjecting people to certain types of videos through these platforms over time, and as another example, they can influence certain regions to start a riot or vote a certain way.
Behavioral psychologists are involved in algorithm development now just as much as developers and that's a big problem that most of the world, especially government regulators are totally unaware of.
I have a TikTok account, but only use it in really small doses because I found the suggestive content really was not good for my mental health. I hope more people realize that this is happening, and also understand the lies about potential for sharing independent work on platforms because the platforms are really not geared towards discovery of new content, they have very specific agendas and money making at the foremost behind them.
- see what videos you watch and how long you stay watching them
- show you more of the same
which is all it is really saying, just spread out over 10 minutes
edit:formatting
Facebook videos does the same, I get a lot of videos about Resin art and Woodworking and Streetfood, which are at best mildly interesting. I also wonder who pays for that or what their business model is since I see no ads. But maybe resin and wood tools are so expensive that it pays off for them to promote the videos.
I get some funny stuff but most of it is some real deep in the weeds nerd stuff. Programming, Ops, Sci-Fi book reviews, Dungeons and Dragons tips. I've seen other people's TikTok's occasionally and it never looks like mine. Even a friend of mine who works in tech and has similar interests, his looks completely different.
With all that being said it's at the cost of it being literally spyware. I've tried YouTube shorts. If someone could 10x that algorithm, or start a startup where it's TikTok but now with 20% less spying that would be awesome!
Oh and it's hyper addictive like other social media. Although I will say for at least my feed it's much more positive than social media normally is. I don't feel terrible after using it. Just feels like I wasted my time. To that end I uninstall it when I'm done and try to use it only once a week or so. But at the end of the once a week session I usually have a list of books and new tech related concepts to look up.
My experience of TikTok is essentially like a video hacker news that also cracks me up occasionally.
But lately I’m getting bored with it. I feel like TikTok has put me into too narrow of a type of interests. And now for every fun or interesting video that I see, there is like five or ten videos that are too much of the same as what I’ve seen a million times already.
Idk, maybe I’ve just been spending too much time on TikTok lately and it was bound to happen regardless. Maybe even it’s not TikTok maybe it’s just me. That I am tired of watching videos in general, except for the ones that I can use for something. I’m gonna take a break from TikTok.
And then BAM, TT swooped in sometime in 2018 and became huge.
I'm in the same age group as you and TT is also not of interest to me. It's possible that I just don't get it for the same reason I didn't get the concept of 'subscribe to this Youtuber'. That kind of amateur video style where you're staring into a camera from your bedroom or your car is just not for me.
It's talked about quite frequently on TT itself by people who are not programmers, and more well understood by those people then most people here on HN.
I'd be wary of applying anything you think you know to the community of people using TT today. You aren't familiar with it enough to make any judgement. You don't get it, and it has nothing to do with your age or anything other than your unfamiliarity with TT.
from the wiki:
"TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it only became available worldwide after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018."
Social media startups are still DOA in my book.
I've seen zero articles technically praising TikTok.
Like everything, it probably isn't for everyone (as an aside -- it seems like a considerable portion of TikTok's base now are middle aged...they aren't targeting any particular demographic), but personally I get a wonderful selection of FYP videos. I only use the app every week or so, but when I do it is one of the most interesting, entertaining digressions available.
That statement is not geared towards TikTok specifically, all of them are already dedicated towards encouraging users to create content in hopes of success, but these platforms and even advertisers on the platforms can engineer massive campaigns that influence a lot of people to do potentially very bad things... They really don't care about independent content, and there's very little chance of being discovered, that content just allows them to cover up the underlying motives more perhaps.
Replace 'TikTok' with 'Google' and the 'algorithm' is nothing more than 'personalisation' with mass data collection; Gamed by the influencers to compete for your attention and the same dark patterns used to track your actions and attention. No different to any other social network which the exception of the number of users on there. Nothing has changed.
They are all working for the algorithm and that governs whatever is seen or unseen on the platform. When TikTok decides to change that, well the users will complain once again as they did on other platforms.
I guess this is life in 21 century. Governed by algorithms and feeling empty inside
It's the same for everything people get hooked on, it changes you perception but in reality it's all in your mind.
World's smallest violin for the gross pervert misogynist.
All the empathy in the world won't save anyone here. On one side of that screen is you, alone. On the other side are an army of designers, developers and behavioural experts whose job it is to keep you looking at the screen for as long as possible.
Don't fall in the trap of social media / social-relationship.
Girls on TikTok are beautiful as actress are beautiful, it takes a tons of effort to look so attractive effortlessly!
Similar deal on tinder, maybe even worse.
Go out and bound with real people in real life! Do the effort of being the first one to reach out.
Feel ok with having friends that are busy and that may not reply immediately.
But meet people outside internet, and you will be happier.
What now?
If nothing else, note that words do have shades of meaning. Even if you don't know what they are, you should assume that people "making a big deal" out of it are being honest about it. If you start with the assumption that they're doing so just to hurt you, then that relationship is in a dangerous place before you've even begun it.
They may not even be able to explain why they think the word is a problem. They mostly just know that they've heard the word before in unpleasant contexts. Look up any incel group and you'll hear them talk about "females" in a derogatory way, presenting them as the enemy -- as a separate group to be treated with distance. People know what words are used by people who dislike them, and that taints those words in other contexts.
So whether you get it or not, just trust that they do. Use the words they prefer, and avoid the ones they don't. It's just friendly and polite. If corrected say, "Oops, I didn't mean to do that," and then move on with the word they've asked for. It doesn't have to be a big deal if you don't make it a big deal; it can be over with just a quick change. It becomes hostile if you assume it's hostile.
Every time you take a selfie it subtly confronts you with what could be better about you. It's like a fridge that whispers "you're a fatty" every time you open it.
The face smoothing effect is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as extreme as "filters" that can basically change your skin tone and texture.
And it's possible that Samsung does this and not others. My last Samsung phone had this as well, and I usually buy from them.
I think the impact is fairly damaging. I'm surrounded by people with body image issues, and the impact their issues are having on them is heartbreaking.
Sadly when I discuss this with some folks from that industry they pushed me to an academic debate about "well everything is post-processed after the sensor anyway".
There's probably some debate to be had again about whether this is creating issues, exacerbating existing body image issues, or actually just not having any impact one way or another. But I find myself believing that it is both creating and exacerbating.
And for a while I thought these were "first world issues" but many, if not most, of my friends are not part of the "first world" and they still have them.
I sometimes ponder over the alternate timeline where front-facing cameras selfie cams were never invented.
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/1/17059566/pla...
Link for those who haven't seen it. Can't believe it's been 11 years...
https://youtu.be/OYpwAtnywTk
I see the issue being more so with dating app algorithms, though. Those companies/algorithms are incentivized to keep men in the dating pool and paying Bumble/Tinder for dates. The best way to do this is to make those men think that they need to pay to win the game and will lose otherwise.
If the girl I'm with is pleasing to look at I'm content with that. How pleasing hardly matters
The relationships I've had and hate most in my life are almost perfectly inversely proportional to how much time they spent trying to look 'beautiful.'
i watch a lot of YouTube video without logging into my Google account. if i watch a digital camera review then Youtube will server up a lot of camera related content on the front page. TikTok seem to do the same.
Like all social apps, the engagement is key. TikTok already has a simple UX, and there is zero burden for users to watch videos, vs figure out what tweet you want to write, or click through a bunch of pages on any other social app.
One swipe every however many seconds to 3min (used to be one min) is all you need for instant reward ... video plays.
TikTok needs to schedule some series of videos in advance,which includes video timing. Im sure videos themselves are a key part as well... videos where users lost interest within 3 seconds are probably ghosted.
TikTok has to keep all of this in mind along with the user profile. From there the user is being navigated by the algo which is trying to keep only one thing true -- keep the user engaged and measure the risk of a user leaving, when a user seems to be on the path of exiting the app, thats when you notice the algo throwing more random content out.
TBH ... Im not sure if TikTok cares about the information propagated. Its such a mix of culture, politics, whatever, and its all generally crowdsourced. A lot less innocent that Twitter.
When I watched the video my fist thought was "ok but how are their bots determining what kind of video they're watching?"
While maybe the best you can do in an automated way, I don't think it's representative of how a real human uses social media. ("I'm feeling depressed, guess I'll check out the depressed hashtag.")
They don't care unless it affects the interests of the shareholders waiting for the IPO of the parent company ByteDance.
As for the algorithm itself, I won't be surprised to see the complaints from many users as a result of changing the algorithm down the line since it is already gamed by the large users on the platform; just like how YouTube was.