[HN Gopher] TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in E...
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TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe
Author : thm
Score : 569 points
Date : 2026-02-06 12:11 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > 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?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| 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?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Maybe because FB are getting away with the same thing?
| fifilura wrote:
| I doubt they would if this becomes illegal.
|
| EU laws are slow, sometimes stupid, but consistent.
| sithadmin wrote:
| 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.
| pil0u wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| ulbu wrote:
| 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.
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| 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?
| fifilura wrote:
| 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.
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > 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
| xienze wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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_
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| You answered it yourself. They can't extract billions if
| the company is still small.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > 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/d
| etail/en/ip_24_...) - this didn't come out of the blue.
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| Fines on US tech companies bring in more money to the EU
| than the EU's entire tech industry combined.
| fifilura wrote:
| Haha you may be right.
|
| But instead you may see it as a discount on the money
| these companies are making from European citizens.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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".
| hagbard_c wrote:
| 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?
| iepathos wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Facebook are also under investigation, it just hasn't
| concluded yet.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912263
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Let's hope they don't chicken out.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| 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.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Not to mention Instagram. It is almost indistinguishable from
| TikTok now.
| erzhan89 wrote:
| https://archive.is/V1NPt
| lozenge wrote:
| 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).
| nolroz wrote:
| How'd you kick it?
| bilsbie wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Are you in the US? Lots of people have reported that the
| forced sale "ruined" their algorithm.
| bilsbie wrote:
| 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.
| c-fe wrote:
| 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.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| 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.
| r_lee wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| jumpman500 wrote:
| 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.
| iepathos wrote:
| Get a life that's more interesting than dish washing 4-8
| hours a day.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| mosquitobiten wrote:
| 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.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| 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.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| 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/
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| kyriakos wrote:
| 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.
| mrkickling wrote:
| Similar, but at least headphones uses fewer of your senses
| r_lee wrote:
| 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
| gh0stcat wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > 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
| jcynix wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| > 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.
| jcynix wrote:
| > 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,
| Handel, 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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?
| thechao wrote:
| It's a constant stream of makeup & dogs. I just stick to
| Michael Penn on YT.
| batrat wrote:
| 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.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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.
| halapro wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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).
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Funny how Europe's "concern" for digital health only kicks in
| when a non US platform starts winning
| xienze wrote:
| 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.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The fines are typically accompanied with a requirment to
| change the illegal behaviour.
| hyperpape wrote:
| 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.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Infinite scroll is banned on this phone. Using NextDNS.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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 )
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| 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...
| seydor wrote:
| 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.
| concats wrote:
| 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.
| p-t wrote:
| 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...]
| jamesblonde wrote:
| 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
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| I've been insta-skipping tennis video's for months now. Still
| getting Federer on a daily basis.
| randysalami wrote:
| 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).
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| 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
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| 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.
| cwillu wrote:
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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.
| Wyverald wrote:
| For the record, almost the exact same expression exists
| in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_throw_t
| he_baby_out_wit...
| kylecazar wrote:
| They're optimizing for time spent on the platform.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| james_marks wrote:
| 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| I think your reply has me convinced. You really can't
| expect to have such self control all of the time. Damn.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently
| of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is
| a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 4chan is nothing like TikTok, though yes I agree heavy
| moderation is necessary for both.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| They built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive
| UX.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wh
| a...
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| 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.
| sidharthv wrote:
| I naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to
| turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| 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...
| mghackerlady wrote:
| If you're on android it's better to just use revanced or
| something
| satiric wrote:
| I use an addon for firefox called "Hide shorts for
| Youtube(tm)". Works just fine.
| beAbU wrote:
| Facebook does the same. The longer I dwell on an image post,
| the more likely the next batch of posts would be similar
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| touristtam wrote:
| 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.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Great insight. Any thoughts on RisingWave?
| jamesblonde wrote:
| That, too, and materialize. Feldera is my favourite, though.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| 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.
| btown wrote:
| 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!
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| TikTok's differention is the userbase of all teenagers in the
| world.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Isn't the inverse true though? it's not as if nobody's
| watching youtube, it's just that different videos are
| popular there.
| notyourwork wrote:
| That didn't by accident though.
| wongarsu wrote:
| But go just one layer deeper to 'why is every teenager using
| Tiktok' and the primary answer once again becomes 'Tiktok's
| recommendation engine'
| expedition32 wrote:
| 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.
| godshatter wrote:
| 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.
| cloverich wrote:
| They are arguing its not the recommender that is unique it
| is the network effect.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| lsuresh wrote:
| 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/
| bobek wrote:
| 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
| 3abiton wrote:
| It's interesting to how they found out the "lifetime" of
| features is a feature by itself. Meta features is real.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I thought was secret information. How long as it been publicly
| known?
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| 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.
| tridentboy wrote:
| 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 =(
| not_ai wrote:
| I'm happy to see that Flink is in this stack, I wish that
| Pulsar was as well instead of Kafka.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| apache flink is so good. i think netflix used it heavily in
| 2018. not sure about now.
| llbbdd wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| 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.
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| This is precisely why I stopped using it
| wsgeorge wrote:
| > 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.
| cmsp12 wrote:
| 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
| Andrex wrote:
| The AI video call feature is kinda neat, even though it's
| pretty buggy.
| moring wrote:
| 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?
| llbbdd wrote:
| 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.
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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
| cedws wrote:
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| p-t wrote:
| 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
| llbbdd wrote:
| 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.
| p-t wrote:
| 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
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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?
| walt_grata wrote:
| Worse enough it isn't addictive. The goal is non-addictive,
| whatever changes to whatever part are necessary to hit that
| goal.
| Retr0id wrote:
| "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.
| walt_grata wrote:
| We could measure it for cocaine and cigarettes couldn't we.
| concats wrote:
| > 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I think the chinese version of tiktok has most of these guards
| on for children
| hi5eyes wrote:
| the subtext here is the eu is just teeing up to fine tiktok, x
| and other social media
| graemep wrote:
| 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
| christkv wrote:
| So will they also go after youtube?
| delichon wrote:
| 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| 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.
| semiquaver wrote:
| 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?
| juancn wrote:
| Isn't this exactly the same with Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook,
| etc.?
|
| What makes TikTok different?
| brightbeige wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912263
| concats wrote:
| 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?
| seydor wrote:
| Regulatory capture that benefits whom?
|
| This is typical "EU populism" signaling
| eggy wrote:
| 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...
| mtoner23 wrote:
| 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
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| halestock wrote:
| > 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?
| techterrier wrote:
| or cigarettes?
| arethuza wrote:
| Or drugs?
| haugis wrote:
| Or coffee?
| senbrow wrote:
| The drug so popular no one thinks of it as a drug any
| more.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "One of these things is not like the others..."
|
| What are the harmful effects of a full blown coffee
| addiction? Headaches?
| yibg wrote:
| Or sugar?
| Juliate wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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?
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| It shouldn't be the job of governments to decide what
| content has value and what doesn't.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| wackget wrote:
| 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.
| SirMaster wrote:
| 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.
| EinigeKreise wrote:
| 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.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| haugis wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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".
| mrighele wrote:
| 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.
| Frieren wrote:
| > 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.
| Permit wrote:
| > You attack a straw-man: banning all the content from
| creators.
|
| They didn't say this.
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| > 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.
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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.
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I prefer my water with extra PFAS and my sports bets 10x
| leveraged. It's my "choice"!
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| 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]
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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?
| travoc wrote:
| Your short form comment is in violation of EU Directive
| 20.29A. Agents have been dispatched to your home to collect
| your devices.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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 :)
| wolvoleo wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| > You can't legislate intelligence...
|
| That's why we ban harmful things.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| 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.
| plagiarist wrote:
| 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.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| You should be able to pick your own algorithm. It's a matter of
| freedom of choice.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| 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.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| 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.
| zbentley wrote:
| > 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.
| Juliate wrote:
| > 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.
| wackget wrote:
| > It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media
| consumption
|
| HA!
| wackget wrote:
| 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.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| 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.
| saithir wrote:
| 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.
| landl0rd wrote:
| 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.
| rzz3 wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| weed isn't designed to be addictive. You'll find most
| people would be cautious about legalising heroin, meth or
| crack.
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| it is habit forming, but its not designed to be, by some
| of the brightest minds of a generation.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Personal accountability is contrary to human nature.
|
| We are primates dominated by our primitive urges.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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?
| bondarchuk wrote:
| 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.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 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!
| bondarchuk wrote:
| 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
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| "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.)
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.)
| jonners00 wrote:
| 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.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > * 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?
| svara wrote:
| 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.
| programjames wrote:
| > 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.
| moi2388 wrote:
| 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.
| trcf23 wrote:
| 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
| luxuryballs wrote:
| This strikes me as potentially a hardware problem more than
| a software problem.
| trcf23 wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| 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.
| dinfinity wrote:
| 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.
| programjames wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| > 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| 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!
| CJefferson wrote:
| 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?
| amarant wrote:
| 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 surstromming. I say let
| them, anyway. I can put up with the stink, it's not the
| end of the world.
| CJefferson wrote:
| 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?
| amarant wrote:
| 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.
| programjames wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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.
| forgotaccount3 wrote:
| > 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_.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| Yeah! Or cigarettes!
| mrpandas wrote:
| 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.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >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?
| foobar_______ wrote:
| 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?
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| tvink wrote:
| 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?
| integralid wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Yup. It's capitalism that's the core problem. Social media
| is just a particularly nasty outgrowth.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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?
| saubeidl wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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?
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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?
| saubeidl wrote:
| 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_.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| saubeidl wrote:
| What if this current system also always ends in blood, as
| history has shown so far?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I'd just like us to try regulation first?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| 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.)
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 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 .
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| pardon_me wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| prewett wrote:
| 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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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
| enaaem wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| Are you sure churches are a natural phenomenon rather
| than a cultural one?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Culture is a natural phenomenon.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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...
| finghin wrote:
| 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.
| pardon_me wrote:
| 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.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| "The entire economy" here being a pseudonym for marketing
| and advertising?
| rzz3 wrote:
| 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.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| 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"
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > 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.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 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.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
| kalterdev wrote:
| What's illegal about intentionally making money for being
| addictive? "Unfair"? Maybe. But not illegal.
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > 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).
| DaanDL wrote:
| What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs
| then?
| rektomatic wrote:
| are hard-drugs a design pattern?
| sven_8127642 wrote:
| 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.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > 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?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| There is a gulf of difference between banning hard drugs
| and criminalizing their use
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| > 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.
| derektank wrote:
| 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.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > 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.
| enaaem wrote:
| 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.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| 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).
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| 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.
| nunez wrote:
| 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".
| cvoss wrote:
| > 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.
| gtowey wrote:
| 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".
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| This argument falls apart in the EU though. Where it's legal
| for 14 year olds to drink alcohol.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| 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.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| 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.
| Refreeze5224 wrote:
| You can regulate power imbalances though, which is what every
| individual has versus a multinational with vast resources.
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.)
| afarah1 wrote:
| >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_.
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.
| afarah1 wrote:
| And for most it would be a valid point. Nozick makes the
| best case for this.
| loglog wrote:
| Your link is _not_ about a country that _actually_ imposed
| a sugar tax.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| I'm also skeptical about banning products like opium or
| methamphetamine, just because people might overuse them.
| seydor wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| >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.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| > You can't legislate intelligence
|
| Au contraire
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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
| WarcrimeActual wrote:
| 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.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| I only tried it once and like 30 mins passed in the blink of an
| eye. Never again.
| heyheyhouhou wrote:
| They should do the same with Instagram and Youtube shorts... but
| wait, they are not chinese, they are allowed to mine us...
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| tantalor wrote:
| 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?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| They might be referring to the headline of the hn post which
| I would agree is a pretty severe misrepresentation.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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"
| hahn-kev wrote:
| The headline I see on HN is "TikTok's 'Addictive Design'
| Found to Be llegal in Europe"
| ddmma wrote:
| They will pay upfront or put some geopolitical pressure
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g8v6qr1mo
| shafyy wrote:
| Direct link to EU Commission's statement:
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
| bdcravens wrote:
| So what's next, Hacker News is illegal because the point system
| encourages retention?
| zbentley wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| zbentley wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Advertising is speech and it's often heavily regulated.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Drugs and alcohol are explicit substances with an explicit
| definition.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| 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?
| Juliate wrote:
| > 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.
| uriahlight wrote:
| Europeans really need to get their heads out of their butts.
| Their solution to every problem is nanny state regulation.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| What's your solution to the current problem? Because the free
| market ain't working.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > 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.
| coredev_ wrote:
| 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
| jcynix wrote:
| 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)
| bondarchuk wrote:
| This is generational warfare. Imagine if we said boomers cannot
| watch TV anymore...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| 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"?
| islandfox100 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food , One could
| argue about the plastic usage of the Coca-Cola company, etc
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| 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
| seydor wrote:
| Condoms or contraceptives (if they correlate with the drop of
| fertility
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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.
| asadotzler wrote:
| >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.
| ajaimk wrote:
| Can Europe stop messing with TikTok & Apple and start fixing the
| mental health issues caused by Teams?
| seydor wrote:
| are you sure you want _them_ to fix it?
| genericacct wrote:
| Kind of funny coming from people who levy taxes on tobacco
| products all the time
| tgtweak wrote:
| 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.
| franze wrote:
| Nothing will happen. It is the EU. We bark and then roll over.
| bluedino wrote:
| Probably, but it's hard to take them seriously after the EU
| cookie debacle.
| BaardFigur wrote:
| Which country? Europe is a continent, with many different
| countries and many different laws.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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?
| JimmyBuckets wrote:
| 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.
| senbrow wrote:
| 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.
| xutopia wrote:
| We are essentially saying that our kids should be allowed to
| smoke cigarettes and not doing anything about it.
| seydor wrote:
| If cigarettes didnt have health effects it would be great (they
| may even be good for their brains who knows)
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| pestosandwich wrote:
| 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.
| alangibson wrote:
| 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.
| 7tflutter7 wrote:
| Using this logic the government should regulate Minecraft too.
| benbojangles wrote:
| Am I the only one who does not know what tiktok is or does?
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Nothing will happen.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| I think you dont consider that this is politics and why it s
| conducted through press releases
| metalman wrote:
| 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
| dirtyoldmick wrote:
| Europe is so stupid.
| comboy wrote:
| 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?
| tock wrote:
| > 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.
| comboy wrote:
| 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.
| pinnochio wrote:
| Are you a sophist, or have you made any actual attempt to
| understand the concerns here?
| comboy wrote:
| 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.
| tock wrote:
| 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.
| comboy wrote:
| 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)
| seydor wrote:
| 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.
| pinnochio wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| No, that is actually the EU's press release: https://ec.europ
| a.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
| coliveira wrote:
| In the US it is now legal because it was completely taken over by
| the hydra.
| tock wrote:
| 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.
| johnhamlin wrote:
| 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.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| ok sooo, youtube in general I can watch 8h streams. I watch it
| insane. what about that
| Havoc wrote:
| 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
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| 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
| vondur wrote:
| Who runs their European operations? Is it the Chinese and not
| Oracle?
| vee-kay wrote:
| Very glad that my country India banned this vile rabid TikTok
| long ago, along with other suspicious/spyware/disruptive apps
| like PUBG. Good riddance.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Casually waiting for a legislative body to muster the courage of
| their convictions and just ban social media outright.
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