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I mean obviously TikTok keeps their data close so we only have anecdotes. But anecdotally for myself and anyone I know who has used TikTok, the app is just so

I mean obviously TikTok keeps their data close so we only have anecdotes. But anecdotally for myself and anyone I know who has used TikTok, the app is just so much more addicting than any other social media has been before. I'm not a social media newcomer, I have used social media nearly all my life. I have used instagram in the past.But never before have I felt the same addiction/compulsion that exists with TikTok. I don't think this is that unusual an experience, have you tried using the app yourself?

stjohnswarts 4y ago
If you dig around you can find lots of articles on the addictiveness and proposed theories as to why. This is a pretty good article that cites numerous other articles. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.641673/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6416...
jfengel 4y ago
I haven't tried the app, and I appreciate your comments. From what I've heard it has the hallmarks of a fad: inexplicably engaging, and then dropped by the time it becomes popular enough that I've heard of it. Do you think that is likely here, or does this have something genuinely novel and more enduring?
- initplus 4y ago
  I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive. Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL content is super short form and shallow, anything longer than 20s is considered long, so it's easy to keep that dopamine cycle going. It's a content graph rather than a social graph, people eventually get bored of whatever uninteresting thing their real life friends are up to. And the recommendations algorithm algorithm is finely tuned to deliver the most addictive content. I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

If you dig around you can find lots of articles on the addictiveness and proposed theories as to why. This is a pretty good article that cites numerous other articles. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.641673/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6416...

jfengel 4y ago

I haven't tried the app, and I appreciate your comments. From what I've heard it has the hallmarks of a fad: inexplicably engaging, and then dropped by the time it becomes popular enough that I've heard of it. Do you think that is likely here, or does this have something genuinely novel and more enduring?

initplus 4y ago
I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive. Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL content is super short form and shallow, anything longer than 20s is considered long, so it's easy to keep that dopamine cycle going. It's a content graph rather than a social graph, people eventually get bored of whatever uninteresting thing their real life friends are up to. And the recommendations algorithm algorithm is finely tuned to deliver the most addictive content. I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.