Comment by Salgat 4 days ago
The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.
> A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss real authenticity because they don't have the tools to recognize it.
Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you actually have them?
You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own personal model to maximize the volume of content you swallow.
Because the internet is filled by slop shit by people trying to make a buck from it.
It's like saying I don't know how to recognize non-spam when I end up blocking 99.99% of all mail showing up at the server.
I do recognize non-spam, it's just that I know most of it is crap.
I don’t know that it’s people trying to make a buck - and that seems a bit silly of a thing to say to begin with. I presume you try to make your buck doing whatever it is you do.
What I will say is that it’s definitely a different form of expression from what we’ve had beyond recent history and - at the same time - artists, photographers, painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have been trying to live off their form of expression for a while now too.
My TikTok For You Page is almost entirely made up of Veritasium videos, sci-fi authors, some standup, lock picking lawyer and "how is it made" style videos. I don't get any of that brain-rot slop. If I did, I wouldn't use it. Which would be a slight improvement to my life. Although I'm not negatively impacted by the current level of my TikTok use, I can definitely see it takes an extra level of willpower to stop (i.e. close the app, put down the phone) than almost any other of my extra curriculars. From enjoyable hobbies to other fun time wasting activities such as gaming. Barring Factorio which is the biggest time warp I've ever encountered, with an almost perfect dopamine extracting game loop.
The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
These videos are often not that short. They're often broken into several parts and can be 30 minutes or longer.
The true danger of TikTok is the "wonder what will be next?" which is an infinitely rewarding question.
>The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop onto your brain?
The funny thing is I think you're misunderstanding the scale. You wife likes videos that are not-so-obviously staged. Somone else would get purely staged videos. Someone else would get actual real videos. If you like real pilots landing planes on runways where the wheels make sudden noises, it will give you that.
There are tens of billions of pieces of content there. TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things that the most people like, but it's not the only content there, that's just common sense and good business (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
I think a lot of people fall for the feels authentic and confuse it with authentic. Also a lot of people cant tell the difference.