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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’m a 34 year old who just got into Instagram and TikTok.

I love it and hate it.

I love all the creative and ridiculously funny content I find.

But I viscerally cannot stand and get angry over so much attention seeking garbage there is out there too. Just smug unqualified nobodies telling people to “stop it” with a smug meme song regarding health habits or fashion or whatnot. Or “oh no no no no” or “thank you Diane” memes.

I dunno. Maybe I’m a summer child discovering something everyone’s already contending with. I know it’s a biased sample but there’s this whole culture of entirely unearned confidence and narcissism.

Don’t get me started with all the 20something ”Influencers” humble bragging about their cars and homes.

I get angry at night and yet I can’t stop scrolling because there’s always some occasional maniac driving a canoe down a hill into a lake.

I’m just yelling at people to get off my lawn aren’t I?

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I want to spoil a magnificent movie, the Russian classic Stalker [1]. If you haven't watched the film and want to one day, please stop reading this comment.

It is a deep film with many themes but one main theme involves a curious plot device. From the Wikipedia article: "The Zone contains a place called the "Room", said to grant the wishes of anyone who steps inside." The theme of that plot device is that once a group of explorers finally get to the room they refuse to go inside. The "Room" isn't a monkey-paw like device that distorts your wishes and gives you a bad outcome, rather it sees inside your soul and gives you what you truly desire. It raises questions about man's conscious desires compared to his unconscious desires. Do you really want to know what you truly desire, even the desires you hide from yourself?

I can't do justice to the film but I think of it often and usually with respect to AI and the unreasonably effective algorithms that drive modern feeds. TikTok is in some ways our first true glimpse into the "Room" of Tarkovsky's Stalker.

All this to say: I don't see any of the things you are saying you see on TikTok. Whether you like it or not the algorithm is sending you what you engage with. You have been sorted into the "desires wild canoe ride" TikTok. You are sorted into the "desires smug fashion gatekeepers" TikTok.

And if you happen to have read this comment and haven't seen Stalker - it is still worth it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)

The wish theme is present in the first Stalker game too. Along with a fascinating story about the human consciousness.

Interesting - thats different from the Strugatsky Roadside Picnic novel the Tarkovskys film is based on.

There it was a floting golden ball that would grant you a single wish.

The problem was that to get to it you had to pass via a phenomenon they called "the grinder". Anyone stepping inside it would be mutilated into pulp in short order, after which it will deactivate for long enought to let you reach the golden ball.

So the dilemma is different there - can you live with the fact that you need to take another uknowing human with you to feed to the grinder for you to have a wish, any wish, granted ?

(Well unless the wish could be "Give me unlimitted number of wishes." Then you can just "respawn" your victim without loosing the wish. ;-) )

TikTok sorts you according to it's interests, not your own. Just because they notice that you are more engaged with irritating content doesn't mean you like irritating content.

This does not match my experience using TikTok.

I have an heuristic I follow whenever content I do not want appears on my FYP. I immediately scroll. I don't let the video get 10 seconds in, I absolutely do not let it finish. I do not swipe left to see other videos by the same creator. I do not click on the comments to see what other people are saying about the content. The second I realize I do not want content like that I swipe it away. If I get a series of such content I close the app and don't open until the next day. This has been 100% successful in removing unwanted content categories from my feed.

Alternatively, the opposite behavior is extremely effective in getting more content related to the current video. I let the video play all the way through or even play multiple times. I swipe left to see other content by the same creator and maybe watch a few of their other videos. I read the comments to see what other people are saying about the video.

It's pretty obvious if you think about it.

I just wish you could downvote to tell the algo to not play on my morbid curiosity and stop recommending my that.

“If you’re watching it, it’s for you.”

I'm the same age as you. I remember downloading Snapchat years ago and and thinking "I don't get this, you take pictures and add ugly stickers to it and send it to people?".

With TikTok, I've seen some good videos, so I get the appeal. At the same time, no app has turned me off the way TT has.

- The Grammarly voiceover is like nails on a chalkboard.

- Your feed will always have some fixed % of videos which are nothing but bandwagoning on some contrived trend (usually a dance, but could be style of video too).

- Samples of popular songs, autotuned and pitched up to within an inch of its life.

I'm 35 and definitely too old for tiktok. Sometimes people send me links to videos or ppl to follow, and when I'm trying to play this stuff both their website and the app fight me hard with terrible UI. Like I can't even figure out how to go back to the beginning of a video because it started playing but the sound was off and I had to turn it on, meaning I want to go back to the start. It's also full of random text everywhere and taking control of your back button or I dunno, everything is just all over the place.

I'm definitely too old for this shit.

>Don’t get me started with all the 20something ”Influencers” humble bragging about their cars and homes.

Not sure about that, if they have the car, but I only watch one influencer. called Supercarblondie, I am not sure if she has that expensive car, when she gave her lover a sweet Suzuki Jimmy. (I forgot the name of the car, but it's expensive.

I must say, I got Instagram too, I have no clue what to do with it. I am too lazy to upload and too lazy to touch the app. It isn't easy to upload pictures from the desktop to Instagram.

There is explicit thumbs down with TikTok that more quickly removes segments of videos from your feed.

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