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Comment by alpark3 | Hacker News Reader

People also forget the thirst traps on Tiktok. The Tiktok dance trends encourage attractive young women to post borderline softcore porn, and Tiktok is much more lenient about this type of content than any other platform.

The average For You Page for teenage-young adults(males and females alike) from what I've seen consists of a mix of interesting/funny content and beautiful men/women. The ratio is just enough that there's the inherent sexual interest, without going too overboard and making the user feel like they're scrolling through something they shouldn't be on a regular basis.

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Eh, every time I open YouTube, it recommends me 'Shorts', which are nothing but young women in scant dress doing something called a shuffle dance, all with 10s of millions of views.

Not sure if TikTok started this crap, but as an old married man, I would have thought Google would have known better. I'd rather watch someone shape and sand wood at this point.

TikTok algo most certainly does give you that if you're willing to skip the dancing videos or softcore porn. It's creepy but very effective, at least for me.

I've not had a single YouTube short of that type despite using it way too much at times.

It's mostly gaming related and meme videos in my feet, I've never found a way to significantly spice things up sadly so it's really quiet boring most of the time

On non-logged-in/no-history YouTube (e.g. a new private browsing window), there'll usually be 1-3 such shorts in the shelf on the homepage.

Logged in, I think it's tried to show me such a video just once, after I'd been scrolling for way too long. I hit 'dislike' and it hasn't tried again.

Ok, similar here. Normally I get crafts, programming/development and science stuff, and then I look at Youtube in incognito mode. It pushes shorts like crazy, and they're all young women/girls trying on outfits, shuffle dancing, or announcing their minutest feelings in a closeup of well uh, not just their faces, yet filmed very close ...

And if you go to a mcdonalds, open safari (which I never use) and look, it's 10x worse. The girls (and some sports) is the default thing youtube shows.

Try it with incognito on a VPN - I forgot I was on it and went to YouTube (usually logged in because of premium) - literally video suggestions like 10 hottest pornstars from X, thirst traps, "are you smart enough to figure this out" and similar crap.

Without VPN I get a bunch of regional crap music and stuff.

I've been watching shorts a bit because I'm curious about the algorithm and also I don't wanna install tiktok and some of those vids are legit quite amusing.

Most of what it suggests is inline with my youtube subscriptions, but it does consistently push two things I'm totally disinterested in: Andrew Tate interview clips and some weird spam channel that's just videos of attractive female athletes. Nothing I do in the UX to say "stop showing me these" seems to matter.

It's as old as time, but TikTok/Musicaly was the first modern entity to use that as an entry point. The app is a 'fun dance app' where kids would do meme-dances for each other. That's naturally adjacent to the 'thirst trap' content - either by design or by fruition, either way they went full in.

To be fair, the alg will move away from that quickly (or at least it did) if yo don't linger. My feed moved onto cat rescue, farm life, cute kids and really arcane bits of knowledge impressively quickly.

I'm not sour on TikTok - I've discovered interests I never knew I had and there is something to be said for it. And it's not 'directly toxic' like Twitter etc..

Everytime TikTok and it's algo pop up on HN, people can't help but tell on themselves.

Unsure if you're referring to me, but I assure you it's not the case. I've never even watched shorts!

I rarely use YouTube, mainly for tool reviews and an occasional song. When I open the app, I get one suggested video, then a strip of shorts.

Here's a screenshot:

https://i.postimg.cc/HLG4tFKF/Screenshot-20221217-232808-You...

You don’t have to watch shorts to get recommended shorts based on a Google profile which includes content-viewing, searches, etc — and may or may not be based on a device, user-login, IP, region, persona-profile, etc.

Basically, regardless if the recommendation was valid, there’s a reason content that niche was suggested.

This is explicitly YouTube trying to ape TikTok. TikTok started this.

> I’d rather watch someone shape and sand wood at this point.

https://youtube.com/@WoodworkingDIY

>> every time I open YouTube

Never seen anything like that, guessing Google has filtered content based on past views and tied it to browser cookies, device fingerprints, IP, etc.

This does not even have to be your viewing history, could be someone else on same IP and if you even click a video once it gets amplified and paired to the prior profile that produced that recommendation.

Why even assume personalisation like this when it's more likely just demographic based personalisation?

Not assuming anything related to what triggered the personalization, put it for sure is personalization and key is to understand how to feed YouTube so it recommends content you want.

For example, if a friend sends you a video that you’re going to watch because they’re your friend, but you’re not actually interested — do not view it in a way that’s easily tied to your name profile.

There’s something to be said for giving said teenagers what they want without going “too overboard”.

The posts on HN about the FBI saying TikTok is a security risk (and other general dislike here) has shifted me to Instagram reels (basically the same thing with a slightly less cutting-edge algorithm).

My TikTok feed was 95% stand up comic bits and golden retrievers (with the occasional other cute dog breed). It’s really a marvel of the modern world how closely and relatively-wholesomely the algorithm matches you with what you want to see.

It’s not like the people you’re mentioning are sheltered from NSFW subreddits and other less wholesome content on the internet. The dance trends and generally beautiful people are just what they want to see. That being said, I think the surface-level encouragement of cosmetic surgery that TikTok’s focus on beauty encourages is definitely a hugely negative influence on youth. Just a specific example of popular culture placing undue focus on beauty standards.

> and Tiktok is much more lenient about this type of content than any other platform.

Facebook (the social platform) is already a middle-age retreat, so no soft prOn on there that I know of, but Instagram has had its ascent based exactly on photos of good-looking women. I didn't see any leniency coming from Meta (the company)

> borderline softcore porn

This feels very .. Iranian morality police? It's just dancing, and people who do actually overstep into nudity get banned. Wherever you place the line for "unacceptably sexually suggestive", people are going to walk right up to it.

It's way down on any sensible person's list of "content likely to cause harm".

At least in my view, this isn't a matter of demureness but the intent. Music videos have been doing the same for several decades. Sometimes there is artistic depth or purpose to it but more often than not, it's just "sex sells" - possibly at the cost of the artist's dignity.

If it would be adults nobody would care but the problem is that a major part of the tiktok userbase is quite young, many under 16 yo. Children or teenagers shouldnt get incentivised to dance in a very sexualized way (twerking just for example).

Just dancing is fine, and there certainly are many Tiktoks, perhaps even the majority, where dancing is the primary focus. It's fun, and the movements look cool and make for good content. But some trends lead to Tiktoks that clearly focuses on the sexualization of whoever's on camera, minor or not, and that's also the content that sometimes "hits" on the algorithm and goes viral.

I don't know enough or have enough data to suggest a concrete solution, but thinking about these angles for the popularity of the platform itself can reveal insights that people don't normally think about, in my opinion.

its weird that people don't see this as softcore porn, which is what most of it is

Isn't soft core porn full nudity but no depictions of sex? I wouldn't classify these ad porn in the same way I wouldn't call the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue soft core porn, though the purpose of both is titillation.

It depicts sex but there’s no visible penetration (and none occurs)

i think they've been cutting down on that. the softcore porn. at least I've been seeing less

They didn't, your algorithm just adjusted because you skipped that content.

They all have links to OF pages in their bios as well (sometimes via hosted link pages).

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