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?
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
Please stop trying to compare social media recommendation algorithms with stuff like github. Its clearly a different animal with different set of business goals. And noone is saying ban tcp/ip. TikToks recommendation algorithm is not a fundamental building block like tcp/ip. I think you would be fine without it.
> 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.
Sure thats fine too. I think my solution is better.
> 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.
The algorithms today are still a black box. You don't know "why" certain content is being shown to you. You don't know which political party paid to show you what kind of ideology. I personally know facebook used to show hateful anti-(your opposite religion) posts in India during election times. You could click "i'm not interested/report the content" and they would still show you the same stuff. It only stopped after election season stopped. These companies are being paid to manipulate you.
> (HN is very much a FYP, it's just that.we like similar stuff)
It is user curated and everyone sees the same leaderboard of posts. No personalisation. I'm fine with such simple curation.
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.
HN is becoming increasingly pro paternalism and censorship (largely invalidating the "Hacker" in its name). I'm not sure if this is natural / organic or some kind of astroturfing, but it sure is odd and doesn't really match the rest of the overall (historical) ethos of the site.
Over generalizations of what HN "is" or what HN "does" are always meaningless. It's a large group of different people who don't act as a single individual. For instance the comments and opinions in this post are very diverse.
Generalizations are just doing better than random guessing by just paying attention to base rates, or, equivalently, describing the majority / bulk of distributions. This isn't meaningless, it is just simple statistical summary in common language.
Also, with modern tools like sentiment analysis and other semantic analysis tools enabled by LLMs, it is pretty trivial to do empirical tests of claims like this (further proving how empty the claim that generalizations about a thing are "meaningless").
Being for paternalistic, censorious policies that restrict software behaviour so broadly is very obviously not "Hacker" (even if you agree with these policies), and this would have been far more surprising 10 years ago to see on HN. This is a "generalization" of the ideological shifts of HN, yes, but a meaningful one (which of course people are free to agree or disagree with).
The comment voting is very opionated though. It's like the same person up/down votes consistently. Obviously the people who vote are of the same opinion group.
I've been wondering about that yesterday quite a bit, I've came to the conclusion that a big part is kind of anti-China sentiment on HN. I think the discussion would be quite different if we were talking about instagram reels/youtube shorts.
Plus there seem to be not many users, most crowd here gets dopamine elsewhere (like coding), tiktok seems to be mostly associated with brain-rot and not learning and diving into new topics.
