[hugh4life]

"I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked."

All these apps use behavioral design to get you hooked.

Tiktok is oversocialization on steroids. You have people not only acting out the behavioral scripts embedded and triggered in some meme music or voice you have people mimetically acting out what others are acting out. The psychological manipulation possible though TikTok is immense.

[sixo]

You can phrase it cynically, but that stuff isn't inherently bad. Or at least, it's not worse than anything else people aimlessly browse on the internet. Mostly, it's just fun.

[nwienert]

The aimless, constant dopamine hits are incredibly scary. Especially because people who tend towards using it are the ones who need it least. Especially in children.

I guarantee this: children who use TikTok (and YouTube to an extent, etc), will have issues in the future keeping attention on work, and other forms of important and difficult problems and introspection.

Our roommate who used it in our house is a dopamine addict. He never reads, is by far the laziest and sloppiest, he’s also unapologetic about it and unwilling to acknowledge it, sucks at conversation generally because he has nothing to add because all he does is game, YouTube, TikTok and work, and they all feed into each other. And worst - he’s just totally comfortable being the laggard. Everyone else is happier. They contribute more. They clean, they maintain. They do more and have more to talk about because of that.

I fear a generation of children raised on constant dopamine drip. I already see how hard it’s become for me to sit and read or sit and meditate and I try and avoid all that (Twitter is my vice). But I have a friend with a daughter who is addicted to YouTube/TikTok and I fear greatly for a generation raised like that.

[moron4hire]

Behavioral Psychology really needs to be a general studies topic, introduced to secondary education.

I remember my local high school's motto when I was growing up was something like, "we're not here to teach, we're here to create good, informed consumers".

Never mind the obvious problems with that statement, but just considering it on face-value: how can people become good, informed consumers without having some kind of exposure to the concepts of how easily information can be collected about and used to manipulate people?

I don't expect most high school students to inculcate the full breadth of the topic, just as so few seem to actually learn and retain anything about history, social studies, or even the freaking alphabet (I've met way too many people who think the English alphabet has 25 letters). But currently, the general populace has no idea the extent to which they and their data can be manipulated. It would be enough if all they learned was "you and your data can be manipulated".

[glial]

> we're here to create good, informed consumers

Wow, whatever happened to trying to create good, informed citizens?

[moron4hire]

Yeah, it was definitely "consumers" not "citizens". That was one of the parts that struck me right away.

Glad I didn't go there.

[andrepd]

>I remember my local high school's motto when I was growing up was something like, "we're not here to teach, we're here to create good, informed consumers".

I don't get it, was this the actual real motto, or something people said tongue in cheek?

[moron4hire]

It was painted on the wall in the school office. The part where my memory is hazy is the number of additional adjectives used on "consumer".