Why TikTok Should or Shouldn’t be Banned?

[Merkabah Star]

1 hour ago, Danioover9000 said:

I have demonstrated the mathematical value of your social media addiction, do you not admit you need some help?

lol 

Leave @Juan alone. 

Edited April 27 by Merkabah Star

[The Renaissance Man]

Personally, so subjectively, when grounding the value of TikTok or IG in my direct experience of growth, I've received zero value.

I rationalized for a long time the fact that there was good info, slowly following less and less trashy accounts, but still, those bits of information made zero difference to my growth, and this was a problem since I was using IG for 90 minutes a day.

Once I recognized, over and over, there there was no value, no growth, no wisdom, no pleasure, I quit with ease.

So in my experience it has been a total waste of time, especially as a consumer of content.

[Leo Gura]

I do receive value from IG. It gives me new ideas and artistic seeds. But it comes with a cost.

There is definitely value to be found on TikTok if you look for it. But at what cost?

Edited April 28 by Leo Gura

[BlueOak]

An easy test for anyone is to try to concentrate on something for over an hour or two, take one of Leo's videos, and see if you can sit down for something you want to watch and focus on it for that time without distraction.

If you can't, you are training your mind to concentrate for 5 minutes at a time, and you would benefit from training in the opposite direction for longer periods. People with ADHD should especially take note here. I consider myself to have it on some days, not as a medical diagnosis, but because I have days where I am more easily distracted than others, despite not wanting to be distracted.

If you think back to periods gone by, people needed to concentrate for days, weeks, maybe months, or years on projects.

Edited April 28 by BlueOak

[The Renaissance Man]

Yes it's wrong to talk in absolutes, but if I had to measure the units of value (in how it actually made my life better, even in the long run by giving me ideas or knowledge or fun) per hour spent on IG, man that's REALLY LOW.

Even if there was no cost of being "addicted" and wasting days unconsciously. Even if you consciously spent time on IG. Very very low value IMO.
 

1 hour ago, BlueOak said:

An easy test for anyone is to try to concentrate on something for over an hour or two, take one of Leo's videos, and see if you can sit down for something you want to watch and focus on it for that time without distraction.

If you can't, you are training your mind to concentrate for 5 minutes at a time, and you would benefit from training in the opposite direction for longer periods. People with ADHD should especially take note here. I consider myself to have it on some days, not as a medical diagnosis, but because I have days where I am more easily distracted than others, despite not wanting to be distracted.

If you think back to periods gone by, people needed to concentrate for days, weeks, maybe months, or years on projects.

Have you found ways to increase your ability to concentrate? Did your ability to concentrate actually increase? If so, what were those ways?

[Basman]

I think quitting social media would be an improvement to most people's life. Imagine how much time you would save.

[BlueOak]

4 hours ago, The Renaissance Man said:

Have you found ways to increase your ability to concentrate? Did your ability to concentrate actually increase? If so, what were those ways?

Meditation, walks, diet, exercise to burn off excess energy. Working on the environment you sit in day to day helps a lot, also water quality. Choosing the right music to work to also helps.

I have four Udemy course tabs open right now. I consider the collective learning of them all my concentration. I've been picking and choosing what parts of them I require to be ready to start work two days from now.

In between, I might come here or watch a video for a break. I also find people speak too slowly for me, so I watch them at 2x speed (recently, I found a program to find a 2.5x speed setting for the site) 

Part of the evolution of our minds is a collective intelligence within ourselves, to keep in mind more of life at once, either compressing the information, or having more things in focus when we communicate. So I understand we are supposed to be going through this process to some degree, where old patterns present in societies' methods of delivering information are burned away, and we are left with a faster pace. - This is a long ongoing pattern of our development.

Even with that understanding, I think 5-minute clips on TikTok are unhelpful when set against the usual pace of real life. It's just too far removed from how we have to operate in physicality, and it leaves a lot of people in a state of depression when moving from one mental state to the other.

Edited April 28 by BlueOak

[DocWatts]

Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind and Coddling of the American Mind) wrote an excellent book on how predatory social media platforms are contributing to the mental health crisis among adolescents and teens. (I'd very highly recommend this work).

But even he doesn't advocate for an outright ban of these platforms. This would be akin to how authoritarian counties like China are trying to combat online gaming addiction by just outright banning World of Warcraft. It's a very clumsy and inept way of responding to a complicated social problem.

Instead, Haidt argues for sensible regulation and updating our some of our social norms around technology use (for instance, by keeping phones out of the classroom and advocating that parents delay giving thier kid a smart phone until high school, when their brains are a bit more developed).

 

Edited April 28 by DocWatts

[Schizophonia]

On 26/04/2024 at 9:59 PM, Danioover9000 said:

@Juan

   Because it applies especially to Tik Tok! YouTube and Instagram for example still have time markers, while Tik Tok clips don't, which manipulates perception of time for the users. YouTube and Instagram do not contain much addictive imaging and audio stimuli, meanwhile Tik Tok has massive amounts of addictive stimuli and scroll time. YouTube and Instagram do not contain that much sexy stuff and shady sexy things shown, meanwhile 1/3 of Tik Tok did contain shady sexy stuff. YouTube and Instagram never had to make a S.T.E.M only section and has recently applied filters and sections intended to be more family friendly, meanwhile CCP China had to heavily regulate their Tik Tok and give ByteDance the unregulated stuff to sell abroad western audiences. Even YouTube felt the need to copy their formula a bit to introduce shorts, which is mostly garbage level content even @Leo Gura has moral qualms about for his content!

 

 

 

That said, it's also thanks to TikTok and this type of thing that you and others made the decision to develop to get rid of it.
It is the pact of the West, of freedom. Let people “degenerate” to generate lessons and evolutions of consciousness.

Perhaps the Chinese have a youth that is very protected from Western vices and more disciplined on average, but the West remains by far the supplier of the most creative people whatever the age.
By trying to screw the West with this kind of horse of three, China boost in fact accelerates the reaction processes and the development including cultural personal development.

We win.

 

[Danioover9000]

@DocWatts

20 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind and Coddling of the American Mind) wrote an excellent book on how predatory social media platforms are contributing to the mental health crisis among adolescents and teens. (I'd very highly recommend this work).

But even he doesn't advocate for an outright ban of these platforms. This would be akin to how authoritarian counties like China are trying to combat online gaming addiction by just outright banning World of Warcraft. It's a very clumsy and inept way of responding to a complicated social problem.

Instead, Haidt argues for sensible regulation and updating our some of our social norms around technology use (for instance, by keeping phones out of the classroom and advocating that parents delay giving thier kid a smart phone until high school, when their brains are a bit more developed).

 

   So to simplify his argument solution, he advocates for a slow, more regulation, versus outright ban? Basically if I have had a Coke Cola addiction, slow abstinence than cold turkey quit?

[Danioover9000]

@Schizophonia

13 minutes ago, Schizophonia said:

That said, it's also thanks to TikTok and this type of thing that you and others made the decision to develop to get rid of it.
It is the pact of the West, of freedom. Let people “degenerate” to generate lessons and evolutions of consciousness.

Perhaps the Chinese have a youth that is very protected from Western vices and more disciplined on average, but the West remains by far the supplier of the most creative people whatever the age.
By trying to screw the West with this kind of horse of three, China boost in fact accelerates the reaction processes and the development including cultural personal development.

We win.

 

   So if we let the atheism, feminism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism run amok, cause more chaos, and not try to be more conservative and republican, ditch traditional values like family and community, let these degenerates express themselves, that the Lord will somehow smite them away and make the world a better place? We make the world a better place by letting murderers, sexual predators, thieves, scammers, and so forth who lean liberalism/democracy/individualism/egalitarianism just cause more chaos?

[DocWatts]

26 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@DocWatts

   So to simplify his argument solution, he advocates for a slow, more regulation, versus outright ban? Basically if I have had a Coke Cola addiction, slow abstinence than cold turkey quit?

1) He doesn't think that bans are effective

2) He recognizes that there are social realities which makes the cold turkey approach unworkable. In practice, any parent who tries to cut their kid off entirely, as opposed to teaching them healthy limits and self restraint, will only serve to socially isolate them from thier peers and friends. Also they'll be setting up their kids to fail once they leave high school and haven't learned how to internally regulate (versus having restraints imposed upon them by authority figures).

3) He emphasizes that social media and phone addiction is a social problem that needs to be addressed communally, rather than the on an individual basis (climate change is a decent analogy here)

4) A major emphasis is that kids and adolescents need to be given much more freedom in the real world, so they can learn the embodied social skills they'll need to succeed as adults. Or, that kids are underprotected in the digital world and overprotected in the real world.

 

Edited April 28 by DocWatts

[zurew]

@DocWatts Do you agree with his arguments?

[DocWatts]

8 minutes ago, zurew said:

@DocWatts Do you agree with his arguments?

I'll preface his by saying that I'm only about two thirds of the way through the book, but for the most part I've found his arguments convincing.

Where I disagree with him is more a matter or emphasis and degree I think. For instance, Id argue that political and economic dysfunction are huge contributors to the mental health crisis among young people, which smartphones and social media are interacting with in complex ways. 

I also think that social media is just one factor of the ongoing social fragmentation that we're experiencing. Much of this has to do with Late-Stage capitalism, and all of the social dysfunction that comes with it

I don't think that Haidt denies this, but it's not given a ton of emphasis in this book.

Edited April 28 by DocWatts

[zurew]

1 minute ago, DocWatts said:

I'll preface his by saying that I'm only about two thirds of the way through the book, but for the most part I've found his arguments convincing.

Where I disagree with him is more a matter or emphasis and degree I think. For instance, Id argue that political and economic dysfunction are huge contributors to the mental health crisis among young people, that smartphones and social media are interesting with in complex ways. I don't think that Haidt denies this, but it's not emphasizes as much here.

The only part (from what you have listed) that im unsure about is the "how to properly limit" part.

I havent looked up any empirical research on this, so this is only based on my intuition, but Im unsure how you can limit supernormal stimuli (I would consider tiktok to have supernormal stimuli to it). Because it seems to me, that you can't really productively fight against it (once you receive it - it is extremely predictable how you are going to react to it and it seems to be mostly an unconscious reaction rather than an agency driven choice.) . 

[Danioover9000]

@DocWatts

43 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

1) He doesn't think that bans are effective

2) He recognizes that there are social realities which makes the cold turkey approach unworkable. In practice, any parent who tries to cut their kid off entirely, as opposed to teaching them healthy limits and self restraint, will only serve to socially isolate them from thier peers and friends. Also they'll be setting up their kids to fail once they leave high school and haven't learned how to internally regulate (versus having restraints imposed upon them by authority figures).

3) He emphasizes that social media and phone addiction is a social problem that needs to be addressed communally, rather than the on an individual basis (climate change is a decent analogy here)

4) A major emphasis is that kids and adolescents need to be given much more freedom in the real world, so they can learn the embodied social skills they'll need to succeed as adults. Or, that kids are underprotected in the digital world and overprotected in the real world.

 

1. So he doesn't think that bans are effective, and all bans are useless? Including the ban on certain drugs like Cocaine, heroine, Meth, the hard addictive drugs, and drug sourcing? Bans on certain porn materials?

2. How would you teach your child self restraints and healthy limits against Tik Tok, which is engineered to be the most addictive social media platform on the planet? From no time markers, to infinite scrolls, to flashy visuals and audio, and an A.I program that hyper curates content to user biases, how can you realistically expect children, whilst they're developing their brains and developing their Neo cortex, to will power and self restrain and self discipline against a super addictive app?

3. While I partly agree communally addressing, we cannot ignore the individual's free agency to desire for better change. Use myself as an example, it took 3 years for me to free myself from Coke Cola addiction, not because of community, but because of several personal reasons like health, energy levels, weight lose, diet, and other issues that I found has a common factor: Coke Cola. I've even started using Tik Tok a little bit, but after some weeks I can't continue because of how trash and toxic the app contents are. It's so blatantly assaulting my eyes and ears that I couldn't continue using Tik Tok, and that wasn't pressured by my friends or family or community to change that, but because my free will soul was being disturbed by that thing.

4. Mostly agree here, but in practice more freedom to children in the real world would  be a bit difficult if the environments aren't safe enough, and there'd be sexual preds lurking in some neighborhoods, and also some children can be inherently evil and pick on more younger children.

[Danioover9000]

@zurew

15 minutes ago, zurew said:

The only part (from what you have listed) that im unsure about is the "how to properly limit" part.

I havent looked up any empirical research on this, so this is only based on my intuition, but Im unsure how you can limit supernormal stimuli (I would consider tiktok to have supernormal stimuli to it). Because it seems to me, that you can't really productively fight against it (once you receive it - it is extremely predictable how you are going to react to it and it seems to be mostly an unconscious reaction rather than an agency driven choice.) . 

   And intuitively because of this I'm more pro regulation or even ban against Tik Tok, it's that addictive and really well designed for hyper addiction that it's the best soft invasion weapon used by China against USA and other western countries. It's both amazing and disturbing. Also would you expect empirical research when it may make big tech companies look bad?

[zurew]

12 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

Also would you expect empirical research when it may make big tech companies look bad?

I think the research can be conducted without any need for the direct involvement of the big tech company itself. For example -  you gather a large sample size of people and then start to monitor how their behavior and life is affected once they start to use tiktok.

Edited April 28 by zurew

[Basman]

While I don't like Tik-tok and I do think it is damaging to young people in particular, I don't want to see it banned in principle because people should have the freedom to decide themselves how they engage with social media. The government shouldn't just take that away though I get it is essentially just about the data. The US state is like a small child jealously clutching a cookie jar and pouting when the other kids try to take some of his cookies going "no, only I can spy on my civilians".

[Merkabah Star]

2 minutes ago, Basman said:

The US state is like a small child jealously clutching a cookie jar and pouting when the other kids try to take some of his cookies going "no, only I can spy on my civilians".

😀 so true.