Comment by simonw
12 days ago
This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.
You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts.
This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever
That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.
Yeah, I instantly disagreed with that point in the comment you replied to - TikTok's algorithm seems to reward sticking to your niche.
Does TikTok even have persistent personalities of this type? I thought a big part of the service was its recommendation algorithm that will keep recommending you other new stuff, not just reruns of the same influencers.
It's both. Since most videos are a couple minutes long at most, and a TikTok doomscrolling session can last for hours, the algorithm can show you all the new videos you haven't seen of accounts you seem to enjoy (or are following), and a ton of new stuff as well.
This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings.
He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche.
Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least.
[1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention
[2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase
Hello! My name is Xandiloquence Bizarre the Ab3rd, and today I will make a hat entirely out of dried cucumber.
not true because the meta changes constantly. The accounts that are popular for a long time have someone talented at the head.
yes except all of this stuff...fundementally sucks, right? its why influencers generally don't become actors. there's very little depth to it. Versus for example Hank and John Green who sure, they have good hooks, but they also have depth?
idk can't tell if this is me hoping or coping
>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology
Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind.
I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.
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Dawkins original definition was an idea that replicated unchanged, in an analogy to a gene, which is essentially a unit of DNA small enough to replicate unchanged.
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Attention-seeking is indeed the original genetic algorithm.
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Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch.
We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day.
I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it.
And I deleted it.
I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling.
In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.
Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpaste commercial. The juxtaposition, he said, was bad for the human mind, and was going to create a generation that couldn't focus on important things.
I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.
I've noticed that I can read or see something very emotionally engaging - something that really resonates with me, so much so that I'm maybe even choking up over it - and while I'm still having that emotional response, move onto the next post. I almost always have a moment of meta-reflection that scares me - why wasn't I content to just sit there and process these big emotions? How is the dopamine part of my brain so much more powerful than even the emotional part, that it forces me to continue what I'm doing rather than just feeling?
That talking point - that rapid-form media creates attention deficit problems is honestly overdone and there's no evidence that it's true at all (that I know of). ADHD exists and is a mostly genetic condition, you can't catch it without something serious like cPTSD. Amusing Ourselves To Death emphasized way more the angle of densensitization.
I used to think doomscrolling broke my brain before I was diagnosed. Later I realized I was "doomscrolling" way before I got my first digital device, rereading the same fiction books late into the night.
I can buy the argument that rapid-form media consumption acutely creates symptoms like ADHD (for at most a few hours after exposure) because I see it even in NT people.
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The same is true with the "In other news..." technique of seguing to the next story: its end result is overall desensitization and passive consumption.
> This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.
Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.
Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling.
Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand.
Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.
That’s really actually hilarious and would probably get your account flagged by AI for showing obscenity or something nowadays.
This is leaking to loads of other media too - movie trailers have started with some quick action shots, then BIG text saying "trailer starts now". Like a trailer to a trailer. Which is released after a teaser for a trailer. They even have recurring sound effects (vine boom sounds, but movie trailer edition where every action event (explosion, punch, scene change) is accentuated with a distinct drum boom sound effect, often in time with the dramatized remix of recognisable music). I hate it lol.
As for tiktok / other short video clip format content, one trend I've seen is to start the video with the conclusion (e.g. someone falling over), then starting with the buildup. Since these videos are played on loop anyway, they trick the viewer into thinking they missed the buildup.
How I hate the trend of videos like YouTube shorts to almost show the punchline of the video at the start before the full video.
It's not limited to Shorts, even normal longform videos have had this crap for years now. I hate it too - fortunately SponsorBlock can take care of this, they have optional categories you can enable beyond just sponsors, including the "hook".
I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark it) but my DSP skills aren't up to the task (and turns out LLMs are useless for these kinds of novel tasks).
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Attention is all you need, after all.
On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.
And when propaganda is injected into it - subtly, through many channels and methods - it becomes worse. I'm confident that the western world's rightward shift is down to targeted social media campaigns. It doesn't help that said social media stopped checking for fake news and bent the knees to said rightward shift, because money.
It’s so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits perfectly.
I've started using these platforms for learning (stretch exercises, argentine tango patterns/musicality I might want to lead, etc) and am finding the experience to work better in those kinds of situations. Agree it can be brain rot if using it for entertainment, politics, etc.
It is still doing the same thing, the dopamine hit is just feeling like you learned something instead of seeing something funny/shocking/etc.
The idea you can gain any kind of actual experience/knowledge about a thing through a series of 30s clips that are competing with millions of other 30s clips to grab you is folly.
Why short form though? I’ve always learned much better from long form, more comprehensive videos. Or I guess to put it another way I don’t believe I’ve ever learned anything besides quick hacks on reels/shorts/tiktok. Not even quick guitar licks.
To respond to everyone at once -
I have experience and teachers so I'm not solely relying on these videos. I use the short videos as a fast discovery of what's out there and I'll sometimes watch long videos afterward. LLM sites also work well for this discovery and I use that sometimes but it is a bit more work from me (which sounds strange to write re: AI) because I have to type out what I want instead of relying on algorithms that use data collected about me.
I use Facebook Reels (rather thank TikTok) which show me stuff anyway after I click on a link shared by friends so having it show me things relevant to learning seems like the best option here in case I click on next video.
Honest question: why wouldn't you simply search for exactly the same things but on longer format platforms such as YouTube?
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Yeah, I had to get rid of my youtube plus subscription because I was getting too addicted to the shorts.
Wait until a generation of people who have been mainlining that since infancy while their thought patterns were still being formed becomes old enough to vote.
Oh no, will they elect a president who primarily operates in ragebait, heavily uses social media, and has no meaningful attention span for anything outside of receiving direct praise? Good thing we have such enlightened voters right now who would never for someone that!
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This is part of why I hate TikTok so much.
I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else.
I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.
Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.
Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to.
https://www.kexp.org/
https://somafm.com/
I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.
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Also adding Radio Paradise, apparently one of the first online radios (https://radioparadise.com/). That said, it does have a skip (and pause) mechanism, so if you really don't like something you can skip to the next one.
I went back to CDs because the friction of having to stand up, walk to the player and change the disc is enough to stop me from skipping songs every few seconds.
For discovering new music, I go to the flea market every so often and buy some random discs. Some are unlistenable, but a lot are alright. I found New Mind[1] this way and really loved it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sharp#New_Mind
This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen. (the other part is that my vinyl collection is about 80% from my parents, and its just cool personally to have the same physical copy of the media that they did)
Also, many libraries still have CD collections. In the pre-iphone days I used to max out my library account getting CDs, rip/copy the ones I liked, and repeat.
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> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
No, I think you're right.
I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.
There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.
I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.
Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"
Yeah, similar for me; when I was a teenager I would buy a CD specifically I liked a single on the radio and put it in my car. I would be too lazy to take it out and listen to something else, so I'd listen to that CD dozens and dozens of times, and I would grow to appreciate the non-single songs a lot, very often more than the song I even bought the CD for.
The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly", almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing, and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized now because of that.
With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I miss the way it used to be.
Now there’s an idea. You could get artists to pay for ads just like other advertisers, and instead of hearing an ad for a product that takes you completely out of music mode, you have to listen to a whole song (or the first minute, or whatever) that’s maybe a little outside your usual mix.
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> less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music
For the same reason (plus curiosity of what people are listening to in weird places) I recently switched to Radio Garden [0], highly recommend it (not affiliated)
[0] https://radio.garden
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever
Hmm. I feel exact opposite. Most of successful channels that i see are using exact same formula/structure/often even style time and time again.
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever...
I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...
We have these answers already. At least the successful tubers like Mr. beast do. They ab test everything. That super creepy saturated image of him? Works really really well.
There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to think about whether it should watch or not.
And the other factor is I think the "rat pulling a lever" thing.
A rat is in a lab, pulls a lever, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again... no treat. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. This goes on, 10 pulls with no treat, but sometimes something comes out so the rat keeps going. You get the idea.
This is a lot of social media. You end up scrolling through a lot of shit, adverts and subtle propaganda, passively absorbing it until you get rewarded with something you genuinely enjoy and get the good hormones from.
I don't personally use tiktok but I have friends who will send me tiktok videos. I can't stand the dancing ones but the ones I usually end up watching through tend to be the ones that get right to the point. I wouldn't call it a hook, I'd just say it respects the viewer's time, which I like.
"You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever"
Biology tends to disagree.
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it
Isn't that the most followed user on TikTok Khaby Lame (his facial expression)? Looks like he just sold his company for $900M.
Damn, I'm in the wrong industry.
I think it's different for tiktok (as a non-tiktok user so take this with a huge grain of salt lmao), people don't watch one creator's videos one after the other, they get put in the big soup of clips that people scroll through for sometimes hours a day. And a lot of that is people sticking to one formula, because for many, the predictability is comforting / puts them in the tiktok brain off frame of mind.
Which isn't a new phenomenon - lots of people have "comfort shows" on e.g. Netflix, often the studio series with long seasons like sitcoms. They're comfortable because they often maintain a similar energy or formula over their run time, and missing parts of it (like current-day episodic films) isn't a big issue.
This description leaves me feeling blandly horrified.
> You can't just find one hook that works
Is that true?
I wonder what proportion of people find things like TikTok, YouTube shorts, and even Twitter for the text counterpart, absolutely repulsive. It's not even disdain as in "I'm too good for this", more like some people can't stand the view of a spider I guess.
And other things like HN can definitely hook my mind.
Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.
There is no lizard brain. The "triune brain" theory has been debunked by modern neuroscience for years.
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I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok!
Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192...
And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
It's impossible to discuss TikTok in isolation without discussing its algorithm or the whole 'the medium is the message' nature of it - which is precisely what distinguishes it from the era of the weird and bizarre personal website. In other words, it's inherently biased towards one form of content in a way that the general web is not (a website can contain anything, unlike TikTok).
Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking into Chernobyl to practice their parkour.
I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.
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> I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok!
This is classic equivocation fallacy.
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