I also have ADHD and I made the mistake of downloading TikTok once. It ended up costing me a lot of time, money, and a significant chunk of my attention span. It became so bad that I couldn't focus at work because all I could think about was TikTok.
I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I don't feel angry at the company, but I do feel exploited and preyed on. Makes me worried about the kids that use this app and have even less self-control than I do.
TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here.
I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok.
I had TikTok installed for one day and vowed never again.
Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?
This is what I would have expected as well so it was surprising to hear otherwise. I thought perhaps the OP had seen leaked documents or some other form of evidence that indicated TikTok targeted people with ADHD deliberately.
I read "Dopamine Nation" recently and TikTok "ticks" so many negative boxes. Having lost hours to this ultimate time wasting app, there is no chance my kids are getting this on their phone.
As the book hypothesizes, poor Dopamine regulation and the increasingly prescribed medication to treat this are becoming the norm. Particularly among working classes who have poorer earning potential and engaging work.
Your claim that TikTok deliberately targeted users with ADHD would be consistent with some of TikTok's previous behavior but I wanted to better understand what evidence you had for it.
You stated that TikTok was _almost certainly_ designed to _directly_ exploit the fact that you ADHD. I realize now that you meant something less direct but please re-read your comment and understand why someone might come to the same conclusion I did.
You think recognizing the ill-effects of TikTok is just Luddite-ism? How nice for you. I mean, the evidence is on the Internet; here is one study[1]. I also think it is pretty clear that consuming TikTok regularly by children has a direct consequence on attention span, I don’t require the Cleveland Clinic to tell me that. I think there is a difference from mindlessly consuming TikTok than programming a C64 or playing an MMORPG with complex leveling/crafting/etc systems. Realizing that fact is not anti-technology.
I recently hired a person who was on the moderation team at TikTok.
I won’t go in to detail but they suffered at the hands of a barbaric company which does not care about its staff or its users. People on the moderation team are SLA’d to death and most have some form of PTSD from the videos they’re subjected to.
I’d love to see Tiktok and all the other attention grabbing shitty apps die a death. But here’s the kicker… despite leaving TikTok due to the stress and anxiety working there caused her she still uses the app!
There are definitively some interesting points in the article, but it seems to miss the point and subjectively focusing on the everything that is bad. Fearmongering is something we need to watch out.
The fact that a user use ~75 minutes on the app sounds bad, but in my reality it isn't. kids were watching equally much time on MTV in the 90s if not more. A couple of years back you could say the same things about Facebook. Kids will always spend time on something. It is becomes dangerous when someone claims that it is bad on behalf of someone else.
To me, tiktok is a creative platform and as with every thing, you can get addicted. Sure, they data mine my usage in order to retain me as a user - that is what every business is trying to do. I marvel at the knowledge and insight my kids are able to produce on the new technology that is being made available to them.
It is our responsibility as parents to make sure that we actively engage in the world our kids are spending their time in order to teach the right and wrong, good and bad etc so that they can be critical thinkers that can navigate the world and the cyber-world in a safe and secure way.
Also of course it is not perfect, and there are some issues that needs to be figured out. Maybe Tiktok will be able to sort this out themselves, otherwise they will - as every other piece of technology - be replaced by the next big thing.
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I feel like people get caught up in the, admittedly cool, individual projects but fail to see how this stuff is impacting our society as a whole.
Society sucks right now and abuse of technology is a huge part of it. I know people love their TikTok, Reddit, stable diffusion, etc. but the world would be better off without it.
And if you think blasting peoples brains with ADHD content on TikTok is bad then just wait for AI generated content. It’ll be way worse. Endless novelty at your fingertips. Whatever you can dream up will be generated on the fly for you to consume.
TikTok is the first piece of computer software that I'm treating like a dangerous and currently legal recreational drug. No doubt lots of fun, obviously not good for you, don't need it, so simply not gonna use it.
I have only heard bad things about TikTok so far, and wouldn't let my kids use it. A couple of weeks ago, there was a story about presence of sexual predators preying on children and TikTok's utter lack of moderation.
All social media with attention management may be weaponized and has generally proven to be unhealthy for society. TikTok happens to be actively worse for a number of reasons, one of them being that it is designed to be so.
I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I don't feel angry at the company, but I do feel exploited and preyed on. Makes me worried about the kids that use this app and have even less self-control than I do.
reply