I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.

Flink is too slow for this.

If by features you mean tracking state per user, that stuff can be tracked without Flink insanely fast with Redis as well.

If you re saying they dont have to load data to update the state, I dont see how massive these states are to require inmemory updates, and if so, you could just do inmemory updates without Flink.

Similarly, any consumer will have to deal with batches of users and pipelining.

Flink is just a bottleneck.

If they actually use Flink for this, its not the moat.

TikTok's differention is the userbase of all teenagers in the world.

Great insight. Any thoughts on RisingWave?

Pretty interesting, thanks for your work and talk.

On topic, I also think we won’t see much of a consequence from the new classification.

"No timeline was given on when authorities will make a final decision in the case."

Typical EU commission powerbottom move.Those benchwarmers will not do a damn thing before the next round of elections.

All politicians and world leaders decided to stay on a platform that enables generating child pornography. Why would they leave TikTok? They want people to be addicted to theirs and their parties content on there across all political camps.

You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money. And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible.

The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

It is, quite simply, not a fair fight.

It's not about banning design patterns. It's about removing the harmful results they produce.

Can you imagine if gambling were allowed to be marketed to children? Especially things like slot machines. We absolutely limit the reach of those "design patterns".

I don’t think the addictive argument is being made in good faith. Any platform with an infinite scroll feed and titillating content is intentionally made to be like a slot machine. Just keep swiping and maybe you’ll get that little dopamine hit. The idea that TikTok is dangerous, but Twitter, Instagram, porn, alcohol, and Doritos are fine doesn’t come across as an internally consistent argument. I think that the reality is that those who have an actual say in legislation perceive these platforms as a mechanism of social control and weapon. Right now the weapon isn’t in the “right“ hands.

> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?

Spoiler: There is no line. Societies (or more accurately, communities) attempt to self-regulate behaviors that have perceived net-negative effects. These perceptions change over time. There is no optimal set of standards. Historically, this has no consideration for intelligence or biology or physics (close-enough-rituals tended to replace impractical mandates).

Short form video has been a total break from previous media and social media consumption patterns. Personally I would support a ban on algorithmic endless short form video. It's purely toxic and bad for humanity

Gambling mechanics are also banned for certain ages and in some countries for everyone. We don’t say that it’s just a game, and people should just control themselves. Without going into the specifics of this case, design pattern intervention have existed for a long time and it has been in most cases desirable.

My preferred solution would be to subsidize tools that allow people to better identify and resist compulsive behaviors. Apps like Opal and Freedom that allow you to monitor your free time and block apps or websites you have a troubled relationship with would probably see more use if everybody was given a voucher to buy a subscription. Funding more basic research into behavioral addictions like gambling, etc (ideally research that couldn’t be used by casinos and sports gambling apps on the other side). Helping fund the clinical trials for next Zepbound and Ozempic.

More and more businesses are shifting their operations and outreach to IG and TikTok, so deciding how to live in a society is increasingly becoming "live under a rock" or "enter the casino and hope to not get swallowed up by the slop".

> people might overuse them ... cliffhangers and sequels

I once heard some try to understand pornography addiction by asking if it was comparable to a desire to eat a lot of lemon cookies. To quote Margaret Thatcher, "No. No. No."

> Where do we draw the line

Just because it's hard to find a principled place to draw the line doesn't mean we give up and draw no line. If you are OK with the government setting speed limits, then you're OK with lines drawn in ways that are intended to be sensible but are, ultimately, arbitrary, and which infringe on your freedom for the sake of your good and the public good.

> trust adults

Please do not forget the children.

> You can't legislate intelligence

Your implication is that people who are addicted to TikTok or anything else are unintelligent, dumb, and need to be educated. This is, frankly, an offensive way to engage the conversation, and, worse, naive.

The only reason the US and Europe are targeting TikTok is because they don't own the platform. Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by Meta) are responsible for so much hate politics and social unrest around the world (Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ). Amazon, Google and Microsoft helped the Israelis conduct the genocide in Gaza with their AI tools (UN Calls Out Google and Amazon for Abetting Gaza Genocide - https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o... ). But all that's OK.

You should be able to pick your own algorithm. It’s a matter of freedom of choice.

> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption

HA!

> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app

I think there's a wide regulatory spectrum between those extremes--one that all sorts of governments already use to regulate everything from weapons to software to antibiotics.

It's easy to cherry-pick examples where regulation failed or produced unexpected bad results. However, doing that misses the huge majority of cases where regulation succeeds at preventing harms without imposing problematic burdens on people. Those successes are hard to see because they're evidenced by bad outcomes failing to happen, things working much as they did before (or getting worse at a slower rate than otherwise might happen).

It's harder to point to "nothing changed" as a win than it is to find the pissed-off minority who got denied building permits for reasons they disagree with, or the whataboutists who take bad actions by governments as evidence that regulation in unrelated areas is doomed to failure.

I am just as uncomfortable with this banning of ideas, or to look at it another way, banning designing it this way simply because it’s effective. I assume this exact same design would not be made illegal if it were terrible at increasing engagement. However I also have to acknowledge that I already can’t stand what TikTok and its ilk have done to attention spans and how addictive they are even across several generations. People just end up sitting there and thumb-twitching while the algorithm pipes handpicked slop into their brains for hours a day. I really don’t want a world where everything is just like this, but even more refined and effective. So, it’s tough to argue that we should just let these sociopaths do this to everyone.

Arguably, the best reason for the government to care is that whoever controls this algorithm, especially in a future when it’s twice as entrenched as it is today, has an unbelievably unfair advantage in influencing public opinion.

> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?

We do it for alcohol and cigarettes already: taxes, ads & marketing restrictions, health warning mandated communication.

> You can't legislate intelligence...

That’s why we ban harmful things.

> I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them.

I used to be opposed, now I'm not. I strongly believe human specialization is the important niche humans have adapted, and that should be encouraged. Another equally significant part of human nature is, trust and gullibility. People will abuse these aspects of human nature to give themselves an unfair advantage. If you believe lying is bad, and laws should exist to punish those who do to gain an advantage. Or if you believe that selling an endless, and addictive substance should restricted. You already agree.

There's are two bars in your town, and shady forms of alcohol abound. One bar is run by someone who will always cut someone off after they've had too many. And goes to extreme lengths to ensure that the only alcohol they sell is etoh. Another one is run by someone who doesn't appear to give a fuck, and is constantly suggesting that you should have another, some people have even gone blind.

I think a just society, would allow people to specialize in their domain, without needing to also be a phd in the effects of alcohol poisoning, and which alcohols are safe to consume, and how much.

> Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention?

Yes, the dopamine feedback loop of short form endless scrolling has a significantly different effect on the brain's reward system. I guess in line with how everyone shouldn't need to be a phd, you also need people to be able to believe the conclusions of experts as well.

> The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices?

It's not as linear of a distinction. We don't have to draw the line of where we stop today. It's perfectly fine to iterate and reevaluate. Endless scroll large data source algorithm's are, without a doubt, addictive. Where's the line on cigarettes or now vapes? Surely they should be available, endlessly to children, because where do you draw the line?

(It's mental health, cigarettes and alcohol are bad for physical health, but no one (rhetorical speaking) gives a shit about mental health)

> If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming,

I'd love to ban micro transactions and loot boxes (gambling games) for children.

> even email notifications.

reductive ad absurdism, or perhaps you meant to make a whataboutism argument?

> My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous.

Camels and Lucky Strike are both illegal for children to buy.

> It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app.

We clearly do. Companies are taking advantage of the natural dopamine system of the brain for their advantage, at the expense of the people using their applications. Mental health deserves the same prioritzation and protection as physical health. I actually agree with you, banning some activity that doesn't harm others, only a risk to yourself, among reasonably educated adults is insanely stupid. But that's not what's happening.

> I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.

I'd rather see companies that use an unfair disparity of power, control, knowledge and data, be punished when they use it to gain an advantage over their consumers. I think dark patterns should be illegal and come with apocalyptic fines. I think tuning your algorithm's recommendation so that you can sell more ads, or one that recommends divisive content because it drives engagement, (again, because ads) should be heavily taxed, or fined so that the government has the funding to provide an equally effective source of information or transparency.

> You can't legislate intelligence...

You equally can't demand that everyone know exactly why every flavor of snake oil is dangerous, and you should punish those who try to pretend it's safe.

Especially when there's an executive in some part of the building trying to figure out how to get more children using it.

The distinction requiring intervention isn't because these companies exist. The intervention is required because the company has hired someone who's job is to convince children to use something they know is addictive.

> didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling

Apples to oranges.

I can’t make meth in my basement as a precursor to some other drug then complain that my target product had a shitty design.

Real life experience shows that TikTok is harmfully addictive and therefore it must be controlled to prevent negative social outcomes. It’s not rocket science, we have to be pragmatic based on real life experience, not theory.

What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?

You prosecute one case at a time. A judgement against TikTok (arguably the largest example) will make similar judgements against others easier.

Also, LSD isn't addictive in any sense of the word.

I think the chinese version of tiktok has most of these guards on for children

> Most of these seem concretely doable, and maybe effective. But the core of the addictiveness comes from the "recommender system", and what are they supposed to do there? Start recommending worse content? How much worse do the recommendations have to be before the EC is satisfied?

I agree with you, this is rather odd. And sort of missing the problem.

All apps are about attention. The percentage of the time spent using the app when it shows you your good content (Whatever it is that you're interested in) determines how addictive it is. And the percentage of time it's showing you bad content (Ads, 'screen time breaks', manual scroll time, more ads, loading screens, sponsor ads, filler content (youtube for instance is full of this), etc) counteracts the addictive properties because nobody likes it.

What's the end goal here? Right now TikTok is winning the attention economy race against the other apps because it's more focused on the user's preferred content. Is that what we want to reduce? To show more uninteresting other stuff on the screen? Like blank 'wait 5 minute' statics? Or just more ads?

I get that we don't want a generation of socially inept phone addicts, but this won't solve anything I fear. People will still want the good content, forcing the most customer friendly (it feels wrong to say that about TikTok) app to become more enshittified is a bewildering solution.

Worse enough it isn't addictive. The goal is non-addictive, whatever changes to whatever part are necessary to hit that goal.

Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog?

I think it is, but it's hard for me to articulate without getting into teleological judgments.

How'd you kick it?

Short form video content in general is ludicrously addictive. All infinite scroll is addictive but there’s something particularly strong when it’s short videos that each deliver some kind of hook or punch line.

I landed on YouTube shorts once and started scrolling. Hours later I genuinely felt like I’d been drugged. It was shocking and surreal how powerful the effect was. Made it a point since then to never go there. I’ve never touched TikTok but I’ve heard stories of people spending every waking second on that thing.

Obviously some people are going to be more prone to it than others.

Funnily all of Duolingo's retention mechanisms (formemost streaks and leagues) have the exact opposite effect on me. I am only moderately encouraged by success and extremely discouraged by failure. That means keeping the streak up is stress for me and failing a streak leads to a big negative impact on my motivation for the failure and a positive reinforcement of not doing it because then the stress goes away and that is nice. They literally train my brain not to use their app.

I think you're giving Duolingo too much credit.

Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.

People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.

I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.

This is pretty much everything in business these days. Medicine too. Nobody is interested in solving your problems for a price. They are interested in selling you a never-ending service or subscription that you pay for over and over.

Devil's advocate here (not associated with Duolingo, and in fact I haven't even used it):

> They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them

The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development.

I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the answer is that there is no easy answer. Every solution sucks in a way.

> as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again

Anki does the same, calls it "spaced repetition" and says it's a feature. Should we ban Anki now?

This is the owl image I got when I finally made it to the “delete my account” page: https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg

actually language learning is complex enough that they could build new products/ features to retain users and still deliver value. But for some reason they don't

I uninstalled duo lingo in a day recently. The actual app icon changes to a red faced angry owl if you wait too long to refresh your daily activity.

I switched my launcher so I could customize the icon, but Duolingo overwrites it.

This is not a toggle feature.

Damn them, so it's gone now.

> and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub

They don't need to design for that. If you want to become proficient in the language, you'll have to use the language for something. Whatever lessons Duolingo provides, they won't get you to become proficient in a language.

Duolingo is a shitty company, they don’t care about education, only retention mechanics and dark patterns. The CEO called his employees communists because they wanted to make the product beneficial for users instead of a money extraction machine.

The European Commission bases its investigation on the rules laid down in the Digital Services Act (DSA). This European legislation, introduced in 2022, imposes strict requirements on companies offering digital services in Europe.

In addition to TikTok, the social media company Meta, Facebook's parent company, is also under the investigation.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

Quoting: >The Commission is concerned that the systems of both Facebook and Instagram, including their algorithms, may stimulate behavioural addictions in children, as well as create so-called 'rabbit-hole effects'. In addition, the Commission is also concerned about age-assurance and verification methods put in place by Meta.

And before someone mentions the other? X - the everything app formally known as Twitter - is also under the Commission's scrutiny. It was fined approximately 120 million euro at the end of last year.

it may not be. but it's common to fight a legal battle against one perpetrator first, then see for the rest. gotta start somewhere, why not start at what's arguably the most toxic and obvious case, even if (or exactly because) it's been around for less long.

Maybe it isn't any different to Facebook, I don't know. Why would if matter if Facebook isn't any different from TikTok in the context of this news?

Seems to be the same as Facebook, and a bunch of others, so hopefully they're all looking into ways of stop breaking the law, if their lawyers have flagged this preliminary decision to them yet.

Not to mention Instagram. It is almost indistinguishable from TikTok now.

It's not any different. Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, all are in the same boat. Explicitly designed, tested and benchmarked to hack human reward circuits most effectively to maximize ad revenue.

The algorithm is pretty simple, it'll show you a selection of videos that are from the n most popular genres of videos, then depending on your dwell time, it'll A/B test categories that are related, or sub categories.

That bit isn't that difficult or new. the special sauce is the editorialising and content categorisation. being able to accurately categorise videos into genres, subjects and sub subjects (ie makeup video, 25 year olds, woman, straight, new york, eyeglitter) and then creating a graph of what persona likes what.

The second secret sauce is people going through and finding stuff and promoting it. TikTok (used to) editorialise/pay highly for content.

I did the same, but because I realized it could become addicting. Too bad Instagram f'ed me by copying TikTok. Now I'm addicted to Reels and I can't uninstall Instagram because my friends message me on it.

I did the same... even faster. I installed it, suggested me some local crap. I wanted ltt, mkbhd, etc. searched those 2, added them, after that first 2 videos were the same crap. uninstall. even youtube is better. It's so much content on youtube that It's impossible to watch it all in a lifetime even at 5x speed. And 10x better content.

I'm in the same boat. I have a TikTok account so my wife and friends can send me videos (mostly cute dogs). It's funny when people probe why I don't use TikTok and they think it must be because I'm against the Chinese/Larry Ellison influence or other common reason. No, I just don't like the format.

It's a constant stream of makeup & dogs. I just stick to Michael Penn on YT.

> Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design.

If infinite scroll is good design.

> we might as well throw every designer in prison

No, we might as well convict every manager/boss that assign those goals to the designers.

Designers don't dream these patterns out of thin air, they have incentives to.

Don't ban cigarettes and force age verification because parents can't do their jobs! /s

Reddit once told me to take a break (i was on the sick for a foot injury). So I did. I now check in once a week, for one hour, max. Ahhh, creatures of habit, that we are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food , One could argue about the plastic usage of the Coca-Cola company, etc

> I recently browsed the same feed on mobile ... and it was entirely different! I think I spent a half hour and saw zero content from my follows

At the top of the mobile app there’s a “For You” tab and a “Following” tab. You must have been on the “For You” tab.

Switch to the “Following” tab.

If you start scrolling the “For You” tab and do it for half an hour straight, you’re basically signaling that this the content you wanted to see and will continue getting more of it.

Nah man, I'm glad for you that you live in country X where you do Y instead, but at the same time as an European I'm pretty satisfied regulating big shitty companies

What's your solution to the current problem? Because the free market ain't working.

> Europeans really need to....

Which country, or countries are you talking about? Are you including the UK?

Unlike the States, with one language, we have many.

This kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.

But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.

It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912263

You likely weren’t wired into it while your brain was developing.

There’s clear scientific evidence that these shorts trigger addiction-like behavior[1]. The detrimental effects on a kid’s brain development can be inferred[2]. A reasonable argument could made that it’s not so different from things like nicotine, alcohol or other drugs when it comes to child brain development. I believe these companies know this and willfully push it on kids anyway.

Edit: And I think it’s really telling that China has some of the strictest state-led anti-addiction and youth protection policies globally[3].

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[3] https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/kids-no-phones-dinne...

I think one of the things that short form videos do really well is that they punish creators who pad their videos with unnecessary filler content. On TikTok for example (Not necessarily a fan of the app but it's a good example) no videos start with all that empty jabbering you often see on YouTube ("Welcome to my channel...", "Today we will...", "Please Like and Subscribe...", "This video is sponsored by...", etc), because if they tried any of that crap the viewers would just swipe the content away. So, instead they always get straight to the point. That part is really refreshing.

Of course, there are other issues instead.

European regulators and courts have placed a lot of scrutiny on big US tech companies, with frequent fines for privacy violations and potential anti-competitive behavior. Also as noted upthread, they're investigating Meta and Twitter on this specific issue.

You’re getting downvoted but seriously, it took them this long to figure this out? I also suspect they won’t outright ban TikTok, but instead levy a multi-billion dollar fine and let it continue operating.