Yeah, if I'm looking for a time waster, I'll start on Reddit, just by habit. Then I'll go to TikTok when I see the first one on Reddit. It doesn't take very long anymore these days.

I remember people on Reddit making fun of facebook saying everything on there was on Reddit 3 days ago. The tables have turned since then.

I mean, Twitter out-did Reddit on that by 2012. Everything on Facebook and Reddit is just screenshots of Tweets.

You're using reddit wrong if you only use "popular". There are thousands of subreddits and it's easy curate a subset of ones that fit you rather than whatever tiktok does (and then probably ships off to China for cataloging)

yes pretty much.

TikTok seems to be the #1 source for video content nowadays, the algorithm is just uncanny how fast it learns what you like.

Agreed! I downloaded the app, saw 10 minutes of teenage girls dancing, and deleted it. My friend talked me into giving it another chance. After a few hours, it was consistently delivering videos that were exactly my taste. I've never had such a good discovery experience.

How long does it take?

I got sick of seeing two kinds of videos:

1. Teenagers dancing to a specific song, always one of a handful of songs.

2. Teenagers performing physical feats to a specific song, always one of a handful of songs.

afaict it uses engagement to determine what you like, so

- watching the video completely

- liking

- commenting

- sharing

increase your account's affinity to the tags associated with that video. If you like multiple videos with the same tag, you'll start seeing many videos with that tag. So, I think searching for a few tags about topics you're interested in and liking a few videos will prime the algorithm enough to make suggestions start being relevant.

This can also be annoying - I must have liked a few vids about dnd, and now i get more dnd suggestions than I want.

3. Fooled my parents again HAHAHAAHAHA

I love when people complain that Tik Tok is just teenagers dancing. That tells me you haven’t really spent time on the app or the algorithm has determined that dancing teens keeps you engaged.

Their video player has got to be the worst for a company of their size/resources.

I almost always go to the comments to find a mirror instead of trying to load a 30s clip. I've got brand new hardware and a gig connection...It shouldn't take >30s to load a <30s clip!

The updated video player is unintuitive and difficult to use on mobile, and essentially unusable on a tablet in portrait mode.

It is so strange to see a company making their mobile experience WORSE these days.

Looking at the complaints on the site about the video player UI and the lack of response from Reddit to said complaints, it is speculated that some consultant convinced some Reddit executive that they needed to emulate the TikTok UI to grow their user base. This ignores the fact that TikTok is video-centric, while Reddit is comment-centric, and breaking comment functionality to emulate someone else's video functionality makes no sense at all.

> unusable on a tablet in portrait mode

I thought this was just me and my settings! I have a bunch of accessibility things set and thought somehow that was fucking with it. It’s like a dance of flipping just to push that x. Crappy design.

History repeating itself... Reddit becoming Ebaum's World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxlO5IGst-E

Even worse, many Reddit videos are screen recordings of platforms that disallow saving videos, like Tik Tok, Instagram or Facebook. This whole issue is Kafkaesque.

Not exactly. There are plenty of apps, websites and browser plugins that can rip these videos without recording the user's screen.

Which makes this extra stupid, because they're acting its their first-party content, while it mostly isn't.

Evidently, since Reddit is a content aggregator.