I'm a huge fan of TikTok because after years of content stagnation and dullness, the internet is fun again. Especially places like Twitter and Instagram are outrage and depression inducers for me, consumed together it feels like the society is collapsing but everyone is living a perfect life at the same time.
The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.
I guess by now everyone has heard of their legendary discovery algorithm so I'm not going there but recently I noticed that some of my favourite creators from the Youtube etc. are on TikTok and their material is much nicer to consume there. Why? I think this is because of the short and fast phased nature of the TikTok content. Instead of publishing 10 to 30 min videos(AFAIK Youtube encourages that, it is also good for the revenue), they put together a short video that shows the gist of the subject. They will also be much more responsive, quickly replying with short videos to the comments. It's a very dynamic place.
One exception for me is Nile Red, I love watching his 40 min chemistry videos. Actually, there are a few more YouTubers who's content works best on YouTube but I'm watching far less and I have more spare time now.
Maybe the medium is the message still holds? Maybe people are now ready to hear the message of the TikTok?
Another thing Tik Tok does is get rid of people who are obese, queer, or otherwise the target of harassment. Their stance is it's easier to get rid of the person being made fun of or limit who can see their videos rather than the 10k people harassing them.
> According to Netzpolitik, the social media company instructed moderators to find users who are “susceptible to harassment or cyberbullying based on their physical or mental condition.” These creators would then be marked with a “Risk 4” designation, meaning their videos would only be available to view in the country where it was uploaded. Company documents obtained by Netzpolitik explain TikTok’s reasoning for the ban, pointing to the fact that “bullying has been proven to cause severe emotional and physical distress, especially in minors.”
> TikTok also kept a separate list of “special users” who were considered to be “particularly vulnerable.” Many of the creators on this list, Netzpolitik discovered, made videos with the hashtags #fatwoman or #disabled, or had rainbow flags and other LGBTQ+ markers in their profile. TikTok moderators marked these creators with an “Auto R,” which meant that their videos, after hitting a certain amount of views, would be banned from TikTok’s algorithm of suggested videos that appear in every user’s “For You” feed. As a result, these creators’s videos would reach a much smaller audience than the average user. For many, dreams of going “TikTok viral” and gaining notability on the platform would be squashed by the policies.
> Social video network TikTok apparently limited the reach of people with disabilities, including facial disfigurement and Down syndrome. According to Netzpolitik.org, which spoke with a source inside the company, the policy was supposed to protect users with a high risk of bullying. In practice, however, it apparently amounted to discrimination — and the problem was compounded by moderators who needed to make snap decisions about users’ physical and mental traits.
If you had an issue with Zuck calling early Facebook users "dumb f**ks," wait until you find out what's going on behind the closed Tik Tok doors. You have to remember - we're still in the honeymoon phase with Tik Tok and haven't learned to hate them yet. Once the media and all your friends start sharing hatred about Tik Tok, leaks are going to start coming out, and there will be all the other fun ways through which we discover the true nature of the beast. My money is on Tik Tok setting new standards for how evil a corporation can be.
> The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.
You got used to the idea that the US has the ability to be better at anything we set our mind to. For our sake, I really hope that truism to continue to be true for a long time. But unless you believe in American Exceptionalism, there are no reasons why that should be guaranteed - or even likely. China is more supportive of growth-at-all-costs, their population is willing to work harder, and the idea that Americans are more innovative hasn't been true for quite a while - look at Nio, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, and countless other examples. A lot of cutting edge stuff is coming out of China these days, with the trend only accelerating.
We might even start longing for days when we used to have a strong domestic competitor in the social media space. The same thing happened in Germany - back in 2008 when Facebook was tiny on a global scale, there was a German €100m company called StudiVZ that dominated the social networking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with about 10m active users. I don't have to tell you how that story ended - the company is no more and all those users are on FB/IG now. Germany and Austria also happen to now be the ground zero of the global Facebook hatred [1], and I bet you they wish they had shown their domestic company a bit more love back when this would have made a difference.
TikTok's algorithm has introduced me to my (now) favorite neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ content makers. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers, some a few hundred.
I've learned more about these subjects (and myself!) than from most other sources.
The value of TikTok for me was that it linked up a bunch of neurodivergent/lgbtq+ people into a vibrant, supportive community.
Honestly, if they decide to keep it a clique... I don't mind at all. All the people I interact with there get me. I've never felt this anywhere else.
If my content is seen only by a small subset of people who are on the same page with me — awesome! That's who I'm making content in the first place.
I don't care about the ominous fear mongering. TikTok has made my life better already. It brings a lot of people together now in ways that other places don't.
More importantly, it inspires people not just to make content, but simply being themselves. And it takes away so many barriers for creating, it's insane.
Anyway, we are talking about specific things we like about TikTok as a platform that make it unique (so far), and you are talking in abstract. Anything can be potentially bad in the future. But currently, TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet.
I can give my long list of reasons why if anyone is interested.
I think you missed the parent's point. Their point wasn't that these experiences aren't possible today, it's that these wonderful and joyful experiences are all nice now but will quickly fade as the company scales its commercial operations, just like what has happened at Facebook, Twitter and now Instagram and Snapchat.
The thing is, I think it's more than fortune telling. The social media business model is very dirty, it's an addiction machine coupled with selling your data to the highest bidder. The end result will invariably be the same.
It's like free image hosting or free file hosting. A "better", "cleaner" hoster appears and then they either go bankrupt or they sell out.
Some stuff is just predictable at this point.
Social media should be an utility, we just haven't leveled up our civilization enough to know how to manage social media utilities. It took decades for us to do it for electricity & co.
One thing to watch out for will be the treatment of divisive topics. It's eaten up so much of classic social media players because divisive content does well in terms of raw engagement, but it's not been my experience on TikTok. I wonder if there is explicit anti-divisiveness bias in the consumption experience.
I really like the comment you made, as it's constructive:
"I wonder what makes TikTok different from other social networks regarding divisiveness" is an interesting question that adds value to the discussion. It's an invitation to ponder, research, and share perspectives.
It differs from the ones before it:
"You like it now, but give it time, it will be bad just like the rest" is not a statement of the same kind. It's little more than dull cynicism.
Came off as very patronizing, and even infantilizing. GP is not even part of the disagreement above. They just made a good comment. It seems like you are lumping them together with the others that you are bothered by. If you just removed the quoted section then you're reply is otherwise great.
What value does the following claim bring into the discussion: "The <new thing that you like> is going to be just as bad as <other things>, just give it time"?
It's just needless negativity.
There are so many interesting things about TikTok that one can discuss, and choosing to just be a Debbie Downer about it ("You like it, but it's bad for you!") feel like an extremely boring way to think about anything.
Well, to me it sounds like: "Yeah, it showed that all the old chemical party drugs are bad in the long run, but this new party drug makes you feel really good, so why worry about the future?"
I mean do it, if you want. But I also have the opinion that I do not want to base my happiness and wellbeing in something that has shown to have a short timed luck - followed by darkness. And I do not see society benefitting. When I watch my young nephews as mindless TikTok zombies - I do not see them happy really. They are occupied. But happy?
I see them happy, when they do real kids stuff - running around, jumping, fighting, doing stupid things. Also gaming together. And if they watch some videos - why not. But they seem just addicted to me already. It is all about a healthy balance - and those "social media apps" have the goal to maximize engagement - that means addiction and not a healthy balance.
Well perhaps your nephews aren't in the group of people who should be on TikTok.
That doesn't mean that it's like that for everyone.
Drug analogy: people use Adderall as a party drug too, but some really benefit from having it in their day-to-day life.
Nobody said anything about "basing happiness and wellbeing" on TikTok, btw. It's a strawman claim.
What TikTok does is it connects people who wouldn't otherwise know of each other, lets many people interact with videos, and just be themselves. It's a good place to be at today.
What it already has done is it normalized people just sharing their slices of life and thoughts instead of creating highly polished content (which also exists). And the interactions are peer-to-peer.
It has the most Wen 1.0 vibe of yore out of all platforms. Except instead of ugly HTML with <blink> tags, it's your messy bedroom and untamed hair. But it's yours.
It is not. You do not own or controll the data on it. You do not know, own or control the algorithm that makes TikTok such an amazing experience for you - at the moment.
An proprietary algorithm that can change any minute, out of whatever reasons - may them be just "profit" motives, or political reasons (China is a bit famous for that).
"Nobody said anything about "basing happiness and wellbeing" on TikTok, btw. It's a strawman claim."
And sure nobody say he is doing it consciously. But this is what I observe is happening to quite some, especially young people. They get very angry, if the do not get their mobiles to get their dose of TikTok.
So yeah, drugs can be beneficial, too. Dosis facit venenum. This is my point: to me from the outside - TikTok seems to be just the same. A new addictive drug. That can be beneficial if used moderately, but mostly is not.
The positive experience I have on a platform, the people I connect with, the things I learn — all of that is mine, and no change in algorithm can take that away.
I am also giving you a perspective as one of those "vulnerable" populations ostensibly harmed by TikTok, which is what the comment I responded to claimed.
I am saying, as one of them, that TikTok gave these "vulnerable" something that other platforms don't.
I won't go into ”addiction” issues (if you were to take my books away when I was a kid, I'd get no less angry), I'll just accept that it's an issue for large groups of people.
My point was that TikTok is more than that (addictive entertainment). It saves lives too.
Again, I am giving you a perspective as a "vulnerable" user of the platform. This is a perspective that you do not have (as a non-user at the very least). I don't doubt that other people will have a different experience. After all, that's the entire point of having that algorithm.
What I am saying is that TikTok is #1 not only because it's an addictive fun machine for some. There's a lot more. A sense of community for "vulnerable" groups and the ability to have reach is one of those positives that the parent comment was clearly not aware of.
> I am saying, as one of them, that TikTok gave these "vulnerable" something that other platforms don't.
I have been incredibly disappointed by the queer presence on TikTok. Most of the people who I watched seemed misinformed, or were trying to sell me something. The shorter length of the medium encourages sensationalized media rather than longer, more reasoned takes. Furthermore, there's not a single worse place for vulnerable communities to exist than a Chinese app. China has demonstrated, at length, that they intend to oppress their queer population, Uighur population, Taiwanese population, student population and anyone who opposes them politically. As a queer person myself, I couldn't imagine a less comfortable platform if I tried. TikTok feels like a clinical exposure to queer identity, stripped of passion and packaged as a shiny toy. It's demeaning and degrading.
> My point was that TikTok is more than that (addictive entertainment). It saves lives too.
I think every social media platform of a certain size has "saved a life" before. I remember hanging out in an IRC chat with people who I used to drink with, and we had to call 911 for someone who had alcohol poisoning. There was only like 30-40 members, so "life saving" can really happen on any platform.
Communities can happen anywhere, too: you just need passionate people to drive them. I hope in the future there will be less corrupt/centralized alternatives, if you feel that this medium is particularly helpful for you.
I fully agree, and I hope more platforms will come.
That's why I am talking about the good sides of TikTok here: so that people understand them (which, currently, a lot of the people don't - including me two months ago) - and build something better.
Currently, both Instagram and Youtube have TikTok-like feeds... and miss the mark by a mile. So clearly they don't get it. There really is space for an upstart in that field.
I like the IRC comparison, because TikTok, somehow, is the closest thing in terms of giving the feel of IRC to me today.
An open-source TikTok alternative that communities can sprout it would be awesome. And for that to happen, we need to talk about what makes TikTok good.
Because creating a clone with all of the downsides is easy. Figuring out what made it the #1 app, I believe, is the most important part if you want TikTok to go away.
>The shorter length of the medium encourages sensationalized media rather than longer, more reasoned takes.
This is changing. Most videos I see are 1 minute long, many of them sped up 2x (perfect format for me). And you can upload videos up to 3 minutes long now - which is good enough for a lightning talk.
And the time limitation is what has forced people to state their points very coherently, be laconic, speak fast (or speed up videos), add subtitles and text overlays - all the things that I want (and that some successful YouTubers, like Vi Hart, already do, but most don't).
I believe there is a place for a platform with the creative limitation of short time length.
>I have been incredibly disappointed by the queer presence on TikTok. Most of the people who I watched seemed misinformed, or were trying to sell me something.
That wasn't my experience, but it's hard to say which one is representative. FWIW, the neurodivergent community there is great and well-connected.
Is TikTok good for everyone else? I don't know, but that's one subset of people for whom it seems to work really well now.
As you said, I hope the future brings us a less-centralized TikTok not controlled by an oppressive regime. But who would want to build something that (if you read the comments here!) is only seen with scorn?
Yes, using TikTok is selling your soul to the devil kind of deal. Let's figure out what people get from the devil that made TikTok the #1 app globally.
> But who would want to build something that (if you read the comments here!) is only seen with scorn?
> An open-source TikTok alternative that communities can sprout it would be awesome. And for that to happen, we need to talk about what makes TikTok good. Because creating a clone with all of the downsides is easy. Figuring out what made it the #1 app, I believe, is the most important part if you want TikTok to go away.
I mean, it's already been built. Platforms like Mastodon and Matrix already exist, allowing you to build your own infinite-scroller app, along with a community to fill it. Those platforms don't lack some "magic substance" that we're missing, they just have ~20 billion dollars less ad revenue, and aren't backed by an entire nation with high-profile interest in processing terabytes of global footage. TikTok is #1 because they paid to get there (and, of course, watermarked viciously)
Is that the answer you wanted? I suspect not, so I'll save the trouble of asking. The issue starts with using the app, which is your endorsement of it's functionality. Remember, the creators you watch don't see a dime of the money made from the platform: your usage is explicitly supporting Bytedance's exploitation. Do whatever you want to do, but I'd have a hard time advocating for neurodivergence and queer visibility while simultaneously supporting their oppression.
My oppression. I'm a neurodivergent/queer creator on TikTok.
You're trying to speak on my behalf here, so maybe listen to what I'm trying to yell you?
And it's that yes, TikTok does have plenty of "magic dust" that no other platform has.
I know of Matrix/Mastodon, and sorry, but that tech stack is waaaaay too far off the mark. They barely cut it as Slack/Facebook replacements.
Google and Facebook also have money. What they don't have is a #1 app, in spite of benefiting from the existing network effect.
Did it not occur to you that TikTok must have brought something new to the table to get to that spot?
What you're missing is that it's not the creator/follower dynamic you see on Instagram. TikTok enables and encouraged everyone to be a creator in a way that no other platform currently does.
If you want to argue about this, for God's/sanity's sake please at least use that app for a week to get some firsthand knowledge if you haven't already done so, and post a video or two.
> You're trying to speak on my behalf here, so maybe listen to what I'm trying to yell you?
I'm a queer creator, I'm speaking for nobody but myself here. In fact, you're the only one that's trying to get me to change your opinion so far. I frankly don't care how much you love TikTok (since I could find a school bus full of people who share the same opinion any day of the working week), but I do want you to understand why myself (as well as many other queer privacy/security advocates) are recommending that people avoid it like the plague.
> TikTok enables and encouraged everyone to be a creator in a way that no other platform currently does.
Sure. Their growth is dependent on your devotion to their app, so I don't doubt that they do their best to reduce 'inner circle' friction.
> Did it not occur to you that TikTok must have brought something new to the table to get to that spot?
To my knowledge, TikTok actually became popular because it did nothing new. Once Musical.ly went away, there needed to be a competitor that could also pay the insane license fees for the popular songs you see all over those apps. Since nobody else had that kind of money, the only viable competitor standing was the CCP, who could afford to piss money away ad-infinitum if it was going towards the oppression of marginalized groups
> please at least use that app for a week to get some firsthand knowledge
Hell no! I'm not going to use Facebook for a week to confirm that I dislike it, or reinstall MacOS for a week just to re-discover that everything I love broke after Mojave.
I'm done arguing about this (just got back from a 3 day power outage), but TikTok doesn't make me any less depressed to see proliferate. I hope you enjoy yourself, regardless.
A pattern that has occurred repeatedly with many SoMe companies over the last decade is highly relevant to a discussion about the new SoMe company that allegedly solves all the problems of previous social media. It's not just needless negativity.
> There are so many interesting things about TikTok that one can discuss, and choosing to just be a Debbie Downer about it ("You like it, but it's bad for you!") feel like an extremely boring way to think about anything.
Oddly enough, I find comments like "I don't care to talk about any negativity because this product/service is the best thing since slice bread" boring as well. What's your point?
You seem to be getting unnecessarily upset that people are raining on your parade. No one is raining on your parade, they're simply providing a counterpoint - no need to take that any farther than what it is.
I'm trying to make a simple statement: the claim that TikTok is the same as other platforms is idiotic (if it were so, it wouldn't reach the #1 spot in spite of not being around a few years ago).
Logic dictates that TikTok must be doing something differently, and doing it right.
I am trying to explain what that something is.
I am upset because as long as people here don't get what makes TikTok unique and successful, there will be no US-made alternative to TikTok. Which sucks, because it is a Chinese spying/influence machine too.
Exhibit 1: Instagram, which is now imitating TikTok, poorly, with it's video feed. Literally all content I see there is TikTok reposts.
Exhibit 2: YouTube's... whatever. Dead in the water.
Facebook and Google don't get it. HackerNews doesn't get it. And as long as that goes on, y'all are just handing our youth off to the PRC's influence.
Did I make my point clear?
I hope I made my comment negative enough for your preference, but I'll be glad to elaborate.
> Facebook and Google don't get it. HackerNews doesn't get it.
We do. You're just not understanding OUR point. People are not disagreeing that there is somehow a better/unique experience on TikTok - in fact the opposite, most people here believe that to be true. We're saying that there is a very CLEAR trend when it comes to social media apps. In fact you said it yourself "YouTube and Instagram are crap now". The parent's original premise was that we are in a honeymoon phase with TikTok and all of the ills associated with the other social media platforms will very likely plague TikTok eventually. Worse, TikTok is heavily influenced by a regime well known for abuse that pales in comparison to civil liberties to that of the US/Facebook. In essence, this is a recipe for disaster.
> I hope I made my comment negative enough for your preference, but I'll be glad to elaborate.
Your insistent deflection and "poor me" attitude doesn't help your argument...worse, it makes me think you're a shill.
I hear you loud and clear, which is why I say that admitting that TikTok is better/unique is not enough.
You need to understand what makes it better/unique to build better alternatives that at least won't be heavily influenced by an abusive regime.
Like, sure, let's take it as a given that TikTok will become undeniably evil in 4 years. What are we doing now to prevent a grim future?
I say, look at what makes this honeymoon phase so attractive, because as long as TikTok is the only place offering these benefits, people will go there.
> Like, sure, let's take it as a given that TikTok will become undeniably evil in 4 years. What are we doing now to prevent a grim future?
Simple - not use it. It's entertainment. There are more suitable alternatives (reading books, watching movies, etc.) that have far less evil externalities.
> You need to understand what makes it better/unique to build better alternatives that at least won't be heavily influenced by an abusive regime.
I think the point there is that until a new biz model comes up for social media there is always an incentive to abuse privacy (Facebook/IG) or be abused for surveillance by a gov't.
Glad you calmed down there a bit, makes for better discourse ;)
Look, you still aren't addressing the issues I'm raising.
>> What are we doing now to prevent a grim future?
> Simple - not use it.
You are not using it already. Didn't stop TikTok from getting to the #1 spot. Saying "it's bad, don't use it" works about as well as abstinence-only sex-ed.
>I think the point there is that until a new biz model comes up for social media there is always an incentive to abuse privacy (Facebook/IG) or be abused for surveillance by a gov't.
OK? We aren't talking about that.
What I am saying is that people don't use a social network because of its business model and privacy stance. You might, and you are not representative (again, #1 app!).
If a non-evil, different-business-model social network springs up, it would need to have the good sides of TikTok for users to switch. Otherwise it will fail.
Do you understand that if you want TikTok to fail, you need to understand why people are flocking to it in droves? Queer/disabled/neurodivergent people in particular?
>It's entertainment.
If you only see TikTok as entertainment at this point, after I went to more than extensive detail about the value it brings beyond that, I perceive it as staying willfully ignorant by choice.
>There are more suitable alternatives (reading books, watching movies, etc.)
Suitable for whom? Again, you can only speak for yourself here. My point is that there are no suitable alternatives for large groups of people, particularly neurodivergent/disabled people and folks with mental health issues.
I have written a lot specifically to convey the point that both the value they get on TikTok (beyond entertainment) and the barriers they face elsewhere are not well understood here, and spent quite some time writing about both.
If you could do me a favor and re-read the entire thread before arguing further, I'd feel like my efforts to explain both the value and the barriers were not in vain.
>that have far less evil externalities.
FYI, shifting the burden of responsibility for the externalites onto the shoulders of consumers has not worked once. We have seen this with environmental damage, transportation, smoking, and so on. (If you want to argue about that, let's do it in a different thread, and please look up some examples before trying to reason about what "should" and "should not" work).
I don't think people are saying it'll get worse, but rather that it's already bad, and over time we'll learn to what extent that is.
If you know that and continue to use it, thats fine. I still used Facebook long after all the malarky about that came out (and as is this case, a lot of people, myself included, were already seeing the signs of it way before it came out). You need to pick your battles, in a world where everyone has their no #1 important issue you MUST act on, you need to decide where you can spare the mental energy.
But denying it because you want to have your cake and eat it too probably isn't healthy
The claim I specifically disagree with is that TikTok currently actively deplatforms LGBTQ+ and disabled people.
It simply was the opposite of my experience, as my suggested videos are at least 90% LGBTQ or disabled people.
I can't even compare it to other social networks, as it gives these "vulnerable" demographics an incredibly large reach today — even with the alleged censorship — and nothing else comes even close!
—Your car is bad, it has no seatbelts and airbags
—But the other cars I can get don't even run!
—Why don't you agree that it's a bad car?
–Because it can get me places the other cars don't
—So you think that no airbags is good?
—No, I thinking that a driveable car without airbags is better for me than the stationary car that has them. It's good for me to have this car, my life improved after I got it. I use it to get to my friends that live far away.
—But what about those kids that took a car for a joy ride and crashed it?
—Perhaps they should not have been driving
—But it's a Chinese car, it spies on you!
—I have to use it to reach my friends because there's no other way
—So you're denying that your car will be junk in a few years? It's not healthy!
—Neither is worrying about potentially grim future
—But it'll be worth nothing soon!
—And by that time, I'll get its worth by other means
Bad is a vague term, I thought we were talking about data privacy and such whereas it seems you're talking about deplatforming. My mistake there, although I would say that, especially in the context of data privacy, you probably want to avoid bad things happening.
The car analogy doesn't really work, because you don't seem to be saying "TikTok is terrible but its the best we've got". In fact, you seem to be being quite combative with others when they say something along the lines of "TikTok is terrible", which oddly enough, is kind of negative itself. But maybe I'm just misreading things, emotion can be harder to decipher through text, so I suppose only you can know.
Indeed, I was talking about deplatforming because that's what the comment I responded to brought up.
Privacy-wise... OK, I'm an ex-FAANG, and that ship has sailed long ago. My cynical view is that TikTok is far down the line of entities that collect all the same data.
As for the car analogy, yes, this was exactly what I was trying to say; apologies for lack of clarity.
I was arguing with others who were saying "TikTok is juts as bad as all the others, and if it's not, it will be", which is an empty statement.
I'd switch to a privacy-conscious alternative in a heartbeat, and my point is that there is none, by a long shot.
And that's the thing. If you care about the downsides of TikTok, you better understand why the users go there instead of other platforms that are ostensibly "just the same".
Facebook didn't grow because it was "same" as MySpace; and everyone missing the difference is why Facebook is the giant it is today.
I'm trying to explain the value users derive from TikTok that other platforms don't provide.
Specifically as a member of the "vulnerable" groups on TikTok. I am bringing here a perspective that the person speaking on my behalf clearly doesn't have, being neither a TikTok user, nor, it seems, a member of any of these groups.
The discourse here reached a point of gaslighting where people are convincing me that I'm being "exploited" when I point out that out.
Deplatforming isn't really my wheelhouse so I'll stay out of that one, there are plenty of intelligent people on both sides of the coin who do understand the issue to the point where there isn't much value in my chipping in.
As for data privacy, you make a fair point. As I said in an earlier comment, despite my misgivings about their "take everything that isnt bolted down" approach, I continued to use Facebook even after the big hoo-ha because, like TikTok does for you, it brought me value. The only thing I would take issue with is if someone who did get value from one of those platforms and wanted to keep their privacy high ground by denying any issues, but as you've made clear, your not that person, so we can safely dismiss that now.
> And that's the thing. If you care about the downsides of TikTok, you better understand why the users go there
To be fair, this is an excellent point, and not just in the context of social media. Too often in politics for example you see peoples explanation for why the people they disagree with do and say the things they do and say is "that group are idiots/ignorant/evil, my group is intelligent/enlightened/kind". So you'll get no argument from me there.
Overall, I think this was just a bit of a miscommunication and we're actually coming from roughly the same place. I can't say I'm a big fan of TikTok, but you would probably think the same thing about Facebook or Google (I don't use facebook anymore but google still have their claws around me), so it'd be hypocritical for either of us to try to take the highground.
Also, please accept my sincere thank-you for providing your input to this discussion, as well as putting in effort to understand what I was trying to say, and have me say more about what I didn't convey clearly.
It's this kind of discussion that keeps bringing me back to HN!
And I am a very active Facebook user, too (the use case of keeping in touch with many friends scattered across the nation/world is covered pretty darn well there).
The value I derive from these platforms is orthogonal; there's a place for both.
I am not a fan of Google because they keep changing things and killing off the projects that I like. Believe it or not, I was completely sold on the Circles premise of Google+, and nothing has come close to that ever since. The most important downside of G+, of course, isn't privacy — it's that it no longer exists.
So I'm just waiting for someone to finally figure search out. That's the only thing keeping me there (I use an IMAP mail client, so can switch easily; Maps aren't a unique proposition; Docs aren't something I use).
I tend to write a lot in enthusiastic agreement, so I'll just say yes, if people were more willing to think about why people like Trump in 2016, we probably would not have had Trump (..nor Clinton running against him, for that matter).
The feeling of belonging, acceptance, and power drove disenfranchised poor male white rural Americans to Trump like a magnet, and the Dem party decided that they don't need to care about that because Trump is so obviously bad. It's very frustrating to think about like 100 different ways that scenario could have played out differently.
I feel like that's what I see now with this TikTok discussion. I literally had to defend against accusations of being a parasocial relationship addict for stating my point. Because, apparently, one must be a lifeless addict to be enthusiastic about that platform sigh.
My doomsday prediction is that TikTok will continue to dominate social media, with PRC being intelligent enough to wield influence softly enough for it not to be noticeable (unlike FB literally enabling genocide). Where that will land us in 10 years is an interesting question to consider.
Who knows, maybe we'll get our government to spend less on rockets, and give us healthcare and education instead. Isn't that a win for Chinese geopolitics? I would hope it is! :) Somehow.
(Off-topic, but in the same way, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 happened with quite a lot of help from the Germans, who figured it's going to kick Russians out of the war - which it did. Whether it was good for the Russians is to debate to this day.)
I think the reason Google has such a stranglehold over me is more the fact that they have so many small things that, whilst individually are easily replacable, would be a big job to do at once. The only things I can't see I could easily replace is the account switching with chrome (although I haven't really looked into it, there probably is something) and Keep (the fact that theres nothing out there quite like it is honestly shocking, to the point that I've considered just doing it myself). Everything else is, as you say, not particularly unique, theres just so much of it.
To be honest when I wrote the argument that people should listen to the other sideI didn't even have Trump in mind, but it is a great point and kind of shows it is a universal issue (both politically and otherwise), though Im optimistic that things are slowly starting to change, if for no other reason than for seeing these kinds of comments :)
And you're absolutely right, it applies to TikTok too, so I apologise for being so quick to jump the gun and forget to practice what I preach, and thank you for the great discussion. It is always nice to have something which starts as an argument end so nicely, whether we agree with everything or not. Have a lovely day :)
>You might not care about the future. But others on this forum do.
See, at no point did I ever make claim about what other people here are, or claim to know how they feel or think.
But the implication just made regarding me and caring about the future is the kind of unprovoked hostility that I feel safe from on TikTok, but not here.
Whether I care about future, or cats, or fancy tea is not up for discussion.
Maybe perhaps, it might have occurred to you that your response to mbesto is perhaps the best example of "unprovoked hostility" in this thread. Your shrieking, outright nasty responses and sense of entitlement don't automatically make you a victim. Stop trying to police other people's thoughts, responses, beliefs and predictions about Tiktok.
And yes, pretty please, can you please get off my lawn? I didn't come here to witness mental derangement.
> If that was the point, what's the point of stating that point?
"The thing y'all enjoy now will be crap in a few years, get off my lawn?"
> I care about the future, I don't care much for reading other people's Magic 8 Balls.
Sorry but that assertion makes no sense at all. Caring about the future does not mean naive wishful thinking.
Caring about the future means analysing the likely outcomes and act so that the best ones are the most likely outcomes and the worst ones are least likely.
TikTok has a very clear and obvious attack surface. This attack surface has been known to be exploited in a certain way. Intentionally turning a blind eye to the clear and real threat it poses is the exact opposite of caring about the future because you are thus actively engaged in enabling the worst possible outcome to become a reality.
You do not make problems go away by pretending they don't exist.
Can we perhaps agree that there is a possibility for things to go bad in the future (in regards to data collection and privacy), but that today we have no concrete evidence of it?
> Things always can go bad, and, often, do go bad. That's almost vacuously true.
> What would one expect to come out of saying that, other than the feeling of smug satisfaction at some point in the future?
Why, take action to ensure things won't go bad?
Is that concept hard to understand? That preparation is the key?
I mean, why do people waste their time going out of their way to go to a crosswalk and wait for the light to go green to cross a street? They can simply jaywalk their way through life without bothering with hypothetical traffic accidents. But what value is there in doing that? People can get run over and often do get run over. That's almost vacuously true. What would one expect to come out of saying that people should cross the street in crosswalks other than the feeling of smug satisfaction at some point in the future when a jaywalking fool gets ran over but they don't as a result of thinking things through and avoiding obvious problems?
Under that same logic nothing that could potentially ever go badly should ever be discussed as it can always happen and thus there is no value in discussing it?
Not all of us think along the same lines.
Some might like to believe that things are perfectly fine and there is no harm in participating.
Some might realize the potential for harm, but simply not care about the outcome.
Others have a different opinion, one of caution and not participating in case things do go bad.
It has nothing to do with feelings of 'smug satisfaction'.
I do truly hope that you aren't surrounded by people for whom it would for these kinds of discussions.
A discussion about how TikTok can go bad, and what we can do about it would be valuable. And for that discussion, we'd need to understand what makes TikTok so good that it's taken the #1 spot.
Saying "TikTok bad, don't use it" is the opposite of having a discussion.
TikTok has a lot going for it as a platform, but you should always understand a company's motivations when using their product. TikTok wants you to spend more time with your digital friends, because they make money from peppering ads in your experience with them. So sure, much like Facebook, Twitter or any other platform with the same business model, they will tacitly encourage users to spend as much time as possible on the platform.
I've seen this comment echoed with Tumblr, Instagram, Musical.ly and about every other social media platform. The issue with them? Corporate interests superseded user control, and the whole thing went sideways. Nobody's telling you that you can't like TikTok, and I don't doubt you have an extensive list of all the things you like about it. Undeniably though, TikTok is stepping on the exact same banana peel that every other network did, even if they do a damn good job of controlling their western narrative.
Keep using TikTok if it makes you happy, but remember that happiness doesn't come from apps, it's a state of mind. There are healthier, less destructive ways to surround yourself with the content you love, trust me.
Too many to unpack here, but I'll start with this.
Repeat after me: digital friends are friends.
Personally, TikTok takes a very small fraction of my life (I go there when I don't feel I can do anything else), and I have many "real world" friends to interact with offline.
And I met some of them through social networks.
Question to consider for you: during the pandemic, when one probably couldn't see most of their friends and had to interact with them remotely, did they cease being friends?
Also, just an FYI, your comment comes off as patronizing, missing my point, and making a lot of assumptions about me.
And remember, there are healthier, less destructive ways to surround yourself with the content you love than writing such comments on HackerNew, trust me.
Just wanted to add: aside from assumptions you seem to be making about me and my usage of TikTok, I agree with your points.
>TikTok is stepping on the exact same banana peel
I wouldn't count on TikTok being great in a few years too.
But what I've seen with many products, platforms, and ideas is that something good comes along, perishes, and then the uniquely good parts are gone for good because people didn't get what was good specifically, and so nobody took the torch to carry it forward.
When Facebook started, the novel idea was creating a social network that connected people who already had something in common: namely, going to the same school. That's why it blew up. Because it facilitated bonding within those communities.
It was exclusive by design (no .edu email = no Facebook, not same school = no seeing info), and that's what made it great for the initial wave of users that made it big.
TikTok blew up for a similar reason. It connects people who are already related in some way really well: either by a common interest, or - as in the case I am highlighting - by sharing the experiences of being adults with ADHD / ASD / OCD / BPD / depression / anxiety / burnout / trauma / abuse etc -- a demographic for which it's hard to connect (and be open!) with people in general, people who can't relate doubly so (and unless you know someone really well, it's not something that you can openly discuss in this society).
This is the idea I want to highlight. I want that on other platforms. I want someone to make it when TikTok goes down the drain. And so far, few seem to understand what it is that TikTok gave us -- so we might be left without a platform again in a few years.
Which would suck.
>Nobody's telling you that you can't like TikTok
Many people in the thread shamed me for liking TikTok. If you scroll up, I've been accused of (quote):
* being an addict to parasocial relationships with content creators (with many implying that I only consume that content)
* enabling oppression and exploitation of underprivileged content creators
* etc
So yes, people here are literally telling me that it's bad to like using TikTok, equating it to a moral transgression.
>There are healthier, less destructive ways to surround yourself with the content you love, trust me.
It's not about content. It's about people.
And what basis do you have for telling me to trust you here? Do you have credentials in mental health to back that up, or are you just being patronizing? Relatable experience? Genuinely curious.
Note that I am not telling anyone here what they should do, I only give my perspective as a user of the platform.
But if you do know of "less destructive" ways, pray, do tell, how would one go about connecting to a couple of dozen people who would be willing to openly talk (with voice! while showing their faces!) about how they experienced the symptoms of surviving narcissistic abuse, how they spotted it within themselves, and what helps them personally?
Without paying a dime, I must add?
I'll be checking this comment for responses, because either I'll learn something new (great!), or I see no response, and conclude that you learned something new (even better!).
Some people want tiktoks algo to exposure folks to the right wing militia folks and jam up the interaction heavily (offsense / counter offense).
Tiktok (arguably) doesn't do this, but keeps people exposed to happy bubbles. If you click away quickly from LGBTQ+ you'll see less of it? Maybe?
I'm not LGBTQ myself but I get plenty of that content. I can imagine tiktok also paying attention to this country by country (ie, Saudi Arabia probably not getting as much?).
I read these types of things as the outrage / offense response, and at least from what I can see plenty of interesting (and diverse) folks are on tiktok. My feed feels MORE diverse their then facebook for example (including more unusual things relative to my FB feed including viewpoints) Comments seem more positive as a result.
I'd love to hear your long list of reasons why. This is coming from someone who has heard of Tik Tok but has never used it. I'm a late adopter to social platforms, joining Twitter in 2014 and not really using it until last year.
The social media functionality is the secondary purpose of the app, the first being surveillance and data collection.
Of course Google, Facebook, and a million other companies do the same thing, all completely disregarding user privacy in favor of selling your information for a quick buck, thereby making the internet a more hostile environment for taking advantage of the technologically uninitiated than ever before. TikTok is just the latest in a line of the worst thing to happen to the internet.
>The social media functionality is the secondary purpose of the app
That's like saying that providing people with groceries is the secondary purpose of grocery stores, the first being collecting money in exchange for them.
Duh! How horrible! Everyone would be better off if they just grew their own food on their own farm, like in the good old days
Saying TikTok is the "worst" thing is absurd given the article we're discussing. The people clearly see value for them in TikTok that hasn't been provided by other services, and adding that to the Internet is unambiguously great.
So the value to the users TikTok brings is unique and novel, whereas any potential harm to the users doesn't really change (as everyone and their grandma are collecting all the data already).
Yesterday, an average user had, say, 11 data-collecting apps — and today, it's 12. It's not great, but very little changes for the user. Hardly the worst thing IMO.
> That's like saying that providing people with groceries is the secondary purpose of grocery stores, the first being collecting money in exchange for them.
No, not really. Like Facebook or Google, TikTok's revenue comes from selling ads. The advertisement business quite literally is based on how much personal info they can gather on yourself, and how they can leverage it to allow themselves and third parties to exploit that info to make you more vulnerable to their goals.
In case I didn't make it clear, providing data about yourself and making yourself more "vulnerable" to advertisers is the currency you pay with for using the platform.
As far as I care, letting random people know random facts about me so that they're more likely to peddle me stuff that I actually like is not "exploitation", but that's merely an opinion.
> In case I didn't make it clear, providing data about yourself and making yourself more "vulnerable" to advertisers is the currency you pay with for using the platform.
No, not really. No one uses a platform like TikTok because they are eager to share their personal data to marketers, and most are entirely oblivious even to which personal data is the service gathering on them.
Just because a platform or service or system is free to access that does not mean that we are allowing mysterious third parties to spy on us.
You have almost no control over what information you're giving them though. It's more like having to pay the mob for "protection" and then turning to me and saying, "What? That's the price for safety in this neighborhood. I'm choosing to pay."
The problem with data collection is not what they companies doing it use it for at the moment. The problem is making so many details of your personal life discoverable by someone simply buying some data and cross referencing databases.
When you lose privacy willingly saying "but I have nothing to hide" you also lose the ability to hide from bad actors.
The way you phrase that it sounds like these social media companies black mail you with dirty secrets they learn about you. I understand why people don't want to be packaged and sold, but a realistic view is that you're getting a service subsidized by all of this.
> The way you phrase that it sounds like these social media companies black mail you with dirty secrets they learn about you.
You may come up with the hyperboles you wish, but the truth of the matter is that a) these companies spy on their user base, b) they don't divulge or inform you about how they spy on you, c) they obviously do not defend you or have your best interests in mind, d) they don't even clarify what they do or intend to do with the data they gather on you nor ask for your informed consent about anything.
I don't care if Google convinces some company to pay them while Google provides a service to me without paying. Of course they're going to try and monetize it anyway they can. I don't think Walmart has my best interests either, so there is nothing special about social media companies. Nor do social media companies have a monopoly on "spying" on their users.
I recall reading a case study over a decade ago about how a dad learned his daughter was pregnant because Target was sending her ads to register for a baby because she was buying things people buy early in their pregnancy like pre-natal vitamins.
Precisely. The first purpose is pure invasive data collection of everything on the platform; otherwise how else is that so-called 'legendary recommendation algorithm' supposed to work? That and your data is the key asset that is being sold over and used by other companies as well, which is a violation of user privacy.
The news here is reassuring to investors and the users like the parent comment are once again the prime product addicted under a para-social relationship with other addicted influencers working for the 'legendary recommendation algorithm'.
They will continue to deny how social networks like TikTok keep screwing over their users repeatedly, even when they pretend that they are 'supporting the users' when in fact the investors are waiting for their giant exit for ByteDance's IPO. After that, we will see who ByteDance (TikTok) really listens to.
To the GP comment:
> Anyway, we are talking about specific things we like about TikTok as a platform that make it unique (so far), and you are talking in abstract.
It is not 'abstract' and the comment [0] (and this related comment [1]) you replied to, has evidence of their claims and is factual. It is your 'anecdotes' which are in denial of these facts.
One thing of note is that them collecting everything on the platform doesn't really hit me in the same way as facebook doing. Somehow tho tiktok gets more hate.
Facebook being a more traditional social media has people dropping info and stuff about their plain personal life whilst tiktok is more of a content platform like youtube.
Also unlike facebook and google tiktok has a thougher time following people all around the internet which is probably by far the biggest invasion of privacy.
Might be just me but I'm way more scared of the CCP then of the FB board of directors. The latter hasn't really used online data for genocide purposes yet...
>the users like the parent comment are once again the prime product addicted under a para-social relationship with other addicted influencers
That's quite a leap from what I said, not to mention a personal attack.
Comment [0] doesn't make any factual claims about TikTok (please, go and read it).
Comment [1] is outdated, as the policy they has changed since then. "That wall was black two years ago" is a factual claim, but the wall has been repainted since, and anyone with a pair of eyes can go take a look.
Also, as a member of the several demographics mentioned in that comment - and, ostensibly, oppressed by TikTok -, me saying that my experience was the opposite and extremely valuable should make you reconsider your words.
Have you been affected by TikTok's policy towards vulnerable people? If not, please do not speak on our behalf.
> That's quite a leap from what I said, not to mention a personal attack.
Isn't this what you just said? This is you:
> TikTok's algorithm has introduced me to my (now) favorite neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ content makers. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers, some a few hundred.
> All the people I interact with there get me. I've never felt this anywhere else.
From [0] 'Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them.' [0]
Do they know you personally as if they are your close friends? If not, they will just see you essentially as a fan in a para-social relationship on a platform like TikTok. That is not a personal attack, that is the definition of what you are describing.
> Comment [0] doesn't make any factual claims about TikTok (please, go and read it).
So you are saying that there weren't any leaks happening about TikTok then, which suggests that they can suppress any content they want to or shadow-ban tags? So you trust them that they won't do it again then, since you think in your opinion that 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet.'
10 years ago, another social network had the same accolade.
My friend, I am not here to dispel your misconceptions, but I'll just note that you find HN a worthwhile community to participate in due to level of discourse here, then the same "para-social addict" label is applicable to you by your logic.
You can't 'follow' anyone on this site and anyone can simply have a random discussion here with anybody. The logic you tried to apply here doesn't work and isn't the same thing unlike what is going on in 'TikTok'.
As for my question(s) you are yet to answer, I'll make the first one more clearer for you:
>> Do they (the people you are following on TikTok) know you personally as if they are your close friends?
>> So you are saying that there weren't any leaks happening about TikTok then, which suggests that they can suppress any content they want to or shadow-ban tags? So you trust them that they won't do it again then, since you think in your opinion that 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet.'?
I don't have any skin in this game, but I think it's very sad to see that the conclusion being drawn from this discussion is that it's unprovoked hostility. I see disagreements and different values.
I hope both parties in this discussion can disconnect the message from the person.
Having discussions with people we disagree with about topics we see differently is in my honest opinion the way we get out of the "us vs them" tendency to think.
Right but how was that 'unprovoked hostility'? How was disagreeing with someone with a reason being 'hostile'? For the claims, I just used what they already admitted?
All I wanted was evidence for their claims and that was it. Instead I got anecdotes, false equivalences in their arguments which is not substantiative.
I also just asked a simple question, they couldn't even answer it. For the second question they did not provide any counter evidence to my question. All my questions were left ignored.
> I really don't have to do that, but maybe if you see this enough times, you will get to learn something.
You tried to argue with a false equivalence earlier and then continue to ignore a basic question about the definition of having a 'para-social relationship' with the people you follow on TikTok which you have just described all by yourself in that long post [0] which everyone can see for themselves.
Before you try to ignore the question again, isn't what you have just described here [0] a 'para-social relationship' and fits the definition described here? [1][2]
> Hostility was saying that people "like me" are addicts to parasocial relationships.
So these creators know you personally then and don't treat you like a follower, or a fan then?, and somehow you are not 'addicted' to TikTok then?
On top of that you haven't given an answer to these questions:
>> So you are saying that there weren't any leaks happening about TikTok then, which suggests that they can suppress any content they want to or shadow-ban tags? So you trust them that they won't do it again then, since you think in your opinion that 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet.'?
> So I humbly ask you to cease.
So far you have given zero evidence in all of your own comments and you are actively ignoring my questions right here. Substantiate your comments by answering these questions with evidence and sources, as I'll just continue to assume.
>I think it's very sad to see that the conclusion being drawn from this discussion is that it's unprovoked hostility.
I think it's sad that unprovoked hostility isn't recognized.
>I hope both parties in this discussion can disconnect the message from the person
The message rvz makes is about a person, namely, me. They said: "users like the parent comment are once again the prime product addicted under a para-social relationship with other addicted influencers".
That message makes a claim about me, and this is not acceptable.
>Having discussions with people we disagree with about topics we see differently is in my honest opinion the way we get out of the "us vs them" tendency to think.
You don't get to have opinions or disagreements on what goes on inside other people.
Someone calling me an addict to parasocial relationships is not an opinion we should be agreeing or disagreeing about. Unless specifically asked, by me, you don't get to opine on that.
> The message rvz makes is about a person, namely, me. They said: "users like the parent comment are once again the prime product addicted under a para-social relationship with other addicted influencers".
> That message makes a claim about me, and this is not acceptable.
Some of the commenters here already have also suggested that TikTok is even more addictive than the other social networks; perhaps designed to be this way. How is it 'unacceptable' to suggest that users like yourself and influencers are also addicted as well since TikTok's recommendation algorithm is getting something right on its users over the rest of the other social networks?
So you are not addicted to TikTok then? (Despite you actively creating content on the platform and admitting it has '...made me life better already' and saying '...TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet.' and describing to have a parasocial interaction with creators with hundreds of thousands of other followers)
> Someone calling me an addict to parasocial relationships is not an opinion we should be agreeing or disagreeing about. Unless specifically asked, by me, you don't get to opine on that.
Well you put what you do on TikTok for other people right here to comment and you yourself admitted what is described by definition as a parasocial interaction. If that doesn't fit the definition, I don't know what does.
Nope. I already pointed out your flawed logic earlier and as for the 'claims', you already admitted it right here though? Your comment [0] completely fits the definition of a para-social relationship! [1][2]
You won't answer my first question because you know that you are engaging in a para-social relationship with the people you are following on TikTok. Not even remotely a 'personal attack' a simple 'fact' that you already admitted earlier.
Given that you continue to avoid the first question, I can assume that the creators you follow don't know you and to them, you are simply a 'fan' or 'follower' of them in a para-social relationship as described in. [1]
Now for my other questions that you still haven't answered:
>> So you are saying that there weren't any leaks happening about TikTok then, which suggests that they can suppress any content they want to or shadow-ban tags? So you trust them that they won't do it again then, since you think in your opinion that 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet.'?
> TikTok's algorithm has introduced me to my (now) favorite neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ content makers.
But when did that start? Possibly earlier before the “people who attract trouble” filters were added in to the algorithms or tweaked. Now you've shown engagement with those families of content other parts of the recommendation system will be taking precedence over the negative filters. A newer user than yourself may have quite a different experience, only finding those groups through external recommendation.
> Honestly, if they decide to keep it a clique... I don't mind at all.
So now you are in the clique, you are fine with it being a clique (not just that: a clique born of external pressure to keep it quiet, not through the cliques choice) and other like you but not there yet can fend for themselves?
[I'm deliberately pulling your words towards an extreme a little here to make a point: being happy with your position in the status quo does not mean it is a good status quo, just that you exist near a local maxima]
As the userbase continues to grow, these artificial cliques will become increasingly more minority and the whole system will become a more unpleasant place for people who don't fit the supported pattern (and as they are filtering the bullied not the bullies, the supported pattern, the future majority if it isn't already, implicitly includes the bullies).
> All the people I interact with there get me. I've never felt this anywhere else.
While the filtering described above (stop bullying by hiding the people who might be bullied because it is easier than actually dealing with the bullies) can be seen to have a positive effect of keeping the knuckle-dragging numbskulls away from your communities, it also hides your communities from others like you who might need their support or could otherwise benefit from being part of them.
> but simply being themselves
As long as you don't mind being yourselves to a limited audience, where the limits are set by external pressures not your needs/desires. If you'll forgive another appeal to the extreme: tiktok filtering differences that might attract bullying seems to me not dissimilar to allowing you to be yourselves but only if you wouldn't mind terribly, being who you are in just those specific seats at the back of the bus, thanks.
---
Not that I have an axe to grind for myself here (straight, white, middle class, middle-aged, native English speaker, approaching financially comfortable, ..., about as divergent as an entirely undivergent thing) other than a bit of bullied-for-being-different as a kid (being a geek/nerd type wasn't fashionable back then) but I have friends & other contacts all over the various spectra and from what I know of their experiences and how tiktok is run and how similar things have played out over the decades, what you describe sounds to be a very short term good thing that is (and will continue to be if unchecked) an increasingly closed off part of the system, a walled garden built not to keep you safe but to keep you out of sight. Allowing yourself to be kept out of sight is not how to encourage society to move forward and be more accepting.
A lot of your argument seems to be based on the assumption that I've been on the platform for a long time.
I joined last month.
Specifically, over a year after the article cited by the parent comment was written.
That's my point here: I don't know if their algorithms were bad in the past, they are not bad now in the way the parent comment claimed then to be.
As for the rest of your comment, you seem to miss that we're already out of sight away from TikTok, so your doomsday scenario is my yesterday. And we are so isolated that a walled garden is a huge improvement over solitude.
There's tremendous value in creating safe spaces for people to connect with people who understand each other better. HackerNews is such space for tech.
The incredible thing about TikTok is the the algorithm can connect you to the right people even if you're not consciously aware of belonging to the group.
As in "Wait, I didn't know that I'd be into programming so much until I found out what it actually is after watching all these videos, and now that I know, I enjoy interacting with software developers tremendously".
And, as I pointed out, we already have other platforms to speak out to the world (which, consistently, chooses not to listen).
What TikTok does is an unparalleled reach to speak to each other.
It's peer-to-peer way more than you'd think looking from the outside in.
Let’s say that this purported effect of hiding the ”divergent” to ostensibly avoid bullying does not exist at any substantial rate, at least not for you. I’m still curious what you think about the claims in the articles further up the thread, regarding steps they took to try to make that happen (even if maybe they were unsuccessful). Personally, it doesn’t leave me with a great taste in my mouth.
Let's be clear: it sucks, and at least it used to happen.
But it sucks precisely because there's no other platform that gives the neurodivergent crowd a voice the way TikTok does.
This is why I'm talking about it! If the engineers in the West don't understand the value of TikTok, we'll never get a homegrown alternative.
Think about TikTok as an apartment complex with an awful landlord that sometimes kicks disabled people out...
...while still remaining the only accessible housing for disabled people in town.
Everyone here is saying that obviously it's going to turn into a slum, look how it mistreats disabled people!
And I say, please come and see for yourself how this place is different from others if you want us to move, because this goddamn slum at least has wheelchair ramps, and wherever y'all are living does not.
Short legth limits, audio captioning, using audio from another video so you don't have to talk, easy text placement (again, so you don't have to talk), all videos are vertical, ability to respond to a comment with a video (and encouraging it by imposing 150 char limit), responding to another video with video (including part of it for context), ability to download videos (so you can play or edit them however you want),
— and that's just off the top of my head on the content creation side. Off the top of my head.
Most importantly, it's that algorithm does a good job at bringing you the right audience, having one-click promotion tools, having detailed analytics, etc.
If you don't see this as accessibility features, well, that's my entire point.
The net result is that a TikTok post can start a conversation, with videos. And someone just talking - or just acting to audio - is first-class content. As is just showing a slice of your life and slapping some text on it.
Even if you make such content on other platforms, it'll have zero reach there. You have to do much more work to have people watch a video on IG or FB (people would just scroll past your video without playing it), or YouTube (whose UX strongly favors long videos, otherwise it's too many clicks).
The effort required to make a video for other platforms that people would see is a barrier that TikTok creators don't face.
This applies to everyone, but neurodivergent people benefit from it especially.
> That's my point here: I don't know if their algorithms were bad in the past, they are not bad now in the way the parent comment claimed then to be.
It isn't that the algorithms have been changed for the better. It is that they don't affect your use case. People expressing the things you want to see expressed are they and can be found if searched for, the recommendation algorithms don't have a significant effect there.
> The incredible thing about TikTok is the the algorithm can connect you to the right people even if you're not consciously aware of belonging to the group.
While the algorithm is serving you more content from those groups now you have been identified it isn't the algorithm that got you there in the first place, and once it has put you in your clique it is perfectly happy to give you more content from within that clique and serve any content you share within that clique.
If that is good for you then that is fine, but you have been digitally segregated. The algorithm doesn't mark individual items of content as being targets for bullying and so hides them from the larger population, it marks the user who posted that content (and possibly those that interacted with it too). What about people within the clique that the algorithm's filters are is assigning them to who have other interests too, and they want to express those widely? To make up a realistic example: my friend who happens to be trans puts out a great little clip based on one of Fiore's dagger plays, as does someone else who isn't (or hasn't been identified as by the TikTok) in any minority group, me for example. My clip has a greater chance of being presented by the recommendation algorithms to the whole global HEMA community, hers will likely only ever be presented to other users within the assigned clique. Nothing stops either bit of content being published, found by direct link, found by people that know us so might check our stuff specifically, and so forth, but because of the “hide users who bullies might pile on, instead of actually dealing with the bullies” filter the spread of her content will probably be more curtailed than mine because she is trans despite the content not being related to that part of her identity in any way shape or form.
> What TikTok does is an unparalleled reach to speak to each other.
Which is fine if you don't want to use the platform for anything else. You might be happy[†] being segregated into a clique by these filters, or at least otherwise unaffected by the fact because you don't want to use TikTok for anything else, but other people are inconvenienced by it, potentially significantly so.
There may be workarounds of course. Perhaps having multiple accounts. But that is asking people to make an effort to not be inconvenienced which is itself inconvenient, and the multiple accounts thing might not even work reliably as accounts could end up linked to each other in the back-end by various means either deliberate or as an emergent behaviour of tracking and classification functions.
For the avoidance of doubt: I think it is a very good thing that you have been able to “find your people”, to find an environment in which you feel safe to be you, in which you feel both understood and supported. Just be careful that this safe environment doesn't slide into becoming more of a prison, keeping you in rather than keeping negatives out.
The masses generally don't care. I mean, if you look at the Apple debacle recently, most people will forget about it or won't even be aware about it after a few months.
It looks like you know enough to hate it without using it.
What's up with the sense of superiority here?
The "masses" do care, but if you were an active user of the platform, you'd know that nothing comes even close to what TikTok brings to the table.
E.g.: do I care that TikTok censors LGBTQ+ crowd? Absolutely.
But guess which platform allows me to connect with that demographic the most. Yup, that's still TikTok. And what I learned on that platform changed my life for the better like a magic wand.
What you say is a prime example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Focusing only on the obvious and known downsides means being blind as to why it is the most downloaded app, which is what I try to illuminate by my comments.
And it's the #1 app not because "the masses" are stupid.
>But guess which platform allows me to connect with that demographic the most. Yup, that's still TikTok. And what I learned on that platform changed my life for the better like a magic wand.
Can you elaborate further? This seems quite intense praise. What do you mean by "changed my life like a magic wand"? It's just hyperactive short videos, isn't it?
There is a fledgling neurodivergent community (people with ADHD, ASD, etc) who openly talk about what the symptoms look like from the perspective of people who experience them, how to cope with them, and how all of this fits into the larger picture of our existence in this world.
A lot of people have never been diagnosed because their symptoms don't manifest themselves in a "typical" way. DSM is written from the perspective of "describe how your teenage son makes life inconvenient for you" when it comes to ADHD/ASD, not "which everyday experience are awfully hard for you".
Due to the abysmal state of healthcare access in the US, including mental healthcare, and persistent stigmatization of mental healthcare, self-diagnosis is now effectively the first (and the most important) step towards getting an official diagnosis and care (or simply taking advantage of all the available resources).
On top of that, normalizing the discourse surrounding mental health disorders and neurotypes, and showing how ADHD, ASD, OCD, BPD, anxiety, depression, etc. feel to the person who experiences it has an enormous impact on adults who have been struggling all their lives without ever realizing why.
Realizing both that most people don't face the same challenges (i.e. that it's easy for them to do things that are challenging to you!), and finding that you are not alone, and finding out how to deal with it, and finding a supportive community - all of that is life-changing.
In fewer words, imagine having a shrimp allergy, but living in a society that does not recognize allergies and shames people who don't eat shrimp as "weak".
So you eat shrimp every day, feel awful because your body can't handle it, and then feel guilty for not being "strong" enough. "You are just not trying hard enough!", the society tells you.
Imagine discovering a community of people who have shrimp allergies. Learning that it's a thing. Learning that you don't have to eat the same things most people do, that there's a better way to experience food. Learning that if you can't avoid it, antihistamines exist that you can take to make the experience far more bearable. Learning that really, a shrimp allergy doesn't make you worthless as a person.
That's what the neurodivergent TikTok is currently doing.
My guess is that it just shows hyperactive short meaningless videos to you because either it doesn't have enough input from you to train the algorithm - or maybe that's what you like watching on of the platform. Perhaps your community isn't on TikTok yet.
But as one of the people ostensibly "harmed" by TikTok, I find it offensive that someone would so boldly speak on my behalf when my experience has been the exact opposite.
My observation is that it actually accelerated said brain-gain.
There was a crackdown on fraudulent H1B applications, with more RFEs being issued. That freed a lot of spots for legitimate applicants that were hogged by questionable bodyshops. It also incentivized attorneys to start looking at O-1 (and they are easier than people think for real engineers to get).
Academically, a lot was written (by foreign universities) about how the US was going to lose it's edge have a drop in applicants but the rankings didn't change during the last 4 years. I wouldn't be surprised if more people applied simply because they (erroneously) believed that admission would be a little less competitive with less applicants.
This is misleading though, because a majority of H1b applications are renewals (so folks already on an H1b), not new applications. On top of that, most renewals happen to be Indian Nationals because they have no pathway to obtain permanent residency in many cases.
Also how does a higher rejection rate lead to brain gain? I'd imagine it discourages a would be immigrant.
Curious what you're implying happened in the US in the last 4 years. Maybe I'm missing some important event other than Covid but that affects all countries.
Does a US competitor need to be FB? I would like to see a new more privacy focused social experience prop up. It doesn’t need to be a network per se, but it can be. How do we create a fertile bed for development of new connected experiences? Do we already have it? I am wary of venture capital culture that requires outsized gains. Isn’t there a slow stock market concept now?
the idea that Americans are more innovative hasn't been true for quite a while - look at Nio, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, and countless other examples.
I wonder how many employees at these corporations previously worked at Tesla, Apple, Cisco and Vines...
In Huawei's case, the binaries shipped with the products still had the Cisco copyright strings in them!
> back in 2008 when Facebook was tiny on a global scale, there was a German €100m company called StudiVZ that dominated the social networking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with about 10m active users.
The same that's happening with Facebook and Tik Tok - the new guys built a better product and that was it. In a sense, it's how life works - the winner takes it all. But that's only true in a 100% free-for-all society, whereas most countries have found that some level of regulation is better than none. To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic?
> To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic?
With GDPR Europe is actually moving toward a tax on tech by requiring local data-centers be used. If you can't innovate, time to regulate!
> and I bet you they wish they had shown their domestic company a bit more love back when this would have made a difference.
German here, the problem was different. Facebook was the more attractive portal - they offered stuff like third party apps. Farmville was the death penalty for Lokalisten and xVZ, who were very vocal about not having open APIs for a long time. People naturally flocked to Facebook just to play Farmville.
Facebook won because people from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland could not only connect with friends in their domestic and neighboring countries but because they could connect with friends all around the globe.
That's what pretty much happened all around the world with FB/IG or in one word standardization.
Not only that. Even thought VZ always showed impressive numbers it always was kinda niche. Definitely not as widespread as some comments make it out to be.
China was supposed to start overtaking the US, but the one child policy knee-capped that route. Now their workforce is getting much smaller and the burden of care for the elderly is growing fast.
Because the amount of farmers is mostly decoupled from total agricultural output for industrial societies until you hit ~2%. So they're not really productive in the way normal workers are.
This is an out of touch take from the TikTok=China=bad days of 2019/2020.
I see queer creators on TikTok all the time. Quite frequently actually.
This was the second video that showed up for me today, with 500k views (it is propaganda out of the White House, in collaboration with a popular queer creator): https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdosCgTr/
You really cannot make a claim about TikTok's content distribution based on your own feed. TikTok's feed is extremely hyper-targeted for each individual.
Isn't that the point? You can't say that tiktok "gets rid of people" in those demographics when Tiktok's algo creates all these micro communities where they flourish.
I've never seen more diversity and representation on social media than on Tiktok.
Sure, it "gets rid of people" by isolating them into bubbles and makes sure people who don't want to see it, well, won't see it. Is it "representation" if it's only seen by people who want to see it?
I think it's a big question, and one that applies to most social media, even if TikTok is one of the most extreme examples. Is it ethically/morally/socially good to de facto isolate niche groups of like-minded people into closed spaces? It feels bad to me, but I've also considered that people are "hard wired" for much smaller groups. Maybe the best way to deal with the scale of social media is to condense it down to small, isolated communities, although I personally prefer to actively choose them myself, rather than being herded by an algorithm into some unlabeled cluster with similar viewing habits.
>Is it "representation" if it's only seen by people who want to see it?
Why is that objectionable? It's not like people don't know about queer or trans people and tiktok is shielding them from knowing, people know and just aren't interested. Forcing people to watch things they aren't interested in only makes them resentful and fed up with them, instead of simply uninterested. Interest can't be demanded.
I don't think it's objectionable, I just think it's relevant to the discussion. I think most people use the word "representation" to mean a topic or idea being seen/floated within a larger audience, e.g. "representation" is having <x> actor in a Hollywood blockbuster (for the purpose of, say, exposing more people to a positive image of <x>). This doesn't seem like representation to me.
That said, if the goal of representation is just to provide more media/content for people who like <x>, then yes, this is representation. That's not how I think of the word, but words don't have concrete meanings in the real world.
No, quite honestly I think they are stupid (and was called a homophobe for that once).
Having minority characters in itself is perfectly okay, overcompensating in the other direction and flooding people's media with people that barely make up 10% of the population in a misguided attempt to "promote tolerance" is bizarre.
Coupled with the fact that supporters of this idea all seem to share a very moralistic attitude and jump at the opportunity to call any critic the most extreme names they can come up with, that makes the idea pretty weak in my eyes.
> Is it "representation" if it's only seen by people who want to see it?
Yes. Definitely. The representation matters most to the people in that bubble. I just think about how great it would have been to see more queer media when was growing up.
Okay, that's fair. It's a different kind of representation than what I was thinking of, though, meaning general exposure of an idea to some kind of broader audience.
From an individual's perspective, being in a bubble is great. I get it. I just get a little anxiety at the idea of society being partitioned into a bunch of self-reaffirming bubbles of different extremes, something that's starting to feel very real in the US lately.
50k is really amateur numbers. 50k people have probably already read you comment. Charli Damelio's last post was her eating a bag of Takis for 20 seconds and it got 15 MILLION views. We're just not seeing those numbers in marginalized communities on tiktok but we do see queer creators with top-tier numbers on youtube, facebook, insta, etc. Where's the trans Charli or the obese Charli or the anti-capitalist Charli?
Secondly, you're cherry picking examples. First you can't see how much more exposure these people would have had. Secondly, you're probably not in a country where these people would be invisible to you.
Cherry-picking model minorities isn't helping your case at all. I'm not seeing anything too upsetting to the status quo here or to anything that might threaten tiktok economically. Those voices certainly aren't going to be heard as much. This is like cherry picking popular books, movies, and posters in China and saying, "So where's all the censorship then?" Survivorship bias is at work here, you're only really seeing the survivors.
Its incredible that tiktok literally has admitted to this:
Yet somehow the popular HN response is alt-right denial and dismissal of anything that remotely sounds "SJW" to them. Literally after The Intercept and Netzpolitik broke these stories to the public. Its not even in the realm of "wow are they doing this?" As much as it is in the realm of "How much of this are they doing and how much do we not know?"
“TikTok users posting videos with these hashtags are given the impression their posts are just as searchable as posts by other users, but in fact they aren’t,” the report said. “In practice, most of these hashtags are categorised in TikTok’s code in the same way that terrorist groups, illicit substances, and swear words are treated on the platform.”
Its incredible to me that the oppression could not be more obvious, yet bigoted attitudes guarantee that some people will refuse to believe even what tiktok says. The fact that this company is grouping terrorists with queer and disabled people is completely and utterly inexcusable.
Also encouraging vaccinations isn't "propaganda" but sane and safe health policy.
>alt-right denial and dismissal of anything that remotely sounds "SJW" to them.
Purely Pragmatic Advice : if people deny or dismiss something you think is true because of "SJW fatigue", accusing them of being alt-right is the last thing you want to do if you want to effectively sway them.
You are cherry picking influencers to try and argue your point.. How do you know Charli Damelio isn’t queer? Maybe the reason you don’t see a certain demographic doing big numbers on a platform is because the users on said platform are not interested? I find it odd that you immediately jump to the conclusion that it must be oppression because everybody doesn’t find what you think they should find interesting.
I’d rather watch somebody eat a bag of chips than listen to them talk about their sexual preferences.. I could care less what somebody finds attractive or who/what they are dating.
> Also encouraging vaccinations isn't "propaganda" but sane and safe health policy.
Sane and safe health policy can still be propaganda. The moment you distill things into messages you just repeat and push, it’s propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
As a queer person who uses TikTok, I think you should take some time to challenge your assumptions and get some more information. This video might be informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYEtQ5Zdn8
I should correct a mistake I made earlier: all of my numbers cited are likes not views. The TikTok promoting vaccines was seen 3.5 Million times. There are many queer creators with videos in the millions of views, and many more with videos in the hundreds of thousands.
Still, I don't think its reasonable to expect niche content from obese people to perform as well as generic content from normative people. I also don't think its reasonable to expect trans content to perform as well, given that a substantial portion of the US population still doesn't want to recognize or legalize their existence.
Yet, there is an abundance of queer content (content that sought me out, I never told TikTok that I'm gay), much of it quite niche. TikTok sends me enough gay male twink armpit fetish content that I don't realistically think you can say they're making a serious effort to suppress it.
If you're focusing on hashtags and not algorithm suggestions, I think you don't have a strong grasp of how TikTok works. All of the cited sources are quite old, so perhaps it was too early for folks to actually have time to use and understand the service.
Your claim that there is nothing threatening to China or TikTok economically is suspect, given the algorithm has also suggested Uighur muslim genocide content: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1RhcUj/ - there are many more. This one has 65k likes. I also had no trouble searching for Taiwan and finding content that is quite hostile to China. I've had the fyp send me content directly critical of TikTok itself.
> “In practice, most of these hashtags are categorised in TikTok’s code in the same way that terrorist groups, illicit substances, and swear words are treated on the platform.”
The implementation details of an app aren't necessarily meaningful in the way you suggest. Twitter does something similar; I can type #isis #gay #weed #sex, and now Twitter has code that handles lgbtq, terrorist, and illicit substance content the same way.
> also don't think its reasonable to expect trans content to perform as well, given that a substantial portion of the US population still doesn't want to recognize or legalize their existence
1.) A substantial portion of the US population doesn't want to recognize or legalize the existence of trans people? What are you talking about? You're aware of some faction that's actively trying to make being transgender illegal?
2.) Your expectation is that content produced by transgender individuals (less than 1% of the population) is on aggregate as popular as content made by the remaining 99% of people? Do you mind defining the distribution you would consider to be acceptable here, as well as why you think it currently isn't your desired distribution?
2) I am specifically contesting that assertion. We appear to have a case of violent agreement here. One of the earlier posts suggested that lack of a trans person with 10+ million views is evidence that TT is suppressing content. I contend that the relative unpopularity of trans-related content (only hundreds of thousands or a few million views) is well explained by structural factors and no intervention on TT’s part would be needed to create that outcome. If anything, my experience is that queer and trans content is overrepresented on the platform relative to what you’d expect based on the IRL population/demographics.
Okay well let's limit the conversation to #1, then. Let's start with legal, since it's easier.
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So, I don't understand what any of what you linked has to do with "legalizing the existence of trans people." Nothing referenced in the wikipedia article is remotely to do with making it illegal to be transgender, and I have never heard an argument advocating for that.
So what is being debated is whether or not transgender individuals should be granted protections on the basis of their gender identity. That is not debating whether or not they should exist, it is debating whether or not an additional legislative layer should be put in place to prevent workplace discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
Then there is a debate about birth certificates, about whether or not transgender individuals should be able to have their birth certificate reflect their chosen gender identity, but this is just as much to do with language as anything else. The concept of sex vs gender identity, and the meaning of "gender" as ambiguous between those depending on political faction. Again, this isn't a debate about whether transgender people can legally exist, it's a debate about whether the world should be altered so as to conform to their own perception of themselves.
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This leads to "recognition." Your definition of "recognition" seems to be "recognized within the exact framing of themselves as they wish to be seen." Let's consider two examples of identity related dysphoria. One is a born biological male who considers his gender identity to be female, and one is a man on a street corner that believes himself to be Jesus Christ. If the rest of society refused to see the man on the corner as Jesus Christ, would you say that this was society not recognizing the existence of the man? Surely not. The acceptance of his existence, and the application of all human rights applied to the individual have nothing to do with whether or not people accept this man on all of the terms of his asserted identity. In regards to transgender individuals, accepting this person's identity often boils down to strict hardline questions, a la "is this person a woman?" Any degree of nuance in the answer to that question is to be understood as society "not recognizing the existence" of transgender people? No. I'm sorry. But a failure to recognize somebody exactly within the framing of their own identity that they put forward is not the same as not accepting their existence. That language is absurd.
I don’t know why you would limit the discussion to #1 when #2 is the only part that is really relevant to the topic at hand.
Assertion 1 is offered as evidence that TT wouldn’t need to actively suppress trans content for it to be unpopular. Perhaps that was unconvincing. I’d say you’re arguing a lot about specifics of terms to weasel out of accepting that some people don’t like trans people. The language argument is particularly weak in the way that arguments about word usage usually are. It is in fact quite common to use the language of “existence” when discussing gender/sex/orientation identity. Whether the physically don’t exist in a country, don’t exist as lgbt people, or don’t count as people at all: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/prominent-leader-chechnya-sa...
Okay, so if we're talking about murdering people because they are trans, that is what I'm talking about as not allowing them to exist. So let's look at the data. 33 gender-non-conforming people killed in 2021, by August, which we can extrapolate out to 50 for the year.
So, 50/19,000 means that 0.26% of murders are to gender-non-conforming people, which is less than the 0.6% of the US population which identifies as transgender. So the murders are literally under represented. And given that the murders are a broader category of gender-non-conforming, vs the 0.6% figure which is a subset that is specifically trans, the degree to which gender-non-conforming people are murdered as compared to the general population is even more under-represented.
So, no, trans people are not being prevented from existing in that capacity in the United States.
Now, in regards to not accepting people's identity, as I've already said...this is a completely different thing. If you take someone like JK Rowling, who is frequently labeled a TERF, then the criteria for "not allowing trans people to exist" is literally predicated on the existence of somebody who says that biological women exist as a valid category that is distinct from trans women. That is what JK Rowling says. She doesn't say trans people don't exist. She doesn't say that trans identities aren't valid, or that she wouldn't treat a trans person by the gender they identify with. She just says that a biological woman is a valid categorization. Now, of course there are people that don't accept that trans people's identities are what they say they are, but again, this also includes a good deal of semantic disagreement.
When a trans woman asserts "I am a woman," and somebody else says "no you're not," there is quite a bit of semantic warfare going on in that disagreement. The trans woman is saying, "I am a woman, which I mean to say that my gender is woman, which I mean to say is that my gender identity is woman, and therefore I am a woman." The critic says "no, you are not a woman, which I mean to say that your sex is not a woman." Again, this is not denying their right to exist, this is functionally a semantic argument. Freedom to exist does not mean that everyone in the society accepts the identity you put forth, and this isn't just limited to gender issues.
Have you responded to the wrong comment here? You seem to be agreeing that obese, trans and other niche content is likely to be less popular than generic, less niche content.
1.) A substantial portion of the US population doesn't want to recognize or legalize the existence of trans people? What are you talking about? You're aware of some faction that's actively trying to make being transgender illegal?
Hard to read what you disagree with here, but yes there are factions that are trying to make behaviours that trans people exhibit illegal. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
No one said that there are no queer people on TikTok, or that they get no exposure. They said that TikTok artificially limits their exposure in several ways, especially outside their home country. That's probably not a big deal if they're in the US, but potentially a very big deal elsewhere.
I dunno: this bad posture video is some BS. It seems to be teaching just a different bad posture. People might be liking it, and TikTok might not be discriminating against it (which at least is positive), but that is no indication that the content is of any quality.
Anecdotally, I browse r/TikTokCringe (which, despite the name, is not exclusively cringe TikToks) and it sometimes feels like that number is much closer 50% or higher.
It's nice to see the data supports my observation.
Someone will always post this on top of any thread about TikTok and that someone must not have tried Tik Tok for very long. My feed is chok full of those that are supposed to be discriminated against, they have solid audiences, and there's great healthy communities around disabilities, LGBTQI+, race issues, politics...I rarely get a hot white babe doing a trendy dance and if i do she will probably have a prosthetic leg
I would have to disagree with you about the anti-queer slant. Maye it's what I've tuned the algorithm to, but I see far, far, far more queer and people of color on TikTok than any media form I have previously encountered.
Something tells me we don't have too many Chinese nationals living in China on hackernews either.
Or on Reddit. Or Facebook.
In fact, I saw the most content from China.. on TikTok. And since those were dance videos, I quickly skipped them. But I don't know if Chinese-speaking people in the US have the same experience.
Neither. Maybe I was unclear. I was responding to commenters saying "I often see uncensored LBGTQ+ content". I am assuming those posts are hidden from users in China. But it's just speculation!
You're not going to include the excerpt where a TikTok representative stated this was a bad practice and that they don't do those these things anymore?
But I mean, we can all still find evidence of FB malfeasance, and I can find evidence of cool fat queer people showing up in my For You feed at the very least
It doesn't really moot the point. If they did stuff as egregious as that, we can make inferences about the company, their goals, and other stuff that they could be doing.
I joined Facebook (WhatsApp specifically) in January after working at Amazon for many years. It's evident to me that the company has been and continues to invest massively in privacy and privacy protection – to the extent of inventing new internal technologies that enforce it automatically while handling data, so that software developers don't have to add manual "Should this person/software system be able to access this content" checks all over the various sprawling systems that comprise such a massive platform: software that is privacy-protecting while handling data by default. This tech spans both employees and users. Additionally, all projects undergo a privacy review process, so as not to rely purely on technology. (And, who knows, maybe someday the tech will be open sourced such as FB released Apache Thrift, PyTorch, React, and tons of other tech).
(I will acknowledge that privacy means different things to different people, and that some people may consider a company building a profile of their behavior – even if used in an anonymized and aggregated way – to be violating their privacy. I personally don't consider it to be, but I accept that others have different views on this and don't want to be tracked, even if it's with the intention of making the product experience and advertising better. Personally, if I have to see ads, I'd rather they be personalized and relevant to my interests, than generic ads for Tide detergent or Coca-Cola. I actually bookmarked websites for two out of the last three ads YouTube showed me because they were products I didn't know about that I am actually interested in.
However, I have this comfort level in part because I am a software engineer who has worked on these systems, and I realize that the systems that build profiles and show content based on them are just machines that don't care one way or the other about people as individuals; and the engineers building those systems and managing those data sets are, by and large, with few exceptions, professionals doing a job, and have no interest in snooping on you. The larger tech companies also have internal monitoring systems that detect employee misuse of data, which is why you hear in the news about people occasionally being fired for it.
I'm sure there are people at your ISP who could single out and monitor your Internet traffic if they wanted to (though TLS would mean they could only learn what sites you visit – that could still be compromising information, e.g., do you visit porn sites?); and people at your cell phone company can probably listen in to your phone calls and SMS in real time if they wanted to [1]. We know the police have that ability, so the carrier certainly does. Some administrator who runs a system always has access to its data. But the people operating these systems are, like you and me, sane people doing a job and don't want to get fired for abusing our access. We strive to minimize what we collect, anonymize it, encrypt it, aggregate it so that data for individuals is not present in the anonymized collective used to serve content, etc.)
[1] Last time I checked, SMS was actually broadcast over the radio in the clear, so in fact anyone with the right radio receiver and software could intercept and decode all SMS in an area. Maybe cell standards have evolved since then; I don't know anything about it – perhaps someone else can comment. If they've improved cell standards such that SMS over radio to the tower is encrypted, then there's still an administrator at your telecom provider who can read them. <shameless plug> So if you're paranoid, that's another potential reason to use an end-to-end encrypted communicator like WhatsApp :-), where nobody but you and the participant on the other side can access the communication. iMessage, Signal, and Wickr also to my knowledge provide legitimate E2EE.
Facebook is in the process of implementing E2EE for Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct Messages. In other words, the company is investing in a relatively massive internal engineering effort to take away its own ability to read your messages, at no benefit to the company beyond being able to provide the stronger privacy that users want. That's another reason I believe in the company's sincerity about privacy. And what you post on your wall, you're generally posting intentionally for all your friends or the public to read, depending on your permission settings. You can also post a message on your wall that's only visible to a limited audience you define too, but I doubt the wall will ever be E2EE because of the audience sizes involved. E2EE provides substantially less value when a media star that anyone can follow posts messages that are read by millions. What's more interesting is whether other people can see that you follow a particular person – that's also probably something you can control via the right privacy settings. Facebook has a lot of privacy settings for your account, way more than most users know about. In fact I'm pretty sure there's a switch to you can toggle and ask the company not to profile you – but I haven't checked recently so don't hold me to that.
Personally, I'd rather be profiled and see content and advertisements relevant to my interests, than shitty content and ads, so I tolerate the profiling, as long as companies keep the data they collect to themselves.
If you buy a house or get a cable subscription, by comparison, the companies involved will immediately sell your personal information to all sorts of data brokers, which is why you'll start getting junk mail immediately. (Even if they didn't, real estate ownership is public record, so data brokers would eventually get at it anyway, just less conveniently.)
FAANG companies to my knowledge no longer share or sell any data that they collect outside their walls. (I'm not an authority on this. Amazon never did to my knowledge. Pretty sure Google never did. Doubt Netflix does – maybe at a very aggregate level. Pretty sure Facebook no longer does, but I don't know their policies about working with scientists. After getting burned so badly over the university researcher who passed on data he collected to Cambridge Analytica, I'd guess that's stopped or tightened significantly. I have not looked into FB's policies about research. Researchers that work with Amazon have to be at least part-time employees and are locked tightly with contracts that gives Amazon authority over their ability to publish or share any data from their employment; giving Amazon the ability to go after them hardcore if they abuse their access. FAANG and related parties will however engaged in sophisticated matching schemes that allows them to track ad conversion between each other (such as if Amazon is advertising on Facebook) without actually sharing any personally identifiable data, using complex cryptography and anonymity processes.
None of that really changes the fundamental nature of the product. It’s sort of like oil companies talking about how careful they are handling the oil in response to concerns over global warming.
I wanted to comment on the same statement. At a minimum all those companies share with law enforcement and national security to some extent. Beyond that I've heard of data sharing agreements and some kinds of data sales at more than one of the FAANGs, and can't see why they would stop, though I can definitely see why they might be two-faced about it and try to give that impression.
I'm not sure about the allegations, but this certainly does not match my experience -- I have seen an incredibly diverse set of people in my FYP feed.
(I wish YouTube had content discovery like TikTok -- YouTube seems to always want to steer me to either something that's an exact clone of the last thing I watched, or something that's just dumb and super-popular. TikTok is amazing at ferreting out all kinds of veins of interest. It's great.)
I don't know if TikTok has a better discovery algorithm - I think its just able to feed you with more videos in a set of time. A 1 minute average video time lets you recommend 10 times more videos than a platform with a 10 minute average video.
It would appear that they've changed their strategy with these types of users to one of aggressive reply moderation as I'm regularly seeing content from all of the mentioned "high-risk" categories getting millions of likes and the comment sections are generally positive.
I guess it's hard to know since TikTok has around 1 billion active users. They could be dramatically reducing the set of people who gets suggested such content, and yet that content could still be suggested to millions of people.
Personally, I wouldn't find it strange that the recommender systems are tweaked to different countries and sensibilities as default at first, until it learns more from your own viewing patterns and refines itself.
This isn't really the case anymore. And I am someone that has been super critical of tiktok.
In fact, the most recent viral tiktok reposted on twitter yesterday was that dude in the white house, and it was getting reposted to both praise and criticize how queer-positive it was.
I'm getting a lot of lesbian couples in my feed. And there are extremely obese folks dancing on tiktok. So I'm not sure what you mean by tiktok getting rid of folks who are the target of harassment.
That said, I do think care should be taken to avoid exploiting folks on things like social media - and that's a bit too complex to discuss here.
> Another thing Tik Tok does is get rid of people who are obese, queer, or otherwise the target of harassment. Their stance is it's easier to get rid of the person being made fun of or limit who can see their videos rather than the 10k people harassing them.
The company I'm contracted to has a similar policy - instead of dealing with inappropriately behaving employees/contractors who have the company's logo/name somewhere in their social media profile they just disallow using the said logo and name - that includes CVs.
To quote a certain really upbeat clam: awesome idea in theory
I’m not sure if those are current policies. I fit every tag you mention and find TikTok to be the most welcoming space on the social media scene. It could be a fluke, and I could be dumb but I feel and heard as an obese neurodivergent queer on TikTok.
> Another thing Tik Tok does is get rid of people who are obese, queer, or otherwise the target of harassment.
I cannot think of any better metaphor than a virtual American highschool with regard to Facebook or TikTok. The platforms have little to do with what they claim to deliver. That would be connecting with friends and more engaging YouTube. Instead most of the time a user just scrolls through an endless feed. Even worse there is even some kind of actual addicting factor since they are there to replace other actually better working platforms.
> Another thing Tik Tok does is get rid of people who are obese, queer, or otherwise the target of harassment. Their stance is it's easier to get rid of the person being made fun of or limit who can see their videos rather than the 10k people harassing them.
This is not unlike how the power that be in China do their business. Harmony at all costs, even if it means suppressing those who got screwed over.
Pretty sick of people who haven't used TikTok spreading bullshit like this. TikTok might just be the queerest and most inclusive platform on the internet today. Maybe y'all should actually try it before spreading misinformation.
> TikTok might just be the queerest and most inclusive platform on the internet today.
No, TikTok merely suggests what you are actively looking for. If you're creating a new account and don't look up other kind of content then you will see a lot less of it, especially in the "default" videos.
If you go by what Trump or Obama say its the most important thing. Not because they used it to generate Outcomes for everyone but because They are Good at using it to generate outcomes for themselves.
Nature discovering "Reach" is how we end up stuck with an "Endocrine system". Flood the whole body/system with a signal and hope for the best. Thats great in producing a pheremone driven anthill. Its not how we end up with a Nervous system and the Human Brain.
Understanding the difference between the 2 models is key to understanding where social media has actual value and where it does not.
On an abstract level, that sounds terrible, doesn't it?
At the same time though, I feel like this seems like the "least bad" possible solution. If a subset of accounts are only going viral because people want to bully them, it seems reasonable to limit that content's reach.
Yes, it does sound terrible, on any level. Just get rid of minority viewpoints rather than enforce some sort of basic civility when discussing them? Just get rid of the harassed rather than the harassers? How will that iterate over time?
That would be like firing the current women coming forward against Governor Cuomo and leaving the governor alone to continue his ways, to put it in a current headline context.
I'm not sure I'd frame it like that, I think it makes sense to consider people's sensibilities when recommending them content, so a good recommender system wouldn't recommend you things that anger you or repulse you and might make you become aggressive or hateful at the content or content creator.
That would make things non-confrontational, but that's kind of what people like about TikTok, most other social media have become super confrontational, you can't avoid seeing things you disagree with and it seems everyone is just fighting all the time, reacting to all the things they disagree with.
There is an assumption that everyone wants fame and people posting videos always want them to reach as many people as possible. Maybe that’s not so? Becoming a meme isn’t always fun, and many people aren’t aware of the consequences.
If it looks like something is going viral in a negative way and the system automatically limits the spread, that seems pretty thoughtful, if it’s done right. It makes social media safer and hopefully more predictable than what we have now.
I think the poster should be made aware of this and override it if they choose, though.
Actually, maybe all viral posts should be limited in this way until you opt in to viral spread.
Do minorities have the right to force the majority to listen? That is the abstract question this policy is dancing around. Or, do you let the minority talk to the minority…
I think that’s an odd way of framing the issue. No-one is being forced to listen to anyone on TikTok. The question is whether certain minority groups should have their videos artificially lowered in the recommendation rankings. To do this on the grounds that people bully and harass members of these groups is surely just to let the bullies win.
> Especially places like Twitter and Instagram are outrage and depression inducers for me, consumed together it feels like the society is collapsing
It's been interesting to watch the steady decline of Reddit and Twitter since they launched. They've always had a significant amount of doom-and-gloom clickbait headlines, but in the past it was far easier to filter out the bad and follow subreddits or Twitter people with high signal to noise ratios.
Now, Reddit feels like a lost cause for anything other than consuming endless outrage headlines. r/popular is full of blatant misinformation that could be disproved with a simple Google search or outrage-bait headlines that make every event sound like the end of the world. Even the previously useful subreddits I subscribed to have been inundated with angry, angry people who manage to turn everything into an argument or relate it back to politics somehow.
I have to wonder if TikTok is simply enjoying the early days where the fun, light-hearted content still outweighs the intentionally rage-baity content. There does appear to be vast amounts of misinformation and angry content on TikTok, but it hasn't yet flooded the platform to a degree that it's unavoidable.
I feel like we watched a similar rise and fall of Clubhouse during the pandemic. The early days were full of people with genuine curiosity and good intentions about socializing, but it quickly devolved into lowest common denominator content. I haven't opened Clubhouse for months, but the last time I opened it I remember scrolling through endless "how to get rich" rooms that were keyword stuffing popular terms until I just gave up on the platform altogether.
Maybe TikTok's algorithm and model can stave off the Eternal September problem, but I feel like it's only a matter of time until the signal to noise ratio drops below most people's thresholds for decent content.
Reddit is still good, you're likely subscribing to popular subreddits. Don't subscribe to anything that appears in r/popular or r/all. Try subreddits that intentionally ban politics or have <100k subscribers, it's a totally different website, full of wholesome niche communities.
Part of what keeps Reddit free of such nastiness (in my experience at least) is the downvote button. Sure, it creates an echo chamber that ruins the popular subreddits, but on the smaller subreddits, it means that anything toxic, inflammatory or misleading is nuked into invisibility. After getting used to this, I find it really hard to participate in places like youtube, Discord or old-style forums where conversations can be derailed or turned toxic by only a few bad actors.
This has been my experience as well. There are countless amazing, small communities on Reddit, and being able to kick the popular subreddits out of my feed makes it feel like one of the last places that embodies the spirit of the early internet. Namely -- small quasi-anonymous communities where people can sincerely discuss niche interests and discover new ones through the serendipity of interaction.
Once old.reddit.com gets turned off, I worry about how long this can persist. The iOS app has tons of clickbait hooks, useless notifications, invitations to join "similar" large, emotional subreddits full of toxicity and extremism.
I found politics to be too pervasive to escape on Reddit, which is why I eventually deleted my account. I tried to stick to non-political subreddits, but when I found myself reading comments about police brutality in r/dogswithjobs, I knew I no longer wanted to use the site.
What's sad is the political discussions aren't even good. Comments are written to appeal to the lowest common denominator of reader, and a lot of subreddit comment sections move at breakneck speed, so what you end up with is a bunch of politically like-minded people dogpiling on top of each other to write something like "Being a republican at this point is basically saying you agree with killing the planet" (an actual current top comment on r/news right now). A few comments down in the chain will be a Futurama reference.
If it bothers you that much, don't let yourself get pulled into political discussions! It's really not that hard. Why do you care if other people waste their time arguing dumb politics? Just ignore it and move on!
Reddit's more popular subs at least used to be usable. But over the last couple of years r/all has turned into reposts, outrage clickbait, misinformation, and propaganda exclusively. I started putting more and more sub on the ignore list, but eventually there was nothing worthwhile left. I've unsubscribed from an increasing number of mid-sized subs as even those have more and more turned into complete circlejerks. At this point, I'm down to a handful of smaller subs that I visit semi regularly.
Maybe it's just me and my tolerance for this kind of BS has declined over the years or maybe the site is steadily getting worse as it gets bigger.
No, on smaller subreddits the downvote button also enforces conformity and a right opinion. You can be as polite as you can, as decent as a scholar, but if your opinion is wrong, you will get downvoted -- and once you get to minus 1, minus 2, chances are other people will downvote you, out of sheer reflex: opinion bad --> already in negative --> here, have another downvote.
It's easier, a thousand times easier, to use the downvote button to express disagreement than to actual type words and construct arguments, and that's how most people will use it.
And I suppose sometimes it can filter the toxic, inflammatory or misleading comment.
I tried that approach and found that even in my niche interest subreddits that I subscribe too that somehow politics always found a way in, and became a top post for some cheeky reason.
Moderators also often selectively enforce the “no politics” rule either by only removing political things that conflict with their personal political views or by defining things that are political as not political so they can continue or vice versa.
I think a big part of the problem of Reddit is that there’s a handful of mods who just moderate everything
I wish there was a Reddit without all that crap, I’d pay money to use it
While I agree with you to some extent, niche subreddits are still subject to Reddit's overall content moderation and policies - which are ultimately based on politics (left-biased). This can range from shadowbans on linking to certain domains to bans on certain viewpoints that apply sitewide to affecting the kind of humor that is allowable to whatever else. Yes those niche communities are less toxic than the giant subreddits, but it still feels like a sort of artificial, inauthentic experience to some extent because you can only be the online person that nearly fits within the overton window of what is deemed acceptable by Reddit's admins and leadership. Others aren't welcome, or if they are there, they can't truly express themselves or be authentic.
This trend of niche forums becoming politically biased isn't limited to Reddit either. For example, much has been written from both the left and the right about how Ravelry, a knitting community, chose a hard-left political bias during the Trump administration (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...). When that sort of change happens, a whole lot of people cannot engage in that niche community because it feels like a hostile place to participate, even if the typical piece of content is apolitical.
Meh. Sometimes if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not the fault of the downvote button. Reddit had a core culture of openness in the beginning - god knows I had enough debates in the comments. But at some point one side decided that debating isn't enough, and it needs to control the medium.
It might just be an amazing coincidence, but after they succeeded reddit stopped being fun.
And it wasn't even remotely subtle, because it went down kicking, screaming and throwing the wildest tantrums I've ever seen.
Yeah that's what I've experienced too. I usually unsubscribe to all default subs, especially /r/politics and /r/all.
Then the rest of the niche specialized communities are just pure gold. In particular: data_hoarders, anything D&D related, netsec and programming are ok.
The rest however are just obvious old accounts bought by influence campaigns, which now sells for hundreds of dollars. (not to hard to see if you look at their posts history). Reddit made it so that having multiple accounts is much more easy than respecting the rules, especially with their one post by 10 minutes rule for most default subreddits.
Their new site revamp however reeks of a Product Manager (tm) who got too much free time on his hand. If old.reddit.com goes away I don't know if I'll even bother. Thank God for the SingleFile extension for saving my favorite posts.
Agreed - HN as well has been trending towards the outrage / doom model. The coverage of Apple just rips the worst articles (ie, apple committing child porn felonies), and the headlines are often wildly overboard (imply all Google workers going on strike etc).
TikTok has avoided that somehow - def more fun and interesting there - I do keep on getting exposed at times to somewhat weird idea, but a bit less of the yell in your face while clapping kind of stuff you see elsewhere so they are doing something interesting with their algorithm.
The value of social networks to manipulate politics is way more valuable than any ads. The ads are there to just cover the bills. Reddit is going downhill because it's a radicalization factory filled to the brim with bots. Anyone who presents an unpopular opinion is banned on most subs.
This is why the whole social media world is easy to disrupt. It's not listening to the consumer and focused on influence. I mean the whole reason Gab.com exists is not because it's a good site with cool features. Nope. The reason it exists is nobody can host that stuff without building their whole infrastructure from scratch because of the political controversy.
TikTok on the other hand is just focused on user engagement right now and not politics, so whatever. There will come a day though when it become too powerful for just that.
I don't think doom and gloom made reddit less interesting. I think it is the opposite that some power users feel appointed to clean up anything they do not like or classify as misinformation. Although these "hot to get rich" posts certainly are nothing but.
TikTok is certainly not solving the Eternal September problem, it is accelerating it if it doesn't keep some groups separated at least. There is really good content, but there has been on Twitter and reddit too at first.
But only light-hearted content and artificial positivity can also be worse than doom and gloom in some cases. Political incorrect jokes are sometimes enjoyable. Not everything needs to be a message with the latest hot takes in pedagogy that don't even make too much sense.
I think healthy communities still don't take internet comments too seriously.
I'm still very much a fan of reddit. But then again I never ever ever go to r/all. I don't go to r/politics. So maybe it is a shitshow. But yeah the subreddits I like to visit are still high quality and give me good information.
I also feel like reddit has become legitimized as a source of new information. Especially ever since Obama did an AMA. I seem to find up to date information there that news outlets/journals haven't caught up with yet.
And it's been good that they've taken down some really messed up racism subreddits. It's bad that they for some reason let anti-white hate subreddits thrive and develop. Still not cool with that one. But all in all, I'll take it.
> The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.
I don't think the only question is "who wins at having the most popular social network." The more concerning one is of exerting political influence through manipulative amplification/suppression (which is something the PRC has a lot of experience with). That could be both highly effective and extremely subtle and difficult to detect (e.g. activating one political tendency with relatively more call to action videos, while distracting its opposition with relatively more cat videos and relatively fewer calls to action).
That is a real threat, but that's a problem with (proprietary, centralized) online media in general. Which social network would you trust not to do that? Facebooks experiment on manipulating emotions comes to mind [1].
The only way to minimize these effects is to consume a multitude of media from multiple sources, so no one entity has too much influence. Balancing all the US-based social networks with some TikTok certainly seems healthy in that regard.
Is the network authority the only entity to blame here? Looking at the other end of the spectrum, if a popular network was fully decentralized and had zero censorship or speed bumps to control how viral something goes, then I still think that social network would be vulnerable to propaganda machines. Specifically still by those with the most money to throw at it.
I don't think Facebook and many social networks are doing a good job but I think we should also recognize that the problem is difficult and unclear how to solve. There's an issue with how information naturally flows and how that can be manipulated.
Specifically I don't think TikTok is great because the focus on short videos (we see this on Facebook too. A meme is even shorter). 30 sec to 3 min political videos are more likely to be propaganda in my experience (e.g. NowThis). Though that isn't too say there aren't longer form versions (e.g. PragerU).
Generally I agree people (especially on HN) are too optimistic about zero-censorship decentralized systems, but I think it's important to point out that decentralization doesn't have to mean zero censorship / everything goes. In federated systems like Mastodon, each instance can handle their own moderation separately, allowing moderation to be done with more context by people closer to their communities and for a diversity of moderation styles to exist.
TikTok has already been found to be censoring content that criticises the Chinese government [1]. Theres a big difference between that and a nonpolitical public research project that ended up with a minuscule effect size.
For news, weekly newspapers are probably the best source. They don't have to be reactionary, they have time to do research and let things play out a bit, enabling them to give you useful insights instead of hysteria.
To me social media isn't about news, it's about entertainment, education, social interaction, etc. My TikTok is about people rapping childrens books, what ADHD does to people and how to deal with it, how introverts go to the party for the cats instead of to meet people (all things in the first five clips when I just opened it).
Social media certainly can be toxic, but it can also enrich your live and give you a much wider horizon by bringing you into contact with people outside your social bubble.
> Which social network would you trust not to do that?
Well step 1 is to see what country the social network was made in, and see if that government has had a strong history of using the law to force companies to silence criticism.
What sort of manipulative amplification/suppression, specifically? Maybe a skinner box outrage machine that turns us into hostile tribes sniping over cultural crap while completely unable to govern ourselves as they surpass us?
> What sort of manipulative amplification/suppression, specifically? Maybe a skinner box outrage machine that turns us into hostile tribes sniping over cultural crap while completely unable to govern ourselves as they surpass us?
Amplifying pre-existing fault lines to encourage general weakness is certainly one that's been well explored. Another might be amplifying political or ideological that serve the foreign power's goals (e.g. general pacifism when that power is planning some kind of aggression or military build up, or electioneering messages for a candidate with a more favorable trade policy to that power).
No one could deliver particular results with certainty using any of these methods, but they could definitely put their finger on the scales.
> Sorry I was describing our current social networks. Impossible to gauge how thick to lay it on in text.
I know you were. The issue here isn't that this kind of manipulation is totally unheard of, it's that it could be done far, far more effectively and stealthily with the control of the platform.
"Effective and stealthy manipulation" were your words I believe. Short hop from there for someone else to go further.
We just watched people spend 3-4 years claiming that 50 Russian internet trolls were responsible for beating a billion dollar presidential campaign. The "smart people"! At some point you have to add up the mass values and ask if this adds up, or if we're just making excuses for ourselves.
> "Effective and stealthy manipulation" were your words I believe. Short hop from there for someone else to go further.
A hop you took, not me.
> We just watched people spend 3-4 years claiming that 50 Russian internet trolls were responsible for beating a billion dollar presidential campaign.
Fifty Russian internet trolls (likely more), were working to put their finger on the scale, but it's an exaggeration to say definitively that they "were responsible for beating a billion dollar presidential campaign." Maybe they tipped the scale, but maybe they didn't. There's no way anyone will ever answer that question.
It's like hacking. Has a foreign nation hacked the US power grid to cause widespread blackouts? No. Does that mean foreign hacking of US utility companies is not something for Americans to be concerned about? No. Does that mean the US shouldn't harden its power grid against the threat? Also no.
It's a scale with a billion dollars on either end, and we were asked to believe a small office of internet trolls from Russia tipped it. BS detector engaged.
If we're so fragile that some marginal stuff can steer our culture, then we deserve it.
> It's a scale with a billion dollars on either end, and we were asked to believe a small office of internet trolls from Russia tipped it. BS detector engaged.
No, we were not asked to believe that, at least not by anyone worth listening to.
You're missing the point. The attempt to put a finger on the scale is threat that warrants a response. It doesn't matter if the scale was tipped or not. It's like if someone shoots at you and misses. Would you have no problem with that? Should you proceed like nothing happened?
Similarly, the capability to make an attempt is also a threat. It's like if someone hands you a time bomb, are you going to carry it around and act like it's not dangerous, just because it hasn't gone off yet?
It purports to show North Korea through the lens of a hidden camera. Plenty of shots of couples holding hands and playing badminton without nets.
I get the sense that this is propaganda and not genuinely capturing the everyday lives of North Koreans. That said, I can't prove that this is the case.
> Why wouldn't North Koeans hold hands? Most have normal lives in an abnormal place.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that they wouldn't. What I'm trying to convey is: I have no idea what life in North Korea is like because (to my understanding) nearly every photo that is taken and leaves the country must be approved by North Korean officials[1].
I think many people would love to see North Korea as it is, not as North Korean officials would like it to appear. As such, a TikTok account that claims to be secretly filming North Koreans and exfiltrating that footage is very interesting. However, I believe there is a good chance that this footage is still released with the approval of the North Korean government and does not accurately capture the everyday lives of North Koreans.
The fundamental problem here is that I don't know what life in North Korea is like. I cannot claim with certainty that this footage was staged. I suspect the same could be said about the footage that you've seen, it is very hard for outsiders to know what is real and what is not.
You can actually visit North Korea if you are not American.
I knew a western family German passport who went over. You cannot wear blue jeans. You have someone with you at all times and you are not allowed to talk to anyone.
But that tells you very little about day to day life. Checkout this 2012 movie. You will find it interesting and believable.
There are important differences between being influenced by domestic actors, as part of a domestic political process, and being influenced by foreign actors. The latter is a far more serious threat to political independence.
It's also pretty well documented that the PRC political authorities already use its domestic social networks in this way.
It's also documented that Cambridge Analytica used data made available to it by Facebook to target millions with political propaganda. It wasn't just the US election, they had plenty of practice validating the strategy in elections in smaller countries.
Where's the evidence that TT has been successfully used for nefarious purposes on a similar scale?
Think about how last summer Harvard discovered that Covid started in Wuhan back in August 2019 using satellite imagery and then overnight the focus became how to combat anti-Chinese sentiment (hate crimes had risen against Asian-Americans to levels seen earlier in the 2010s, still an order of magnitude less prevalent than hate crimes against American Blacks). TikTok was the principle platform leading that charge. Pretty simple strategy and it worked, no one even talks about the timing of the Wuhan cover up anymore.
From where I'm sitting, the overnight focus was on establishing public health protocols to prevent the healthcare system from a black-swan type of event-driven collapse.
And passing legislation to provide financial relief.
Those four things are absolutely what the discourse morphed into, but it goes to show the success of the campaign. Because Trump called it the "kung flu" and is almost always racist with his rhetoric, liberals piled onto anyone that tried to dig into the origin of covid as being racially motivated. TikTok made that culture war really simple for liberals to fight. Trump is a nasty guy full of bad ideas, but the culture war and Trump Derangement Syndrome are real things that shut down legitimate inquiry.
The concern is exactly that such evidence might be much harder to find for TikTok. Cambridge Analytica's clients included multiple prominent American politicians, including the sitting president at the time the scandal broke. China would try their hardest to stop a scandal involving Xi Jinping from breaking in the first place, and certainly the People's Congress wouldn't demand a public investigation as the US Congress did.
I'm not sure how this is a counter to the above comment. Seems to still apply.
To add nuance, it's also not a binary problem. Is it influence from a country with closer values to you/your country or one further apart? Obviously your country is likely to be one end of the spectrum. I'd also say that US and China have very different cultural/political/economic views and considering a significant percentage of HN posters are American, this is why the specific comparison is frequently made (and a Dutch, for example, social network isn't really a world player right now).
> You are assuming that the person you respond to is american.
No, I was responding with my thoughts as an American. And frankly, his comment was ambiguous enough to be open to multiple interpretations (e.g. 1. to a non-American, US-controlled networks are foreign; 2. and manipulation/propaganda happens on US-controlled networks already, so why should it be any more concerning on one from China; 3. etc.).
> He's dutch, and is regularly spied on by the US.
If we ever get a Weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the capitols of Europe episode again, I would wager FB and YT will start to block content which questions that narrative ( or fairytale rather ).
> There are important differences between being influenced by domestic actors, as part of a domestic political process, and being influenced by foreign actors
Just because the actors are domestic doesn't make it at all better. Domestic actors don't have public welfare in mind, they have their own welfare in mind.
This influence happens behind close doors, and I, as a constituent, don't get to have any input on it.
For a great example, I didn't get to vote on whether or not Fox news should peddle absolute nonsense 24/7 that radicalizes their base. Its owners made that decision, without my input.
If you want 'domestic' influence and oversight over your mass media, social networks, etc, use the political process to set some ground rules, and make everyone operating these businesses in your country follow them. Blaming or targeting the foreign boogieman is a distraction, when we've got plenty of domestic monsters living in our closet.
>> Just because the actors are domestic doesn't make it at all better. Domestic actors don't have public welfare in mind
No love for any social network from me, but there's a huge difference between a company looking for its own interest, and one being controlled by a state which may be in a hot (or certainly cold) war with your country in the near future.
You can surmise that FB will put its interests over your own, but you can bet that a Chinese owned media will actively look to harm you and the place you live, it's just a matter of time.
The US has had by far the most aggressive foreign policy in the last several decades. There's simply no contest. No matter what you think of China's track record, it is clearly focused on domestic control and internal security. A statement like "Chinese owned media will actively look to harm you and the place you live" is delusion, not borne out by any of the facts. A frightening example of how easily the state can designate new scapegoats.
I am not looking to argue which country is objectively better/worse (although I disagree with your view, it's not important to disprove it for the point I am making.)
Whatever that is, I live in the US and so do many TikTok users. As a point of view of someone who lives in the US, being dominated by a foreign adversary is a bad thing. Giving that adversary control of what we see and think about is therefore very dangerous.
I totally understand that if you're in China your perspective on this will be backwards but here's one example: let's say China invades Taiwan which is our ally. Should the US defend our ally? Would china use its control of social media to make most Americans not aware/not care/be misinformed about the situation to ensure that the US does not get involved?
Again, not expecting you to agree, but do think that someone who lives in and likes the US to care about this
> You can surmise that FB will put its interests over your own, but you can bet that a Chinese owned media will actively look to harm you and the place you live, it's just a matter of time.
There are plenty of powerful domestic actors that actively want to harm particular groups of people. Sometimes the cruelty and the harm is the point. Sometimes it's just a distraction, intended to pit half the country against the other half, while they get away with highway robbery. Sometimes it's because they are sociopaths on a massive ego trip.
And I'm not talking about Facebook's leadership, here. You are correct that it just wants to make money.
Which country has closer values to your country? US or China? Take the parents comment above and turn it from binary into a spectrum using this metric.
And I'm an American, speaking as an American. If you want to ban Facebook and Tiktok in the Netherlands over these issues, it's totally fine by me. I have no love for any social network.
I actually had a thought in the back of my mind that the outlook may be different in other countries, but I didn't write it down. Especially since American companies have a tendency to pursue their own agendas, even against the American government.
> exerting political influence through manipulative amplification/suppression
and social influence
there are a few worrying trends on the internet which are difficult to attribute to simply headstrong visionaries concerned with the general progress of our species
I do think TikTok's chosen format and their algorithm make a great product. However, I am also increasingly wary of their growing power. Although I didn't expect it because they are foreign-owned, they are much more heavy-handed about censorship of centrist and conservative views (on the American political spectrum) than other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I've seen numerous people I follow get banned aggressively, and apart from making me/others feel oppressed, such censorship also makes me concerned about the degree of influence they have in shaping public conversation in our society - particularly with younger generations. A feasible explanation is that they are simply conforming to the same politically-biased moderation practices seen elsewhere, like on Twitter ,and are conforming to what they perceive the market is demanding. A more sinister explanation is that this is a purposeful plan by the CCP to sow chaos in America by fanning the flames of a very fundamental, pervasive, ideological division.
Funnily enough, the most fun content on Twitter, reddit and instagram these days are repost of TikToks. One very bold and interesting move by TikTok which I believe is a huge reason for their success is allowing videos to be downloaded as mp4 by default and shared on any platform. Youtube et al would never allow that, which is why Reels and Shorts will never succeed.
Every time I browse through TikTok, I share dozens with my friends through all sorts of channels. Every time I try Shorts, I get a shitty youtube video link and I honestly don't want to spam people with Youtube links...
I agree that many Youtube videos are tedious and needlessly dragged out, probably caused by focussing on time spent as KPI. Too many Youtube videos nowadays give a strong vibe of creators being made only for the money.
For TikTok I feel it's still at the stage where the makers, above all else, just want to be seen. But maybe it's only a matter of time before it devolves into aggressive monetization.
I feel like Vine had a lot of that quirky, comedic energy. It's a shame that Twitter decided to discontinue it. I sometimes still watch Vine compilation videos when I want to feel nostalgic.
> I agree that many Youtube videos are tedious and needlessly dragged out, probably caused by focussing on time spent as KPI. Too many Youtube videos nowadays give a strong vibe of creators being made only for the money.
Yep, and honestly I can't blame them. But at this point every video I watch I immediately press '1' to skip to 10% of the video as a start, then correct if I went too far or if I haven't gone far enough.
The first 10% is usually spent on an intro which is entirely useless to 90% of the audience. e.g. there'll be a video called 'How to add a screen protector to your phone' of 10 minutes, at least the first minute will be a talking head asking if you remember how scared you get every time you drop your phone because it may have cracked the screen, explains how much that sucks, then explains that screen protectors reduce the chance of that blablabla. Stuff everyone knows, which is why they probably bought one, and after wondering how to put it on their phone looked up your video and clicked it... then after they explained the problem, they'll tell you that in this video they'll be providing an answer.
It's okay once but it gets super tedious. Imagine for every search on Google you first get a minute of speech on what the typical reasons were that you likely searched for this, and that this google search is going to provide you with possible answers...
That having been said, I see this on TikTok too. There'll be some music playing and a 'wait till the end' comment, and you're just staring at your screen and nothing happens until quite a bit later, and it's often disappointing too. At least on YT you can skip through easily.
TikTok's algorithm is just pre 2017 YT and FB cranked up by 100X. For some reason the media hasn't gone after TikTok yet for pushing people into "echo chambers" but they basically just feed the most engaging content with no breaks on the train.
I read an article about the parent company and they have one of the most popular news app in India as well despite none of the engineers being able to read what content is being pushed to the top, they just let their machine learning push the most "engaging" content, which is basically stuff that is controversial, creates anger, etc.
Despite this claim tiktok seems like it pushes some the least outrage machine type stuff. At least my feed is filled with interesting folks.
HN is going down the road too now of the google is horrible, apple is horrible, facebook is horrible type headlines. I don't necessarily disagree - but... boring? Repetitive? There are never any positive suggestions any more (ie, here's how apple should screen for CASM). It's just pure outrage factory in some cases.
Luckily for me at least HN still has some "boring" content with lots of what seem like smart interesting folks posting - keeps me coming back :)
Mind posting some examples? I find it recommends lots of useless stuff. I know the rebuttal - it learns what you're interested in - but I can still tell you there are lots of vapid people and videos on it.
New stuff is scored well too at first, so the algorithm can "test" and see what kind of traction the post gets. If it hits a certain score for traction then it's boosted more, and if it doesn't then it's buried.
It's pretty much purely about the popularity curve of each post. The more it drives engagement the more it's boosted.
every video starts with 0 views, new videos all get pushed to small sample groups and the ones that get the most engagement in terms of watch time and other factors then get pushed to larger groups
that's the point, the content that doesn't engage users doesn't get promoted. TikTok isn't going to push a boring video to millions of users
It would be really interesting if TikTok allowed users to make a sequential thread of videos, and added a scroll control to view "next video in sequence". Currently "part 2" videos are very tedious to find, if they could make a way to continue a sequence from the fyp with a simple gesture or button, I think they could seriously challenge longer form videos as well.
> There are plenty of sites that focus on long form videos
Youtube. It's pretty much just Youtube. They are the only player with meaningful market share. Even Facebook video is most effective at only 20-40 seconds.
I would welcome any competition to Youtube, even if it means TikTok expanding.
They recently added playlists (they show up as yellow text with a gray highlight in the description) but the ability to make them may not have rolled out to everyone. They have notoriously slow roll outs (like with new TTS voices and the captions).
My opinion is, things happened on the Internet are mostly the reflections of what happened in the real world, +amplified. You got people from all the corners and they all got different backgrounds. The common is probably that they know how to buy reliable&comfortable keyboards.
During the years, in China, Chinese companies has developed some sophisticated strategies to allow them to grow and sometimes thrive under the rules that should have killed them. One of such strategy is to provide only fun and nothing else.
Imagine one day, George Carlin come back to life, expect this time, he only tells fun jokes, jokes makes nobody angry, jokes that only generate laugh. Of course it will be pleasant, even become a "place to escape to".
Of course, platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook has problems of their own. Those big techs are trying to do something that they are completely incapable of while trying to make money out of it. Moderating is hard, they just can't do it, even with their discriminating stupid ideas such as keyword scanning and profile rating.
I have this feeling, that is in the future, the Internet will become circlized -- Communities will be small, specific and private, just like those in the real world.
Of course, few "Town Squares" will still exist, where talks there probably remain toxic.
The fun I mean isn’t only about entertaining me to death, there are plenty of thought provoking creators too. History, cosmology, math, philosophy - TikTok has it all.
>the short and fast phased nature of the TikTok content
Ahh, so it's Twitter for video... is this good? It's my impression that there's a growing consensus that Twitter's content length restriction optimizes for shallow hot takes and angry mobs.
I don't think that's a rule, I think Twitter's length restriction has lead to quite a few good things too. Restrictions in general are a great way to motivate creativity. Of course there are limits to this. There are times where a 40m video or a proper 10 page blog post are more appropriate.
You are addicted (most probably). Not exactly "a huge fan" (most probably). It shouldn't sound like blaming or something. It's just that TikTok has proven having a more addictive algo than FB.
That's crazy that you mentioned Nile Red. I coincidentally just finished watching his tiktok and thought "boy am I glad I didn't have to sit through 40 minutes of beaker swapping just to see the end result". I much prefer his tiktok channel over the youtube channel.
Isn’t the discovery algorithm something that any media network could easily adjust to either favor the entire community of creators or to favor the network itself (perhaps by favoring creators with more lucrative advertising deals)?
I would expect fairly new networks to adjust their algorithm towards the former to attract creators, then eventually tweak it towards the latter to please investors/shareholders/advertisers.
The US has far more influence over most western countries than China ever will.
I'm much more worried about about what the US can do with all the data it collects on its allies than what China does.
Of course, I'd rather my government were to ensure the personal data of its citizens never leaves its boarders (similar to Germany). But that's far too much to ask of the UK.
> One exception for me is Nile Red, I love watching his 40 min chemistry videos
I have dozens of "exceptions" like this on Youtube, slowly accumulated over years.
A lot of the content on TikTok is being funded by TikTok themselves. If this is sustainable I suppose it could keep going forever, but I wonder if the way Youtube turned out in the long run has an inevitable monetization reason behind it.
> outrage and depression inducers for me, consumed together it feels like the society is collapsing but everyone is living a perfect life at the same time.
I am sorry to hear this.
Are you comparing yourself to yourself of yesterday, or are you comparing yourself to the fictional characters of others on social media?
It’s not really about me comparing. On Twitter (and reddit) the world is crumbling, what the society has become, WW3 must be imminent, anything is futile, very organization is evil, everyone is angry, and there are some people that are stupid beyond comprehension that that makes me think I shouldn’t even bother. The same old nonsense would keep be parroted repeatedly.
Then I look at Instagram, everyone is having a perfect life. By perfect I don’t mean a life I would like to have, I too go to vacations and restaurants, what I mean is a curated perfection of what life is “supposed to be”. It’s just dull. When combined with TikTok It makes me feel like the society dried up. It’s like When people don’t do evil things and not yelling they do extremely mundane stuff out of the mill.
In my limited experience making videos teaching kids how to code, they prefer the shorter videos.
But there is an age problem on TikTok like YouTube, your likely only to reach age 13-24 even if your educational content is targeted age kids under 13.
I think this is because of the short and fast phased nature of the TikTok content. Instead of publishing 10 to 30 min videos...
Thanks, you just revalidated my opinion. I had vaguely understood TikTok to be more transient in communication, with less substance, but I never bothered to find out myself. However, I had slowly grown an inkling of curiosity whether there might be something in there in TikTok, actually. You just saved me an hour of eventually signing up and seeing it for myself.
You see, it's exactly the 30-90 minute videos from good people, that I like on Youtube... My kind of fun, I suppose.
i've actually seen far more diverse and niche creators on tik tok. their algorithm also promotes them if you show interest in those kinds of videos.
youtube used to do a decent job but lately is more focusing on showing viral or promoted/paid videos. along with videos with 30second ads or useless intros, it's no wonder people are flocking to shorter form vids.
For me being controlled by China is a huge no. I am from a third world country, so neither USA, Europe, etc. But I don't like the totalitarian way of China. And before somebody thinks I have something against the Chinese people, my best man and best friend is Chinese. This is against the Chinese government's totalitarian way, not against the people.
I’m not concerned about wellbeing of China but about the future of the West, simply because I am European.
Quality of our products decline rapidly when they are not optimized for our needs but the needs of the country to compete with China.
What terrifies me the most is becoming like China to compete with them(Where every individual msu provide for its country and not the other way around). I was shocked when TikTok was almost banned in the USA and people were rallying for it because China is banning US social media.
Please don’t become China. If the US becomes like China, I am afraid Europe will follow and the world will be dominated by the Chinese way of life where individual rights and freedoms are limited in the name of national security.
To be honest, I feel like Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc. are all a case of how you use it, it's not intrinsically that bad. And wrt short videos on TikTok, it's great that you enjoy the format, but I also think longer form videos such as on YouTube have a lot of value. TLDR I think TikTok is making
'the internet fun again' due to its novelty, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter all still have fun on there but as a byproduct of aging.
Yesterday a friend posted a funny post about corona virus and getting her vaccine, she said something like, “I imagine I shoved much worse things in my body, it wasn’t so bad after all.” With a funny accompanying photo.
She is in Australia where there is a pretty big campaign underway to improve the image of vaccines with younger people.
Anyways, it was mostly unreadable because Instagram had put a massive warning from the WHO about how important vaccines are.
I understand the intention was positive but it was also kind of ironic because it was a pro-vaccine post, it was also a bit of fun.
I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media. I used to think my dopamine receptors were burned out by the constant barrage of memes I received from reddit, Facebook and Twitter but TikTok proves they can refine that product to make it even more potent.
When I visit reddit now it feels behind in the same way Facebook used to feel behind. Facebook's video feature (which they shove into my feed as the third or fourth card during scrolling) is 90% stuff stolen from and that I already saw a few days ago on TikTok. But absent their algorithm it isn't nearly as effective.
I often have to remind myself how good TikTok's algorithm is. After using it for just a couple of days I can tell it knows more about me than I am comfortable with, even though I just scroll the FYP (For You Page) without logging into an account. The unbelievably narrow category of content it serves me clearly panders to my personality in a way that almost lets me believe I have a majority opinion. It creates a nearly perfectly personally tailored media bubble.
A lot of people from my generation (Gen X) and even from the older Millennial's don't use it, thinking it is just for the kids. That is probably for the best. If you are susceptible to media addiction I suggest never downloading it. TikTok: Not Even Once.
> I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media.
I'd compare it more to something like coffee, somehow every time I leave TikTok I'm happier than I was before. This did not happen with Facebook, Instagram, etc.
I'm not sure why people keep comparing these. I go on facebook for friends, I go on twitter for work, I go on instagram for showing off, and I go on tiktok to consume cocain directly to my brain
>I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media.
>If you are susceptible to media addiction I suggest never downloading it.
These are the two big takeaways I've had from using the app for a day. Everything about it is designed to be a sinkhole, like a modern casino where they're gambling with your attention. I know a lot of people who use Facebook/Instagram/TikTok compulsively, and it ruins them to a degree. I think (or hope, at least) the future is headed towards more personal communique (a-la Discord, Slack, Matrix, etc.)
I don't think the algorithm is that good, it's simply that the content is better.
I used TikTok for a couple of weeks and the product is very good. I uninstalled it not because I didn't like it but because I think it's another step in the wrong direction, for society and for me personally.
I believe the amazing content and algorithm go hand in hand. It isn't like humanity suddenly became more creative in 2019. TikTok has two things going for it that I believe create a feedback loop.
First, their algorithm is good. Those same memes and ideas are on reddit, YouTube and even Facebook but often they are buried. TikTok algorithm manages to surface them extremely well, finding the right audience for the content with a much higher degree of success.
Second, the low barrier to entry for creating new content means that ideas iterate more quickly. If I see a funny YouTube video and I have an idea on how to expand or refine the idea, it is a bit of effort to create the content. By contrast, the extremely low production bar on TikTok means people can riff on ideas in near real-time. What starts off as an amusing seed of an idea can grow into a mind-blowing work of comedy genius over the course of thousands of videos within a week.
At each step these work together - good idea is surfaced by the algo, hundreds of works inspired by it get created, the best of those ideas are surfaced, hundreds of works are derived.
However, I agree with you in the direction of "but for what?" Amusing Ourselves to Death [1] was written in 1985 and is as relevant as ever.
This is because the TikTok app has a very good toolset for creating the content. For YouTubers, creating a content means hours of filming and days of editing because high production requires that and AFAIK YouTube leaves all the implementation details to you. Many YouTubers have Hollywood level production workflow.
On the TikTok app you have all the means to edit the video on the spot. It's not Hollywood level production but it is still good. When TikTokers do something with high grade production, it feels off.
I first discovered the app when it was Musically but I was scared away by peer pressure, even then had a bad reputation. Then I noticed that the icon changed(or read an article about it becoming something else, not sure), gave it another shot secretly. I still don't have friends who use TikTok, at least that's what they say but they laugh to videos stolen from TikTok all day. They are late of course.
According to iPhone's screen time I use TikTok 29 minutes a day on average. For contrast, it says 2 hours 15 minutes for Twitter.[0]
I need to cut Twitter down, I mostly doomscroll on Twitter whenever I get bored. TikTok is great before sleep, I don't get the urge to check it all the time, I don't feel FOMO.
My wife is a user and I've noticed how incredibly reinforcing it is as a platform. After the first week I never heard her groan, cringe aloud, disagree with, or mock the creator of any video she was watching. Think about that. Even in online communities tailor made as escapism like gaming you still have people that piss you off or challenge your opinions. Tiktok is a perfect echo chamber.
Yep this older millenial is staying away. I do enjoy the links my friends send me. I watch and immediately close. "Download the app" they say. Nope. I'm mostly down to just a few minutes of twitter and instagram a day and a bit of reddit. The latter I don't really consider social media, its just what forums evolved into IMO and I've been using those since the late 90s so no difference. Facebook is probably just a few minutes per week. If it wasn't a convenient way to contact a distant connection I'd delete it entirely.
I think it's possible but it's also not clearly borne out by the data yet. What came out was that TikTok was "most downloaded", but that is in part because they've been paying $$$ for user acquisition through ads. There is definitely some addictiveness to the platform but it's not clear that users who download are staying long term. Personally I fell off the charm a few months ago and nothing at all is pulling me back in. We would have to see what happens in ~ a year when they run out of users to acquire and YouTube develops its own vertical-scrolling short form content.
As a genxer with an addictive streak, TikTok is undoubtedly as addictive as crack. Do not pick up the pipe. If you do prepare to lose hours of yiur life.
Let the children be free to download this app and let them play in it. They are going to realise soon how much of an addictive nightmare this app is and it just takes a slip up or a scandal from ByteDance to anger the majority users on the platform.
The news about it being the most downloaded app is great news if you are an investor in ByteDance; I don't know what you get out of it if you're a mere user. As always you're basically the product (again), providing them with shareholder value by being addicted and posting continuously to other addicted users. Making your data and their algorithm more valuable.
Since we're comparing these platforms to being like drugs, and given you are saying that TikTok is proven to be even more potent, the description of such a drug sounds more like heroine, than crack. Addictive and dangerous. That isn't going to end well.
>They are going to realise soon how much of an addictive nightmare this app is and it just takes a slip up or a scandal from ByteDance to anger the majority users on the platform.
Have you seen this previously anywhere? Sounds like a pipe dream to me. Did, for example, Facebook's scandals kill Facebook? The spywares that Lenovo bundled even make a dent in Lenovo's brand? Reddit's constant push of dark pattern shrink their userbase?
> Have you seen this previously anywhere? Sounds like a pipe dream to me.
That's because it has already happened. They already were sued for screwing with their users privacy. [0] [1] Facebook's brand has been damaged because of this, as for Reddit they hasn't even started yet. Even with the 'dark patterns' you speak of.
The worst part is TikTok has already started these violations for everyone to see and the fact they are still getting sued over this, probably means they will continue to do it anyway.
I don't blame them, both Reddit and ByteDance (TikTok) need to IPO.
I realize that I need to elaborate my point. I agree that angry users can happen, and lawsuits can happen. There will be news articles that detail the problem. But the pipe dream part is that any of this has significant effect on the platform itself. As long as they offer something that people think they want, as long as people have their peers on it, the platform itself will thrive.
Facebook and Reddit survived tons of controversies already. Is the brand damaged? Maybe. But can you measurably show the impact of it?
Lots of positivity in this thread, and I don't think that's entirely a bad thing, but I think TikTok is the worst of the social media platforms in terms of addictiveness, based on my peers.
As a recent grad, so many of my friends are heavily invested in TikTok and have been since quarantine began, some of them for a bit before. The amount of time they spend there is absurd. Consuming 30 second content for three hours can't be good for concentration, right? It helps add to the 'always online' mindset that has grown more popular with social media and smart phones.
Instead of going for a walk, some of my friends would opt to lie in bed and watch TikToks, creating empty, basically non-existent connections with people across the world. Connections with people across the world are awesome, and one of the best things about the internet, but TikTok connections are basically UDP.
Most TikTok content I've been shown is shallow, the same way so much social media content is shallow. My having to get to the point immediately, we leave out key details and we want to catch your attention before you scroll away. Of course there is the other end of the spectrum with YouTube where a 2 minute tutorial takes 15 minutes.
I try not to use much social media, and honestly, I probably should limit my time on HN more as well. Doom scrolling is a real thing, and TikTok is not immune to that. I've seen plenty of dread inducing content that comes from TikTok as well.
TikTok keeps you logged on, as it's supposed it. I just don't think that's a good thing. If you can control and limit your usage to something that's healthy for you, then I don't think there's a problem. For me though, that healthy limit is 0, because I know myself and I have little self control with social media in the past.
From what I've seen Tiktok is no worse than Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat. If anything there's less toxicity which in itself makes Tiktok better than the rest.
With that said I don't use social media much (like maybe an hour a week? I have neither Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat accounts) and if I had to pick only one it would be Tiktok (even though I don't use it now) except if there were a curated HN page with all the toxicity filtered out (that would be awesome).
> As a recent grad, so many of my friends are heavily invested in TikTok and have been since quarantine began, some of them for a bit before. The amount of time they spend there is absurd. Consuming 30 second content for three hours can't be good for concentration, right? It helps add to the 'always online' mindset that has grown more popular with social media and smart phones.
How do they keep on it for 3 hours?! I've doomscrolled FB quite a bit, but I find even the less doomy stuff on TikTok much more exhausting to watch, like one of those Japanese game shows or shouty YouTube video game meme channels. I can maybe do 10 minutes at most until I need to put the phone down.
To be frank, I've experienced those "scroll for 3 hours through short-length content" on youtube, especially with shorts.
You just kind of... zone out. Watch, click, watch, click, heart, watch... The action is repetitive, but the content isn't. I've definetly felt like I was on a Netflix binge, there's so little friction, time just flies.
Well everything in this HN thread about TikTok is music to the ears of the investors who are almost certainly looking for a massive exit when ByteDance eventually IPOs.
As for TikTok itself, all I see is another social network that is no different to Facebook or YouTube that tracks every single action, video and comment you make and watch which that feeds to the 'algorithm' to make you more even more addicted as possible. On top of that, Bytedance gets to control what is seen or unseen on the platform depending on what their guidelines are which can benefit some users over others. I do not know what is so positive about that.
So given that TikTok has screwed up on their users in the past, the question is how long until they do it again?, but on the seriousness of a massive scandal; just like how other social networks have done already.
I'm not a TikTok user.. or really a fan or user of any social media (and yes I realize I'm on HN).. but I find it silly that people are saying TikTok is somehow "better" for society or peoples' psyches than any of the alternatives.
Do you remember when Facebook wasn't considered terrible? Twitter? Reddit? Instagram? Snapchat?
This is just the latest one to rise to the top.. following very predictable patterns. It's got something novel (in this case I guess a better algorithm and UX).. an attracts an early community (which largely always seems like the youth rebelling against the current top dog). Then the masses come. Pretty soon.. that original spirit and thing that makes it "better" is taken away by greedy advertisers or "influencers" and the party's basically ruined. And then the next one comes along.
So consider me skeptical of TikTok being any fundamentally different. In another 2-3 years, the next social network will emerge and take over the zeitgeist. Rinse. repeat.
Indeed. That is the pattern. This is yet another social network doing the same typical social network things found on other networks with:
* Far more invasive tracking
* Designed to be addictive as possible.
* Manipulation of content - seen and unseen
* Feeds are gamed by larger creators
* Lots of privacy violations and getting sued for it.
Every other social network has all of these properties and TikTok isn't any different. The users here commenting about how great it is like 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet' [0] maybe forgot when Facebook was once seen as 'the best thing to have happened to the Internet' Until the larger influencers, companies, large corporations come in and ruin it.
When ByteDance eventually IPOs, it will be in the interests of the investors and the big money and not the users who still work for the algorithm even when it is already gamed. Another fast growing social network will take their place.
So you are showing me that both Reddit and TikTok do fingerprinting on their users? There is no difference in any of the posts you have linked. You might need to read both of those posts again.
So this is not far more invasive tracking in TikTok as of 2021 then? [0] [1]
Substantiate your comment with concrete, up-to-date sources otherwise your claim can be dismissed as baseless.
For example, in TikTok's own privacy policy: [0]
> "We may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under US laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints, from your User Content. Where required by law, we will seek any required permissions from you prior to any such collection."
Given that it has been admitted after a privacy lawsuit [1] which confirmed that all of this was the case, How is this not worse than the other social media companies that already collect your data, but in this case it also includes voiceprints?
On top of that, they were sued for billions for abusing under-age children's data of this year [2]. Then I asked you how long until they screw with their users again? [3]. No response or evidence from you obviously but after that question, it turns out it took them 22 days to do it again. [4]
I have to disagree pretty strongly with this. The early Farmville days were 2009-2010, at which point Facebook was already fairly mainstream (300M users) and trending toward the garbage content, advertising, and outrage bandwagon. For the first few years when it came out (2005-2008), Facebook was the shit for everyone in the demographic groups currently targeted by TikTok.
I’m a 34 year old who just got into Instagram and TikTok.
I love it and hate it.
I love all the creative and ridiculously funny content I find.
But I viscerally cannot stand and get angry over so much attention seeking garbage there is out there too. Just smug unqualified nobodies telling people to “stop it” with a smug meme song regarding health habits or fashion or whatnot. Or “oh no no no no” or “thank you Diane” memes.
I dunno. Maybe I’m a summer child discovering something everyone’s already contending with. I know it’s a biased sample but there’s this whole culture of entirely unearned confidence and narcissism.
Don’t get me started with all the 20something ”Influencers” humble bragging about their cars and homes.
I get angry at night and yet I can’t stop scrolling because there’s always some occasional maniac driving a canoe down a hill into a lake.
I’m just yelling at people to get off my lawn aren’t I?
I want to spoil a magnificent movie, the Russian classic Stalker [1]. If you haven't watched the film and want to one day, please stop reading this comment.
It is a deep film with many themes but one main theme involves a curious plot device. From the Wikipedia article: "The Zone contains a place called the "Room", said to grant the wishes of anyone who steps inside." The theme of that plot device is that once a group of explorers finally get to the room they refuse to go inside. The "Room" isn't a monkey-paw like device that distorts your wishes and gives you a bad outcome, rather it sees inside your soul and gives you what you truly desire. It raises questions about man's conscious desires compared to his unconscious desires. Do you really want to know what you truly desire, even the desires you hide from yourself?
I can't do justice to the film but I think of it often and usually with respect to AI and the unreasonably effective algorithms that drive modern feeds. TikTok is in some ways our first true glimpse into the "Room" of Tarkovsky's Stalker.
All this to say: I don't see any of the things you are saying you see on TikTok. Whether you like it or not the algorithm is sending you what you engage with. You have been sorted into the "desires wild canoe ride" TikTok. You are sorted into the "desires smug fashion gatekeepers" TikTok.
And if you happen to have read this comment and haven't seen Stalker - it is still worth it.
TikTok sorts you according to it's interests, not your own. Just because they notice that you are more engaged with irritating content doesn't mean you like irritating content.
I have an heuristic I follow whenever content I do not want appears on my FYP. I immediately scroll. I don't let the video get 10 seconds in, I absolutely do not let it finish. I do not swipe left to see other videos by the same creator. I do not click on the comments to see what other people are saying about the content. The second I realize I do not want content like that I swipe it away. If I get a series of such content I close the app and don't open until the next day. This has been 100% successful in removing unwanted content categories from my feed.
Alternatively, the opposite behavior is extremely effective in getting more content related to the current video. I let the video play all the way through or even play multiple times. I swipe left to see other content by the same creator and maybe watch a few of their other videos. I read the comments to see what other people are saying about the video.
Interesting - thats different from the Strugatsky Roadside Picnic novel the Tarkovskys film is based on.
There it was a floting golden ball that would grant you a single wish.
The problem was that to get to it you had to pass via a phenomenon they called "the grinder". Anyone stepping inside it would be mutilated into pulp in short order, after which it will deactivate for long enought to let you reach the golden ball.
So the dilemma is different there - can you live with the fact that you need to take another uknowing human with you to feed to the grinder for you to have a wish, any wish, granted ?
(Well unless the wish could be "Give me unlimitted number of wishes." Then you can just "respawn" your victim without loosing the wish. ;-) )
I'm the same age as you. I remember downloading Snapchat years ago and and thinking "I don't get this, you take pictures and add ugly stickers to it and send it to people?".
With TikTok, I've seen some good videos, so I get the appeal. At the same time, no app has turned me off the way TT has.
- The Grammarly voiceover is like nails on a chalkboard.
- Your feed will always have some fixed % of videos which are nothing but bandwagoning on some contrived trend (usually a dance, but could be style of video too).
- Samples of popular songs, autotuned and pitched up to within an inch of its life.
I'm 35 and definitely too old for tiktok. Sometimes people send me links to videos or ppl to follow, and when I'm trying to play this stuff both their website and the app fight me hard with terrible UI. Like I can't even figure out how to go back to the beginning of a video because it started playing but the sound was off and I had to turn it on, meaning I want to go back to the start. It's also full of random text everywhere and taking control of your back button or I dunno, everything is just all over the place.
>Don’t get me started with all the 20something ”Influencers” humble bragging about their cars and homes.
Not sure about that, if they have the car, but I only watch one influencer. called Supercarblondie, I am not sure if she has that expensive car, when she gave her lover a sweet Suzuki Jimmy. (I forgot the name of the car, but it's expensive.
I must say, I got Instagram too, I have no clue what to do with it. I am too lazy to upload and too lazy to touch the app. It isn't easy to upload pictures from the desktop to Instagram.
I'm baffled by the glowing endorsements of TikTok on Hacker News of all places. TikTok content comes across as completely vapid. It's like the worst possible mashup of bad television and social media. As a company TikTok seems to have zero goals beyond increasing engagement.
> I'm baffled by the glowing endorsements of TikTok on Hacker News of all places.
Could it be addicts trying to justify their addiction to the world (and themselves)? It sounds like TikTok is even more successful at being addictive than previous social media drugs, maybe it's strong enough to hook people who weren't hooked by its predecessors.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and (to a lesser extent) YouTube are weapons of psychological warfare that have been optimised to spread political misinformation and outrage.
TikTok, on the other hand, is just hot chicks dancing, stupid memes and Shrugging Black Italian Man. It reminds me a lot of old YouTube in that regard.
I'm deep into exploring farming practices, a funny opthamologist and queer culture. All of which I am not exposed to in my regular life and are not shallow.
It's as deep as you want to make it. As vapid as you want to make it.
I get the temptation to write it off (I don't personally use TikTok daily), but to me this take feels similar to people who used to assume Twitter is just for people reporting what they ate for lunch. That might have been the case at the start but TikTok has _plenty_ of niche content, some vapid, some productive, which frankly depends on the media you engage with.
Indeed, every time I see a post on HN/reddit assuming TikTok is just people doing dances and other vapid content, it's almost from people who have never actually used TikTok.
As a non-user, I am genuinely curious about what are some concrete examples of productive contents?
From my understanding, the only format of communication on TikTok is videos with a short time limit. I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
> I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
This is actually one of the most refreshing things about TikTok. Content density. What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds.
The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
I went through some TikTok accounts that aim to be informational. Even for the basic type of people talking to the camera, the content density is indeed higher than some YouTube counterparts.
The problem I see is that there's an upper limit to the quantity of information even with this higher density. And that's a hard limit on the range of topics that this format can cover.
Furthermore, I don't think this can be solved by simply increase the time limit as well, since people can't maintain the same level of attention for a long period of time. Say the content needs 60s with max density. It usually needs to spread out to 120s with lower density for it to be understood better.
For the informational content I consume on YouTube, in a 10min video, the parts that can be removed are usually 30s of opening and 30s of closing. For the rest, though it has lower density than TikTok, I don't think it's possible to compress that much and the low density is in some sense necessary.
Of course, this is specific to how people use YouTube and TikTok. And though I am unlikely to use TikTok from this experience, I still appreciate your input.
>>>What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds. The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
I'm struggling to comprehend how German artillery tactics in WW2 can be competently covered in 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/3VY10gfnrTQ
> I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
I have found some great TikTok tutorials on iPhone photo techniques. For example, hold the phone upside down and on the ground, pour water in front of it, and you get an amazing PoV / reflection shot. The clips that demo'd this were all less than 30 seconds long. There are other tutorials on tool use and knots, by way of example, from which I have learned useful things.
These short-form tutorials are a breath of fresh air compared with bloated YouTube equivalents and their tedious intros. And you can save them to your camera roll.
There are a lot of tech-related accounts. There is also a lot of marketing, ux-design. Some examples :
- @therubberduckiee
- @loewhaley
- @tony.aube
- @cassidoo
- @systems_analyst
There is also urban design tiktok with @mrbarricade.
Let's also be clear that the goal of the app is to entertain and I think it does this really well and cheaply. Then sometimes you learn something that you might use in your work or personal life.
I'm not who you replied to, but I find it hard to believe that you went to an account with the username "systems_analyst", who posts videos on networking and cybersecurity in an informative manner, and decided it was "aspirational meme garbage".
On HN, I give people who I disagree with the benefit of the doubt and assume they're always intelligent. But that doesn't extend itself to believing they're always arguing in good faith. I find it unfathomable that a critically thinking person truly believes a social network with close to a billion users is devoid of any useful content. I "feel" like you're trying to be contrarian and edgy for the sake of being so.
I think my earlier Twitter analogy is apt here. Of course you can't expect TikTok to be on par with Coursera. Similarly, you don't go to Twitter for dissertations. These social networks are entertainment first, and their algorithms and restricted formats lend themselves to a certain type of content. But the natural evolution of social networks at scale is that people easily discover new content that is legitimately useful to them, or find a community based on their professional or side interests.
I went to the #softwareengineering hashtag on TikTok and very quickly found a few helpful accounts. You can do this with any hashtag. Frankly, software dev TikTok feels more friendly than HN at a cursory glance.
TikTok's audience age skews younger. I'm not saying these profiles will be helpful to you personally, but if I were in high school with a passing interest in development and got exposed to TikTok-style entertainment/info content, I probably would've started coding a lot earlier.
Yeah, it isn't really comparable to Facebook or Reddit or Youtube. They really do different things. TikTok seems most optimized for the passive receiver of vapid content use case. You can actually do exactly that with reddit if you browse without logging in and never click a comment thread. The top 1% (and bottom 1%) of interesting TikToks end up on Reddit anyway. Facebook/Insta are explicitly about your life and the lives of your acquaintances. TikTok seems more like competition for Netflix really.
TikTok is the latest social media on its ascent. Perhaps they are impressed by its ability to keep the pigs eating. Or maybe they really like short videos. Hard to say.
Uh... yes? I'm sorry, but if you go to tiktok for deep content you're in the wrong place. If you want deep content, you read a book. Or use a carefully curated blog list. Or read scientific papers.
I go to tik tok purely for enjoyment, and for that it works.
Yeah, some of the content looks like it's "teaching" you. But it's doing it in the same way Discovery Channel is (was) teaching you. We find learning certain stuff to be entertaining. If I really wanted to learn about history or biology of physics I'd find other, much better ways. But I still like it when I see a video on how black holes bend light and make it orbit a couple of times before letting it go. It's cool. But it's still entertainment, and that's 100% ok.
LE: And I make sure to like 90% of videos with pretty girls, just because I like tik tok to be entertaining and I never want to curate it to blandness. (It's very gender equalitarian btw, I've seen feeds of my women friends and they're full of sexy men).
You have to use it a bit and interact with it to find the content you like. My guess is that people who like it have done this and people that don't haven't yet found their niche.
I think this might be it. I remember my first interactions with Tik Tok to be full of teens lip-syncing songs while preening on camera. I'm still not a regular user, but now whenever I open the app I actually see people from all walks of life.
Sure it's vapid and I'm glad I've aged out of feeling I need to participate in any of these things.
But it's great to see competition with SV, competition FAANG, competition with the US even. It's not a solution, but it's a breath of fleetingly fresh error for everyone sick of endless monopoly, acquisitions, and "tech nationalism for me, free trade and dependency for thee".
I just downloaded it and tried the first 100 TikToks after expressing my interests explicitly and putting 'personalised' ads and app sharing on... I know it takes a while to get an algorithm going but, I was thoroughly bored with all of the content.
I also saw a lot of content I'd already seen before. A lot of people mentioned they see TikTok content on YT, reddit, FB. I also see it the other way around, including plenty of classic meme content from years ago before TikTok even existed.
Can the people who're so glowing about tiktok please post their top 3 interesting accounts? At this point I'm not sure whether I'm looking at other stuff, or that my judgement of the same stuff is just different.
I started using TikTok for a couple of weeks now and started to find it fascinating, the communities that are built around the bubbles the algorithm creates are quite interesting and have discussion between themselves. It's easy to reach out to actual subject mater experts for non-technical stuff, people you wouldn't typically see on HN or Reddit.
Now does it bring __value__ to my life? No
Will I keep participating and creating content just to engage in these niche communities? Yes
You find it fascinating and interesting, you're discovering niche communities and engaging with them. You (presumably) enjoy creating content. That's value. Fun, entertainment and communication all have value.
I'm with you here. I was under the impression that there is a general consensus (backed by scientific studies?) in hackernews that social media consumption is detrimental to mental health.
Also I always read negative comments about TikTok on YouTube and Reddit. I've only read praise for TikTok on hackernews.
Reddit and YouTube are very hive-mindy. HN users tend to actually try things themselves instead of just consuming the trendy mass opinion (though they do this too to some degree), which is why we might be seeing this distinction.
TikTok content is precisely what you want it to be. Turns out when people are tired and looking for quick entertainment they aren't looking for deep philosophical questions, though you'll have no trouble finding plenty of that on TikTok if that's your thing.
Honestly, I don't use it but my gf uses it and it's far and away better than any other social media I've seen. At least half the content I see when we scroll through together is good.
Yeah, no kidding with that reddit one, every time I go there I feel like everyone is just in constant fear or anger, especially going to subreddits for my city/state.
I've near completely stopped using it due to this. Now I just spend way too much time on YouTube instead. It may be a terrible waste of time, but at least it's less angry and fearful.
Regional subs are the worst, for whatever reason. My theory is it's because they bring together people with nothing in common besides their geographic location.
Even subs that should be neutral, fun or supportive have attitude problems. One about a game I'm playing, for instance, consists mainly of dramatic complaints with a feeling of impending doom.
Topic Subreddits tend to be joyful, but there are things that can turn communities very toxic. It could be the demographic the topic appeals to. It could be that some moderation decision for the subreddit is festering and creating a lot of hurt feelings. It could be that there's some underlying issue that the community is uncomfortable with, or divisive, and a loud minority are dominating the discussion.
I have two examples of this from otherwise extremely positive communities. /r/factorio and /r/satisfactory (same genra, but I like this genre)
/r/factorio initially had no issue with self promotion of videos and series. This caused a ton of consternation and all kinds of other subjects turned very very negative. Moderators created another subreddit dedicated for self promotion of series, and the community stayed angry about everything for about 2 months, before things regressed to /r/factorio's mean, which was very positive.
I saw a similar thing happen in /r/satisfactory. Before the game was released people on the subreddit had nothing to talk about for the most part, and satisfactory announced that it was going to be epic exclusive for 6 months before release. Given that many people really hated Epic, and because we didn't actually get to play the game, anything that didn't talk about the Epic exclusivity, was subject to the conversation. Eventually moderators placed dedicated threads for epic exclusivity discussion but still, the whole subreddits tone was extremely vitriolic. Even on things that didn't have anything to do with Epic Exclusivity.
Then the game released. And that toxic discussion was totally wiped out by people actually playing the game. The subreddits snapped to positive tone instantly.
Most times I read reddit it is either in context of diving or a video game. Neither make me want to hate the world.
In particular, the rim world subreddit is great. That kind of game makes for a lot of crazy situations, and much of it is captured there.
When games has game breaking bugs, reddit is often a common search results with people discussing it and providing solutions. In many way it serve the same purpose for gaming as stackoverflow does for programming.
Is this just because the way I am reading reddit, or the subject matter?
Specialized reddits about programming topics, drugs, do it yourself stuff etc are quite good TBH. People are much more helpful then on some other popular places such as Stack Exchange in my opinion which hoards achievement people which do not generally answer unless there is a chance they will get a vote or something.
For YT, try a client like NewPipe or SmartTubeNext that can be configured with adbock & sponsor block, and which is less "in your face" about suggesting/autoplaying rabbit-hole content.
Considering NewPipe isn't available in the Play Store or at all on iOS, I'd imagine the number of people using it is small enough that Google doesn't care too much.
Technology-wise, NewPipe builds off of the back of youtube-dl and a custom page parser, and SponsorBlock uses a user-built database of timestamps.
TikTok regularly leaves me inspired, and across many different creative realms: Amazing makeup, mindblowing parkour, beautiful original music and eye opening covers. Oh and some of the short comedy sketches have left me thoroughly incapacitated due to laughter. The list goes on for me.
In general, I'm happier after viewing, even when the "you should stop watching too much TikTok guy" comes on.
I don't understand all the "it's more positive" comments here. It's almost seems like FUD to me. The times I used TikTok I just got so absorbed in it that I wasted hours of my life just scrolling endlessly consuming brainless content. I don't know how that was a positive experience compared to consuming a more thoughtful video on youtube, for example.
reddit and twitter are the most depressing places on the Internet. So much doomerism and political outrage.
It's on TikTok too but the TikTok algorithm quickly learns I'm not interested in political outrage and actually directs me toward content I'm interested in.
Something more toxic than reddit? I have only seen it in sites that start as "free-speech reddit clones". Outside those I find it hard to believe anything can be more toxic than Reddit. Unless you digg really deep into niche subs even Facebook is better.
Also, what subreddits/communmities are you in on Reddit that make you hate the world after 20 minutes? Are you on /r/popular or /r/all, or filtered down to your niche interests?
HN is mostly like a good day on Facebook but once in awhile it transcends every other social media. IMO it is going downhill fast though and the really good discussions are getting drowned out by China hate, nationalism, brand loyalty, etc. more often than not. All in all 30 minutes of Tiktok is likely to make me smile a lot more than HN but then there's not any real discussions so hard to compare the two.
All of Reddit makes me hate the world. No sub doesn't. If it does just visit it one or two times more and bingo.
HN is still relatively balanced, but I see a lot more reddit style comments. Usually 20 min on HN I find nothing really new, tons of polarizing topics, discussions are decent but ultimately pointless, I really feel like I need to take a break.
Even niche reddit communities end up being full of newbies and self promotion spam. There are exceptions (/r/steroids comes to mind back when I was into that) but programming/tech subreddits are just noise.
r/steroids used to be great but the pandemic really turned it toxic imo. Pandemic made so many subs polarized and awful to read. everything was trending negative before but now it's another level feels like.
I spend time on HN if a post I read also results in a meaningful conversation among the commenters. Usually I will try to add a comment as well, so there can be a bit of back and forth. It's not all one-way the way it is on TT.
Of course it's not always that way. I know to steer clear of posts related to H1B visas, because the exact same conversation plays out each time.
I learned a lot from watching YouTube. I was able to complete many home improvement projects based on DIY videos. And learned about many different subjects: history, science, engineering. I probably learned more from YouTube than from books. I do have YouTube Premium subscription so I don't need to watch ads — makes a big difference.
Honestly, from a social media perspective, TikTok feels like the least toxic environment. Nobody is showing off their new homes, cars, kids, spending. It feels like a significantly reduced pressure to produce. Many of my friends are just consumers of content. Most of the content I'm seeing are memes and are funny. Even the advertising is more light hearted.
That's because It's the least commercialized of the social platforms and dominated by youth (for now). AKA we're at the end of it's honeymoon hip-new-platform phase. The company cannot maintain meteoric user-growth forever as there's only so many people in the world, and their primary target demographic that is responsible for much of their growth is already nearing saturation (the youth).
As such, they're at an inflection point in their user growth and their operating costs have never been higher. Billions in revenue will only tempt investors for so long when they're still netting a loss in the billions a year and their growth curve is starting to relax. This will see the implementation of more dark patterns to monetize the revenue per user while simultaneously the users on the platform will search for any and every possible advantage to leverage their following for clout and profit (especially as the userbase ages into adulthood and has bills to pay) and ultimately we'll see the same poisoning of the well that we've seen with every other social media platform to date. Question is just how bad it will get.
>TikTok targets a younger demographic that is digital native and practices better internet hygiene.
Or maybe they're a younger demographic that doesn't have "new homes, cars, kids, spending"?
Also, the bit about "practices better internet hygiene" because they're "digital native" is kind of funny. Prior to the mid 2000s the standard advice was not to put public info about yourself online. "internet hygiene" was the norm, even when most people weren't "digital natives".
Con. The algorithm seems to dish out similarly structured videos for all users. For example, it generally includes music that is extremely annoying. (That "No no no" song that is on every other video). At the same time, I also recognize how addictive the app is and because of it I would never download it myself.
I get "No no no" videos but when I mentioned them to my friend who is using TikTok a lot she had never heard of them. I presumed that was too big of a trend not to leak into everyone's For You feed but I was wrong.
This is why I stopped looking at TikTok altogether. "Trends" just seem to be too enormous a use case for creators, to be avoided. I never wanted to know who Megan Thee Stallion or $NOT are, but here we are.
I don't use it, but it looks so painful to me. I couldn't imagine having to 'stage' my life so frequently for the temporary enjoyment of people I do and don't know.
Lurking doesn't seem all that appealing to me either.
I just checked the tiktok homepage and the top two videos I saw were of a woman failing a sobriety test and a guy scaring a drive-through woman with a blow horn.
I realize this isn't the content you might see once your algo is calculated, but it's obviously popular stuff on the platform and it just doesn't seem like very positive content for me.
> it's obviously popular stuff on the platform and it just doesn't seem like very positive content for me.
This is true of everything. If I look at the front page of YouTube in a private browser window, it's all bullshit too, obviously. But there's plenty of quality stuff on YouTube that I do like, ya know?
The point is that the well is deep and broad enough that there is probably a whole community of people making content you'd like, and TikTok is extraordinarily good at finding that stuff for you sooner rather than later. I watch tons of diorama-building tutorials and recipe videos, for example. And I'm better both at painting and cooking as a result.
Look: I'm not a shill, here. I'm not trying to convince you to get into TikTok (I mean? who cares, honestly) but I find a lot of talk about it tends to boil down to "kids these days" dismissiveness.
And yeah I don't post anything there - nobody wants to see my grizzled old-ass face.
> I find a lot of talk about it tends to boil down to "kids these days" dismissiveness
These platforms are the products of megacorps, using incredibly sophisticated technology. Just contrast even a single CPU, versus, say, kids using their language faculties and markers to be funny or naughty, or using a bunch of stuff they found outside to invent a game. And then think of how many CPU and other things are involved in the pipeline. Kids being kids is as far from it as it could be.
During the peak of the outrage about and the being in denial about Elsagate, there were plenty of people actually saying "these videos probably are this way because AI generated them based on the things toddlers like". People getting stabbed, raped, kids in trunks and crying over being separated from their family, endless body horror -- all brushed aside with "meh, they like that".
Pointing to good content that one could pay attention to instead is a bit like saying "ignore the spam email from the Nigerian prince, you obviously aren't in the target demographic for it [let the people who are fend for themselves]". That's what people did with content literally aimed at children who couldn't even speak, why wouldn't they do it for teenagers, and of course for adults. This doesn't affect me, so it doesn't get shown to me, so it's fine.
And while online mobs are certainly not a TikTok specialty, just to counter the general fluffy happy picture that so many comments here are painting based on things being fine for themselves:
> But let me tell you, reading a hate comment about yourself that’s relatively true (I mean hey, I do have thin lips) said by 1 person stings at a level 1 on the pain chart. But reading hate comments about yourself that aren’t true, and are said by tens of thousands of people is….well, it’s a physical feeling. That’s the only way I can describe it.
They weakly claim to no longer use these rules, without saying what rules they use instead. I would bet you that certain political topics are hard filtered though, and some things being censored while fluff being tailored to be addictive is a net negative effect in my books. It's not exclusive to TikTok, but that doesn't absolve it, just like TikTok doesn't absolve others.
Oh, that's nothing. There's also things like "if this $optical_illusion moves, you have $disorder", or people faking DID and showing off their "alters".
There is a time and place for everything. Connecting with all your friends and relatives (over Facebook) was a novelty but is cooling down. We are rather going back to the "celebrities model", admiring influencers on better suited platforms for asynchronous (fan>star, rather than friend<>friend) interactions: YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok.
There are plenty of arguments and issues with the politics and moderation of Facebook, but TikTok is more simple than Facebook, and it appeals at that level in the same way Instagram does.
It's fascinating to see Facebook threatened by a company they can't just acquire to put down their competition. Their response in the form of Reels is consistently much worse at recommending quality content than Tiktok is and generally just comprises re-uploads from Tiktok, which is a bad look (people aren't making their content for Reels first). Tiktok is also addictive in a way that no competing app has managed to capture.
I'm still optimistic Facebook can recover based on the quality and abundance of talent they have working on the product, but it's been a year and Tiktok only continues to strengthen their position while Reels doesn't appear to have improved, at least from the customer-facing side. We may be witnessing the early stages of a shift in social media apps that Facebook cannot stop.
I’ve noticed most the re-uploaded content on Reels are from meme accounts and not the actual TikTok user themselves, which leads me to believe its shortcomings are more of a content and cultural issue.
Instagram has become way more formal and people’s profiles are carefully curated now. Posting silly trends or going on live on Instagram would be a form of social suicide for many.
The march away from language continues. Facial expressions may be a rich form of communication but the kinds of ideas you can communicate with them are severely restricted. Literacy was hard won and now it seems like we're letting it go. Then again, maybe I'm just too old to understand.
Is sculpting, or painting, a step in the march away from language, too? Is dancing?
What about videos of people dancing is going to hurt literacy. People will consume Apps instead of TV, neither are literature, but one you can participate in.
You may be too old to let yourself like new things. Where's the childlike wonder?
I don't use The Tik toks either, but let me not lose mine.
So, what do you think happens to those creations? They just go right into the dumpster, having fulfilled the moral obligation of their creators to constantly be producing things?
Going through a museum, and actively studying individual art deeply is a very different activity mentally, and much more stimulating, than scrolling through a feed passively 15 second clip after clip.
It does actually take a sort of literacy to understand and appreciate art. Go talk to anyone about art who has spent a lot of time studying it and then talk to someone who just walks through the museum to take instagram pictures and you get very different answers about what they see.
>It does actually take a sort of literacy to understand and appreciate art.
No it doesn't. It might add something (or nothing at all or detract from it) but if it is a hard requirement then it isn't art.
> Go talk to anyone about art who has spent a lot of time studying it and then talk to someone who just walks through the museum to take instagram pictures and you get very different answers about what they see.
Exactly, and both are equally correct in their view on the art pieces. I'm sorry but your post sound like one of those snob magazines that try to make art only something for the rich and well educated. It is neither. If anything money detracts from art and studying something too much can too. A young child can appreciate art by Leonardo da Vinci or Mr. Brainwash just as well as an art professor. They just appreciate it in different, equally correct, ways.
It seems like passive consumption, be it of books or tiktok, is unlikely to improve someone very much. You may learn some new facts but I doubt you’ll be able to revise any of your deep assumptions about the world.
That being said, it’s much more natural to actively read than to actively watch TikTok. Thus, in practice, reading is often a better activity than watching TikTok. The first chapter or Robert Adler’s “How to Read a Book” talks about active reading in more detail; he has a few more arguments too.
Side note: unless you are a relativist and think everyone’s view about art is equally correct no matter what, the person who studies art is probably “more correct” than the Instagramer; a lot of art requires cultural context (e.g, familiarity with the Bible and Ovid) to understand. If you are a relativist, then why does nearly everyone agree some art belongs in a museum and a lot of art is garbage that nobody cares about?
No they don't. It's a popular view nowadays because people want to have egalitarian views on everything but someone who has played Bach for 20 years has a deeper understanding of (his) music than someone who listened for ten minutes and can pick up on things that someone else cannot.
E.F. Schumacher coined the term 'adaequatio' for this.
"What enables man to know anything at all about the world around him? … Nothing can be known without there being an appropriate “instrument” in the makeup of the knower. This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adaequatio rei et intellectus — the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.[...]
Beethoven’s musical abilities, even in deafness, were incomparably greater than mine, and the difference did not lie in the sense of hearing; it lay in the mind. Some people are incapable of grasping and appreciating a given piece of music, not because they are deaf but because of a lack of adaequatio in the mind. The music is grasped by intellectual powers which some people possess to such a degree that they can grasp, and retain in their memory, an entire symphony on one hearing or one reading of the score; while others are so weakly endowed that they cannot get it at all, no matter how often and how attentively they listen to it. For the former, the symphony is as real as it was for the composer; for the latter, there is no symphony: there is nothing but a succession of more or less agreeable but altogether meaningless noises. The former’s mind is adequate to the symphony; the latter’s mind is inadequate, and thus incapable of recognizing the existence of the symphony.[...]
For every one of us only those facts and phenomena “exist” for which we posses adaequatio, and as we are not entitled to assume that we are necessarily adequate to everything, at all times, and in whatever condition we may find ourselves, so we are not entitled to insist that something inaccessible to us has no existence at all and is nothing but a phantom of other people’s imaginations."
It's absolutely childish to even for a minute assume that my perception and understanding of chess is "equally correct" as Magnus Carlsen's. He sees complexity and depth in the game that I cannot, because I do not have the capacity for it, learned or otherwise. And the consequences of not recognizing this, are equally dire, again Schumacher:
"When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality."
>someone who has played Bach for 20 years has a deeper understanding of (his) music than someone who listened for ten minutes
See, there it is again. The snobbery. We are discussing art, not music theory. No, one that has played Bach for 20 years cannot by default appreciate art better than someone who just heard Bach for the first time. It is exactly the same as saying only a mechanic who have worked on cars for 20 years can appreciate a good sports car or only a doctor can appreciate the human body. It is pure elitist nonsense! Just because you know the theory behind how something is made doesn't mean you are better at appreciating it. Far from it. Using all kinds of theory on, say, a book will often ruin it.
It is those who have used a lot of time on theory that want to believe they are better, not those without the theory that understand art less.
It's more dire for the average person to get stuck in an assessment loop that may not have their best interest at heart.
The problem of art being impossible to appreciate without sufficient training is that there then becomes no way to detect dishonest art. The worst possible intentions are officially impossible. There is no way to stop the dissent into art created for the sake of producing "inadequate and impoverished" feelings in all but the most devoted followers. Post-modernism is one such authority play all the way down.
Reading this, I just want to see the "scholarly approach" to TikTok. That sounds like some nice performance art.
Alternatively, this is the kind of thing guys like Banksy and Warhol were doing with their art. It's a pretty narrow minded view of art to not include some of the stuff going on on TikTok.
It's surprising to me how many people in these comments are trying to gatekeep art, as if art must only be the life's work of famous masters. Museums are full of crude drawings, sculptures, tools created by people who didn't consider themselves artists. Art reflects the social mores of its time and we can also take interest in art to simply get a glimpse into the past.
Plus no one in their right mind would have compared the Pieta to a local bard with a talent for singing and dancing getting paid to entertain people. Just a lot of backward comparisons all because people have in their mind a single definition of what "art" is and should be.
There is a difference between a museum, which curates culturally significant art from places around the world and at home, to TikTok, a social media app that is for making money.
The 'culturally significant art' you're talking about was created for money. It's not any different than TikTok, it's just from long ago. TikTok is refined Vine and some of those Vines were worth preserving and spawned careers like ProZD.
Culturally significant art was created for money in a different way than a global brand like TikTok creates content for money habibi. They are not equivalent no matter how hard you try to fit your square block in the circular hole.
It's made by individuals, not TikTok? I'm not really sure if you know what TikTok is after this comment.
Just to clarify, TikTok does not do ad revenue sharing. They have a creator fund, but TikTok creators really make money via brand deals, merch sales and direct donations from fans.
TikTok is a social media platform that makes money from other people creating content for others to consume. Individuals get money for either sponsoring a product or getting many views. How is this the same as someone paying for a clay pot in Ancient Egypt that we admire at today in a museum? The act of getting money is not devoid of the context of which it was acquired.
In one case, people are viewing something created specifically for people's entertainment. In the other case, it's detritus or grave goods we're viewing.
What a shockingly simplistic view of art you have. It pains me to know that the cultural artifacts of my people will be viewed by you in the same vein as a 30 second TikTok video.
Are you serious? How do you think the clay pot ended up being recovered by an archeologist? There's pretty much two ways...
You should look up some TikTok creators from Egypt, there is plenty of great stuff out there.
The basic premise of your argument as I understand it is that art is something you see in museums or art is something that has been gated by age or by scholars or by "cultural significance". This is not how art works, some great works were discovered long after the artist had died. TikTok creators create art, some of it good, some of it bad, but it's art all the same.
First, I've seen Arabic TikTok creators and I don't need to be lectured about their presence and content.
Second, that is not the argument I am making. The ancient Egyptian clay pot at a museum was just an example. I stated the act of getting money is not devoid of the context of which it was acquired when it comes to art.
Well, in the same way, producing TikTok content is creation, but watching TikTok content of others isn't (just like looking at other people dancing isn't creation either).
We only came up with words and writing to cover the gaps with facial expressions and motions.
Truly, from the dawn of writing we’ve been dealing with the faults of expressing ourselves via words. The issues have been worth it however, because communicating complicated ideas across time and space was impossible otherwise.
Now, video has progressed to the point where it is trivial to use as a storage medium of ideas. We are still in the very early days of “moving pictures,” and with any technology, the first iterations often look like toys. In the far future, we may look back at this very moment as the start of a surge of _better_ communication across all boundaries; time, space, country of origin, species perhaps?
This is all baseless speculation of course, but it’s fun to speculate.
I don't use much social media, but Snapchats discovery cards are over run with creators using that face. It's excessively abundant in the channels there.
It feels like a forced attempt at viral marketing. "Maybe if we act shocked, they'll be shocked too!"
My best guess is, that as humans our brains are especially sensitive to the facial expressions of other people. And, a shocked expression is an incredibly important signal. Looking at someone wide-eyed with an open mouth in front of you implies there is something you really need to pay attention to.
Just watch how babies react when you make the same face.
I suspect social media just hijacked and metastasized the response.
My niece and nephew both learned to read and write at very young ages due to computer games. Kids being at a 3rd grade reading level at 5 years old suggests literacy has if anything become more important.
these are the drills of the 21st century oil fields. they can stimulate you instantly with personalized content feeds, with no thought or effort required from you. inevitably you'll blow a geyser of ego. like oil wells people will be drained from the inside and uninhabitable on the out. don't mind the placid smiles illuminated by the glow of phone displays when your eyes venture forth from your own pixelscape, it's another oil rig.
Actions, in this case what someone uses their time on and fills their mind with, aren't in a place, they're in place of the other actions one could have taken. And hey, one could say literacy also "had its place" when the church ruled over the illiterate in medieval times, so that itself isn't much of a consolation.
"literacy" itself is not some transhistorical, transcultural "achievement" that is now being lost. we do not live in a civ game, and there is no rubric to compare ourselves against.
I disagree entirely. There’s still plenty of stuff to read online and plenty of ways to share writing. Short creative clips are just another form of expression.
Thing is, most of American culture is only interested in literacy/literature as minimally as possible, and this has been the case since before social media came on the scene. As far as back as I remember, people get defensive/offended if you use too many "big words".
I think one of the reasons for TikTok’s success is that the content exists outside a timeline. Every tried to figure out when a particular TikTok was posted? It’s very hidden. That means two things:
* More content for the algorithm to present. It’s quite happy to reach way back into the past to show you something you’ll like.
* No time-sensitive content. This suppresses a lot of the political and outrage-driven content that plagues Twitter and Facebook (and to a lesser extent, YouTube, which does seem to favor recent content)
As a result, like others I find TikTok a breath of fresh air on the internet.
It also reduces the amount of reposts, on Reddit, Instagram and Twitter it's full of 'forwards from grandma', which can disappoint users. But when users get served the original post by default, reposts will gain less traction, and in addition the original creator is more likely to gain followers from their old popular posts.
I still have a lot of friends that use it daily but it's all for things that don't hold a company with a 1T market cap.
Anecdotal data:
- Facebook usage from my feed it's just older family members posting cheesy political posts and selling items on marketplace
- Instagram became a selling channel for brands, be it with their accounts or with "partnerships" with meme/influencer pages. I see less and less content from friends. SO has a professional account there, she always has the feeling that if she doesn't pay them her posts are rarely seen, even by people that follows her. I'm using it less and less every week.
- I still use WhatsApp a lot, and I'm quite scared how they could leverage their ad network with my private communications to improve bottom line
- I don't use and don't see the point of downloading Messenger, Threads, Reels, Lasso and any of the other weird knockoff apps they release every few months
I remember the last chapter of Chaos Monkey and the author hit a very good point that Facebook bought their extension ticket of relevance two times with Instagram and WhatsApp, since then (if you disconsider Oculus) the company didn't manage to create or acquire their next ticket. Maybe they're going the same route as MySpace?
* Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.91 billion on average for June 2021, an increase of
7% year-over-year.
* Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.90 billion as of June 30, 2021, an increase of
7% year-over-year.
* Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.76 billion on average for June 2021, an increase of 12%
year-over-year.
* Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.51 billion as of June 30, 2021, an increase of 12%
year-over-year.
It's hard to show large growth rates when you already count most of the +16, non-Chinese internet population as your users, but it doesn't look like an apex.
I've been thinking this for years now, but there's really nothing to replace it, it has a huge lock-in, and there's not been an underlying technical shift that enables product re-invention.
"Social networking" has obviously been around forever, IMO that core technical landscape shift we've seen for 70+ years that results in product evolution has been increasing network connection speed. Faster connections drive re-invention on just about every layer of the internet. In this case:
My guess is we'll see a true Facebook killer emerge once mmWave 5G hits widespread adoption. Of course FB will have their own products to compete, but talking to many Gen-Z they are not really interested in Facebook and typically use Snapchat/TikTok/etc. Facebook is losing the mindshare game, so we're waiting on the tech to seal the blow.
On the devil's advocate side, FB has made some shrewd acquisitions like IG/WhatsApp, and tech itself is increasingly headed towards a "cereal box" mindset where a few core companies make all the products you consume under separate labels. A new competitor would need the guts to avoid an early exit.
I honestly just don't get who is really using Facebook. My parents aren't on there, kids aren't on there (my friends are teachers). I have friends (30yo) who removed accounts. Not a single close friend whose account remains posts more than once every few months, the vast majority never post. A handful of people that aren't close friends post every now and then, but I'm so disinterested in the content that I typically unfollow them so it doesn't show up in my feed.
Just took a quick sample of my first 10 things in the feed:
- Article from a paper I subscribed to a decade ago. (just unfollowed)
- Ad about some stock related thing
- 'suggested content for you': picture of a football team (PSG) lineup for 2021 posted by Eurosport
- Sales listing for a 2nd hand yard sale group in my city that I follow
- Post by UN Water that I followed a decade ago and had zero interactions with since (unfollowed)
- A comment posted yesterday on a meme posted 5 months ago, by a person I met on exchange that I've not spoken to or seen in a decade (unfollowed)
- Ad for furniture
- Another sales listing for the 2nd hand yard sale group
- 'Suggested for you': news about a guy going crazy at the airport after baggage delays, posted by a local news channel
- A video of a building getting demolished (spam), posted in a (unmoderated?) FB group for selling bicycles that I joined years ago when I bought a bike (unfollowed)
There's literally not a single piece of useful content in here. One comment by a stranger-friend that was unfollowed. Two ads. Two wrongly suggested content I didn't ask for. One spam video. Two posts by orgs I never interacted with in a decade and unfollowed. And two listings from a 2nd hand group, that's the only thing I'll stay in (although the listings weren't interesting, the group has some good stuff).
And this is from a person who's on FB maybe 10 minutes per week, the 'good' content should've piled up. It's pretty insane how this crap can somehow be one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Facebook (and YouTube) are at peak awareness and penetration and now moving along the maturity model to squeeze more and more revenue from the audience they have. It will 1000% percent happen to TikTok and probably way faster than the others.
Back around 1990 I had the thought 'every new communications medium turns to sh*t eventually'. I think because it eventually gets dominated by grifters swindling marks of the lowest common denominator.
I'm really curious if China will go after bytedance next in its crackdown.
My guess would be no. Alibaba, Tencent, DiDi, Meituan all are either local champions that have no competitive advantage overseas - and thus does not help China's growth. But TikTok actually represents that China might have a competitive advantage in deep learning algos that takes massive amount of data - therefore it would be spare from crackdowns.
FB, Google, AWS, and Azue all have a competitive advantage that China don't - English.
Few global powers have their home made social networks spread in other countries, let alone in another global power. There’s a reason why Russia and China don’t let American social networks operate in their countries. They’ll protect TikTok, it’s valuable or will be.
> FB, Google, AWS, and Azue all have a competitive advantage that China don't - English.
While true, that's the lesser of the competitive advantages. China's companies are locked in a highly restrictive CCP control box, which they're not allowed out of. That box will shrink further, suffocating the companies as it goes. It heavily limits how they can compete, what they can do, how fast they can move, and those restrictions will keep getting worse. This isn't even the middle part of the craziness that we'll see out of the dictatorship in China. Dictatorships always get ferociously psychotic as they age, hyper paranoid, increasingly detached from reality (nobody dares to tell them the truth, fear of reprisal increases drastically, so the ability to govern gets worse with time). The purges will get worse, the controls will get worse. It'll make it far more difficult for China's big tech companies to operate, they'll be increasingly hamstrung.
The CCP probably won't need to directly hit ByteDance at this point. They've already restrained the company, it got the message as everybody else has. ByteDance will reaffirm that it understands its place in the scheme of things and comply with Beijing's understood wishes. ByteDance was planning an IPO and cancelled it at the behest of Beijing.
The fake cover reason was data security. The real reason is that Xi and the CCP want China's tech giants pulled back home and away from foreign listings (foreign ownership, foreign influence). China ideally wants those listings to be domestic-only in the future.
Had ByteDance pressed forward with the IPO, they would have been mauled with a giant fine and investigated (turned over) as Didi was.
July 12, Wall Street Journal -
"ByteDance Shelved IPO Intentions After Chinese Regulators Warned About Data Security"
"The Beijing-based social-media giant, last valued at $180 billion in a funding round in December, had been weighing an initial public offering of all or some of its businesses in the U.S. or Hong Kong, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
But the company’s founder, Zhang Yiming, decided it would be wiser to put the plans on ice in late March, after meetings with cyberspace and securities regulators in which they asked the company to focus on addressing data-security risks and other issues, the people familiar with the matter said."
I think this is a bear case on China - essentially you're saying that authoritarian government is unstable by nature, democracy is the end of history, etc.
I'm a bit less certain. Past is no indication of future, but China has been the most successful authoritarian country to date. Enough for me to start questioning whether democracy is truly the only way.
For example, I look at their recent crack down rather enviously - to pivot from consumer internet which they realized they have no competitive advantage over into the "German model" where industrialization is key, is a much better approach considering their industrial base and current political climate. In the US, things are moving much slower.
So IDK - I'm not sure if I buy the "it'll get worse" effect. Besides, you could be right, just off by 500 years. In the longrun - we're all dead
>I'm a bit less certain. Past is no indication of future, but China has been the most successful authoritarian country to date. Enough for me to start questioning whether democracy is truly the only way.
There's a 200 year old quote by Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler that elaborates on this viewpoint:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
> While true, that's the lesser of the competitive advantages. China's companies are locked in a highly restrictive CCP control box, which they're not allowed out of. That box will shrink further, suffocating the companies as it goes. It heavily limits how they can compete, what they can do, how fast they can move, and those restrictions will keep getting worse....The purges will get worse, the controls will get worse. It'll make it far more difficult for China's big tech companies to operate, they'll be increasingly hamstrung.
Is that insight or reassuring complacency?
I don't think China will be a replay of the Soviet Union. It's clear that the CCP wants remind people it's top dog, but it's not clear that will make those companies uncompetitive failures in the world market.
> The fake cover reason was data security. The real reason is that Xi and the CCP want China's tech giants pulled back home and away from foreign listings (foreign ownership, foreign influence). China ideally wants those listings to be domestic-only in the future.
How is this bad for the PRC? If anything, embrace of foreign ownership and foreign influence has weakened Western economies.
I am honestly stunned that so many people apparently use both HN & TikTok.
What does it offer you? Why isn't it the reserve of teens and younger that I thought it was? (I'm in my twenties, it's not news to me that I'm out of touch with the modal person my age/younger, but I'm not totally obliviously removed by generations or anything, and seemingly it's not just used by people my age/younger anyway.)
If you don’t think it’s funny, simply swipe up, at some point TikTok will start showing you the right kind of comedians(or maybe no more comedians?).
It’s no fuss when you encounter something you don’t like. You don’t need to go to the comments and tell then what’s wrong with them. You don’t like it, you skip it, it’s gone. Eventually you will see mostly stuff you like and TikTok isn’t going to think that all you want to watch is pizza making video just because you liked one pizza making video. It’s strangely good at keeping the exposure diverse.
Like 3/4s of my algorithmic feed are music content, so
- People talking about music they heard recently and enjoy, and often featuring much smaller/unknown artists than I've ever heard of elsewhere. It is biased towards indie rock and a small spectrum of electronic music though.
- Those small artists uploading their music, sometimes with a Tiktok-meme-friendly video accompanying it, or just a recording of them performing it
- Artists and producers explaining how they make their music, and offering composition or production tips. Much like Medium blogspam from first-year programmers a lot of this advice is pretty awful, but there is good stuff that manages to poke through.
The other fourth is a mix of popular content and a decent assortment of the terminally-online irony-poisoned content creators you see everywhere. You already know if you like that stuff.
As a Canadian, it did a great job of showing me videos from Indigenous people. There was a recent discovery of mass grave sites at the residential schools in Canada. I was very happy to get to see plenty of videos from native creators - some educational, some memorial, plenty of great funny videos too for good measure.
There were some truly beautiful videos. Ex, a mom showed her 11 year old daughter in traditional native dress at her first pow-wow. The mom wasn't allowed to do that when she was a kid. So sad and beautiful. I cried!
Where else can I find this content..? Idk! I didn't have to look for it, Tiktok showed it to me.
I also think there's filter against toxic content. A lot of the videos I see are educational about social issues, but rarely does it feel like a toxic echo chamber.
TikTok is great because it values good content above else. Every other social media platform tends to value followers and popularity over content to reach people.
Facebook: Number of friends
Instagram: Number of followers
Twitter: Number of followers
Snapchat: Number of friends
YouTube: Unsure exactly, but hard to go viral
TikTok: Value of your content
Consistently on TikTok you see very popular users with millions of followers only get a few thousand views.
That’s the best part of TikTok. You make good content, and the platform puts you to the top. Your popularity does not matter. Everyone gets a fair chance. It’s absolutely fantastic.
In a dystopian world, where algorithms judge everyone by some arbitrary metric, you get to decide which algorithm will choose your fate. Which one will it be?
Here in Germany, I have not seen much quality content on TikTok yet.
Every time people praise the service like in these comments, I give it another try. I start the app and see unfunny scripted jokes, barely dressed girls singing and today even covid denial. I try to swipe it away as quickly as possible, but the algorithm doesn't seem to adjust. Yes, there are some funny or interesting clips in between, but what exactly is the content that keeps you in the app?
I think after reading a ton of comments here, the one thing that most people overlook is that each user's experience on social platforms is now completely different because of all of the algorithmic "funnels" they implement.
Some people get funneled into depression spirals, some people find great new music, the paths are implemented by companies bent towards profit and engagement, while as a result the people driven by reckless experimentation can be driven to madness, suicide, and even doing harm to others including animals in hopes of being seen.
I only use social platforms in small spurts because I noticed most of these short video platforms are wrecking my patience and attention span in real life... They are truly good when search works properly and when each user is in full control of what they want to see and the content is properly categorized and tagged, but that doesn't make them enough money... apparently.
Funny this crops up today: I was in line just a couple of hours ago behind a 20-ish lady who was using TikTok on her phone, and I got to watch her use it for a good 10mn.
This was both frightening and sad.
Specifically, the speed at which she was switching from content to content without ever (in the span of 10mn) actually settling on one piece to actually watch it.
The longest she stuck to one piece of content was on the order of 10 seconds.
Besides the fact that her brain didn't (couldn't possibly) register anything useful out of the whole usage stretch, the only think I could think of after witnessing this was pavlov's dog.
I am genuinely happy for those who feel they have found a place online that has less doom, gloom and hatred then other corners of the internet.
For my part though, I am aware (and concerned) of the potential for social networks to use their troves of data for ML/NN training (see the Cambridge Analytica scandal).
What could the largest social video platform in the world with strong ties to a totalitarian regime do with their data, if they so wished?
Call me a cynic, but I do not believe that the potential for misuse will be left untouched. The allure of it is simply too strong.
I figured I would be dragged kicking and screaming into using TikTok. At first it was my youngest friends, then my same-age friends, and now my older family members. Really Uncle Steve? It's fine, I like to be in the know, but I will continue to draw my line at SnapChat.
Sometimes I wonder what the most downloaded app would be if free apps simply didn't exist. Let's put $1 as the minimum. Would TikTok still be #1?
Apparently Minecraft is the #1 downloaded paid app. Would TikTok beat Minecraft? It's kind of fascinating. TikTok's ability to hook you in is truly amazing.
The barrier is what you pay for the phone, either with Apple's margins (both in the up-front cost of the phone and via the 30% paid via in-app purchases) or, on Android, Google's ability to target ads at you. If consumers didn't have to pay these (arguably hidden) costs, and had to pay $1 minimum per app, then yes, it wouldn't exist or be nearly as popular.
Most people on the planet don't use ios, and in 2016 when whatsapp had, IIRC about 900 million users was about when they cancelled it. It's fair to assume a lot of people paid that dollar.
If you look back at just HN anecdotes from past threads. The majority of people talk about never paying anything. On any platform. Since again, I was only talking about iOS in my post. But Android “charged” after a year too. So pointing out Android doesn’t change anything
Why did you assume I wasn’t only talking about iOS in my post when I only brought up iOS? I did not even bring up Android. Regardless, most of you’re reply isn’t true.
First, people who talk about iOS maimly charging $1 usually also bring up android charging a dollar after the first free year. Are you only claiming the iOS part? If so. Why ignore the android part?
Why would Facebook, one of the most profitable companies, keep charging a dollar for Whatsapp in 2015 and 2016? They didn’t.
In reality, almost no one on android or iOS paid for Whatsapp. WhatsApp was regularly free on iOs in between stints of being a dollar. On android, almost no one got charged the dollar that came after the purported free trial period.
Why would it be fair to assume a fair amount of people paid for it? The fact that no other app whose success mattered on being viral has successfully followed this strategy would make it fair to assume it did not happen.
If tens upon tens of millions were charged for iOS [and android], is there any thing to back this up? to back this up? WhatsApp was cagey with their private company revenue. OTOH anecdotally on forums like this and others, It’s hard to find too many early WhatsApp users who paid for it.
All my friends in two friends groups were on WhatsApp pre FB buy out. I only remember myself and one other friend in each friend group paying for it.
You must surely see the parallels between the US Government agencies' interest on even small email providers, the US Government threatening to prohibit TikTok on the grounds of doing the same as several near-monopolies based on US soil do all over the world but in TikTok's case being Chinese, and what you're saying?
That the US Govt can just reap without sowing as the Chinese Govt does through state-run banks is just a convenience.
Unless you say that Chinese government is forcing appstores to fake numbers, then it's not relevant. Products with great market fit can get infinite amount of money from VC and other investors.
These social media companies are so young, and most of them had to topple the previously largest company in their space to obtain their position now. I think with a little time that the social media giants will start bleeding market share, any monopoly regulation will be wildly out of touch by the time it makes it through the courts.
Finally some real competition to the US domination of social media. Definitely would love to see other countries step up and make unique and interesting social media apps that are relevant globally.
Has anyone actually enjoyed using Facebook since 2009? Other than to very occasionally interact with old friends from high school and college, it's all just noise as far as I'm concerned. Everyone is too afraid of making the wrong step in the Real Name panopticon. Nobody under 30 wants to use it. On a good day, it's just a worse version of Craigslist (Marketplace).
TikTok at least makes me laugh. It's something to flip through while I do mindless cardio at the gym.
Does this really mean much? I hate Facebook as much as anyone and would love to see them fail, but they have four times the daily active users of TikTok. Growth has no choice but to slow when you have less room to grow. Also if you lump Facebook and Facebook Messenger together, it's still more even just in downloads, and they didn't have to split into two apps.
>if you lump Facebook and Facebook Messenger together
As two separate apps there is a massive overlap in the users that are downloading the Facebook app and the Messenger app for their phone. Combining the total downloads for each and using that total number of downloads is not a good measure of anything.
I find Facebook fascinating. I started using it later than most, maybe 2 years ago. What stopped me from using it was, everyone I knew that was on it never said anything positive about it. They got upset over deleting "their friends" who they never met. They talked about how annoying the cat videos were. In sum, I sensed they received nothing positive from it. I could never understand how people could get so attached to something they downright hate.
Instagram became a uh... a bunch of advertisers advertising to each other. I think 9 out of 10 photos are promotional material. Nothing personal, nothing funny, nothing enlightening. Most all of my friends stopped using it about 1 year ago. I won't get into reasons why, but I think you can add 2 and 2 together.
TikTok just feels more genuine. If someone is dancing, what are they trying to sell? Nothing at all. It's amazing how much talent is on that app. It's only a matter of time before the marketers figure it out and destroy that app too.
For those individuals interested in TikTok, Bloomberg has a six-part podcast series - Foundering: The TikTok Story - available [0]. Well worth a listen and discusses the origin of TikTok as well as some of the controversy that surrounds the app.
The "comment" section that has appeared under every piece of content on the internet in the last 10 years is the source of so much wasted effort and conflict it's truly depressing.
If TikTok is breaking that pattern then it's a step in the right direction.
True, however HN is designed for fair civil discussion.
It comes down to the goals of the site owner. Do they want to create a community and moderate accordingly. Or is it simply a way to up the time-spent metric through readers having a peek to see how stupid the comments are, or not being able to resist throwing in their own two cents.
I'm not suggesting I am any better that the average net user, I said "wasted effort" for a reason.
FB to me today is mostly a modern phonebook rather than real content platform.
TikTok's power lies in how much they encourage creators to develop new and fun contents. Every other social media I tried feels way too static and full of propaganda these days, built only for the famous and powerful. Instagram (not including reels) is nice but the picture format is restrictive and the interface feels less immersive. TikTok has a better interface imo since their videos occupy the entire screen.
I think the main challenge for TikTok would be to commercialize without degrading their content, but I doubt other companies could do it better at this point with the same medium. A TikTok challenger would probably need to have a substantial edge on technologies such as VR/AR to beat them.
A lot of talk about how amazing the app is amazing at drawing people in but the conjecture comes off more that these are users looking to being drawn in. Whatever trick the app pulls, these users want that attraction. Kind of comes off as willful gullibility to me.
Maybe just the right app at the wrong time? To be honest I think TikTok is 20% short videos and 80% AI, so even if you had vine today it would feel totally off compared to TikTok.
If you look at social medias evolution the "Feed" concept was first a cronological list of friends' posts then evolved to mix of ads and random friends post to allow for more engagement + monetization. TikTok just got rid of the concept at all, the feed gauge what you want to see by how you interact with the content. I think this was their biggest differential.
It's the difference between showing me just stuff that I really like doesn't matter from whom and showing me some ads while holding the content of my friends hostage.
Seems like a pretty good example of "Ideas are nothing, execution is everything." The for me page, the longer video length, all the particular UI decisions all add up to a big difference in stickiness.
TikTok is a phenomenal app technologically and design-wise. But it does seem like the ultimate "social media as a drug." I'm not zoomer enough to enjoy it either. But the app itself is very good.
YouTube Shorts as a copycat service has been quite interesting to see develop. I think it works well alongside existing long-form content, sort of as an alternating filler to take a break with after watching a few longer videos.
It wouldn't surprise me if in the past, people went to TikTok/Instagram instead to fill that gap, which now is potentially being fulfilled by Shorts. Curious to see how metrics change over time with the rollout and if it has any impact on TikTok / other general short-form video app usage over time.
TikTok is mainlining Instagram. I'm sure whatever malignancy Instagram causes will be an order of magnitude worse after this generation consumes the firehouse of TikTok.
I created an account when my wife went to run an errand. After two hours she returned and I was still using it. Immediately deleted. It's flawlessly executed and addictive, but so is fentanyl.
Tiktok is a crowdsourced video ad creation platform. The stream is a lab that tests videos for their effectiveness before they are later reused as ads for publishers. The end goal is for TikTok to sell well optimized crowdsourced content about your brand as an ad.
The users are literally competing to make better ads while they believe they are making content.
The question is whether TikTok will continue to be as popular as they start onboarding more advertisers and showing more ads. Most apps tend to get worse when they start attempting to make money. Also, TikTok can't be cheap to operate unless they have somehow convinced all music labels to behave in a way they have never behaved before.
Never been a TikTok or Facebook user, although I had installed both apps a while ago and deleted within a day. Maybe I missed something interesting but I'm sure it's trivial and would forget soon. But I'll buy TikTok stock if available since it's likely very profitable like FB.
I'm kind of surprised Facebook's downloads are actually so high. 2 out of the last 3 phones I've bought came with facebook pre-installed and it was not removable. My latest phone came with Facebook pre-installed, but it is removable.
The interesting thing here is the rate of change in the social media space. Facebook took about 10 years to gain the global reach that it did, and TikTok only took about 3 years. The next winner may come and go within the span of a year.
And I'd probably use TikTok if the "Oh no" and "Astronaut in the Ocean" weren't used in damn near every video. People overusing the everloving crap out of those two songs has ruined that platform for me.
TikTok is probably the best social media app, the only problem is the terrible search function. It doesn't have the sorting and filters that youtube does, fixing this one thing would make it so much more useful to me...
What makes it good other than being addictive?
If social media is defined by "sharing ideas with other people" is TikTok even social media? Or is it more like Netflix?
I can't help but think Facebook (the app) is on the way out. They've been around long enough and the scandals have damaged their rep. It's time for Mark to focus on one of his other toys.
I've never used tiktok, but I do have one question. Does the fact that its in video make it harder for influencers to fake their lives? Or is superficiality still highly prevalent?
Images are easier to manipulate and show less context so it’s definitely less shallow in that sense. TikTok also has a more personal and comedic culture in my experience.
Wow. Weird. If it wasn't for Digg linking to TikTok, I'd never see any of its content. Facebook & Insta often result in broken or sign-up links. Maybe that's why.
Well, Facebook held the crown for way too long, it was bound to happen, but honestly I don’t see TikTok as a Facebook killer. It feels too niche to be popular in the long run.
Facebook can not acquire TikTok like Instagram... and Instagram is copying Tiktok. TikTok could be using Facial Emotion Detector to improve their Recommendation System.
TikTok is addictive; while I don't use it I saw reposted TikTok videos in YouTube Shorts, all I can see yea they are fun but they are meaningless engagement.
The label of obnoxious behavior on TikTok is way too high for anything but light use. Heavy users of TikTok are definitely being negatively affected by it.
Every time I see stories about TikTok’s success I keep thinking of Vine’s failure and whether or not it would be in the same position by now if it survived?
Bytedance would have to want to sell TikTok first ;)
Unlikely IMO, unless there will be drama similar to what trump did a year ago, but even then I would expect that someone else will buy it
It's possible but extremely unlikely, being a Chinese company. I'm sure the Chinese Government has no interest in letting Mark Zuckerberg own the platform. And it's certainly not like they need the money from Facebook.
ByteDance is an unethical company that bows to pressure from the CCP to remove content from TikTok about the genocide against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang [1]. Therefore, it's unethical to give time / attention / money to ByteDance.
[Grand-comment: TikTok is legendary and beautiful. The world unites!]
[Parent-comment: OMG YUCK TikTok is the WORST because they are Nazis who are actively harming my favorite oppressed protected minority]
[Comment: And not only that, but China will ruin us all!]
[Very grey comment: Actually there's some nuance here and the thing you say is wrong, is in fact the very thing that draws people together in shared psyche groups]
HN: where popular positivity is met with unremitting cynicism, fear-mongering and hatred.
The Principle of Spree Speech: Not only do I disagree with you, but I disagree with you in the most horrible and vehement way possible. I render all your points null and bad because they emanate from a poisonous corruption that had the sheer nerve to look sideways at My Truth. All who gaze upon me, shall tremble, and they shall know my name is the Righteous One.
Guffbert's Law of Internets: The extent to which one can express hatred, is also both the extent to which the one is right, and all other's are wrong.
Pandybergh's Law of Speech Forums: When the internet reflects a reality that is more pleasant than the one known to the speaker, the speaker must punish that reality and prove that the world is in fact as hateful as the speaker has known it to be. Corollary: While simultaneously broadening the perspective of all participants, the internet mostly only succeeded in reinforcing people's already limited perspectives.
The parable of the mustard beard: Do not go mellowly into that good forum, wag, wag your finger of blame and clench your jaws of hatred at all the nice things in the world from your rocking chair, grumpy old person with no name.
It's not a surprise at all. There are a lot of people who are downloading the Tiktok app as they find it entertaining. You can learn a lot of things in TikTok, and at the same time, it serves as a social media. Want to find more about a certain niche? Worry not; there's a lot on TikTok.
I've seen that popping up a LOT recently, even colloquially. Going through dating profiles, I've seen a number of people describe themselves as "neurodivergent".
Many people don't watch shows on TV, they just channel hop to avoid ads and numb their brain after a day at work, consuming short stretches of content at a time.
In that regard, TikTok is indeed very much like TV.
There is a lot of copyrighted music in TikTok clips. I wonder what percentage of their growth is because of that. Do they get away with it because they're a Chinese company or is it because the music industry hasn't wisen up to it yet?
The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.
I guess by now everyone has heard of their legendary discovery algorithm so I'm not going there but recently I noticed that some of my favourite creators from the Youtube etc. are on TikTok and their material is much nicer to consume there. Why? I think this is because of the short and fast phased nature of the TikTok content. Instead of publishing 10 to 30 min videos(AFAIK Youtube encourages that, it is also good for the revenue), they put together a short video that shows the gist of the subject. They will also be much more responsive, quickly replying with short videos to the comments. It's a very dynamic place.
One exception for me is Nile Red, I love watching his 40 min chemistry videos. Actually, there are a few more YouTubers who's content works best on YouTube but I'm watching far less and I have more spare time now.
Maybe the medium is the message still holds? Maybe people are now ready to hear the message of the TikTok?