TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/TikTok-overtakes-Facebook-as-world-s-most-downloaded-app

by em500 • 5 years ago

1007 678 5 years ago

asia.nikkei.com

Is there any chance for facebook to buy them like they did instagram and whatsapp?

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.

appleflaxen2• 5 years ago

Both of those owners (a chinese company vs facebook) seem terrible for the public interest in the US.

mciancia• 5 years ago

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

code_duck3• 5 years ago

I'm quite sure that Mark Zuckerberg has been pondering that day and night for a couple years now.

3102602• 5 years ago

That's unlikely to happen. Hence why Instagram created Reels to compete with TikTok.

ericcholis• 5 years ago

Pro TikTok take. It's easier and friendlier to consume. The algorithm is good at tailoring interests. But, it's more like TV than FB.

minikites• 5 years ago

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.

spullara2• 5 years ago

100% agree. The "for you page" is absolutely the best automatically curated feed I have ever seen.

purple_ferret2• 5 years ago

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.

lovegoblin5• 5 years ago

So...don't post? Every platform has (read: is primarily) lurkers.

nostromo2• 5 years ago

It’s also much more positive.

If I spend 20 minutes on TikTok I usually laugh and smile a few times. And regularly I’m impressed at human creativity.

20 minutes on Instagram or Facebook is usually either boring or leaves me comparing myself to others.

20 minutes on YouTube and I feel like I’ve watched 10 minutes of ads and 10 minutes of fluff.

20 minutes on Reddit and I hate the world.

arsome2• 5 years ago

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.

bredren• 5 years ago

Reddit is wonderful compared to Next Door. Next Door's feed is pure trigger content and quickly escalated arguments. Super toxic.

MisterTea• 5 years ago

Spending 20 minutes in any of those apps is 20 minutes you didn't do something productive. None of them are good for you.

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

How do you feel after 20 minutes on HN?

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?

drewg123• 5 years ago

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.

Lendal• 5 years ago

It only takes a few bad-faith actors to infect, exploit and ruin a platform. Give it time. They will figure out how to ruin TikTok, too.

slohr• 5 years ago

this!

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.

majkinetor• 5 years ago

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.

Mainstream reddits could be junk ..

keewee72• 5 years ago

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.

baby2• 5 years ago

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.

deckard12• 5 years ago

so they built a better filter bubble for you. Brave New World had Soma and we have TikTok.

I'm not sure humans, flesh and blood, should be handing control of our emotional state to corporations with highly-tuned algorithms.

ghawr• 5 years ago

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.

Kiro• 5 years ago

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.

psyc2• 5 years ago

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.

lovegoblin5• 5 years ago

That "No no no" song that is on every other video

Oh, every generation of internet users has made repetitive memes like this; we just have more bandwidth now.

thisisnico• 5 years ago

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.

jackcosgrove• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is because TikTok targets a younger demographic that is digital native and practices better internet hygiene.

Zandikar• 5 years ago

TikTok feels like the least toxic environment.

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.

code_duck3• 5 years ago

Certain types of people have been trying to turn the internet into television since at least 1997. They're getting closer.

MSEmployed• 5 years ago

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.

stiltzkin• 5 years ago

Beware TikTok is also available for download as APK on Android TV, at the end now TV are smarts but the same outcome follows get stuck watching TV.

endisneigh• 5 years ago

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.

hkmurakami• 5 years ago

Was WhatsApp $1 to download back in the day, or did users pay after download via some kind of subscription?

eruleman• 5 years ago

WhatsApp used to cost $1 to download when it was just starting out — this was before Apple added subscriptions to iOS apps.

judge2020• 5 years ago

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.

lbarrow• 5 years ago

Remember, though, social media giants are monopolists and it's impossible to compete against them.

bitlax• 5 years ago

You just have to be the Chinese government?

bun_at_work• 5 years ago

This isn't really small startups competing, though. It's a state sponsored/backed entity with more goals than just disrupting the market.

justapassenger• 5 years ago

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.

forgetfulness• 5 years ago

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.

paxys• 5 years ago

How is TikTok state sponsored?

sosborn• 5 years ago

Every social media entity took its position from an entrenched giant.

cthor• 5 years ago

The main antitrust complaint against social media giants is that competitors are either acquired or bullied out of the market.

The only reason this hasn't happened with TikTok is it's based in China.

megaman821• 5 years ago

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.

KaoruAoiShiho• 5 years ago

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...

EamonnMR2• 5 years ago

It's not meant to be useful, it's meant to be engaging.

thomasahle• 5 years ago

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?

reidjs2• 5 years ago

Tiktoks video editor is by far the best phone based video editor I’ve ever used.

RGamma2• 5 years ago

Modern social media is way beyond searching.

The urge to seek out doesn't originate in the user. Content is being fed.

yuy9106163• 5 years ago

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.

bnt• 5 years ago

Alibaba, Tencent, Didi, all have lots of AI and ML/DS experience

yuy9106163• 5 years ago

None have products that "you can only get it here". They have experience but no product that is competitive, if not protected by government action

lalos• 5 years ago

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.

kokekolo• 5 years ago

Russia does allow American social networks. Facebook and Twitter are alive and kicking in Russia.

adventured• 5 years ago

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."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bytedance-shelvedipo-intentions...

yuy9106163• 5 years ago

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

tablespoon12• 5 years ago

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.

EamonnMR2• 5 years ago

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.

edgyquant• 5 years ago

Literacy will always have its place. Short, meme centered, entertainment isn’t one of them I suppose.

howaboutnope3• 5 years ago

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.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

I'm just getting tired of seeing SHOCKED faces everywhere. Clearly, exaggerated faces lead to video views but I'm growing so averse to seeing it.

nostromo2• 5 years ago

That’s YouTube, not TikTok. You don’t even click on videos on TikTok.

n8cpdx7• 5 years ago

That’s primarily a YouTube thing from what I’ve seen. And more recently I’ve seen it on Google News article thumbnails.

tux3• 5 years ago

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.

ciconia• 5 years ago

Sculpting, painting, dancing etc is creation. Watching other people do it is not.

Retric• 5 years ago

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.

reidjs2• 5 years ago

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.

svachalek• 5 years ago

If Facebook was the end game for language then 8-O :-) ;-D

andrewxdiamond• 5 years ago

In a way, language has always been the comprise.

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.

beepbooptheory• 5 years ago

"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.

toiletaccount• 5 years ago

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.

imbnwa2• 5 years ago

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".

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

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?

cwkoss• 5 years ago

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.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

I haven't created a TikTok video yet, so don't count on me for the details but on some videos I see a link to a playlist.

BTW, I skip all multi-part videos unless there is a good reason for being multipart. Most are trying to game the system.

Syonyk2• 5 years ago

I think they could seriously challenge longer form videos as well.

Is this like the

Twitter feed readers that take

what should be a blog post on an

external site and stitch them back

into something readable, instead of

a blog post in 40 parts?

There are plenty of sites that focus on long form videos and it might make sense to put long form videos there, if one wants long form video content.

mywittyname• 5 years ago

Initially, I'm thinking, "but that's just youtube with a slightly different presentation."

But then I thought about the fact that a lot of significant developements were "just <something else> with a slightly different presentation."

teddyfrozevelt• 5 years ago

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).

dizzystar2• 5 years ago

They can make a comment that says "part 2" and respond to it. Add a pin and it'll be at the top.

Some creators do this, but not enough. Besides with 3 minute videos, this shouldn't be a problem anymore.

madeofpalk4• 5 years ago

What you're describing is Quibi.

tmaly2• 5 years ago

There is a way to group a set of your videos by topic, they call the feature “playlists” and it was introduced in March 2021.

tablespoon12• 5 years ago

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).

the-dude4• 5 years ago

As opposed to US based networks?

refenestrator5• 5 years ago

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?

jareklupinski• 5 years ago

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

wongarsu2• 5 years ago

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.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

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.

xvector12• 5 years ago

What is stopping Facebook or Google from doing this for their own political goals?

Did y'all just forget Cambridge Analytica?

cronix2• 5 years ago

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.

https://www.them.us/story/tiktok-suppressed-fat-queer-disabl...

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.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/2/20991843/tiktok-bytedance...

cma• 5 years ago

TikTok apparently limited the reach of people with disabilities, including facial disfigurement and Down syndrome.

Hollywood and Youtube Originals presumably do this too, based on proportion of actors with these issues compared to what you see out and about.

warning26• 5 years ago

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.

kshacker• 5 years ago

It is an anecdote but over the last 2 weeks, a few times (3-4) when I clicked on the top live videos, it is the live of a man too obese to even walk

n8cpdx7• 5 years ago

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/

Only 50k views from an amateur creator, because TikTok hates queers: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdoss9jL/

90k likes because TikTok hates fat people: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdosn9PW/

100k: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdoGfVKH/

Drew_• 5 years ago

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?

vernie• 5 years ago

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.

slownews452• 5 years ago

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.

SpaceManNabs• 5 years ago

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.

mysterEFrank• 5 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/style/tiktok-gay-homiesex... Tik Tok is the queerest video platform out there. At least 20% of the videos I get are queer.

aerosmile2• 5 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/86d1ce50-3799-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c...

x86_64Ubuntu2• 5 years ago

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.

dilap• 5 years ago

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.)

pantalaimon2• 5 years ago

My for you page is full of dancing fat girls because I like those videos ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yann2• 5 years ago

Ah yes the Fundamental Right to Reach.

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.

t_akosuke• 5 years ago

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

werber• 5 years ago

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.

TeeMassive3• 5 years ago

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.

Tade0• 5 years ago

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

madeofpalk4• 5 years ago

This does not reflect my experience with using Tiktok. Tiktok very quickly determined i wanted queer content, and that's basically all I see now.

hellomyguys• 5 years ago

I've seen more people with Down Syndrome and facial disfigurements on TikTok than any other platform.

blablabla123• 5 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

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.

slownews452• 5 years ago

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.

rjh29• 5 years ago

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.

excitom• 5 years ago

Interesting, no one seems to be talking about SnapChat any more.

narrator• 5 years ago

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.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

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.

ffiirree• 5 years ago

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.

em500• 5 years ago

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.

danbolt• 5 years ago

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.

varrock• 5 years ago

For TikTok I feel it's still at the stage where the makers, above all else, just want to be seen.

This sounds like what YouTube used to be like. I wasn't around much for it, but I can only imagine how fun it must have been in the early stages.

IkmoIkmo3• 5 years ago

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.

lovegoblin5• 5 years ago

Maybe the medium is the message still holds?

Was there ever any question? Your whole comment here is a perfect demonstration.

gregkerzhner• 5 years ago

Curious - does TikTok censor content that China would find sensitive, like the existence of Taiwan or pro Hong Kong protest content?

saddlerustle3• 5 years ago

It did in 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

alexfromapex• 5 years ago

Re: the China thing, is Instagram's Reels not a better alternative? Where you know your data is only being spied on by non-totalitarian regimes?

phatfish3• 5 years ago

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.

stanislavb• 5 years ago

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.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

According to my iPhone’s screen time stats, it doesn’t look like an addiction. I averaged less than 30 min/day on TikTok. Twitter is over 2 hours.

I would be on TikTok before sleep, sometimes for over an hour but not everyday. It doesn’t induce FOMO.

tomcooks• 5 years ago

What's fun about stolen videos with a selfie introduction, happy dances and lipsync? Does tiktok offer anything else?

Sincerely, the no fun guy

theshrike792• 5 years ago

Yes. Sincerely, one of the old farts who had the same opinion, but kinda likes TikTok now.

emodendroket• 5 years ago

I got sick of it in like a week, but clearly my preferences aren’t representative.

tshaddox• 5 years ago

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.

durpleDrank• 5 years ago

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.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

Interesting, for me his long videos have ASMR effect. I also enjoy following his thought process, which is absent on TikTok.

dragosmocrii• 5 years ago

I've been using Coub since before TikTok was around for feel-good content.

ren_engineer2• 5 years ago

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.

buryat• 5 years ago

they basically just feed the most engaging content with no breaks on the train.

this is simply not true, i regularly get videos with less than 100 views, and a few videos i published got a few hundred views.

whoknowswhat113• 5 years ago

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 :)

dTal• 5 years ago

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.

ehsankia3• 5 years ago

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.

cerved• 5 years ago

remember Vine?

WaitWaitWha• 5 years ago

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?

meowtimemania• 5 years ago

If I use tiktok regularly it makes me feel depressed. For me it's best just to limit social media as much as possible.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

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.

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

TikTok is the only genuinely happy and positive place on the internet!

bamboozled3• 5 years ago

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.

The fun and good will was stolen.

ehsankia3• 5 years ago

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...

manojlds• 5 years ago

The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.

That is what everyone thought when opening up trade with China - make it as a reason to make the country more open and move away from dictatorship.

afterburner• 5 years ago

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.

nirui• 5 years ago

the internet is fun again

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".

I believe the word here is tittytainment (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tittytainment).

---

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.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

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.

josephcsible• 5 years ago

The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.

The problem is that China doesn't play fair, so if the west plays perfectly fair against them, we won't beat them even though we're better.

metrue• 5 years ago

Define fair.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

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.

wraptile2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm surrounded by an algorithm bubble but content on TikTok is just so wholesome. It's really refreshing!

b0rsuk• 5 years ago

I think TikTok will figure a way to cram advertising into 60 seconds.

yason• 5 years ago

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.

peoplefromibiza• 5 years ago

I think this is because of the short and fast phased nature of the TikTok content.
they put together a short video that shows the gist of the subject

not to sound dismissive, but what I read here is "Tik Tok algorithm is better at exploiting people's attention span issues"

andreyk• 5 years ago

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.

kwanbix• 5 years ago

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.

tmaly2• 5 years ago

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.

didntknowya• 5 years ago

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.

standardUser• 5 years ago

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.

Quarrelsome• 5 years ago

I'm just continually amazed at how Twitter bought vine and then allowed this to happen.

mtrovo2• 5 years ago

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.

psyc2• 5 years ago

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.

base698• 5 years ago

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.

mftb• 5 years ago

I thought fb had moved on from being downloaded, to taking over whole countries, by co-opting their internet access?

hiddencache• 5 years ago

Time suckage... and suddenly, it's 3am...

root-z2• 5 years ago

been there done that. deleted tiktok from my phone and reinstalled multiple times too

reggieband4• 5 years ago

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.

smoldesu7• 5 years ago

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.)

cruano• 5 years ago

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.

baby2• 5 years ago

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

rvz14• 5 years ago

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.

npteljes3• 5 years ago

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?

linspace• 5 years ago

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.

reggieband4• 5 years ago

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

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.

[0]: Here is my usage data: https://ibb.co/Ytb6Hbt

theshrike792• 5 years ago

TikTok is great before sleep, I don't get the urge to check it all the time, I don't feel FOMO.

...this is actually true. TikTok has so damn much to see that your brain knows that it's physically impossible to see it all so the FOMO goes away.

jasondigitized• 5 years ago

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.

systematical• 5 years ago

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.

Causality1• 5 years ago

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.

seph-reed• 5 years ago

I tried it out for a few days, and can see the appeal. But something about the content got really, really repetitive really really quickly.

Like... it was all so staged and television like. It felt like watching TV did, back before I could see through the tropes.

There's only so many forms of arc you can fit into 15 seconds though.

bodge50005• 5 years ago

I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media

Even in as so much as the denial of it. A lot of "its not as bad as the other social drugs" in this thread.

I get it, people want to enjoy the thing they like and don't want to be made to feel bad about it. We're all guilty of that to some extent.

But outright denial that the thing you enjoy isn't absolutely pure and harmless is never healthy.

ridaj2• 5 years ago

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.

nonameiguess• 5 years ago

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.

stevewodil• 5 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa82• 5 years ago

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.

firechickenbird• 5 years ago

I have Facebook on my phone at least since 2013 and I haven't ever re-downloaded it. I also downloaded tiktok last year. Do the math

jlduan• 5 years ago

There are some problems about TikTok, but it just reminds me how fun internet could be.

yarsanich• 5 years ago

The only issue I see that it can be quite addictive without proper moderation.

From tech perspective I think that it brings something new to social media world and that creates some movement in industry. Look at YouTube “Shorts”.

jjice• 5 years ago

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.

Dah00n6• 5 years ago

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).

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

It's survival of the fittest. The replacement for Facebook and Instagram must have more frequent dopamine hits and less friction.

TikTok is better at delivering those hits and worse for the human.

argonaut2• 5 years ago

The comments on TikTok are just as toxic as Facebook and Instagram. I've also seen misinformation on TikTok as well.

twoquestions• 5 years ago

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.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

CyberFoxar2• 5 years ago

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.

rvz14• 5 years ago

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.

silksowed• 5 years ago

better content, simple as. if you want a pulse on what youth are thinking, go to tik tok. no poll will capture what you can gauge on this platform

karmasimida• 5 years ago

TikTok is not social media and can be used without 'engaging' with anyone, is an incredible useful feature to me.

phatfish3• 5 years ago

I've never used TikTok, but that sounds nice.

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.

sltkr• 5 years ago

... he wrote, unironically, in the Hacker News comment section.

mtc010170• 5 years ago

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.

sorry_outta_gas• 5 years ago

Facebook was usually considered pretty terriable especially in the early farmville days

mdorazio• 5 years ago

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.

rvz14• 5 years ago

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.

Rinse and Repeat.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484

xvector12• 5 years ago

Far more invasive tracking

False. It's actually not worse than any other social media platform. [1] It doesn't even try to exploit your browser and device, like Reddit does. [2]

[1] https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tiktok-logs-logs-logs-e93e81626...

[2] https://smitop.com/post/reddit-whiteops/

rc_mob2• 5 years ago

I've followed facebook from day one and I can assure you there never existed a day when it was not terrible. it started off as dudes creeping on girls

imbnwa2• 5 years ago

Gotta love that hacker problem solving spirit

gnopgnip2• 5 years ago

What is the advantage of installing the app over using your web browser?

ev1• 5 years ago

The app collects orders of magnitude more private information, permanent device identifiers, phone numbers as a requirement of service.

travoc• 5 years ago

You can’t even browse the website anymore unless you download the app or log in.

gnopgnip2• 5 years ago

Is there some feature installing the app gives you over logging in in the browser?

omot• 5 years ago

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.

mtrovo2• 5 years ago

Are we seeing apex Facebook?

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?

edit: small typos, posted from phone

ur-whale3• 5 years ago

Are we seeing apex Facebook?

One can only wish.

Except for the fact that it's being replaced by something worse.

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

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.

30 years on and I'm not wrong yet.

kirse• 5 years ago

Are we seeing apex Facebook?

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:

     300b ---> 14k+ -> 56k --> DSL/Cable > Mobile 3G -> ??

     Email --> BBS --> AOL --> MySpace --> Facebook --> ??

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.

tootie2• 5 years ago

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.

marketingtech• 5 years ago

Per the latest earnings release on https://investor.fb.com on July 28:

* 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.

IkmoIkmo3• 5 years ago

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.

mullingitover• 5 years ago

I love to see well deserved success and well deserved decline.

Tiktok's experience is making you like people you don't know. Facebook's experience is making you disappointed with people you know.

soheil• 5 years ago

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?

unraveller2• 5 years ago

15 seconds background noise is fair use.

chansiky2• 5 years ago

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?

testmasterflex• 5 years ago

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.

sarasasa28• 5 years ago

TikTok is literally TV.

not youtube, tiktok. Youtube failed to be a television replacement, and tiktok succeeded. If you don't see this, you are literally dumb.

smoldesu7• 5 years ago

What shows can I watch on TikTok?

ur-whale3• 5 years ago

What shows can I watch on TikTok?

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.

jmfldn• 5 years ago

It's "literally" not TV.

Pedantry-aside, YouTube clearly fits the bill as the TV replacement.

MangoCoffee• 5 years ago

isn't FB is on decline and young people no longer care to be on it?

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

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?

rchaud5• 5 years ago

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.

MonaroVXR2• 5 years ago

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.

reggieband4• 5 years ago

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)

npteljes3• 5 years ago

The wish theme is present in the first Stalker game too. Along with a fascinating story about the human consciousness.

m4rtink• 5 years ago

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. ;-) )

emddudley• 5 years ago

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.

closeparen• 5 years ago

“If you’re watching it, it’s for you.”

ec109685• 5 years ago

There is explicit thumbs down with TikTok that more quickly removes segments of videos from your feed.

ant6n• 5 years ago

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.

I'm definitely too old for this shit.

underwater• 5 years ago

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.

tablespoon12• 5 years ago

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.

trynumber9• 5 years ago

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.

spullara2• 5 years ago

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.

SPBS• 5 years ago

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.

tootie2• 5 years ago

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.

Ericson2314• 5 years ago

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".

m1aw• 5 years ago

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

krapp• 5 years ago

Now does it bring __value__ to my life? No

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.

JimTheMan2• 5 years ago

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.

AussieWog93• 5 years ago

TikTok content comes across as completely vapid.

I think that's exactly the point.

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.

B-Con• 5 years ago

I see a reasonable amount of political/social content. I think it's there, you just didn't engage with it enough to get it in your FYP.

I must have accidentally liked a couple things to trigger it, so now I'm ignoring it going to train the algorithm.

panorama3• 5 years ago

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.

ehsankia3• 5 years ago

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.

crvdgc2• 5 years ago

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.

b0afc375b5• 5 years ago

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.

xvector12• 5 years ago

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.

trophycase• 5 years ago

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.

IkmoIkmo3• 5 years ago

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.

marmshallow• 5 years ago

It’s only positive cause HN also likes bashing FB. Just give it time and the tides will turn.

xvector12• 5 years ago

Alternatively, it's positive because people genuinely like using it!

xvector12• 5 years ago

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.

radu_floricica2• 5 years ago

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).

root-z2• 5 years ago

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.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

modern phonebook

phonebook or phonecall? it seems that people use it as a substitute for calling all their friends once a year.

hardtke• 5 years ago

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.

ur-whale3• 5 years ago

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.

TV zapping on steroids.

Ugh.

mrkramer4• 5 years ago

The question is how do you fit an ad inside a short video if attention span of the user is 10 sec?

partiallypro• 5 years ago

Tiktok is fun, I have tremendous problems with it being so closely tied to the CCP...but you can't deny that it's a good app/service.

franczesko• 5 years ago

TikTok feels like YouTube in it's very beginning, when it was cool and consisted mostly of "sunny" content.

nonfamous• 5 years ago

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.

sdk16420• 5 years ago

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.

deminature• 5 years ago

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.

DLay2• 5 years ago

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.

yepthatsreality2• 5 years ago

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.

spideymans• 5 years ago

Well... yea.

People go on TikTok seeking to be entertained. Is this different than any other entertainment platform?

yepthatsreality2• 5 years ago

Not exactly. I seek out entertainment all the time and yet I’m not surprised that I couldn’t look away.

With this app, responses mostly revolve around the novelty of being tricked into binge watching. Not necessarily the enjoyment of said entertainment.

balozi• 5 years ago

A few day ago some kids told me that TikTok is for old people. Not sure what's hip anymore.

tom7• 5 years ago

Isn't facebook shit app preinstalled on all android phones now and hard to remove?

tintt• 5 years ago

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.

jjaammee• 5 years ago

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.

dizzystar2• 5 years ago

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.

giantg2• 5 years ago

I don't really get TikTok. I guess I'm just an old fart.

YeBanKo• 5 years ago

Because it does not give a shit about your privacy, equality, inclusion, misinformation.

mrkramer4• 5 years ago

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.

OJFord• 5 years ago

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.)

y2bd• 5 years ago

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.

mrtksn10• 5 years ago

There are wonderful comedians, musicians, dancers, storytellers, videographers, people with curios jobs, unusual animals, remote locations etc.

It’s overwhelming positive and creative.

This guy is funny: https://www.tiktok.com/@adrianbliss/video/695706186311272371...

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.

srcreigh• 5 years ago

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.

n8cpdx7• 5 years ago

It’s actually quite similar to HN in the scope and breadth of educational/informational content:

- Charlie Puth on how he created the sound for a recent song: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1k6eHS/

- Walkthrough of how the iconic sound of “Blackout” was created: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1kr4t3/

- A window into the world of Mormon childhoods (TV Guardian): https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1hTPP7/

- speed walking is an Olympic sport TIL: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1kgbpH/

- Furby internals: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1kq2ut/

- GameCube trivia: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1kP4dG/

- Plane auto land demo (very cool): https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1kq8Xj/

- The heart attack grill (exists): https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1kXRfo/

- Japanese coffee vending machine with pre-order capabilities: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1k3Lvb/

- Film ice: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1Brqhd/

- crew rest areas in airplanes: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1koA9C/

- derma lasers: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1B8cGF/

- Live every day like it’s NBER day: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR1Bjupm/

BTW: TT is a good way to stay up to date with youth culture without actually having to experience it IRL.

ok123456• 5 years ago

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.

arminiusreturns• 5 years ago

I'm severely dissapointed that so many people on hn are giving tiktok a pass for all the things it is up to just because its cool/entertaining.

broknbottle2• 5 years ago

The death of bookface can’t come soon enough

pseudolus• 5 years ago

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.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/foundering

grawprog• 5 years ago

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.

tsunamifury• 5 years ago

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.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

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.

bamboozled3• 5 years ago

I love TikTok because it’s my chance to miss out on social media ! I don’t have an account and if I can hold off from making one…

quaintdev• 5 years ago

The comments in this thread are surprisingly long.

aero-glide2• 5 years ago

Makes me quite suspicious.

winternett• 5 years ago

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.

nrclark• 5 years ago

This rating system ignores something fundamental: Facebook is preinstalled on a lot of Android phones, and TikTok is not.

It would be much better if we could see metrics on which app is _used_ more, not which is downloaded more.

che_shirecat• 5 years ago

This is a great writeup of some of the story behind the Tiktok algorithm - https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

rcconf• 5 years ago

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.

rc_mob2• 5 years ago

my video got 4 views :( i did bad

chansiky2• 5 years ago

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?

1270018080• 5 years ago

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.

shp0ngle• 5 years ago

I don't know. Every time I try TikTok, I just get teenagers "sexy" dancing to whatever is the popular TikTok song of the week.

Now I understand why someone might find sexy teenagers interesting, but I find it quite boring and mind-numbing.

wayeq• 5 years ago

Maybe partly because everyone who wants the facebook app already has the facebook app.

workinghard• 5 years ago

It baffles me watching people acting like clowns for a few views/bucks

hoangdo2102• 5 years ago

Facebook can not acquire TikTok like Instagram... and Instagram is copying Tiktok. TikTok could be using Facial Emotion Detector to improve their Recommendation System.

outside1234• 5 years ago

Great - so not only are people giving their privacy away but they are sending their data to China

planb• 5 years ago

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?

komali2• 5 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/video-07282020180119...

graderjs2• 5 years ago

I always wondered if Zuck lurks here and shitposts like he did back in the day, enjoying stirring the pot.

billpg• 5 years ago

There are two types of video. Ones recorded in landscape and ones recorded badly.

graderjs2• 5 years ago

Wow I love the HN dynamic on this thread:

  [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.

bongoman37• 5 years ago

It is also impressive that this is achieved despite TikTok being banned in India which takes a particularly large market offline for them.

MrDresden4• 5 years ago

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.

bamboozled3• 5 years ago

The neon dragon is rising!

LightG• 5 years ago

I had tiktok for a few months but uninstalled due to its addictiveness.

And any videos of real worth seems to get shared on other platforms anyway so I have no need for the app!

Aside: #deleteFacebook on principle. Hot garbage.

yhoneycomb• 5 years ago

Idk why I come to this website. Constant hate against anything Chinese. It disgusts me that people are so xenophobic.

Cue the comments saying “it’s the CCP blah blah” Whatever. Literally every comment is always China bad. It’s so transparent.

beezischillin• 5 years ago

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?

_xnmw• 5 years ago

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.

ElectricMind• 5 years ago

Good for them. Good for people. For me, I read books and get better everyday. Kudos to people wasting/engaging to such apps. Keep it up !

helharpr• 5 years ago

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.

say_it_as_it_is• 5 years ago

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.

RGamma2• 5 years ago

Why is it getting worse? It is always getting worse.

lawrenceyan• 5 years ago

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.

foxbee• 5 years ago

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.

coltonmorris• 5 years ago

I made a fun domain for you tik tok lovers: https://nicetik.tk

TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

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