Honest question: Is there something specific about TikTok technology/usage pattern paving the way for distopy acceptance or it's just the same concept of facebook/instagram/Twitter but with a younger audience?
I have noticed a cultural difference between different generations of social networks. With Facebook, people usually sought out people and groups that they wanted to connect with and complained about being algorithmically profiled for ads but accepted it as part of the business model.
With TikTok, people usually express how much they love the algorithm that finds things that they like.
> With Facebook, people usually sought out people and groups that they wanted to connect with and complained about being algorithmically profiled for ads but accepted it as part of the business model.
Google's success with ads is that they were able to trigger them as part of user action. Paid search results are hypothetically helpful to some people. Contextual ads on a site may actually provide value if they are on-topic.
Facebook ads mostly target people. They don't really provide any in-context value, they are pure commercials - spooky commercials that know what is going on in your life, although the ability to utilize this information is often laughably bad.
Twitter often has the same problems. Ads interspersed within conversations just aren't helpful or desired.
You will hear testimonials of most TikTok users addicted to and sniffing the digital crack / cocaine on the platform praising the super dystopian algorithm that operates on their viewing activity and collects minute data-points to keep them glued and addicted to the platform and screen time.
Then you will get something like this [0], and folks [1] on the kool-aid with nonsensical claims like 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet' at the height of the euphoria.
In reality, it is both the same concepts of the other social networks but much worse and [0] has shown that its algorithm was more dystopian than previously thought.
It's strange that people lump these four together. There's a marked difference between Facebook/Instagram (friends first, sharing encouraged by all users) vs. Twitter/TikTok (mainly acting as a broadcast medium with a long tail).
