I'm with the rest of the commenters here in being puzzled about why TikTok is being singled out here with respect to the other social media apps. It's like comparing whiskey, vodka, and tequila in terms of health risks. You can't single out one as particularly pernicious when they do about the same thing.
Facebook, IG, Snapchat and other old social apps already had their fair share of dirt thrown at them. TikTok didn’t, and lots of people think that they are just a cool app for teenagers to record their dancing.
So it’s more about telling people who already know that alcohol is bad, that White Claw is also bad.
Not really. TikTok has had tons of bad press from day one, even if it was just the sense of ick that it's just for kids and skeevy people watching young people dancing. And there's been criticism for years that it's a covert tool China is using to manipulate our youths. We need to think of the children!
They do seem to have a policy of asymmetric warfare, for example turning a blind eye to the export of fentanyl. It's not exactly far fetched. See the book "Unrestricted Warfare" by 2 PLA colonels.
Sure. Lots of people will refuse to even entertain the thought, because if true, it means that we're already at war and our people are being killed, and most western people are too mentally weak to take on the burden of accepting that bitter reality.
We're already at war because we're bombing several countries and arming insurgents. Not because China is getting fewer people addicted to opiates than the Sacklers.
Was CEO of TikTok grilled by congress, used as an excuse by most major politicians on both sides for their failures, and blocked from acquiring any companies moving forward?
They need to take "let's not pretend" away from people. I guarantee I'm not saying anything that I never mentioned or even hinted at. What I said is that TikTok got their fair share of dirt thrown at them.
I think the regular Chinese folks are great, however the CCP is a very bad organization that is orthogonal to your average Chinese person on the street. They are easily distinguished by anyone who is being logical on the matter, rather than seemingly not being able to comprehend they are not one and the same.
I understand the consequences of access to telecom infrastructure. Is there a "human mind infrastructure" being compromised here?
I intend that in all seriousness; I'm sorry I can't find a way to phrase it that doesn't sound fatuous. There seems to be some access to which we're ok when American companies do it and not when Chinese ones do. And I couuld understand that, but just what asset are we hardening?
1. TikTok appears to be the optimum in social media platform evolution for the foreseeable future. The other platforms don't even come close. TikTok presents a perfect stream of user interests - no "friends" that bare little interest graph similarity. It's all delivered in a video funnel (great for ads) and A/B tests are so natural they're part of the platform itself. Highly optimized dopamine-triggering doom scrolling perfectly tailored to the viewer.
2. Some people are worried about the CCP exerting control to learn about sensitive leaders and their families [1] or to persuade populations at scale [2]. The app has been shown to capture all keyboard input [3], clipboard contents [4], and record much more than it needs to function. Furthermore, all US-based social media is blocked in China, and there's an argument for reciprocity. The topic of Facebook being used to gather international intelligence for the US is not typically mentioned in the same conversations.
> TikTok appears to be the optimum in social media platform evolution for the foreseeable future.
Could have been Vine, but we allow leaders in an industry to buy out insurgent, innovative competition and shut them down.
> Furthermore, all US-based social media is blocked in China, and there's an argument for reciprocity.
Reciprocity would be walling off sections of our social networks that could be bound to Chinese censorship laws. We get a special TikTok that isn't bound by Chinese censorship, if we want to be in China we must give them a special Facebook that is.
I don't know anything about what's on Facebook for the past 10 years other that what people tell me. But if it's like everywhere else, it's utterly drenched in anti-China invective that periodically gets deleted if it crosses into open racism and wasn't said by Marsha Blackburn.
Oh don't get me started on Facebook. Since the War started in Ukraine, every single artcle is drowning in: 'western propaganda', 'russia is awesome', 'putin is awesome', 'china is awesome', 'america sucks', 'america is going to fall', 'russia sucks', 'china sucks'... etc
Prior to the war there was mostly around articles to do with covid so it was easy to avoid most of it.
It's impossible to avoid now.
I was reading comments about the iPhone 14 and the comments were reduced to 'stupid americans, we make your phones, haha you're too dumb to make iphones'..
Which hash tags can I try out to see that it doesn't lead anywhere because the content gets removed?
Maybe I don't know enough about what bugs the CCP but I can find content with the hash tags #tiananmensquare, #hongkongprotests or about the social credit system in China, each showing thousands of videos with millions of views.
When a video by "Stopcommunistchina" about Tiananmen Square is the top result when typing it into their search bar, I wonder how bad their censorship algorithm must be to miss this.
All social media apps have the same goal: soak up as much of your attention as possible to get you to look at ads. But it's a difference of degrees, TikTok is simply so much more successful at soaking up peoples attention than competing platforms.
TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before. Any social media person will tell you how insane the numbers are on TikTok compared to their competitors.
Facebook was equally as effective when it launched. People were spending all day on Facebook, then spending all day on Farmville, then spending all day on Instagram. People got tired of it. People move on to new things.
> TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before.
What evidence do you have that its effect is worse than other platforms? Perhaps its scale is worse, but is the actual effect on the individual that much worse than it is with Instagram?
I mean obviously TikTok keeps their data close so we only have anecdotes.
But anecdotally for myself and anyone I know who has used TikTok, the app is just so much more addicting than any other social media has been before. I'm not a social media newcomer, I have used social media nearly all my life. I have used instagram in the past.But never before have I felt the same addiction/compulsion that exists with TikTok. I don't think this is that unusual an experience, have you tried using the app yourself?
I haven't tried the app, and I appreciate your comments.
From what I've heard it has the hallmarks of a fad: inexplicably engaging, and then dropped by the time it becomes popular enough that I've heard of it. Do you think that is likely here, or does this have something genuinely novel and more enduring?
I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive.
Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL content is super short form and shallow, anything longer than 20s is considered long, so it's easy to keep that dopamine cycle going. It's a content graph rather than a social graph, people eventually get bored of whatever uninteresting thing their real life friends are up to. And the recommendations algorithm algorithm is finely tuned to deliver the most addictive content.
I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.
If I do a wrong and another person does the same wrong, it’s still two wrongs. We shouldn’t be defending TikTok because some other company did the same thing. This should be obvious to anyone.
A better analogy. It's like comparing alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana. Historically, we socially glorified alcohol and tobacco while heavily criminalizing marijuana in order to be sneakily racist.
The problem is not what TikTok is doing to people. The problem is that we don't control it and China does.
This is a sneaky thing those who manufacture consent do. They are very thorough in calling out the bad of the thing that exists outside their control and profit structure, but then accuse you of whataboutism when you try to compare and contrast with the status quo they are implicitly supporting in their criticism.
> The problem is that we don't control it and China does.
So, if TikTok was a US-based company (like Meta) fucking up peoples' minds (like Meta) it would be fine? Sounds a bit racist, if not everybody is allowed to destroy lives.
It would be less bad, yes, because American elites could more easily co-opt and control it to their support own agendas, like they are doing with Meta and Twitter and have done with all traditional media.
I have heard it said that in China, the TikTok algorithm heavily favors content supporting and glorifying science and engineering, in an attempt to encourage their youths to go into those fields, while here, they prioritize vanity like dancing and bodybuilding.
Im in Taiwan, I downloaded tiktok, and basically in between a bunch of Taiwan content, was bombarded with propaganda videos about how covid started in the US and it’s all the US fault, and how amazing China is…
So I don’t doubt they push content that keeps us dumb while they try to use their own platform for good inside China.
Also a good analogy. My guess is that most of the people commenting that it's "no different than Facebook" must not have used either extensively. They are completely different experiences.
I found myself addicted to consuming and creating tiktoks for about a year and a half after amassing 25k followers in a few months.
There’s many repercussions to being on any social platform for countless hours a day, but for me it was a hard addiction to break.
Not only do you get the feeling of a slot machine when the platform allows you to win to keep you incentivized to keep creating, but you get stuck in a niche of content you probably would never do otherwise. You become a one trick pony or see yourself following trends out of desperation to keep your views.
I find TikTok to be one of the best platforms for manipulating your emotions. It can give you power just as fast as it can take it away. Once you get used to a certain amount of engagement and views, you hardly can settle for less emotionally.
I’ve been using TikTok for search lately and it kind of works. Web is at a point where it’s faster to watch a video than open a search result. Click a cookie warning, figure out how to disable my ad blocker, and hope I’m not on an SEO page.
I think this is the next move for TikTok - a search + map offering. I've started searching for restaurant reviews on TikTok and it mostly works. Couple things I liked about that experience:
* The medium of video. It's just a next level experience compared to reading text and looking at photos of dishes.
* I thought I wanted an aggregate vote on a restaurant. I actually like one detailed TikTok review over a ton of shallow, generally extreme Yelp reviews.
The current state of text-based Web is unusable. It's mostly SEO text walls with fill up content for SEO. Most of the content is in Youtube videos, which also have it's own filler blabber but at least you find answers.
It's terrible how the "strategic decisions" of one company (Google/Youtube) have marked the flow/form of information in the web. Even "for pay" content providers (mostly news sites) now shove video when you enter into their websites.
Long lost and forgotten are information dense text sites like HowTOs, Benchmarks, Shoot outs and similar web pages from the 90s and early 2000s.
>Even "for pay" content providers (mostly news sites) now shove video when you enter into their websites.
My understanding was that this was mostly a response to a decision by Facebook to boost their algorithmic ranking of articles that feature video. So maybe "two companies" :)
There is no doubt, but that study is an occasion of exciting lust, and of giving rise to many obscene actions... Hence, as I suppose it is, that we find, in Euripides and Juvenal, that the learned women of antiquity were accused of immodesty.
===
... he so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits.
And that doesn't even count the multitude of ills brought upon society by the television. Perhaps we should take a brief step back and consider before we continue our clamor over TikTok.
Here's a list of social panics that turned out to be nothing:
Kids being poisoned by halloween candy (no child was ever poisoned by a stranger on Halloween)
Kids being latchkey kids
Violent video games
Jazz
Hip hop
Rap
Heavy Metal
Satanists meeting up to cut up animals
Marijuana
Dungeons and dragons (really https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-1980s-media-panic-over-dungeons-dragons)
People gassing Euro trains and removing everyone's kidneys
The internet
Email (really)
Text chat like aol and yahoo messenger
Sms messages
The dark web
Jelly bracelets (really, on Good Morning America https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/the-great-sex-bracelet-scare-and-other-teen-myths/2197833/)
Most songs sung by black people
Many songs sung by Italian Americans
Homosexual men
Africanized Honey Bees
Facebook
Myspace
Pinball arcades
Video game arcades
Pool halls
You will probably die after 70 of old age stuff. If not then a car crash or falling. Your kids might get screwed up but we have no idea why and avoiding all the above won't change the odds at all.
Yeah but just because you made a list of unrelated things, doesn't mean I have to let my kids get addicted to some silly government controlled app. I wouldnt want them to get addicted to gambling, or drugs either. Thatd be a dumb thing to do. The power of marketing is real.
The difference with all of those things is it was parents "social panicking" about something they had no experience of, whereas parents are also on social media experiencing the negative effects for themselves.
If you want to look at past analogous campaigns, tobacco lobby arguments fit better: All the cool kids are doing it, so if you don't do it you're uncool, correlation between lung cancer/depression doesn't equal causation, the science can't prove anything, maybe people who are predisposed to lung cancer/depression are more likely to smoke/spend all day doomscrolling.
As far as I can tell, TikTok scares like these are 30% standard social media moral panic, 70% jingoism. Everyone knows that they are paying for TikTok with their data and a few hundred million people (myself included) are okay with that calculus and making a rational, informed decision to continue using the product.
>As far as I can tell, TikTok scares like these are 30% standard social media moral panic, 70% jingoism. Everyone knows that they are paying for TikTok with their data and a few hundred million people (myself included) are okay with that calculus and making a rational, informed decision to continue using the product.
This is just silly.
The overwhelming majority of people have no idea of what any of that means thus have not made any such calculus.
The overwhelming majority of people probably know just as much as you and I do about the uses to which TikTok puts the data they gather. Which is why conversations about TikTok immediately move into attacks on the Chinese government and Chinese people rather than discussing a single material effect that their data gathering or use has or could have on anyone's life.
The difficulty with discussing material objections to TikTok is that people would immediately enter areas that they personally have a hand in working on and/or investing in, and would lobby to preserve. They want American data to go to American oligarchs.
> The overwhelming majority of people probably know just as much as you and I do about the uses to which TikTok puts the data they gather.
As a very technical person in this industry, do you really think you don't have a better understanding of the data TikTok collects and what it will be used for than Average TikTok User?
Absolutely. Not only do I think that the general public has a good, though vague idea of what their social media data is used for, but I also think they're rationally alarmed about it (aside from the anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-Republican, anti-Democrat talking points they're taught to repeat by people who should be trustworthy.)
We like to call users stupid or confused for using something that is bad, then we only give them one choice. People aren't using Facebook because they don't care about what's happening to them, the use it because it's the only/easiest way to get certain things done and they have other problems in their lives to worry about.
You're not paying with your data, you're paying with the foundations of functioning society and democracy that are being algorithmically subverted by a totalitarian slave state. The very things that trend on TikTok in the West are banned and filtered in China for a reason.
There's a patriot in China talking about you and your government in exactly the same way. And his government has a quarter of the incarceration rate the US does, and bases its governance on the work of one of Hegel's students.
Anybody who isn't trying to ban it as they try to ban TikTok, unless they see a material difference in the behavior of the applications other than hypernationalism.
Ban both for kids. Double ban Instagram. If nobody has planted a flag in your moral center, you'll rarely find a reason to mention TikTok by name when talking about the manipulation and surveillance that social media decided it wants to be.
I have no love for facebook, but if we're talking about protecting kids from exploitative social media, it's probably beneficial to focus on platforms they actually use.
Not that I support Facebook, but it's impossible to be moral absolutist in today's world. You either support western democracy with all it's imperfections or you are supporting authoritarian / totalitarian states. Everyone who pretend to be "politically neutral" will always be helping later.
UPD: Yeah I meant "later" and not "former". Corrected.
>Everyone who pretend to be "politically neutral" will always be helping former.
I'll assume you mean latter, easy mistake to make.
Personally I find the "if you aren't supporting the ridiculous things we're doing you're supporting the enemy" argument ridiculous. I'm capable of thinking both need to seriously change, and think it's a better use of my time to try and change the Western Democracy I am a part of as it's supposed to change if I disagree with it. It's strange how that point of view gets me labeled a (possibly unintentional) traitor.
I'm neither meant to mark anyone as traitor nor I like how Facebook affected society. At the same time I totally for any limitation or sanctions against media companies controlled by totalitarian or authoritarian states. Allowing literal "enemy" propoganda machines to run freely while they banned everything in their own countries is madness.
Disclaimer: I'm not US or EU citizen. I just seen how my home country changed from liberal state of almost absolute freedom into authoritarism and then into fascism. Western democracies do all kind of things I dont like, but at least they dont risk to burn planet in nuclear fire.
A Western democracy invented nuclear fire, is the only country to have ever burned anyone in nuclear fire, and is currently threatening the two largest nuclear powers on the basis of their border disputes.
Saying anyone who doesn't fully back Western democracies is supporting the enemy is calling them a traitor. Maybe that wasn't your intention, but providing support to the enemy is a textbook definition of traitor.
I did not say that you suppose to fully back western democracies or their governments. What I said is that you cant play "politically neutral" by pretending that Facebook (that obviously affected by some US state actors) is as evil as CCP backed company.
Facebook and Zukerberg personally obviously have political agenda, influence and censorship. At the same time it's not the same thing as totalitarian state agenda and censorship.
That's because China has strict censorship laws while the US protects free speech. TikTok (like Meta) follows local regulations when it comes to their content.
lol… free speech for those who don’t rock the boat. Go ask someone in the US who criticizes Israel in any serious way how their employment prospects are going.
No it's because TikTok is owned by the CCP and used as a tool to sow discord and subvert liberal democratic values so that it may destabilize the west and pave the way for CCP supremacy.
That the content is promoted to create disorder. Facebook has similar issues (they're even being sued for contributing to genocide) but they were never accused of the same thing (but mostly of negligence).
This thing started with Facebook being accused of being the conduit for the stealing of the 2016 election through 100K worth of ads featuring Bernie shirtless. It's hard to remember because they got utterly bored with it eventually, and they have relatives that they brag work at Facebook.
Facebook wasn't created to create social disorder as a first principle, it was created to be addictive and make MarkZ and crew billionaires. TikTok is being used to do something similar but it is completely designed to do that by a foreign power and use algorithms specifically to damage the psyche of westerners with distracting videos, tuning them to give just enough of a dopamine buzz to keep you there and coming back, and in general distract youth from pursuing more enlightening and educational activities while building a psychological profile on them to be filed away for future clandestine purposes. Or that's just my 5 minute take on it.
This is some peak moral panic material, mixed with a healthy dose of irrational nationalism (which was planted into your mind with intention, just a hint).
25% of their user base are kids in the age range of 10-19 world wide and that goes up to 32% is you look at the US. Do you really think most of them are making rational decisions about their data? Take a look at studies on brain development and rational thinking. Combine that with literacy rates and data privacy understanding... the overwhelming majority of their users are not making rational or informed decisions.
Applies just as well to almost any social media. The worst thing is that these apps addict one to unrealistic expectations and instant gratifications. Digital tobacco.
No it does not apply just as well to almost any social media.
TikTok is unique in its control of the user experience, its use of data, and its popularity.
Best not to throw this on the pile of “well duh, it’s social media — of course it’s bad.”
TikTok is spyware. TikTok is an adversary. TikTok must be regulated. Let’s talk about TikTok in this comments section, and not zoom out like we so often do.
>TikTok is unique in its control of the user experience, its use of data, and its popularity.
How so? I don't use TikTok, so I might not be aware and I would appreciate you expanding on what you're asserting here.
What is it doing different than other social media in regards to the control of user experience?
What data practices are employed which are different and worse than the other social medias? Is it just where the data is going, i.e. the 'wrong' people have the data? Or are they capturing more data than, say, FB is?
TikTok is no more spyware than any other major internet ad platform, it just happens to use the knowledge it gains to provide you with content you actually want to watch (even if you don't know you do).
Google and Facebook collect the same sorts of information, they just don't use it as much to curate your experience.
Edit: to the downvoters, do you really think that Google and Facebook don't scan images you upload to them, and save drafts of things you type into their views: email or chat window or what have you? Do you really think they're not creating a complex profile of who you are as a person? That's how ads work. "Show this ad to 20-35 year olds in [Area] with [political affiliation] and a hobby of [thing]. You gain that knowledge by reading and tracking _everything_
Do you really think it's how ad networks figure out someone's marketable interests? Based on their draft email/chat messages? You obviously haven't tried doing something like this, but getting solid inferences from such tangential data is very hard, and it's not really a priority when the same users leave such a large trail from their browsing and searching anyways, visiting countless websites with promiscuous audience reporting, ad tracking cookies, etc. Why would someone bother to track someone's draft emails to figure out their political affiliation when the media they consume provides all the signal.
In my book there are many adversaries and TikTok is only an item in a set of adversaries. The solution is to look at the set, this is not zoom out.
There are many children who are target to pederastians in Instagram and we can also say that they should be regulated and/or take this very seriously improving their alerts.
I wonder why it would be a valid argument to say "what about Facebook". To me, the same applies to Facebook too, and I don't participate on either platform - well maybe I do on Facebook[0], despite me not registering.
It's a valid argument in the context of the comment being replied to. If you look at the parent comment, you will see that they are specifically claiming that TikTok is different than other social media companies in its intrusion on privacy.
>No it does not apply just as well to almost any social media.
>TikTok is unique in its control of the user experience, its use of data, and its popularity.
Its legislation. More transparent governments like the US' are generally trusted with data over closed governments, at least, for the majority of Westerners.
I think I'm far less likely to be impacted by China having access to the intimate detail of my life, than my own countries government or companies based in my country.
I can't see the Chinese government selling my medical information to health insurers, but could certainly see a local company doing this.
TikTok is made by China, considered an all-encompassing adversary by proponents of nationalism, conflict, and hatred. Therefore it makes TikTok an "adversary" despite the only unique thing it did was eating into Meta's marketshares.
It's very telling when it comes to topics marginally related to general idea of China (the place, the people, the culture, etc.), these so-called free thinker intellectuals seamlessly transition into Goebbel-like devices as if a switch has been flipped on.
> The worst thing is that these apps addict one to unrealistic expectations and instant gratifications.
I mean, there's also racism, sexism, white nationalism, etc. that TikTok occasionally dumps into your feed to test your engagement with it in order to improve the psychographic profile it uses to decide what to throw at you next. (To be clear, this is not hypothetical, this is my personal experience with it.)
>The worst thing is that these apps addict one to unrealistic expectations and instant gratifications. Digital tobacco.
You could say the same about the internet, even pre-broadband, as anyone who spend significant time on websites, message boards, etc during the 90s and 2000s (or earlier with Usenet, IRC, etc) could attest to. Shall we just do away with the whole thing then?
This guy has found out the benefits/features of free social media. I don't know why he bothers to mention the name. It could as well be Meta(FB, Instagram) or TW. The last part is really laughable...
>> There is also the matter of lack of consent, as children are sometimes too small to understand what is going on ....
That being said I believe in the EU at least they will have to change a few things.
Have you used TikTok? I have and uninstalled it after a while. It feels like it takes all the bad elements of social media to the extreme. It's highly addictive, more so than other social networks, contains extremely shallow content, and can be very manipulative. I agree all social media can exhibit these traits to a degree, but TikTok at least for me really took it to the extreme.
I always have a laugh when people say TikTok has x-type content. The truth is it has that type of content _for you_. Because it's what you engaged with. TikTok has lots of great content, but some people really don't like what they see in the mirror.
Then you're either being willfully naive or don't understand how media works. Marshall McLuhan described this phenomenon 60 years ago, the medium is the message.
Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Note that I don't much care about Tik Tok fear mongering, but pretending the platform doesn't shape the type of content on it is absurd. Why is Instagram different than Tik Tok different than Twitter different than HN?
>>Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Unironically, yes, I'd bet dollars to donuts there's some niche creator doing exactly this. As an example, one of the people I follow (@maklelan) is a PhD in theology & religion, and has ~1000 videos on biblical scholarship, the history of various religious texts, different translations/interpretations of scripture, etc.
It's interesting and very niche content. There are probably 1000x more views being had by attractive young women dancing, but TikTok is big enough that it has everything.
Fair enough. I thought I'd test it. I opened Tik Tok for pretty much the first time. I've installed it but not yet used it. It showed me a bunch of girls dancing, as expected. I thought I could swipe up / down to tell them what I like, but I can only swipe up, so I'm not sure how I train it.
I searched "Israel Palestine". I got an Irish guy named Freddy Quinne telling me it's like "coming home from work one day, only to find that someone else is now in your house". It appears to be mostly just guys talking / ranting. This hasn't really changed my mind that the medium shapes the content.
Oh, it's absolutely not easy finding that niche content. You're going to need to swipe past a lot of cleavage to find anything else. To get more of whatever you're currently on, re-watching, liking, commenting all probably work. To get less, either swipe past quickly or long press (I think?) and you can choose "not interested" or something. I think there are other ways to block particular creators and sounds (and maybe filters?) if you don't want to see that specific thing.
The search does leave something to be desired - the app is very much designed for just endless scrolling.
It just sounds like a lot of work trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Point taken that the content (maybe) exists on the platform, but if I can't find it what good is it? As essentially a worldwide daily competition for virality, it seems like it'll trend to what is mass entertainment.
Yah, if you're looking for particular content or something it's not a great app. It's really meant to be a maximally configurable timewaster. The app doesn't care if you waste an hour on dancing videos or slime videos or politics videos, as long as you spend it on the app.
I don't think things go viral on it quite the way they do on other platforms - like on youtube, to a certain degree, anything viral enough is going to show up in the recommendations for everyone. Less so on TikTok, I think.
It's hard to believe anything of real value can be communicated in such a constrained format, but would you care to share any tiktoks that are actually worth risking a hugely time-wasting addiction for?
Yes, absolutely. In fact I was just emailing some childhood friends these videos earlier today.
What TikTok does _really_ well is surface hyper specific content to you. I grew up the children of indian immigrants and there's a, let's say shared trauma, to growing up like that. It's a ton of little things that I just swallowed as a kid and now I realize: that's kinda messed up. Things like aunties always asking me what school I got into, am I dating, am I getting married, etc. They seem like innocent questions right now but as the eldest teen in the group, I wanted appreciation and felt like I was getting orders from these questions.
Yes it's a constrained format (though I think you can up to 90 seconds now) but you have to realize, it is near impossible to find this kind of content elsewhere. There's a whole generation of people who find communicating through short video clips more natural than how you and I are talking right now. And they're not afraid to challenge social norms that I had to accept; I can only salute that.
Does this represent all the type of content I engage with? No - the slot machine effect is very real here. For every impactful video I watch, there's maybe 10 dopamine hit videos I consume. I choose to make that trade off (with guard rails - I install TikTok every friday and delete it every Sunday).
> It's hard to believe anything of real value can be communicated in such a constrained format
This is exactly what I've always hated about Twitter. Its length-limited posts actively stimulate stupid crap like people posting what they had for dinner and make real insightful content very hard to read because people have to split it up in 20 different parts which all become their own threads with distracting replies.
Even the sane people I followed posted so much nonsense I had to wade through to find the one pearl that it was just not worth it. If something good comes up it'll make it to HN anyway so I just left Twitter.
I really don't get why Twitter is so popular either but I guess like with TikTok most people like shallow content. See what's popular on TV too, it's the "reality"/celeb crap.
It sounds like thats the end of content you tend to engage with to be honest. My tiktok tends to be filled with comedy, music, and people telling stories about their lives.
All of those things can be quite shallow. It's really easy to confuse engaging content with deep content which is why you can watch five hundred minutes of e.g. Youtube content and remember very little of it while having an inflated sense of knowledge. I imagine the same thing applies to Tiktok, although I avoid that because I worry that it has basically solved exactly for engagement.
> 2020 pandemonium about TikTok being a national security threat looks increasingly like a power play.. dire warnings, and even the threat to completely shut down its platform, subsided only after TikTok began appointing Western officials to important positions within its organization, thereby giving the state considerable influence over the content and direction of the app.
>Whatever the strength of your scroll, you are going to be shown the next video TikTok selected for you, one by one — or keep moving your finger to actively scroll up after each video begins. They are in control of what you see, not you
I mean this is just plain wrong given that TikTok has a search function. In fact this seems to work so well for young people that apparently half of Gen Z is now using TikTok as a replacement for Google[1].
>TikTok is newer and much less scrutinized than Facebook and Google
TikTok barely escaped being forced to sell off or open up their codebase to inspection by authorities for what was essentially just nationalistic paranoia. Anything said in this piece applies to American domestic companies. the article follows the typical style of "throw enough shit and hope that some of it sticks" together with spurious assumptions about what, why or how people use the app or get out of it.
>TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational, that follows a normal learning pace,
well no shit because it's not a replacement for school, it's a short form video app. That's not a crime. There's honestly a decent amount of educational stuff and people do use it for that purpose. This goes for criticism of Facebook and Instagram as well by the way, these are tools, not replacements for parenting or education and it's the parents job, not the companies to see that children use them appropriately.
From that link, it makes TikTok sound more like a replacement for Yelp than Google:
> Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan told the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference that according to Google's internal studies, "something like almost 40% of young people when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram."
I'd go as far to say that is a clickbait headline.
4chan has nowhere near the influence over children that TikTok does. Maybe a /pol/ thread gets 500 replies or something, while Cobra Tate (a sex trafficker who went viral by openly hating women) gets 100M+ views by literal children on TikTok who go on to repeat everything he says.
And yet, primary complain about tiktok is that it is shallow or cringy. I remember some complains over ableist algorithms. The complains about racism and what not are vanishingly rare.
Is that surprising given that there are approx 2 or 3 orders of magnitude difference between the popularity of these platforms? 4chan is and has always been fringe even within its demographic, whereas TikTok is already one of the dominant networks.
Almost certainly cannot read your iMessages. It can theoretically look in your photos if you grant that permission, but most likely it only looks at your photos when you select videos to upload.
The biggest thing was left out, its complete existence is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, and you should consider that if you want to offer them up your private data and psychologic profile that TikTok is mining on you.
Reminder that Facebook paid a firm to create negative buzz around TikTok [0].
> The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said.
> The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.
Does it make it any less true? I think this author understates the harm other platforms cause, since the focus was TikTok, but she does explicitly say that many of the addictive engineering tricks are employed by the other platforms as well.
Maybe we shouldn't place any limits on social media, but instead charge them a nominal tax for dealing with the negative externalities? Perhaps at a rate set by reported hours of human engagement, which will also serve as a balance against robots.
Use such taxes to pay for PSAs about the harms and let people decide for themselves if or how to change their use.
Just because facebook (a soulless ghoul amalgamation trapped in the vortex of a billionaire p-zombie) took shots at tiktok (also a shit company), doesn't absolve tiktok of real, actual harm.
This is whataboutism, although I always do appreciate light being shown on Fb/meta.
There's no need to single out TikTok, the same regulation that will make them spy on people less will also work with Meta, Twitter, Google. TikTok does nothing extra compared to them.
There absolutely is. TikTok is Max Headroom blipverts come to life, and the effect is hypnotic. They're relentlessly slicing and dicing you as you watch to a far greater degree than anything that's come before it.
This is contemporary liberal anticommunist whataboutism. Whataboutism once described when you point out bad thing X someone else is doing, and they respond by pointing about totally unrelated bad thing Y that you're doing, such as when the USSR responded to the US criticisms of their economic system by pointing out that the US was an apartheid state. It's an ad hominem.
What you're doing is yelling about your neighbor beating his wife when you're also beating your wife, and you're not going to stop beating your wife.
Point: Tobacco is especially bad for young children. Therefore we must restrict it for children.
Counterpoint: Caffeine is bad, too. Therefore, should we also outlaw Coca-Cola for children?
The argument that "TikTok is no worse than other social media" is the Counterpoint.
TikTok is very bad for children and adolescents, and we should do the difficult-but-honorable thing and prevent them from using it. If that's difficult, TikTok will have to deal with it.
I don't want to sound pedantic or smug, but I think maybe coca-cola should be banned for children too. Perhaps not illegal but just not for sale for children. I think social media should be similar. 16+ at least
I agree that parents should have much more responsibility on these matters, but not in exchange for state influence, at least in the US. 40M+ adults lack basic literacy to inform themselves well enough to pass on to their kids. Another 65M only have enough literacy to make low-level inferences and compare/contrast [0].
I’d rather govt (which has many channels for advocacy even if flawed) influence choices than corporations completely control the panopticon of choices (where small time spenders have very little consumer power).
But we’re not far apart. As you mention schools (of the state) are a good place to start.
It's not in law, but some supermarkets in New Zealand age restrict energy drinks to 16+.
On the one hand it strikes me as being kind of silly, because those same kids could buy a coffee/iced coffee with just as much sugar and often even more caffeine in it just fine.
On the other hand I do see how the differing marketing/pricing on each product means you can't treat them as equivalent. Probably a good case for voluntary age restrictions by retailers rather than actual laws.
285mg of caffeine in a 300ml bottle. Energy drinks are already regulated to max out at 320mg per litre (so that would be 96 mg max in a 300ml bottle, I guess "weak energy drinks" would be the answer to your question).
Although that does have less sugar - 6.5g per 100ml compared to the 11g per 100ml in Red Bull.
Now I'm curious about what qualifies as an energy drink, I guess it must be based on marketing?
TikTok already limits minimum user age to 13, along the same lines as every other major social media platform which are all shamelessly stealing the same idea for short format videos provided via tailored algorithms. Picking on TikTok while ignoring every other platform doing the same thing simply screams ulterior motivation.
Every generation needs its ultimately inconsequential moral panic after all. TikTok merely got picked out because its background allows easy fingerpointing thanks to a few shifting political trends in the late 2010's.
Online services can only do so much due diligence. Do you want mandatory photo ID & facial verficiation instead? That would be infinitely more harmful to user privacy.
Maybe try presenting actual facts instead of tabling predisposed statements then proceeding to attack anyone who point out how awfully biased they were?
Is it? I was under the impression (after some reading of studies, not just dreaming about the topic) that it was not just GRAS (generally regarded as safe), but several studies showed benefits to regular coffee consumption.
Maybe parents should actually be responsible and do this? I'm getting more and more convinced that smartphones should probably not be in the hands of minors. A dumb phone with call and text capability is probably good for 12+ but social media is a scourge.
I find this argument unintelligible, if not intentionally deceptive. We don't ban tobacco because it is bad, we ban it because it is addictive and causes COPD and cancer. We don't ban bad grammar.
The argument that TikTok is no worse than other social media is not a counterpoint, and has absolutely no relation to any rational argument about whether TikTok should be banned. It's a statement intended to raise a simple, obvious question: Why only ban TikTok when we can ban all social media for children? Is other social media better?
Watch me answer that question about caffeine and bad grammar: It makes sense not to ban caffeine and bad grammar along with cigarettes because we ban cigarettes for being dangerous, and caffeine and bad grammar are somewhere between far less dangerous and not dangerous at all.
You want to ban all social media for children under 16/18? Fine with me. There'll be fewer children walking into you on the sidewalk because they're staring at their phones.
> I first noticed that half a coke zero results in a "colon cleansing" complete with cramps and loose bowels. Over the last 2 days, four other friends/family have experimented and come up with the same results. What is the ingredient that causes this?
Props for using tobacco in your example and not nicotine.
I'm sick of explaining to people that tobacco is/contains a bunch of awful carcinogens and will slowly kill you whereas nicotine in isolation is practically harmless, if addictive.
(Note to downvoters: this isn't some stealth argument in favour of vaping - obviously those have a bunch of extra factors outside of the nicotine, and in relationship to the addictiveness of the nicotine that should be evaluated when determining safety too).
It is way past time for parents and educators to take a stand. You have the power to shut off the sewage pipe bursting in the middle of your living room. NO internet access under 18. Whitelist every single page your kids has access to.
Playing whackamole is physically impossible. This social media vs that social media. This hyperaddictive videogame vs. that hyperaddictive videogame, and 1000 more waiting in the wings. Various shades of (soft) porn, including some very mainstream: hello ad industry. Sales funnels for harmful chemicals, including some very mainstream: hello Ritalin. Instant validation for any quackery under the sun, and then some. Etc, etc, etc.
Some will say: Wait, but there is clean, useful, value-dense content on the Internet. Aren't we throwing the baby with the bathwater? For an entire childhood, you can buy all of it for a few thousand $$$, in book or DVD format. Better, creators of value-dense content now have a way to sustain their lives. Not worth taking chances with "free" Internet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32315074