Or fashion products, which hire models based on attractiveness.
Or the music industry, which puts forward pop stars that are attractive while keeping ones that don't have sex appeal off the air.
Or the film industry. Or the literally any other industry that tries to survive via popularity and getting eye time. Attractiveness sells. What TikTok is doing is no different than any other industry, it's just that the models aren't getting paid.
Sure, why not?
Privately-run-and-owned social networks like TikTok tend to attain a critical mass where they're considered a utility when they're really not. So boycotts don't work because it becomes literally where everyone is after a while, and alternatives become difficult because the barrier to entry gets so high.
That's the real problem, and the problem of a centralized Internet. I should be able to broadcast video from my house and participate in a peer-to-peer CDN of my choice.
Tiktok is not a CDN, it's a presentation layer on top of their own CDN or one they rent through cloud providers.
But even ignoring the authoritarian state angle, surely you'd think it'd be weird and counterproductive for user content from YouTube or Instagram or imgur to have similar policies? Those sites are also not nightclubs or modeling agencies or a Hooters franchise either.
FWIW it's totally shitty for nightclubs to be discriminatory in that way. I get why they do it, but it doesn't make it any less shitty of them, and it sure as hell doesn't let them off the hook for their shittiness in this regard.
Tangentially, this is one of infinitely many reasons that nearly all of humanity hates nightclubs, including the people that feel socially obligated to go to them, and including people still young enough to convince themselves that they must be having fun there because it sure looks like everyone else is, not realizing that everyone else is thinking the exact same thing.
You say "it's a place for people to put their content out on the internet", but you don't ask WHY they would do that. And I don't know if you have used TikTok at all, but if you ask anyone who "put their content out on" TikTok, they would agree TikTok is like a giant nightclub.
Don’t blame this on young people, IRC was becoming popular again right around when the iPhone started to become necessary for everything.
Emphasis added for clarification.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
For example, there's a massive difference between saying "everyone has a right to healthcare" in a country than saying "the provincial governments of Canada has to provide a public health insurance option to tax paying citizens and temporary visitors".
When I walk into a doctors office as a Canadian citizen or enter the ER I'm still at the whims of the system. All that I know is that the financial costs of the what care I can find will be covered, care which is provided by a limited set of doctors, care the doctors decide to provide me often based on their perceptions of need and a broad definition of 'cosmetic'. If the doctors office is busy and all the ERs are full, or they don't believe what I say or that my symptoms don't require care, there's no one I can go to about my "right to healthcare" or right to spend the health insurance.
Proposing these limited arrangements as if they are positive rights does more harm than good. Once you add enough modifiers to make it accurate, you might as well not say it at all.
I know this matters little during political campaigns and all promises are non-binding so they might as well lie through their teeth as much as possible, up to the point people call bullshit. But it still significantly influences how we debate and discuss important topics, and it's a type of thinking which filters down into a lot of things which have little to do with political campaigns.
I do find this nomenclature helpful when trying to convince people.
It's more like a strip club, where the beautiful people are unpaid strippers who don't even know that they are strippers. And even that's a poor metaphor.
Spend just a little time on Twitter/Instagram/Tiktok or click on any given Patreon link and you're likely to come across new age digital strippers. If anybody is unpaid and making popular content these days, they're very unaware.
And why I think the analogy does have some merit, is because the metric used to decide on who gets restricted is the very similar in both of these cases.
Also, again, the people turned away from the night club door still can’t go in. Took Too users who don’t post can still view content.
However, if this article is correct, they also seem to favour good looking TikTok users, which is not unlike Night Clubs who also like to favour good looking patrons.
Something not trending on Twitter isn't the same as not existing or not showing to one's followers. Likewise, something not becoming a suggested TikTok isn't the same as not allowing the post wholesale.
The web is still the web, most people still don’t bother using it.
If I actually had interesting things on there it would probably be on the front page for a few related keywords.
Their platform, their choice for what goes on. You want something better? Go build in yourself. I have no problem with platforms self moderating. At the end of the day consumers speak with their actions.
How many TV shows feature dwarfs or people with who are abnormal? Don't blame a platform for the inherit flaws in most of us. It really only serves as a black mirror to the truth.
Yet for some reason, TikTok wants to hide this story. Why do you think that is?
This is what people want. I mean, if they wanted to see ugly people or whatever, then TikTok would show them it. It's not any different than Tinder filtering out the duds.
The person I was responding to was basically saying "let the users decide" but that can't happen if TikTok is lying to the users.
So there isn't much difference between algorithmic and manual sorting yet, because the AI needed for algorithmic curation is not intelligent enough yet.
Oh I don't know...Game of Thrones (Tyrion), Stranger Things (Dustin), Breaking Bad (Walt Jr.) etc.
A platform is not entitled to be free from criticism. And neither are you.
The platform can do what it wants, and the rest of society is free to attack them for it, and cause them to get bad publicity.
And it is silly for you to attack people for giving their opinion on the matter.
Can you say the same about Facebook?
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-facebook-wont-let-you...
No, TikTok is a place for a company to sell ads on views of creator content and they, much like those nightclubs, believe having "desireable" creators will get them those views.
Other sites have different strategies (much like the local bar in comparison to that nightclub). Their strategy seems to work for a variety of industries.
I am not supporting it, as being on the other side of the good looking line does tend to make life a pain in the butt around the "pretty" people.
Please, please, read the ToS and stop thinking like that! This is not people's own content, it's Facebook's, YouTube's, Reddit's content. If you want to own your content - you should rent a domain name, a server and host it by yourself.
Except typical social network users doesn't want to own their content. They are here for other's attention.
Or maybe there's a case to be made that censoring people for being homosexual or looking different is a form of harassment by censorship?
It's not like these platforms offer any kind of critical service. They come and go every couple of years it seems. TikTok seems pretty crap, just tell people to stop supporting it.
Some people feel socially obligated to go to nightclub, others feel socially obligated to use some social networking app. They're probably both wrong.
No it's not. China has their own version of TikTok called Douyin. If I recall correctly, TikTok isn't even available in China.
Since TikTok isn't even used in China, who exactly are the users you're describing as "people living in a pathologically authoritarian state"?
> but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that
This is patently false. Unless you're calling the US an authoritarian state.
The point is:
> but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that
This is patently false. Unless you're calling the US an authoritarian state.
What would shaming them for this accomplish? Is the idea to shame them so much that they pretend to like ugly people like me? What would be the point of that?
Tell that to the black people who demanded the right to eat in "white" restaurants.
This is an incredibly ignorant and offensive analogy.
The ignorance here is among those who don't understand that people are suffering from this discrimation, and the offense is coming from people who justify and defend it.
Nightclubs and TikTok aren't the most important examples of this, but for people who faced discrimination their entire lives, any victory would make life a little easier.
Exclusivity is a necessity for society.
But if a group is excluding people based on innate physical characteristics, maybe they should rethink that.
Many physical attributes are absolutely relevant for a given context.
What we should do, is getting rid of irrelevant and abhorrent discrimination, such as racial selection.
Society made progress only because people fought against that. They were all accused of fighting against nature, but over time, more people realized those old standards weren't as "natural" as they were once thought to be.
Do you imagine we've reached the pinnacle of human social evolution and tolerance? Perhaps we still have similar lessons to learn, and people of the future will consider our behavior as abhorrent as we consider the 1800s.
The only progress that could push society past that, is genetic engineering. Everyone on equal footing or so different, that sport as we know it ceases to exist.
But that's no reason not to eliminate discrimination when we can.
What effect on their behavior do you hope to accomplish by shaming pretty people for not wanting to hang out with ugly people? I'm not seeing a productive reason to do this.
In addition to that I doubt that refusing to sell a cake to someone because they are ugly would be considered an acceptable thing in a court of law.
This is not a distinction that most people have the mental capacity to make. Whatever the law is, that's obviously what it should be.
Aside from beauty, if you do things to signal you are poor as a luxury sales person, I’m not sure the company is required to keep you on, right or wrong.
Which is not a statement of whether it is moral, or a social benefit. Discrimination against an “unprotected class” can still be worthy of criticism.
For a very long time in Ontario, homosexuals were not protected from discrimination by law. The laws protecting them came about because people would not settle for, “if it’s legal, it must be above reproach.”
If you're by some semantic classified as unattractive, you will automatically feel segregated and marginalized. This is not like sexual orientation where non-heterosexual people actually have a desire to express their sexuality but this desire is repressed by a regressive, judgemental society. This is exactly why "Gay Pride" is a thing.
Compare that to being unattractive. Unattractive people, whatever that means, don't want to be part of that group. That's a pure factual reality of the human instinct. People want to feel attractive because they have a natural instinct to intermingle and reproduce.
But even if we opt to oversee this particular deficiency when attempting to justify an "unattractive" protected class, the problem is that "attractive" is extremely subjective and usually dictated by societal norms.
What's attractive today wasn't attractive 100 years ago. What's attractive in Africa is not what's attractive in North America. What's attractive for me (even in this dictated herd mentality) is not necessarily attractive to you. The only common factor that all these perspectives share is that nobody wants to be classified as unattractive.
We have an example of that right here from TikTok.
"I determine you're ugly but you can still come into my nightclub" is not that much better than "I determine you're ugly and you can't come into my nightclub"
The laws prohibit certain behaviors, like excluding people from nightclubs on the basis of skin color. They could easily also prohibit excluding people from nightclubs on other appearance criteria.
Of course no one can control thoughts, and some people will still feel and think hateful things, but that's true for every protected class.
Neither do the elderly, the disabled, etc, but still they are legally protected from descrimination.
Unattractive people don't want to be part of that classification and their belonging to that class is 100% subjective in any direction. Even them leveraging their status to get some sort of benefit.
Also, where's the line? Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
You'd be surprised. Being disabled is a spectrum just as being ugly is. It's not just perfectly healthy people vs people missing entire limbs. It's also the person with moderate chronic pain who can do anything they like but not everything they like.
And then there's the whole other subjectiveness that comes from bureaucrats having to classify people into discrete buckets based on how disabled they are. Sure you can't raise your arms above parallel, but does that qualify you for 4C coverage and not just 3D?
If someone's nose is causing as much distress as gender dysphoria, why not?
Sex reassignment surgery isn't easy to get, and presumably coverage for "corrective" cosmetic surgery would also take some evidence. Patients couldn't just make an appointment on a whim.
I definitely agree with you on this one.
But that's where I feel the line gets super blurry. This is not a white or black issue. Gender Dysphoria is an actual documented mental disorder.
Feeling ugly (or in the context of this debate, being classified as ugly), in general, it's not.
Body dysorphic disorder is a real thing (probably spelled incorrectly). There are people out there that feel like their limb isn't theirs - it is alien - and go to great lengths to stop it. Some folks spend lots of time and money hiding "flaws" (like their nose), even when they cannot really afford the costs every month, and avoid dating and going out because of these things. Just because it isn't a specific disorder doesn't mean the people are healthy.
And then there is another category altogether: Folks that have had accidents of different sorts. Sure, facial scars from burns or a disfigured nose might not actually cause a psychological disorder and it might not make things physically difficult, but damn it is hard to argue that fixing these things (when possible) wouldn't improve one's quality of life.
Or perhaps a mental disorder in those other people, but that's not likely.
On the other hand, your health insurance could easily create subjective definitions to deny coverage. Because unlike gender dysphoria, beauty is not binary.
With Gender Dysphoria there is only one direction when it comes to re-assignment options, and it is fully documented that this surgery is beneficial for the patient's mental health.
With beauty/ugliness, there are hundreds of possible permutations and no documented precedence to validate that this is a necessary surgery.
The way these laws work would not necessitate that. People who are old, disabled or queer are not required to carry a card or get a face tattoo. You are simply unable to descriminate on that variable, whatever the value is (old or young, able or unable, etc).
>Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
Age is a protected class in Canada/Ontario but they don't cover blood boys for seniors under OHIP either (although I will strongly lobby for it in old age).
It's difficult to prove individual cases of discrimination. Evidence can take the form of written commentary about a person's looks, or a documented policy about hiring practices. That is to say, you don't need to prove that somebody's unattractive; only that damage was done on the basis of that perception / judgement.
Dating apps are a good data point to start with.
That sentence is super ambiguous.
Do you mean “Most gay people have a desire to be not gay.”
Or “Most gay people lack any desire with regard to there orientation.”
Mainly his points: "There's no solidarity with the ugly" and "people would rather be called the worst racial slur for their race then be called ugly"
Some people don't want to see you, and that's their business.
"Protected class" is a cop out because the question isn't about what the law says but what is moral.
I mean, some nightclubs have immigrants, but nobody goes there because there are too many immigrants.
It's sort of the same thing here with TikTok: on one hand we say that it's bad to ethnically discriminate in nightclubs, on the other hand we don't go to the 'urban' nightclubs, and take it as a good signal when we read the immigrant patrons online complaining about ethnic discrimination.
Provided it's not a matter of a protected characteristic, the idea that you can push your way through the door by law is silly.
They go there to meet people who titilate them, and who don't remind them of how life can go wrong; that's their business in my view.
I know that I'm not attracted to ugly, unhealthy, or elderly people, and it's not wrong to feel that way, it is basically natural; and people who are themselves ugly, unhealthy, or elderly also feel these same things that you find ugly to acknowledge.
I guess you missed the part where I said you can leave them alone.
The nightclub lets you know where you stand at the door. I took a read of tik-tok's about page, and it gives me the impression that they're here for everyone. Just a platform to share short videos. The author of one of the featured videos on that page looks like someone who may have been filtered out.
I don't think the analogy is completely off base, but we can judge tik-tok for being deceptive.
TikTok users aren't aware of filtering yet, so telling them is a social good. Humans may prefer to see beautiful people, but filtering out ugly people means the majority of users will be below average compared to the content they view. They should at least know it's happening.
> and driven out of business?
Has this happened to TikTok?
That kind of tone is frowned upon here.
The individuals who they reject on the other hand are living beings, more specifically humans. And that is the point where it starts to become a moral issue because the business interest of an organization is directly linked to the discrimination of a group of humans.
Yes, that is the way that kind of business works, but it should also be valid to consequently judge it as immoral.
It's not, and that's pretty messed up too when you stop and actually think about it.
> If you disagree, then you are a hypocrite.
Just going to shut out any opposition to your view point like that huh? Great chat.
> So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do and driven out of business?
Actually yes, discrimination is NOT OK and those supporting it need to be named and shamed.
Many night clubs want users to have "fun" so they pay for a membership. TikTok wants users to stay so they can collect enough data to give it to advertisers or government to target them better.
A single night club won't have more than 100 people at any given time. But tiktok boasts 1.5 billion+ users and millions of them are active at any given time.
Few people going to night clubs won't decide the future of your country but millions on tiktok or other US centric social media might - facebook? instagram?
This too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611404
Other comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22612589
Most people going to nightclubs are there for fun. In contrast, it's possible to make money on Tiktok and a lot of handicapped people are desperately looking for ways to make money online.
A lot of those people will not be beautiful people. Their disability makes sure of that in many cases.
So the difference is that nightclubs are not telling people "You can make money from the comfort of home" and then shafting people who have few other viable means to make money.
There may be a few sex workers and drug dealers making bank at the nightclub, but they already know they have to fly under the radar and can be thrown out if caught, etc. The nightclub isn't actively telling them they are welcome to hang there and establish an income, then secretly saying "only the sexy people."
Now as for how we should treat businesses that treat people better based on their looks is not something I have a strong opinion about, but my two cents is that looks should not be a factor of how people get treated because it is possible that representation of "ugly" people in media could make many diverse looking people "attractive" to younger generations. This would be beneficial because it means that talent would have more priority over looks than before.
Nightclubs tell you if they think you're not up to their standard. This is far more manipulative and cruel. You could even call it gas-lighting to simply encourage these people to post content!
Nightclubs that have physical appearance standards have a business model designed around one end of the beauty preference spectrum. By itself, that's not bad; if you want to have a club for only right-handed people, that's fine.
But it's unethical to then pretend that the club is for everyone, when it's really not. That's more like selling someone a car with a top speed of 120mph, but artificially limiting the speed for poorer people, and not telling them. Just because nightclubs walk a fine ethical line doesn't make other companies that also walk that line a great idea.
A lot of things are like that. One example that comes to mind is that the New York Times, which frequently runs articles criticising tech companies for invading their users' privacy, loads a million trackers every time you access its website. When you're bigger (and more lucrative), different rules apply to you. Maybe that's not a bad thing.
Tell me how it could work any other way? nightclubs are "popular" because of this selection, if anybody could come and go, what would make a place popular?
I don't go to nightclubs and I don't enjoy it, but I can understand why it works that way, it may be unfair but if you break that, the whole concept falls apart. It is valid with any type of community, they simply value different things.
Business that engage in immoral behaviour should be shamed. Doesn't matter if it is casino sites, drug dealers or nightclubs that discriminate against ugly people. Whether that shaming results in them becoming unprofitable is beside the point.
Or do you mean another kind of bar?
Pretty similar to how TikTok isn't stopping anybody from posting, they are just selective about what they feature.
Don't casting agents and producers essentially do the same thing for movies and TV?
No, that's how you work.
Humans exist within a fitness gradient and we naturally evaluate other humans according to how they fit within it.
I don't like it, but we're bloody animals.
I wonder how much is genetic and how much is learned or conditioned.
Why does it matter? Because a nightclub does it, suddenly it's OK for TikTok to do it, too?
If Johnny jumps off a bridge, are you going to leap as well?
I gather that TikTok claimed to be inclusive. Nightclubs almost by definition don't.
If you want to do that, then go ahead.
But you should not use whataboutism to shame people into not fighting bad behavior on other platforms.
At the end of the day, this behavior is not normal on most online platforms. And users have the right to shame platforms that do this, and you are the immoral one if you are trying to attack people for doing what they believe is right.
Are you implying that it is only because of a sense of “political correctness” that people would object to discrimination?
I am not saying this is an ethical thing to do, I am saying these apps are no different from nightclubs and they gotta do what they gotta do to survive. And no matter what you may say, humans prefer non ugly people over ugly people. I am sorry but this is simply how humans work. If you disagree, then you are a hypocrite.
So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people) and driven out of business?