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.
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.
Even subs that should be neutral, fun or supportive have attitude problems. One about a game I'm playing, for instance, consists mainly of dramatic complaints with a feeling of impending doom.
I have two examples of this from otherwise extremely positive communities. /r/factorio and /r/satisfactory (same genra, but I like this genre)
/r/factorio initially had no issue with self promotion of videos and series. This caused a ton of consternation and all kinds of other subjects turned very very negative. Moderators created another subreddit dedicated for self promotion of series, and the community stayed angry about everything for about 2 months, before things regressed to /r/factorio's mean, which was very positive.
I saw a similar thing happen in /r/satisfactory. Before the game was released people on the subreddit had nothing to talk about for the most part, and satisfactory announced that it was going to be epic exclusive for 6 months before release. Given that many people really hated Epic, and because we didn't actually get to play the game, anything that didn't talk about the Epic exclusivity, was subject to the conversation. Eventually moderators placed dedicated threads for epic exclusivity discussion but still, the whole subreddits tone was extremely vitriolic. Even on things that didn't have anything to do with Epic Exclusivity.
Then the game released. And that toxic discussion was totally wiped out by people actually playing the game. The subreddits snapped to positive tone instantly.
Hell, HN feels like this often.
In particular, the rim world subreddit is great. That kind of game makes for a lot of crazy situations, and much of it is captured there.
When games has game breaking bugs, reddit is often a common search results with people discussing it and providing solutions. In many way it serve the same purpose for gaming as stackoverflow does for programming.
Is this just because the way I am reading reddit, or the subject matter?
Mainstream reddits could be junk ..
Technology-wise, NewPipe builds off of the back of youtube-dl and a custom page parser, and SponsorBlock uses a user-built database of timestamps.
TikTok regularly leaves me inspired, and across many different creative realms: Amazing makeup, mindblowing parkour, beautiful original music and eye opening covers. Oh and some of the short comedy sketches have left me thoroughly incapacitated due to laughter. The list goes on for me.
In general, I'm happier after viewing, even when the "you should stop watching too much TikTok guy" comes on.
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.
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?
All of Reddit makes me hate the world. No sub doesn't. If it does just visit it one or two times more and bingo.
Even niche reddit communities end up being full of newbies and self promotion spam. There are exceptions (/r/steroids comes to mind back when I was into that) but programming/tech subreddits are just noise.
I spend time on HN if a post I read also results in a meaningful conversation among the commenters. Usually I will try to add a comment as well, so there can be a bit of back and forth. It's not all one-way the way it is on TT.
Of course it's not always that way. I know to steer clear of posts related to H1B visas, because the exact same conversation plays out each time.
I'm not sure humans, flesh and blood, should be handing control of our emotional state to corporations with highly-tuned algorithms.
- John Lennon
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.
Or maybe they're a younger demographic that doesn't have "new homes, cars, kids, spending"?
Also, the bit about "practices better internet hygiene" because they're "digital native" is kind of funny. Prior to the mid 2000s the standard advice was not to put public info about yourself online. "internet hygiene" was the norm, even when most people weren't "digital natives".
Unfortunately 13-25 year olds are less tech sawy than a decade ago because they were raised on locked down platforms like iOS and Android.
Oh, every generation of internet users has made repetitive memes like this; we just have more bandwidth now.
I just checked the tiktok homepage and the top two videos I saw were of a woman failing a sobriety test and a guy scaring a drive-through woman with a blow horn.
I realize this isn't the content you might see once your algo is calculated, but it's obviously popular stuff on the platform and it just doesn't seem like very positive content for me.
This is true of everything. If I look at the front page of YouTube in a private browser window, it's all bullshit too, obviously. But there's plenty of quality stuff on YouTube that I do like, ya know?
The point is that the well is deep and broad enough that there is probably a whole community of people making content you'd like, and TikTok is extraordinarily good at finding that stuff for you sooner rather than later. I watch tons of diorama-building tutorials and recipe videos, for example. And I'm better both at painting and cooking as a result.
Look: I'm not a shill, here. I'm not trying to convince you to get into TikTok (I mean? who cares, honestly) but I find a lot of talk about it tends to boil down to "kids these days" dismissiveness.
And yeah I don't post anything there - nobody wants to see my grizzled old-ass face.
These platforms are the products of megacorps, using incredibly sophisticated technology. Just contrast even a single CPU, versus, say, kids using their language faculties and markers to be funny or naughty, or using a bunch of stuff they found outside to invent a game. And then think of how many CPU and other things are involved in the pipeline. Kids being kids is as far from it as it could be.
During the peak of the outrage about and the being in denial about Elsagate, there were plenty of people actually saying "these videos probably are this way because AI generated them based on the things toddlers like". People getting stabbed, raped, kids in trunks and crying over being separated from their family, endless body horror -- all brushed aside with "meh, they like that".
Pointing to good content that one could pay attention to instead is a bit like saying "ignore the spam email from the Nigerian prince, you obviously aren't in the target demographic for it [let the people who are fend for themselves]". That's what people did with content literally aimed at children who couldn't even speak, why wouldn't they do it for teenagers, and of course for adults. This doesn't affect me, so it doesn't get shown to me, so it's fine.
And while online mobs are certainly not a TikTok specialty, just to counter the general fluffy happy picture that so many comments here are painting based on things being fine for themselves:
https://www.fluentlyforward.com/home4/my-experience-being-ca...
> But let me tell you, reading a hate comment about yourself that’s relatively true (I mean hey, I do have thin lips) said by 1 person stings at a level 1 on the pain chart. But reading hate comments about yourself that aren’t true, and are said by tens of thousands of people is….well, it’s a physical feeling. That’s the only way I can describe it.
And then there is this: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
They weakly claim to no longer use these rules, without saying what rules they use instead. I would bet you that certain political topics are hard filtered though, and some things being censored while fluff being tailored to be addictive is a net negative effect in my books. It's not exclusive to TikTok, but that doesn't absolve it, just like TikTok doesn't absolve others.