The primary difference between TikTok and other social media platforms is about a decade. For example, Development of a Facebook Addiction Scale - 2012. In other words, mostly recency. Another major difference is age group; these days platforms like Twitter will skew much older than TikTok, and "the youth are being corrupted" is really a timeless story.

Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like. It’s both scary and extremely impressive.

Twitter on the other hand seems to promote monoculture, and tends to push you towards what everyone else likes. It essentially pushes whatever is popular. Some of the most interesting content and users on Twitter are shadow banned, either intentionally or through poor auto moderation.

TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like, and given it’s Chinese ownership, has no political skin in the game. So you tend to see much more diverse views.

>> TikTok on the other hand doesn’t care what other people like

Yes, it absolutely does. Nonviolent social activism, LGBTQ content, and anything judged to be "subversive" is downranked/shadowbanned.

Oh that’s interesting. An entire platforms that hinges on not trying to social-engineer its users, and being successful.

I’ve also heard that TikTok wasn’t showing the same contents inside China than abroad. It would be flattering the dopamine receptors worldwide, while flattering nationalist values inside China. Is it true? It could easily be that the engine is personalized enough that it does behave a bit differently.

I've heard that too, but I've never been able to verify it. If you find any sources on it, please pass them along.

I first heard about this on JRE and subsequent articles based on JRE.

However, China did pass "Recommendation Algorithm Regulations"[0]. Not sure if enforced.

ByteDance does operate a separate Chinese app specifically for kids[1], which is enforcing the recent anti-gaming regulation (no nighttime access, 40 minutes per day only).

The app also enforces that all kids use their real name, and they stated the following about content[2]:

  In the youth mode, we have also prepared wonderful content for you, such as novel and interesting science experiments, exhibitions in museums and galleries, beautiful scenery all over the country, historical knowledge explanations, etc. I hope these contents can arouse children's interest in a certain field, and they will learn and gain something while watching the video.

[0]: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-passes-sweeping-re...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-20/bytedance...

[2]: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zp43DhzwanDApoPCIgCvJQ

Banning LGBT content is definitely social-engineering its users.

Thinking takes effort, the goal is to make you keep watching videos and to do that the videos need to take no effort. So it makes perfect sense to downrank anything that makes you think.

They stopped doing this in 2020. Now you can easily find very popular subversive content

Yeah? Can you post about Tienamman Square?

It seems like it[1], as long as you can spell Tiananmen correctly.

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmensquare

tik tok is free of a lot of the expectations that twitter and facebook and instagram have to contend with. no one really gets upset if they think tik tok has it's fingers on the scale with regards to what you get to see. people using twitter, facebook and insta get EXTREMELY upset if they even suspect they are missing out on content or getting content "put in their face". look how much outrage erupts every time twitter defaults everyone to the algorithmic timeline

Certainly. I had a friend (and TikTok user) describe it as the "Monsters Inc. effect": TikTok is showing that you really can win engagement with honey instead of vinegar, at least in the context of all other social media providing constant negativity.

Twitter is an outrage platform. We would all be better off without it. I genuinely believe it’s a disservice to society.

Yes. There are very few things I’m certain of, but I’m certain Twitter is a net negative on society. I view Jack as one of the most dangerous humans of the last decade.

It's also full of pornography.. It's the worst thing Thiel got instead of the flying cars he had been promised.

Not my experience of twitter. I follow a few people who provide a stream of high quality insights about 99% of the time. It has materially helped my career for example.

I don’t use it as entertainment, I never tweet anything myself, I don’t read the replies to tweets and I have retweets turned off for almost all of the people I follow. If someone strays into tweeting about politics, culture wars, woke/antiwokeness then I cull them from my follow list.

That makes sense, because you are aggressively tailoring your experience to make sure you only see what you want. No retweets mean you don't get distracted from your main focus, blocking any slightly controversial topics mean you don't expose yourself to the most ornery users. But that isn't how 99+% of users who tweet use twitter.

It's like a discord server where you set "slow mode" to 5 minutes, remove reactions to comments, and require a 500 character limit to any message. That's one way to try and turn a normally chaotic, real time chat program into a sane platform for longform discussion, but few users would describe discord that was just because one niche server retrofitted it.

> Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like.

I suspect that is because TikTok has different goals compared to other social media companies. Their aim (right now) is to serve you better and/or more relevant content. Whereas other social media companies’ goals are to serve you ads and what do they know about you will not be as apparent to you. I would argue Facebook probably knows even more about you, more than just preferences, but social connections etc from its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

I don't believe all those kids using TikTok have the faintest clue it's "a weird Chinese app".

Not even to mention, in what world is TikTok "a weird Chinese app". It's just an improved and iterated upon version of Vine.

I wonder if there's a way Vine could have iterated and TikTok never caught on in the US. Was Vine just before its time, and that alone doomed it?

From what I can gleam, Vine simply had no way to monetize itself (something Twitter struggles with to this day, despite being the top 3 largest platforms), while Snapchat and Instagram could capitalize on that much more quickly as they implemented vine like features into their services.

And that just spelled the death toll. Why would a creator stay on one platform when the other is paying them? Consumers bemoan the constant bombardment of ads and now data tracking, but those are the costs of business if the user isn't directly paying a subscription (something services like Patreon and Onlyfans would take advantadge off around this same time that Vine was struggling. So Vine had potentially more than one way out). And if you don't/can't, some other billion dollar coporation will happily sell their soul for the trillionth time to outcompete.

These things live and die by the recommendation engine. Only fun I remember having with Vine was when someone would compile top 10 vines and put them on YouTube…

Twitter just doesn't know how to integrate products.

Even if they do, they do not care. The user only cares about what the app can do for them.

I wasn't talking about the kids using TikTok. Most of the discourse I've seen online about TikTok's addictiveness (and origin) has been by young-to-middle-aged adults.

Maybe people are using different language to describe it for a reason? Try it and develop your own informed opinion.