What’s so wild or appealing about this — that would entice someone to continue their time on TikTok?
Like the videos of a guy lighting a firework, shoving it in a tube, filling the tube with a potatoes and then covering that with putty. They catch me for a few seconds every time, just slightly longer than a video that made sense would; and I think that extra second or two is all they need to jump up the algorithm’s ratings a little.
I spend my time watching artists draw, watching people play FF6 for nostalgia, and putting mustaches on Ellie from the last of us: https://imgur.com/a/rLjU7Ux
Turns out it bubbles a bit, the cycle continues as normal. Very mild entertainment.
Reminds me of those extended silent close captions videos all over Facebook.
a lot of people want to be simulated every moment of every day, so they need the constant hit of dopamine
The others sound like "outrage porn", which is most of the content on subreddits like diwhy and shittyfoodporn. Doing things wrong or exaggerated on purpose to elicit a reaction and engagement.
Weirdly enough, come to think of it, Epic Meal Time started trends like that over a decade ago - just make stupid, expensive and exaggerated food that doesn't look appetizing at all... yet strangely compelling.
As long as the algorithm glues many of its users to their screens as much as possible with the money coming in, the grifting show must go on.
I think I know which baby you’re referring to. If it’s a mom tending to the baby, then that baby is fine. I agree it’s shock value, and in fact is so shocking that I took a screenshot of it: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1512778289676496902?s=2...
But the truth is that the baby is profoundly disabled and is barely responsive. Using them for social media attention at least gives you some money to better tend to them.
(There are lots of examples in that thread which illustrate your overall point. Tiktok can be quite the carnival.)
Disclaimer: severe medical deformity, may not want to click this.
It’s so interesting that tiktok managed to revitalize this… genre.
When you donate to these gangs, you are supporting child trafficking and worser things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEnN_Bqu14s
If you want to help, donate to certified organizations with a proofen track record of helping the poor.
> * a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker
Is clearly performative and meant to entertain the audience.
Oh and you forgot the one where they have a calculator app open set to 999,999,998 or something and if they just get two more gifts they will see what happens when you get to one billion, but they are always so awkwardly slow and keep decrementing the number so it never reaches it.
Like that damned guy stacking bolts in a giant column.
I, in contrast, get gamers (kind of like a lo-fi twitch channel), accounts I follow, and the odd musician. I have honestly never seen any of the live streams you mention.
Pre-internet everyone consumed the same media, TV, newspapers, radio, magazines. You had to read older books or listen to smaller, probably local artists to get a different viewpoint.
Now no one shares the same information feed, no two Tiktok feeds, Twitter feeds, Facebook/instagram homepages are the same.
It's making for interesting societal changes. How will future historians be able to judge the intentions of society of they can't view our individual feeds, previously you could refer to news reports, but now it's just lost in the day to day feeds of billions.
Historians reading newspapers learn what a small part of society thought, and hopefully read them in the context of as much other information from the time. But maybe the newspaper made something that hardly anyone really cared about seem like the main opinion, or vice versa - it happens now days, likely more back then.
If anything social media might make things easier for future historians, with literally billions of opinions written by everyone from homeless people to billionaire CEOs, all within large datasets to be analysed.
More importantly though is the amount of semi-political & marketing-related polling that goes on. By semi-political I mean things politicians want to know, rather than polling about politics - people regularly get polled on anything from transport ideas to favourite songs. And I imagine that's a huge trove of data compared to what there is around public opinion even decades ago, yet alone centuries.
Ubik, by Philip K. Dick
There are a lot of articles and videos showing that sometimes watching just one video will suggest a ton of videos related to it, no matter if you are not interested. Machine learning and deep learning is not perfect, and sometimes the goal of the companies is not clear and may not align with your goals.
Sure, your experience will vary on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok based on the people you follow, that's the goal of hyper-personalized feed. But you still get a trend, a social effect of the network.
For example, on Youtube, you need "clickbait" thumbnails. So even Tom Scott, who 's content is educative and entertaining, needs to follow the "trend" of Youtube to get views.
But I see these comments every time someone is blaming the weird content they are seeing on their feed: "Oh me I only see nice stuff, stop watching weird stuff". I think we can have a deeper conversation than that.
> TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article.
> It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling.
However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth.
TikTok's algorithms are scarily-effective (dramatically more effective at tailoring than all of your other examples), and thus what you see is indeed a direct reflection of what you watch. Any single video (ads excepted), or even trend, just doesn't appear globally on TikTok.
It's a direct reflection on what tiktok's algorithms think they know about you so far, modulo what they think they know about the contents of the videos they are showing. They have a good recommendation engine, sure, but it works on average over large populations through the limited funnel of video interactions, and their video understanding and inventory is similarly limited. This is even before considering that they clearly add some kind of extra exploratory weight to new content they don't have a lot of data about from you.
Their machine learning is basically fancy statistics on watch data, not a peering-into-your-soul Oracle, it's very possible it gets some people's preferences very wrong and is still profitable for larger population segments.
Should maybe post on a throwaway but: it will show me the gay version of tit-tok, let's just call it putting a bunch of sweatpant season thirst traps in my feed.
Often videos with like 100 views or even less.
Their ML is likely categorizing d*ck prints, visible nipples, and a bunch of other human monkey brain dopamine drivers.
Instagram will recommends shirtless people. But TikTok takes it way farther. And probably a good reason it got so popular to begin with. People are creeping on kids.
Shouldn't have to point this out - but I do not search for, like or watch anything remotely similar on Tiktok.
Think about what you watched right before these videos, its coded to being a feeling a disgust so you assioate that with the previous videos.
YouTube does the same thing with ads of kids dying in hospital, screaming for help on the start of 'controversial' content. Most of the time it makes you click back and watch something else.
If this was the whole truth we could as easily excuse facial recognition algorithms failing non-white people by simply saying that non-white people are more difficult to identify.
The algorithm is a human-made thing and subject to conscious intents or subconscious biases of its makers.
You can control the feed by tapping on a clip you don't like and selecting 'Not interested'. Less successfully by immediately swiping to the next clip. In this way I have got rid of live streams, cats and girls doing dance or PoV trends.
But if you do in fact have a quick peak at the live streams, cats and girls doing dance or PoV trends, TikTok will keep showing them.
I really do not think this is true, and is what the parent is getting at. Yes, the videos shown are a reflection of _past videos_ shown to you, and your reactions to them.
That does not mean that they are a _direct_ reflection on you, or an acknowledgement of the truth. The first videos shown to you, or a random stray video with off-content, whether you like them or not, can have a strong biasing effect.
Simply looking at the comments on a video you disagree with, just to see if others are appalled or brainwashed is something that the algorithm will interpret as deep interest in that kind of content. I have to go find the “not interested” button. Its sad because all those other people are really stuck in that rabbit hole.
Nah, it's not about intent, but it is about profiling. They're saying that e.g. gullible-seeming people will be algorithmically matched with videos trying to con them out of something, while non-gullible people won't be. People who watch more videos by creators with religious values will eventually be recommended religious content; while people who don't do that, won't. Etc.
Think about it less like users being matched with things they'll appreciate; and more like creators being matched with the audience most receptive to their message.
> There are a lot of articles and videos showing that sometimes watching just one video will suggest a ton of videos related to it, no matter if you are not interested.
This isn't a failure of ML. They've got the algorithm doing exactly what they want it to do. It just isn't serving you.
TikTok is a two-sided market, where the supply is "engaged eyeballs" and the demand is from advertisers with ads to show them (where a regular video producer is just an advertiser who provides enough retention value to the platform with their "ads" that they get paid rather than paying per impression.)
TikTok's algorithm isn't trying to match you with the videos you'll most like; rather, it's trying to optimize the amount of money ByteDance extracts out of its advertisers by optimizing for three things:
1. keeping the eyeballs engaged, by showing them videos which are predicted to increase the particular user's session duration in the app;
2. showing the "engaged eyeballs" the most profitable ads, under the proviso that any given advertiser can filter for eyeballs with specific demographics/interests;
3. (here's the clever bit) — nudging the eyeballs toward videos that will allow them to plausibly say that a given user has a given high-CPM interest, and thus now show them the high-CPM ads.
The third factor is what makes the "one video causes your recommendation feed to completely change" thing.
An very close analogy would be to dating (another imbalanced-demand two-sided market where demand is a passive judgement while supply is an active offer.)
Picture person A walking into a nightclub, looking for a date, but not actively talking to anyone. They sit there, and wait for other people to come up and talk to them. The people that come to person A might be somewhat random at first; but, as the people in the club notice a pattern in who's doing best talking person A up, the supply-side will self-select — they're profiling person A, and "recommending" themselves based on said profiling.
But then, at some point, imagine person A quietly mentioning to one of these strangers "I think I might like [niche interest]." And this news spreading throughout the club.
Now, if there's anyone who likes [niche interest] in the club — suddenly, they think they have a chance. And if having [niche interest] is rare, maybe there are a bunch of unsatisfied single people with [niche interest] who've been desperately waiting for someone like person A to show up. So now there's suddenly a stampede of people, all with [niche interest], trying to get person A's attention. Willing to pay money to get person A's attention, even. So much that the club manager (who happens to be easily bribed) is willing to cordon off the area around person A and set up a queue of all these interested people, so that the "rabble" who aren't so intensely interested (and so aren't willing to pay a bribe), won't even get a word in edgewise any more.
That's TikTok. You're person A. The advertisers are the desperate people in the club. And a single clicked video can be the whisper of acknowledgement of a niche interest they were hoping for.
The only truly "sleepy" lives I've seen are ones where it's someone quietly studying/working and using the live as the accountability part of the pomodoro method. Like, "I'm going to study for 20 mins, then we can chat for 5 mins, then I'm going to study again for 20 mins, etc."
Other kinds of livestreams that seem to be persistent categories:
- people in classrooms, libraries or other social settings, livestreaming themselves
- insides of mosques, presumably with the camera hidden somewhere
- space station footage with random background music. Sometimes footage from space walks, mostly Russian ones
I think it goes to show how wildly different people's TikTok experiences can be, depending on what the algorithm decides and what TikTok decides to push in your region.
Do a web search for “TikTok fake disorder”. Or specify one directly, such as “tourette” or “ADHD”.
I also really like all the truck drivers who do cab views. There's an ambulance driver somewhere in Vietnam who livestreams his shifts. Oddly mesmerizing to watch him zip through dense city traffic without a care in the world.
Quite a few people who seem to found the best hustle possible. They go daily to Disneyland and other parks. Somehow get enough gifts and tips to pay for it.
Also like the bars that stream their house bands. That one guy who rides a scooter around downtown LA late at night and gets in weird conversations with drunks. A guy who races Matchbox cars on his track and keeps track of the winners in a pseudo league. An Italian man who looks vaguely like Mr. Bean and does an almost endless stretch of magic tricks.
The one that I think about often is this 19 yr old guy in the Ukrainian Army. Only caught him once. Back in the summer. He and his unit were not yet on the front lines but his superiors had him digging a trench anyways. He was half-assing the digging while his comrades relaxed under trees and occasionally yelled something that would make the young guy laugh. He'd perk up anytime someone with a cute girl avatar would say something to him. They'd say something that made him just beam with happiness. I'll always wonder what happened to him. I hope he's ok.
Most rides at Disney parks have pre-shows about 3/4 of the way through the line that set up the story for the ride. Sometimes these are audiovisual, sometimes animatronic, but always with audio and almost always dark.
Likewise, most Disney rides are "dark rides" where the ride is primarily in the dark with animatronics and the scenery lit by carefully designed show lighting.
Influencers have seen these pre-shows and rides a thousand times and don't care about them. They keep there full-brightness phone up and filming for them and talk over them to their audience. It's incredibly distracting and immersion breaking.
I imagine Disney sees them as a net-positive though, as I'm sure they drive tons of ticket sales. Most influencers are travel agents who get paid by Disney, or are affiliated with a travel agency.
FWIW, I dug into this a while back because I was curious.
Most of them don't get 'paid' by Disney in a traditional sense, but will get things like exclusive access to press events/rides, free upcoming products, or in the case with that flop of a star wars hotel a "free $7,000 hotel stay."
All of which lets them technically say "I'm not paid by Disney, they just gave me this to show all of you!"
Most of their money comes from donations/stickers/whatever the latest term for it is from the livestreams.
Usually the order with Disney showing off new stuff goes something like
- Travel agents
- Social Media Influencers
- Passholes
- D23 (aka pay $100/yr for access)
- Joe Shmoe
The IRS have a completely different point of view.
“Hey, we’ll give you a free stay if you promote our hotel!” is compensatory.
“Hey, we’ll give you a free stay” isn’t obviously so.
There is a clear if unstated expectation that they will receive positive reviews and promotion as a result.
There is no such thing as "free" when it comes to the US IRS.
But yeah, you're right. If you get audited, you might have to explain to the IRS that this is not compensatory income.
Oh, I fully agree and I would bet a majority of them know that as well, they just have figured out a way to use some weasel words to act like it's not a payment to the general public.
However:
If I buy you a gift and we agree for the gift you do task x for me. Now that is income and the value of the gift must be considered income on your tax return.
Disney isn't saying "here is a room for free if you do x, y , z"
Disney is saying "here is a room for free" and that is the end of it.
Of course the obvious issue for Disney is that the influencer might never do the review of the park and never in a million years could Disney take them to court complaining services were not rendered.
You cannot give a gift with expectation of return.
So it's not income.
But it's limited because the one giving you the gift really has to trust that you'll do the thing you do.
I am surprised Disney would bother to be honest. I thought their theme parks were popular enough already.
They want to keep being popular ;). Same as the coke comment above me
> However:
> If I buy you a gift and we agree for the gift you do task x for me. Now that is income and the value of the gift must be considered income on your tax return.
Caveat donor! The hand of the taxman extends somewhat further than laid out here.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... :)
The USA has similar rules.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Nah, but you can book it for literally 2 days for now, which is somewhat unheard of for something like it, especially with the Disney and Star Wars name attached.
>All of which lets them technically say "I'm not paid by Disney, they just gave me this to show all of you!"
So they literally are not receiving any meaningful payments from Disney. A “$7000 hotel stay” you can’t even resell is worth very little compared to $ in bank.
Also, you forgot about Club 33. Those folks sometimes get better treatment than the regular passholes.
Except it's $7k that they most likely would have spent themselves as a business expense to try and get money from their streams. It's still Disney paying them, just in an alternate way.
It's why YouTube, Amazon and others require you to disclose that you got the item for free, because that can significantly alter your view and is basically turning you into an ad.
How many "normal" people would spend $7k for a 2 day hotel stay where you basically are stuck in someone else's itinerary? Hint, not enough to fill out 100 rooms consistently, even within 2 days. But it was all "OMG THIS IS AWESOME YOU HAVE TO DO IT" from the 'influencers.'
>Also, you forgot about Club 33. Those folks sometimes get better treatment than the regular passholes.
Oops, yep. Forgot the $100k Disney club. Plus the timeshare suckers.
So and so. Here’s an exaggerated example: Disney likes your consistent shilling and grants you a Club 33 membership valued in many tens of thousands.
Even as a big Disney influencer there’s a very good chance you’d never have paid for this.
From a legal POV whether or not something like this is compensation isn’t clear, it’s highly dependent on the specific details. An influencer absolutely can legally receive gifts from Disney knowing that they’re almost certainly hoping for those gifts to pop up on that influencers feed.
I always assumed that was a legal requirement. Isn’t it technically classed as fraud (or something?) to not disclose that you were sponsored by the resort?
In the UK for example the advertising regulator decided it's advertising, kind of like a 'product placement' on television, and therefore needs to be clearly so/declared.
I hope he's OK too.
btw i'm pretty sure i know exactly which live you're talking about with the house of cards guy. about the only kind of lives i actually like are the debate ones which can be kinda interesting.
No. This is not true. HN likes to believe it's "smarter" but how do people forget that the app stores take a 30% cut off the top? These aren't charities, these are digital live streaming fits.
You see TikTok in the title, and you just blindly believe it.
It seems (from doing the math in the article) TikTok is taking ~40% of the cut. You can argue that's still too much, but that's a far cry from 70%.
But blindly spewing 70% is ignorant at best.
> With TikTok declining to say how much it takes from gifts, the BBC ran an experiment to track where the money goes.
> A reporter in Syria contacted one of the TikTok-affiliated agencies saying he was living in the camps. He obtained an account and went live, while BBC staff in London sent TikTok gifts worth $106 from another account.
> At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69% of the value of the gifts.
Because to me it sounds just like a publishing label that takes a massive cut between the actual content producer (tiktok user) and the platform (TikTok).
If that's the case, that's just another situation just like what happened between Spotify and the artists. I heard a lot of noise about it, but turns out Spotify only takes a 30% cut. Why do artists complain about their 70% cut? Oh, that's because artists signed to a label only get a fraction for it, while their label gets the rest. That has nothing to do with Spotify and all with contracts between artists and labels. None of that applies to independent artists with no label, who all get their full 70%.
Is "a TikTok-affiliated agency" basically acting as a music label here?
And again, TT isn't taking 70%. Anyone suggesting that is wrong. They are taking 38% vs 31% that the creators take.
UYFM.
I see the sleep streams, the disability streams, and I saw the same chinese factory fake airpod one.
I do remember one amusing thing we did back when Chatroulette was still fairly novel - hung out at a local dive bar where one otherwise boring evening's entertainment was Chatroulette on a projector screen with a webcam pointed at the bar patrons.
Any time we hit a disembodied penis, we would all cheer and laugh. They always disconnected right after. Had some fun talking to folks in other countries and around the US. I think it was a lot more fun when it was still the novelty du jour early on and hadn't quite become 90% (literal) wankers yet.
Or: people packing sweet boxes.
Worst is when you see random people doing streams cause they're bored. They're alone, playing music, answering semi private questions and pandering to strangers. I don't even know what to make of it.
It’s really crazy — and a bit scary — how much messed up stuff can proliferate a single app.
I used to tell people that even if Trump had the wrong reasons, he had the right idea when he wanted to ban TikTok.
I don't think you needed to admit anything :)
I’ve seen some wild stuff online but some of this just seems gratuitous. It’s not just for maladjusted kids on an Indonesian throat singing forum either, it’s being beamed to everyone’s phone.
I never see any of this content. Maybe I'm not on it enough, but all I ever see are mostly just people talking. There's a guy who "races" pool balls on a treadmill, but except for that and an occasional person building some strange contraption, it all just seems like extremely mundane (and in my mind boring) chats.
Is this normal? Is it safe for the human mind to consume content like this constantly? How does this affect production of dopamine? Is this what children are seeing?
This sounds really scary.
Or it's just regressive: We're back to the traveling circus and the freak show, but different middle men.
FOR YOU.
What TikTok chooses to show you is extremely personalized, I have never encountered any of the live streams you describe above.
I mostly get young good-looking guys trying to promote their OnlyFans.
...and I don't think most people on TikTok get livestreams like that, so I would be very cautious about making any sort of sweeping statements of what the experience will be like for other people.
That said, I'm absolutely delighted about all the absolutely crazy things and the enormous diversity of stuff you can get on your feed. TikTok feels just like GeoCities did on the early web, it's a bazaar of the bizarre, and trends change so fast that you never get bored, and corporations still haven't been able to suck the joy and life out of the thing yet.
In any case, I never really encounter very many Livestream when I'm on the for you page. Could this be because I almost always don't engage with them? I'd like to get good looking guys promoting their OF.
or posts with corn emoji in place of a word that starts with P. Or trends that are really just thrust your hips in loose fitting shorts. Or guys who point to song name which is really their twitter handle.
I know this because... Science.
* very drunk single women talking about how no one loves them and fishing for comments from wackos telling them how beautiful they are
* working class people streaming their entire shifts. Something mesmerizing about watching a guy knocking down trees, a smart ass machinist talking smack while operating a lathe, 4 Uzbeks putting running shoes together, or timber being milled into boards in a very non-OSHA compliant plant in Indonesia.
* micro talk shows where only 50 people are watching 4 talking heads who don’t know each other debate politics. These ironically are better than a lot of cable news since you actually get people who have wildly different views talking to each other, and they will take the time to resolve factual disagreements on Wikipedia between making points.
When the Canadian trucker protest was going on the media mostly did such a bad job of reporting, but if you dig around on tik tok live it was easy to find the guys in the lead trucks chatting with their friends and families back home about how things were going and how much they loved “driving through this beautiful country”. Sometimes I would be one of 70 people watching. Same goes for the early streams out of Ukraine. The ease and quality of mobile streaming on tiktok feels like a huge revolution in social media that’s just getting started. Real McLuhan global village stuff developing.
tiktok is TOO good at micro-optimizing. it's so far above at recognizing the content of a video and then serving it to that specific individual.
It's crazy that videos with 100 views, from a poster I've never seen before, fit into the niche of something i'd like.
and super telling that I haven't seen like half of the things people are listing in this thread!!!!!
* baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby
* people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not)
* people with these vibrating bowls of sand with crystals in them, and they take crystals out of the bowl every once in a while to show you
* a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker
* people pretending to sleep, and if you donate different kinds of stickers, it plays different loud sounds or trigger lights to "wake" them* people freestyle rapping on the spot, but it's more like melodic rambling to the same backing track, so you don't really have to rhyme, you just have to rap in a way that sounds like it rhymes or makes sense
* and my favourite: some workers in what seems to be a Chinese factory assembling something like AirPods. they take the airpods, they take the case, they put the airpods in the case, and they throw the whole thing on to the completed pile
I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on.
It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. The whole game is to give viewers a reason to use stickers on the show, which gives the streamer money (and TikTok like 70% of it).