I just followed a link to TikTok for the first time. It’s far better than twitter, kinda like YouTube but cleaner.

It actually renders most of the information you'd expect with JavaScript and Cookies disabled. Cannot say the same for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Just can't play the vid, but I can see the thumbnail.

https://mbasic.facebook.com/ works without JavaScript. Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly broken.

While I don’t have first-party JS and Cookies disabled, I have everything third party disabled and had the same experience. Now that you mention it, that is actually extraordinary.

I just use Maki for Facebook.

It is like Twitter except only videos so you do not have to read, and all your behavior data goes more directly to the CCP instead of having to pass through Twitter servers first.

Why? I've been on HN forever and I'm a huge TikTok fan. I will never understand the outright rejection on TikTok, there are so many cool projects which produce TikTok devlogs. Not just that several niches which I don't see often enough on HN (like AI ethics, not just copy right stuff) have entire channels on TikTok.

Short video is a terrible medium.

I am already on the fence regarding long videos. They are a rarely paying off time investment next to reading the equivalent article.

Short videos are an immediate no from me. It’s never worth the investment. Realistically if it could be written in a script fitting a TikTok video it’s not going to go deeply into anything.

I will have to completely disagree on this one. The amount of excel I've learnt from my TikTok fyp is genuinely unprecedented in my life. It feels like passive learning because they appear between my other interests like history or comedy. Specially stuff like archeology is specially condusive to this format.

Depends.

If you are trying to show a repeatable process, whether that's just DIY or microbiology, a video is dramatically better than an article.

Short video is a different medium. Like it or not, TikTok is encouraging creation of new culture via its particular creation tools.

While damaging peoples ability to have an attention station.

I never had one in the first place so none of it makes a difference to me.

And the reality is that different people learn best through different means. I can't stand video as a learning medium for software-related topics, but to each their own.

You're focusing solely on the content.

My abject hatred of TikTok stems from who controls it.

Weird, Bytedance has not done anything, to my knowledge, worse (or even better) than other big companies in consumer software space. Do you also not use Instagram? What about google or YouTube? They have done some pretty shady stuff. Or oculus VR? PayPal/stripe? All these companies have done extremely shady stuff, it's impossible to be at the top of any of these markets without being shady.

Bytedance's payout to creators is much lower than YouTube's and their content-moderation has been more harmful to people who are poor, queer, or not traditionally attractive than competing platforms.

These probably aren't the top of the complaint list for most social media and content distribution platforms so I'm not saying these are reasons to consider Bytedance in a different category than Google or Facebook but they are worth knowing about.

It's about China... Everyone that can (US, China, etc.) tries to guzzle as much data from online users as possible. That said, there are checks and balances in the US, there is a certain level of accountability. China is an absolute black box setting up an Orwellian social credit system for its own citizens, and with no accountability whatsoever about the data they might collect from foreign citizens. So, even if everyone is playing a similar game, ultimately there are differences.

> That said, there are checks and balances in the US, there is a certain level of accountability.

I'm sorry but there is no accountability in US, there are price tags.

>abject hatred

Well, thank goodness we're all managing to retain some perspective and not just descending into performative melodrama.

"Abject hatred" seems a bit much, even for TikTok.

When it comes to negative impact on humanity, Meta seems far more hate-worthy. And it's not like this list is particularly short (e.g. nearly every venture a16z is involved in seems like it should get a spot).

Heck, even HN isn't without sin.

My hatred is not so much for TikTok itself, but for the controlling entity a few steps removed.

If I were to judge TikTok solely on its own merits as a service then I would just be sitting at a "smoldering disdain" with perhaps a dash of sadness for modern preoccupation with frequent dopamine hits.

Do most of the videos that you watch there have such (subjectively) awful arrangement? I have no tiktok account, and am no hater, but I wouldn’t follow content like this either. Cannot imagine myself receiving a notification, watching $subj and thinking “this was a good one”.

I mean it’s a cool idea and tech spirit, but the form… raised eyebrows

I am confused about what awful arrangement you are talking about, but an example of good learning videos is excel channels. They teach you nice tips and tricks and get to the point fast.

Add more fuel to the fire --> https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/beh...

I'd recommend the Joe Rogan clip where they read the ToS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtGwlQWqQWs

TikTok is the most public and effective social espionage campaign ever devised or put into practice.

Imagine being this easy to fool.

Tiktok isn’t special when it comes to collecting data.

I do not care how good the content is. Anyone that posts there is demanding people pay for access with behavioral data on how many microseconds they view each post, what apps they have installed, where they are located, what locations they frequent, everything they type or view in the built-in web browser, etc.

All this data goes to a centralized surveillance capitalism organization controlled by an authoritarian foreign power.

https://lr.riverside.rocks/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_...

If you -must- view Tiktok content, consider ProxiTok which is an open source frontend that removes most tracking.

Real HNers have tiktok blacklisted up their pihole.

For those that don't want to go to TikTok's page (for one reason or another) there is a proxy service you can use, like how Nitter is used for Twitter, called ProxiTok. Gets just the video, description and ability to download it.

The first video in the GP proxied: https://proxitok.pabloferreiro.es/@bsmachinist/video/7157587...

Proxy info: https://github.com/pablouser1/ProxiTok

(Not the creator of it but a user of it)

Never heard of this - thanks for sharing.

Nitter and Teddit have become near full replacements for twitter and reddit for me. I don't know if they can last but I love services like this without dark patterns.

I hadn't heard of this either, thanks. I made a Firefox Add-On to redirect TikTok to use ProxiTok: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxitok/

Nah, that computer-generated voiceover is repulsing no matter where the videos are rehosted.

nonsense. for those who dont care to run tiktok ive written an ephemeral microservice driven with an AWS lambda, rust enabled, react framwork that uses an intuitive haskell based dockerless rootless console interface for the API i created out of a go based esolang implementation of the Turing complete driver for TikTok included in the 7.7 Linux kernel I built a ruby on rails time machine to travel into the future and clone using my custom built git plugin for mercurial on AS400.

That’s reads like it took a lot of effort to write.

As long as it doesn't have the robotic text-to-speech that seems to be on every TikTok video.

Wouldn't it be easier to use yottadb or some other MUMPS derivative instead zapping it onto an AS400 cloud?

Nah. That would induce significant overhead because of the distributed Blockchain systems. I think using zig with latent diffusion or some variation of GAN would do better.

how did you manage to mention rust without also mentioning "fast" and "secure"?

Install LibRedirect extension and it will convert most user hostile links like TikTok to their open source community proxy alternatives.

I doubt it. Most people here are doomscrollers like the rest of genpop.

Please don't post off-topic dross. This kind of stuff takes over threads like kudzu and it's just what we don't want here.

Especially not the meta kind, please. Meta is the crack of internet forums.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33316063.