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.