The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.
That's how wars are won. Those who are nice to enemies because of "values" get crushed by the ruthless opponents.
Or to put it another way, should the US also ban/censor Chinese art and cinema within it's borders?
Every little thing the West does is already played up in China and spun as an intentional attack aimed directly at China because the West wants to destroy China. Usually this is conveyed in news broadcasts set to a backdrop of video of various US military exercises.
A lot of the support the Chinese government enjoys comes from people in China generally seeing the country as much better off than it was a few decades ago, and a sense of nationalism and conflating the government, country, and people as one. An attack on China is an attack on all of us is an attack on me.
Whatever you do in retaliation is just building the public and political will, or even public demand, within China for them to take harsher measures or escalate things further.
Despite the government's efforts, the populace is not exactly entirely isolated from the outside world. There are many people who, while maybe not fully distrusting of the government, definitely smell something fishy. They're curious, and they want to and are able to learn more.
Heading into the 2030s, China itself is already forecasting China's going to enter a period of negative population growth. Combined with a variety of cultural forces, this could be even more impactful than in some other countries. And it will only get worse with time. "Better off than we were a few decades ago" may soon become clearly untrue to a lot of people. The government knows this is coming and is trying to prepare by strengthening their grip.
I think a smarter long term move here would be to just... not. Let them yell at the clouds. Make whatever information we can freely available to the curious in any way we can. Welcome those that want to embrace Western values with open arms. Model the world that we think is best.
Rather than giving China the government the tools and ammunition needed to unify the people and rally them behind China the government... let's just wait. When the people feel the government is failing them, instead of leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable... let them see they have somewhere else to turn.
Or, y'know, escalate this towards an economically and politically unstable nation of 1.5 billion people who think the West is the cause of all of their woes and see how it all shakes out. That'd definitely show everyone we have the biggest dick.
US social media is banned in China because it doesn’t comply with local censorship laws, nor because it is American. They impose the same censorship on local individuals and organisations too.
Then there is no need to find another excuse that might be offensive.
Obviously not probably an issue with social networks, but mindlessly banning something just because somebody else banned something seems like a recipe to be tricked.
In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those countries.
In both cases though, for normal citizens your own country and it's companies are far more dangerous than some random country halfway across the globe.
"USA is a free country" does not refer to China. "The free world" does not refer to China.
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/despite-army-order-some-bases-...
this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.
1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
Microsoft and Tesla accepted the same rule
You can understand it as the US gov requiring TikTok's data must be hosted by Microsoft in the US
2. Did I say that? No. I am opposed to the tiktok ban
really? > https://www.bbc.com/news/36938812 > https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/...
Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the competition in this industry in China is.
Uber died before it grew up in China
From your article:
> If Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately would have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund.
> "Uber China" sought local investors. The hope was that, with local investors, the Chinese operation would be spared some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism. Not sure where the profit is in denying that, given your own sources seem to clearly state it and even name a number of channels through which the state puts their thumb on the scale, not just regulatory but also through financing.
> *If* Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately *would* have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
classic demonizing and loser's execuse
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
every other demestic companys face headwinds from Chinese regulators, just like I mentioned above, and Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, they all in same situation, some of them couldn't handle this so they leaved, some stays
Also, DiDi once were banned more than 2 years by authorities, it survived
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund
The 'STATE-BACKED' is a typical word used by certain people, it's just some kind of gov investment funds, there're dozens and invested thousands private companys, it's a Socialism country, it's called socialism, what do you expect? Didi is not even a state-owned enterprise. And is this equals to "force to sell"?
> some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
Bruh
> China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism.
That's true, and? many Chinese people also have intense domestic favoritism
BTW, Apple is losing market share in China. However, take it easy, I don't think Apple will be sold to Huawei. Moreover, Apple is produced by Chinese and Indian, why bothered?
We don't?
I just typed https://www.baidu.com into my browser bar, hit enter, and their page loaded.
You can still go to the mobile web version; but that doesn't give the same level of access to devices and data that an app does.
I'm saying we don't hack them with the goal of driving them out of the American market, which is what happened to Google's PRC operations.
paradox of intolerance and all that..
Imagine if Japan owned all the Newspapers in the run-up to WWII.
That's not to say China is the only one with propaganda.
Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.
You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.
Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
Such as? Disappear as in getting flagged?
Sarcastically chuckling about the state of the city as a long time resident gets the ban hammer.
It is really quite something.
Is it true that women unknowingly engage in Eugenics when choosing to procreate only with tall men in large numbers?
Or another test:
What happened to Epstein's video tapes stored in his NY mansion and why were the people in them not prosecuted?
Think about it...
Anyone that's going to be a senator in the next 12 years (at minimum) is already on Grindr if they were ever going to be.
Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.
Do you think that there is a price at which they would be willing to sell it?
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
What do you mean by "Chinese perspective"? Do you mean people's genuine opinion or the official government talking points?
Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!
https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...
People have said it before but the clear internet is increasingly under Israel's influence. X's have silenced so many Palestinian accounts.
Western social media have platforms that allow states to censor content, and they have to comply. Under the guise of misinformation ofcourse.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and implementation. The former is discretionary and the latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban would effectively require the creation of a Great Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace, etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more adversarial setups where these companies will make no effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US government madly gesticulates, though again with the current administration said gesticulation will not even happen in the first place.
The law (PAFACA) doesn't directly apply to TikTok, but only to TikTok's ownership by ByteDance, due to ByteDance being a corporation located in a foreign adversary nation. Foreign corporations are not protected by the first amendment as domestic corporations are. Case law clarifying separate first amendment protections for domestic vs foreign entities such as Citizens United v FEC (2010) and Bluman v FEC (2011), already established the precedent for this.
>I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them
Did you watch the hearing or read the transcript? The opinions of the majority of the justices on both sides, including the chief justice, were not ambiguous. As referenced in the hearing by the justices, the first amendment only applies to communication on the platform, not the ownership of the platform. Given that TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, and as the first amendment does not apply to foreign corporations as it does to domestic corporations, which multiple justices pointed out, the law is not in conflict with the first amendment. The law is referred to as the "TikTok ban law", but it doesn't ban the platform explicitly, it only bans its ownership by a foreign adversary located corporation, which are not protected by the first amendment, which is how the law avoids a conflict with the first amendment while potentially still effectively banning the platform.
Don't trust regular media to give you fair assessments of this case. ScotusBlog generally has excellent and impartial analysis of cases from experienced lawyers, and this is no exception. [1] They described the overall court as skeptical of the claims. Skeptical does not mean fully in bed with one side or the other, but simply that - skeptical. It's also important to bear in mind is that hearings are, by their very nature, off the cuff. And the implications (or factualness) of what the justices believe may change as they consider the implications of a decision, and factualness of their assumptions.
Again the thing I would say is that if this was an obvious case, the justices would not be waiting to the last second. My guess is that we'll probably see an announced delay+injunction on Friday.
[1] - https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/01/supreme-court-skeptical-o...
"Some justices, however, were unconvinced that the law necessarily raises a First Amendment issue. Justice Clarence Thomas asked Francisco how a restriction on ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok created any limitations on TikTok’s speech.
Justice Elena Kagan echoed Thomas’s skepticism. If the law only targets ByteDance, which does not have any First Amendment rights because it is a foreign corporation, she asked Francisco, how does that implicate TikTok’s First Amendment rights? TikTok can still use whatever algorithm it wants, Kagan observed.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to agree at times. The law, she simply requires ByteDance to divest TikTok. A shut-down by TikTok, she suggested, would be the consequence of ByteDance’s choice not to do so.
Other justices appeared persuaded by the government’s invocation of national security concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts observed that, although Francisco contended that TikTok is a U.S. company, Congress had concluded that the “ultimate company that controls” TikTok is subject to Chinese laws, including an obligation to assist the Chinese government with intelligence work. “Are we,” Roberts queried, “supposed to ignore that?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted the government’s contention that China is using TikTok to access information about millions of U.S. citizens, and in particular young people, and could in the future use that information to try to recruit spies or manipulate future U.S. officials. That “seems like a huge concern for the future of” the United States, Kavanaugh observed."
She was, at times, being overtly mocked with quotes from judges like, "That's your best argument is that the average American won't be able to figure out that the cat feed he's getting on TikTok could be manipulated, even though there's a disclosure saying it could be manipulated?" Prelogar in general found herself struggling to defend the claim that the attempted ban was based on data access and not content (which would be unconstitutional), why there were no alternatives if the claims were based solely on data access, and the implications for any other foreign company that has access to user data (which is basically all of them). TikTok was met with some tough questioning but generally responded competently.
[1] - https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/12/majority-of-court-appears...
[2] - https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-us-supreme-court-ora...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-17/tiktok-ba...
Yet his opinion was almost entirely critical of the arguments that justified such. And it also seemed to include misinformation (unless it happens that I'm misinformed) suggesting that the TikTok app could access "any data" - a term which he himself put in quotes and also italicized - about anybody in a user's contact list. He said it included, but was not limited to photos and personal information. And this leaking of data of non-consenting users was apparently a significant part of the case. I'd be beyond surprised if the Android/Apple APIs bleed any substantial amount of information through contact access alone.
Interesting times we live in, as always!
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a following on one will post to the other because they are so similar and that would increase their reach.
LMAO
[0]https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...
I'll definitely admit that China is doing some horrible shit. I'm not the most educated on all of their issues but from what I've seen it's not great. But I'm also not convinced that TikTok is as much of a critical intelligence/espionage tool as much as the government claims it is, and I've seen a very real positive influence on people's connection with each other, and a frankly insane amount of mutual aid content on tiktok.
I am seeing a lot of people talking about how they have discovered that Chinese people are very welcoming and polite when you talk to them online. IDK, maybe I'm just missing the pro-chinese government stuff you are.
I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
It's like saying I don't know how to recognize non-spam when I end up blocking 99.99% of all mail showing up at the server.
I do recognize non-spam, it's just that I know most of it is crap.
What I will say is that it’s definitely a different form of expression from what we’ve had beyond recent history and - at the same time - artists, photographers, painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have been trying to live off their form of expression for a while now too.
Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you actually have them?
You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own personal model to maximize the volume of content you swallow.
The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop onto your brain?
The true danger of TikTok is the "wonder what will be next?" which is an infinitely rewarding question.
There are tens of billions of pieces of content there. TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things that the most people like, but it's not the only content there, that's just common sense and good business (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.
I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."
I think you and others here are focusing on the stereotypical “influencer” faking authenticity for views but there are literally millions of human beings posting on TikTok about all kinds of things. A lot of them are pretty cool. Just click “not interested” on influencers and click like on the stuff you want to see instead.
Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and knowledge, after that the space of available content quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of resources and experience. If you're still relying on an algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to dive further.
Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place, another medium, a different author, actor, photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you, and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things they learned decades prior.
“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
Everything invented from your 20s-40s is cool, you accept it and will probably make a living with it.
Everything invented after your 40s is a perversion of the natural order and must be destroyed.
If a student asks a friend a question, and then drifts off into space before the two sentence answer has been delivered, that's not great.
> One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world.
Perhaps being prone to anxiety attacks, panic, and self-harm are what we need to meet today's challenges head-on.
> The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Hey, not everything is negative-- we live in a world with more interpersonal kindness and tolerance than a few decades ago, and that's great. But the kids aren't alright.
Especially teen girls. It's impossible to escape curated content encouraging social comparison to edited, perfectly curated standards of perfection.
This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness of misinformation in social media today, while completely forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources of the past often were, helping create all kinds of absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into alternative viewpoints was much harder.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...
Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're paying attention to and that itself changes things like emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At the same time, a whole lot of different measures moved in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these time series seem to show more the effect of social media in general and smartphones than short form video content on social media/smartphones.
There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.
There's also evidence that short form video use is correlated with shorter attention span and that it is addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little of both.
We also have research that shows that if you show people lots of short form video and then test their attention span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links to specific things, let me knwo.
Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all the time will do something like ask a peer a question, and then drift off to something else during the answer if it's longer than a single short sentence.
I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts in my own data aligned with this trend, too.
There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We have to act on the information we have, and when we're studying humans it's going to include time series data and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab conditions.
When you reach your 40s, something starts corrupting the youth.
This reads as both extremely condescending and extremely naive at the same time.
An earlier version of the internet had blogs and meme lords sure, and a generation consumed that stuff and found that it was good. And after that consumption, it turns out kids still wanted to grow up to be doctors, astronauts, or whatever.
Another generation consumed another kind of content which was mostly leaning towards short-format, after many years spent researching/weaponizing dopamine and misinformation. Almost all of that content was mediated by corporations really, with as little involvement from people as the corporations could manage. That generation wanted to be influencers and "content creators" when they grew up.
The basic incentive structures are radically different now, for companies, creators, and consumers, and we're sort of past doing things for the lulz. There's a difference here that actually makes a difference, and writing it off as "yawn, more of the same if only your perspective was as wide as mine!" seems more ignorant than enlightened.
You know it's interesting to frame these arguments because it's exemplar of the clash of worldviews here, between the classic view of an cyclical history, and the modern linear view of historical continuity. The latter was birthed in reaction against the former, yet as the inheritors of Rennaisance conquered the world, it eventually became the norm, the "old" of which the "present" would be compared against.
So if the present now cycles the past, is this an abberation or the norm here? The past is the "future", and the present is "stagnation". It is both revolutionary and regressionary. The TikTok Bill, the need to retake the Narrative by the Establishment thus represents itself the Past reasserting Continuity, and thus the Future, while Present pushes back to the very denial of the Future itself, to establish it's totalizing dominance of an endless now. So for the question of whether I would like the future, well that depends on which of the two sides win.
Does your opinion change if you understand that none of that is remotely real or actually exists?
You have an app that is designed to feed you Potemkin villages, and here you are praising their real estate value.
> That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
That's like praising psychosis for being one of the best mental illnesses, and concluding that you'd like to see more of it.
There's a spectrum between Vaudeville and sharing family recipes. YouTube's MrBeast is on one end of that spectrum.
This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
This is what was meant.
I think you inadvertently made an entirely different point: it's all fake, but you just swallow some content acritically believing it's something personal that speaks to you.
In the end, you're just complaining that some sirens are fake but others really do love you.
still confused. Is this supposed to be an example of “bad” or “good” content?
Because I can’t (perhaps due to lack of empathy.. idk) imagine why anyone would want to waste their time watching stuff like that.
The way people choose to spend their lives is largely up to them, I'm not sure it's good to be labeling things as a "waste of time" when they're deriving something from it that you simply do not understand. Particularly when they do it in a way that is pretty harmless.
I don't know if you have pets, but if you spend time observing them you'll see most of what they do is simply letting time pass and for them, that's enough. Believe it or not, for many people the same is the case. Finding meaning in the acts we do is a personal endeavour so I think rather than telling people they're wasting their time instead try to understand what they're seeing in such things that you don't see.
I think a lot of people find creative acts very rewarding, there's an element of surprise that comes from it. The unexpected can be enjoyable. I think one of the reasons why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful is that it really succeeds in giving people the feeling of constant surprise.
Personally, I've found really inspiring art on Tiktok, as well as new music and also a lot of simple but engaging content in german (which I'm trying to learn).
Also people are getting really good at making content seem real.
Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though
YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff
so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must go!
What prismatic gave me was pages and pages of Art, Design, Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature and all of it hours to days old. Every single article it back I wanted to read and there was pages of it, never ending. There was no way I could even filter out what read and even what to be aware of, there was simply too much.
I closed it and never went back. I also realized that even knowing of knowing is itself a Faustian bargain, we are all on a temporary atoll in a giant sea.
first time i did that, i finally realized that this is probably the tiktok experience that so many other people are talking about. utterly terrifying.
""" Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.
I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
"I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out. But the one
command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
and all the little transistors just to go... """
Rick Roderick 1990https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663
It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.
My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'. I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to gaming the system this way.
The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot wasteland.
I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.
Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is
After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.
My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).
Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)
YouTube Shorts are not bad now for this kind of thing. I’m guessing it’s based on my subscriptions so it’s already off to a good start for me.
This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of thinking was incredibly common these days—instead, it's mildly terrifying.
With the short videos, people expect them to be genuine, and not highly staged productions meant to entertain.
They show you something and say something incredulous like, “I can’t believe something like this is legal. How is this allowed?”
Your choices are to point out it’s fake or play along in a stupid fantasy. The latter is disingenuous just to avoid conflict.
I deleted Instagram because of the change. I’m done. Never used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.
I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.
That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.
1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how to spot phishing scams 2) another guy doing a short video about how much you need to invest to retire in my native language 3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions directly 4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely drive old Citroens 5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a wall full of Milwaukee tools
Instagram Reels
1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit 2) A stolen clip from an old 90s sitcom 3) one-liner joke 4) A dude farting 5) A homophobic "joke" video
Youtube Shorts
1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope 2) A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988 3) A skit by a couple 4) One of those weird youtube-only dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff 5) Americans not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022
The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny. In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or snippets of bigger YT videos.
FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the engagement metrics.
Mine:
A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.
It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.
1) more people post there 2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.
I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.
Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them
I actually tried reels for a good while, but the content is just tits&ass (a major part of instagram), "funny" videos reposted so many times they're grainy from all the recompression and crap like that. Very very few people I would like to follow do actual original content on Instagram Reels.
Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To most of the world that is a much more real danger than the Chinese communists.
However, the US seems to ban only the options where it's not US companies making money off their users...
Exhibit A for banning tiktok right here
Somewhat paradoxically, I am actually more comfortable giving out private data to foreign countries than my own. I mean, what is Xi Jinping going to do with a US social security number? If I am in the US, it will be hard for bad people in China to reach me, because there is a border between the two countries, in every sense of the word. There is no such protection if me and my data are both in the same country.
Xi Jinping can have my social security number, in fact, he can have my whole life, it is not like he is going to do anything to an random guy who lives in a foreign country. I will definitely won't give these data to a neighbor I barely know because my neighbor can do something I don't want him to do with it and may find some motivation to do so.
Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users. You can imagine how well they are up to that task.
> Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users
Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many critics of globalization have pointed out that you can directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization has made us more siloed off from each other
It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
I'm shocked how easily manipulated people are by social media. The vast majority of TikTok content is very intentionally produced, largely to attempt to generate revenue or, at the very least, to feed ones ego.
The "real" people you see on there are all, to different degrees of success, actors. Nearly all of the spontaneous/I can't believe this happened!/caught on camera style content is entirely staged.
Likewise all of the "freedom of speech must be protected" posts are laughable. Everything on TikTok is ultimately created for and prompoted to ultimately drive profit.
This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
Are you going to need similar evidence if I claim that YouTube has been working on being a TikTok replacement as well? It's pretty clear that YouTube created the "shorts" feature as an attempt to allow TikTok creators to trivially repost content.
Yknow creators get paid _by tiktok_ to do natural ad placement in their videos?
It’s just as fake as everything else, if not more so.
HN excluded of course.
Probably the most bizarre thing I've read on here in the last few days. You actually believe that what you're seeing on TikTok is real? It's literally the antithesis of base reality. It's a living, breathing delusion.
They're very different, and I understand what you're getting at comparing it to the hyper-manufactured perfectly glossy Instagram culture, but I wouldn't call TikTok 'authentic'.
Of course, Tiktok is large and there's many different subcultures there, but overall I think TikTok is heavily drenched in Irony. It's a stark difference to the very fake Instagram, but that doesn't make it authentic.
Are tiktok dances 'authentic'? They might have started as just innocent kids doing a fun little dance, but the moment anything turns into a trend I think it loses authenticity. The whole NPC live streaming trend[1] from a few years ago was anything but authentic. TikTok 'suffers' from the exact same paid 'influencers' promoting whatever garbage of the day, and even has its own version of affiliate marking spam with 'TikTok shop' junk.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/people-are-pretending-to-be-npcs...
The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram or YouTube.
What makes you think that? The process is not open and fully controlled by the company running the show
Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even louder!
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.