And let's not pretend that TikTok is filled to the brim with high quality products and small businesses. Yes there may be a couple of feel good stories about a local pizza place or small band that got their big break because of TikTok, but 99.9% of the advertising there is for the same junk/scam products that are on every other influencer-driven app.
I cannot count how many times minute I’ve been the first to see or comment on a TikTok video.
It let small creators be shown to lots of people in a way no other platform does.
For example, there’s a company called “Cerebrum IQ” which scams people out of hundreds of dollars for fake IQ tests. We are painfully aware of this issue because we own cerebrum.com, and we receive at least 100 furious support requests per day from people who have been charged $80.00+ for a subscription they never agreed to, and they somehow confuse us with “Cerebrum IQ”.
They get most of their users from TikTok ads.
We’ve reported them to TikTok many times, with no action taken. Meta at least restricted their ability to advertise.
TikTok's algorithm was amazing, as was the community.
You can't just recreate communities. They're alive, organic, fragile things.
youtube shorts and instagram reels seem like they do the same thing on the surface, but they're so much more focused on showing you content that they are certain you'll like, and from people in your network or people who you normally watch. they're a whole lot more focused on keeping people in their existing content silos.
some of the fediverse alternatives seem appealing but have less content.
i'm sure something will replace it if the ban remains in place but at the moment there's nothing nearly as good for me
Handwaving TT away as "another social media platform" is like comparing Friendster or MySpace with the ad machine that FB has built. There are countless businesses that will be impacted by this.
I don't give two shits how many leads these platforms drive, just like I don't care how many farmers the tobacco industry employs.