Instagram used to be good when it was largely used by professional food and travel bloggers.
These people weren’t pretending that this is their life and that you should feel terrible because your life isn’t cool. It was clearly a job, and the job was to share these great experiences with everyone else.
The problem was when these bloggers morphed into “influencers”. Influencers aren’t people whose job it is to show you cool stuff. Influencers are people whose job it is to live cool lives that you want to emulate. And the reason you want to emulate it is because they are always doing cool stuff.
The difference is subtle but highly consequential, IMO. The reason for the shift to influencers is that the food/travel blogger might be paid for an ad by the tourism agency of a place they visited, or a restaurant. Because you don’t want to be them. You want to gain information about traveling and eating from them.
But influencers make you want to be them, so now they can sell anything. The car they drive, the movies they watch, the toilet paper they use.
And the effect is that the former didnt make you feel bad about yourself, since the content made you think “ah, that’s a cool place I can go for my next vacation, or next birthday dinner is at that restaurant”, whereas an influencer makes you feel miserable cause you’re like “my life will never be as cool as theirs”.
Ad-hominem attacks at publication instead of the content of what they publish? I thought we're better than that on HN but you're making a good case against it.
But all you wrote were ad hominem attacks? I literally just responded to your comment full of ad-hominems.
"Instagram: False impression of people's lives through beautiful photographs
Twitter: Short, thoughtless vitriol directed towards each other about some politics/tech news/public information
Tiktok: A total consumption machine, psychological hell hole"
The lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy makes me wonder whether you work in the news industry? Not to mention the passive aggressiveness. Also, "WSJ is rupert murdoch propaganda mouthpiece." is a statement of fact. Not an ad-hominem attack. WSJ is owned by rupert murdoch and used as his mouthpiece.
This is a google+ moment for facebook. Hope they compete and win. I genuinely like facebook as a company, and what they're doing with their VR computer bet.
This is why being old is great. I accidentally click a link that takes me to someone's tiktok, it shows me a bunch of 'next videos' that are just young attractive women. I think, "oh this must be a trash website if they're trying to hook me with that" and I close the window and life goes on.
Same thing I did with Facebook in 2008. Life's been great since.
I didn't understand why my parents seemed so ambivalent when I'd come to them with the early fruits of the internet and try to get them to buy in and get excited. Now, I'm doing the same thing when people try to "explain" what TikTok is. I know what it is - I just don't see enough of a value from it to bother, thanks.
I am 19 and my parents raised me all-analog(tv and books only) with computer use sprinkled in as needed. Of all my friends I am the happiest and most productive. I am not trying to say I am better, but please consider treating the internet the way we used to(use it for learning and talking to close friends only). It has brought me great returns and the people I've inducted into this cult agree. Reorienting from consuming the lives of the collective to making things just for yourself feels weird at first, but do it long enough and you get this infectious sense of pride and confidence which I've never felt in my attempts to integrate with the social media grid
I think you’re correct that I don’t trust tiktok as we’ve seen our own social media be used as a weapon against us in elections. It’s more likely than not tiktok will be used similarly, but I’m doubtful it’ll be a sign of war
I'd argue we've been in a cold war with china for decades we just didn't pay attention because we love their cheap stuff.
There is a growing danger that war will go hot at some point and Taiwan is the most likely catalyst.
Because of the concentration of TSMC's chip production controlling Taiwan would mean controlling much of the world's manufacturing of chip dependent products.
Given these risks letting china control an influential social media time waster for GenZ is an enormous strategic mistake.
Our bargain with China should be simple, we get access to your markets and you get access to ours and let's all be prosperous (win win). Instead we're playing a win/lose game with them and we're losing.
Of all the boogeymen that have been attributed back to China, I think the one that's potentially most insidious is the taproot Tiktok has into the captive collective. Just imagine the kind of power you'd have to be able to turn the knob - ever so slightly over time - and influence millions of 13-40 year olds with viewpoints that they'll absorb and likely hold on to forever.
It's simultaneously the most brilliant and terrifying thing I've ever seen.
> It's absurd we in the US allow Tiktok as a Chinese company to operate their service while they chase Uber and Airbnb and others out of their country.
"The official website www.tiktok.com of the overseas version of TikTok is currently blocked by the Great Firewall... "
To understand how this situation has come about have a read of Red-Handed by Peter Schweizer.
The Chinese "elite capture" program is well-documented.
They intentionally ensnare govt & business elites in lucrative deals with China to ensure they remain pro-China.
The media doesnt talk about this corruption as they all have movie studios and also want to sell their movies into China.
I still am not convinced that TikTok is direct competition for Facebook. I see tiktok as more a competitor with YouTube. Furthermore, while Instagram was well positioned as the modern “what’re my friends doing/gonna post some nice photos here”, Zuckerberg move to make it a competitor with tiktok is only damaging the service by changing what it’s about. As I said, Instagram is for sharing photos and keeping in touch with friends. Tiktok is about watching stuff cause you’re bored. There’s room for both if you let them not compete! But I think Instagram is killing the golden goose as it were
I think in the future Facebook will become something like Google+ and Flickr or in another words the thing that nobody cares about.
Web is changing and people are changing too and you can't expect people to stare at their Facebook News Feed for decades. That's why Zuck is pursuing the "metaverse" thing that nobody in the world knows how the hell will it look or will it even exist. I claim something similar to "metaverse" already exists it's called every online virtual community in which you can interact through some sort of avatar e.g. World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Roblox etc.
It is great for the ecosystem when companies like Facebook can die off. It's great for the ecosystem and allows a new generation of companies to grow. Also it is inevitable.
Yea it is inevitable but the problem with Facebook is that it has billions in cash and that it has its family of apps which still can somewhat thrive without Facebook; for example WhatsApp so I think in the next decade we are going to witness strange unfolding of events where the main app is going to lose relevance but the sister app/s will still be relevant(this is already happening with Instagram). On top of that Facebook will use its cash pile to again acquire competitors in order to slow main app from fading away and in order to expand its family of apps. The similar thing might happen with Google Search but I think Google Search is more integrated with other Google's products so consumers might be unwilling to switch to competing Search product but I might be mistaken who knows.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 86.3 ms ] threadTwitter: Short, thoughtless vitriol directed towards each other about some politics/tech news/public information
Tiktok: A total consumption machine, psychological hell hole
IMO Tiktok is far worse than the other two. WSJ investigation convinced me that this thing needs to be made uncool amongst teenagers [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/video/series/inside-tiktoks-highly-secre...
These people weren’t pretending that this is their life and that you should feel terrible because your life isn’t cool. It was clearly a job, and the job was to share these great experiences with everyone else.
The problem was when these bloggers morphed into “influencers”. Influencers aren’t people whose job it is to show you cool stuff. Influencers are people whose job it is to live cool lives that you want to emulate. And the reason you want to emulate it is because they are always doing cool stuff.
The difference is subtle but highly consequential, IMO. The reason for the shift to influencers is that the food/travel blogger might be paid for an ad by the tourism agency of a place they visited, or a restaurant. Because you don’t want to be them. You want to gain information about traveling and eating from them.
But influencers make you want to be them, so now they can sell anything. The car they drive, the movies they watch, the toilet paper they use.
And the effect is that the former didnt make you feel bad about yourself, since the content made you think “ah, that’s a cool place I can go for my next vacation, or next birthday dinner is at that restaurant”, whereas an influencer makes you feel miserable cause you’re like “my life will never be as cool as theirs”.
"Instagram: False impression of people's lives through beautiful photographs
Twitter: Short, thoughtless vitriol directed towards each other about some politics/tech news/public information
Tiktok: A total consumption machine, psychological hell hole"
The lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy makes me wonder whether you work in the news industry? Not to mention the passive aggressiveness. Also, "WSJ is rupert murdoch propaganda mouthpiece." is a statement of fact. Not an ad-hominem attack. WSJ is owned by rupert murdoch and used as his mouthpiece.
The one with the best arguments wins, the owner is taken into consideration. But it's ignorant to dismiss everything
People are dumb.
Same thing I did with Facebook in 2008. Life's been great since.
Unfortunately this makes market research difficult. Guess it depends on the audience you're trying to reach.
“when goods (and services) don’t cross borders, soldiers will”
There is a growing danger that war will go hot at some point and Taiwan is the most likely catalyst.
Because of the concentration of TSMC's chip production controlling Taiwan would mean controlling much of the world's manufacturing of chip dependent products.
Given these risks letting china control an influential social media time waster for GenZ is an enormous strategic mistake.
Our bargain with China should be simple, we get access to your markets and you get access to ours and let's all be prosperous (win win). Instead we're playing a win/lose game with them and we're losing.
It's simultaneously the most brilliant and terrifying thing I've ever seen.
"The official website www.tiktok.com of the overseas version of TikTok is currently blocked by the Great Firewall... "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
The Chinese "elite capture" program is well-documented. They intentionally ensnare govt & business elites in lucrative deals with China to ensure they remain pro-China.
The media doesnt talk about this corruption as they all have movie studios and also want to sell their movies into China.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/tim-...
Web is changing and people are changing too and you can't expect people to stare at their Facebook News Feed for decades. That's why Zuck is pursuing the "metaverse" thing that nobody in the world knows how the hell will it look or will it even exist. I claim something similar to "metaverse" already exists it's called every online virtual community in which you can interact through some sort of avatar e.g. World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Roblox etc.
sometimes i get fb, insta, twitter links; however, i need to log in to see the full content. they constantly nagging me to register.
out of habit, i ignore the last groups.