Let it, it was a scourge on the world. Like every other simiar app it preyed on people's attention span, disintegrating it in the process, getting them addicted to just scrolling for that dopamine rush.
twitter, facebook, and reddit already did and do that and are far better at it due to being mostly images or text content. if anything tiktok pushes back on that due to the length of the videos.
At some point, you all need to think about herd mentality. tiktok is much chagrined here, but it's not any more egregious than facebook, twitter, youtube, or reddit.
The extreme aversion here to tiktok in particular is not well-informed.
I'm sure the rise of smartphones had as much to do with that as anything.
At its peak, WoW had 12M players; Pokemon Go had 4x that many daily actives at its peak.
I love the irony of reading: "The app is even testing a new feature that uses AI to identify products in the background of regular content and turn every single video into an ad", followed immediately by a dozen pages of ads targeted at me based on my browsing history (missed the 'Read More' button).
> Outrage is brewing among a growing contingent of users who post videos arguing TikTok is ruined now, and analysts say the company is jeopardizing its success.
People say this about all platforms. As much as I dislike Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, etc, they all are doing fine. The vocal minority/article bias is at play. I don't like TikTok as a platform either, but it's insanely massive and that's not going to change for a while.
It feels this way. I feel like I see the same 10 people who are talking about building and being a 10x developer but have 100k tweets and probably liked by the same 1000 accounts, 20% of them being bots.
They have lost most of their advertisers and serious users, because content has been driven into extreme corners. The platform is now full of bots, scammers and problematic opinions on the political spectrum. Latest I heard, they value of the company has gone down to less than half of what Elon bought it originally.
The only who are doing well on Twitter are crypto-scams, Nazis and trolls. But it seems Elon is now in those bubbles active, so maybe that was the intention all along?
I mean, I used it about 30 mins/day before, now it’s like 10 or less. Personally haven’t felt the need to find a Twitter-replacement, you just do other stuff more, I guess? It’s like dropping a hobby. You don’t replace it with an exact replica, it just wears off.
On Twitter, I never use to get spam DMs but now it is a daily occurrence. I never blocked anyone over 10 years but now I am blocking multiple people per day. I used to never see anti-semitic content, but now I run across it regularly (even though I don't follow similar accounts). I still enjoy interesting discussions on crypto and genAI tech/trends but that is probably not a broad enough audience to be sustainable for Twitter/X.
It's doing better than ever IMHO. Much more information due to less censorship and government interference, and the community notes keep things in check with much less bias than the "fact checkers" ever did.
You mean the community notes that have been disabled for the CEOs account? The account that needs community notes more than any other account on Twitter?
> Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk. The company has not refused a single request since Musk took ownership, according to self-reported data.
Can't read anonymously anymore, which makes it more like facebook/instagram rather than a grassroots news site (which it used to be for a lot of people). It's a big loss I think.
Yeah, I used to occasionally click twit links when friends shared in chats or they were included in articles. Now I just don't bother because I either see the first of multiple posts in a "thread" or nothing at all. Much like when someone posts a link to Facebook or Instagram.
You don't even need SEO chum and AI generated "content" to understand why search engines suck so badly nowadays. The discussions that used to happen on (indexable) forums, blogs, and comments have largely moved behind pay- or login-walls.
The fact that so many people resort to appending "reddit" isn't so much a testament to the quality of reddit so much as it's a result of that being one of the few large, centralized platforms that could still be indexed.
For me Facebook is hit-or-miss. If the post is public (say, a venue posting about an event) I can typically read the main post, but can't click on anything. If I'm on mobile, it tries to redirect me to install an app. Usually harder to see much.
Instagram just shows me a Meta logo or a blank page. Not sure how much this is due to ad-blocking though, and not particularly inclined to disable it to find out. Mostly I just don't click and I ask the friend/whoever to summarize or send a screenshot if it's something I care about. For generic "hey look at this funny post" stuff I just skip it.
Sucks, because links from friends should be fun or useful. It's kinda nuts how many don't work unless you are logged into something snoopy/sketchy.
I do not know about features, that may be true. But unfortunately Twitter seems to be in austerity mode. Unlike most sites, it is not working for wast majority of internet users.
Works fine when I log on. At the beginning of the Musk era, everyone said the technology would fail. That hasn't been my experience. Plenty of tweets appear when I go to the site.
Now you might argue that the social networks are failing. There are definitely some people who I don't see any more.
But really, there are discussion and I can read them when I want.
Now that discussions are ranked by pay, when you read a tweet thread it seems to be just all onlyfans promotion quasi bot accounts but paid blue check, even on machine learning threads and stuff.
It may be my bubble, but so many of my followed accounts have left, or stooped using it mostly, that my timeline is almost entirely US politics[1] and meme videos
Posts show up, but there are far more bugs, and the general experience is slightly worse in lots of ways. Also, the overload of sycophants, trolls, and obvious bots has made it a lot noisier than it used to be.
Twitter feels like the exception there. They still have a lot of users, but they aren't exactly making money.
Anecdotally, it's reputation is also far worse than other social media companies. It's hard to go into the office, family gatherings, etc, without hearing people joke about how awful Twitter has become, whereas with other sites I usually only hear that sentiment from other long-time users deeper inside my own bubble.
I heard a lot about that Boeing plane in Alaska too. Indeed, I heard a lot about it than the flight my parents were on that week, which by all accounts, went fine.
It's actually a sign that people care. Branding "disasters" have cemented the public's love for lots of brands, including Coke. In a few months, Elon will say that X is the umbrella payments network and Twitter is one of the products on that network.
The fact that the company insists the product is now called X, but the domain is still twitter.com (x.com redirects to it, not vice versa) and much of their documentation still says twitter too... means something or other.
What's funny is that Twitter has always had a reputation as the dumpster fire of social networks, at least among people I talk to. Something about the, traditionally, short-form posts and the user base means it's a constant mess of drama and flamewars.
I think it's gotten worse since Musk took over. But it hasn't moved in "the rankings" compared to other social networks. I wonder if Threads and Bluesky will eventually be as nasty as old Twitter of if they'll manage to foster better discussions somehow.
Yeah...I always looked at it like "the comments section".
For a while, everyone joked about Youtube saying "never read the comments section, man!" Or you only need to look at the comments section on any large media outlet (newspaper, tv, etc) article to see the same thing. Person + anonymity + audience, etc.
Twitter was like the comments section for the entire internet. So many people. So much trying to be funny or witty or provocative. Such expected results.
>I wonder if Threads and Bluesky will eventually be as nasty as old Twitter of if they'll manage to foster better discussions somehow.
Both of those places seem to have gotten their initial swell of "actually using it" users from anti-Twitter/Musk people and pro-leftist/progressives. They also seem very militant about making sure that they are the gatekeepers/rulemakers of these new kingdoms.
Threads is already going that direction. It's a lot more negative and cynical than it was when it started out, and seems to be slowly morphing into more of a Twitter like experience than an Instagram like one.
Not sure about BlueSky, though I may not be following active enough people there to notice any change in atmosphere.
Before Musk took over, I ranked it above Facebook.
It still wasn't "good", but it wasn't a privacy nightmare to the degree that Facebook was, and you could at least trust that things like blue checkmarks actually meant something.
Amazed that your bubble still talks about twitter, most of my friends don't even know it still exists and don't really care. It definitely feels like twitter has a very specific demographic that is much smaller than all other social networks.
As an end user, most social media platforms are not doing fine, and have been overrun with abusive behavior and suffer from some form of Enshittefication.
These companies doing fine financially (is Twitter? I don’t think so?) should not be conflated with the end user experience and health of the communities, which in many cases have degraded so thoroughly that they no longer serve their original purpose.
I agree. Facebook ads are so aggressive that I have cut way back on my usage, as have others. Also pieces of the app keep breaking with more and more frequency. And account hacking or impersonation is rampant.
Facebook is really not doing fine. It's not about to fall off a cliff - but it's a slowly sinking ship, and I doubt FB can change that (and they don't really need to since they have enough diversity - Instagram - and can just buy something new).
Twitter is a sunk ship - one of the worst business purchases in history.
Pinterest is nowhere near as bad as Twitter. It's maybe "fine" depending on your definition.
TikTok was on a truly incredible growth trajectory. In many ways - it would be impressive for TikTok to make enough bad changes to not at least be "fine". But "fine" is subjective. That growth trajectory is nowhere near as impressive these days.
Depends what counts as an MAU. I deleted my Twitter account, but I can’t realistically delete my Facebook account because I have too many messenger contacts to make it worth doing. I occasionally receive a text message fron someone I haven’t seen for a long time or an aunt on another continent, so I probably count as an MAU but I am not seeing any ads on Facebook.m
Apple, on the other hand has 2 billion active devices that people paid money for and are on a replacement cycle. Somehow that is only worth twice what a Facebook account is worth in terms of market cap.
One user can own multiple devices. My friend owns an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods as well.
Also, the timeframes are different. Apple consider any device which pinged one of their services within the last 90 days to be active. So it's approximately 1 month vs 3 months in terms of the window of measurement. And we're not even getting into the possibility of devices pinging their services that aren't in true active usage, i.e. an iPad that's just charged and connected to WiFi but not actually used.
Of course, that's still extremely impressive from Apple! It's an amazing achievement which the market has obviously rewarded. But it's very much apples to oranges here. Those two statistics can't be directly compared because they represent different measurements over different periods of time.
The whole point is that they are vastly different. Of course it’s an apple’s to oranges comparison. Nobody is trying to compare the two statistics as if they were the same - that wouldn’t make any sense.
The comparison is between 2 billion physical devices that cost real money to buy and replace with 3 billion entries in a users table with a datestamp.
FB is still surprisingly strong in growing markets. But that translating to business means those markets see drastic increases in spending power, which we’ve been awaiting for many years. It’s up, but nowhere near parity with western markets.
>FB is still surprisingly strong in growing markets.
In a lot of those growing markets, Facebook is the main (or only) way of having a web presence for their business. WhatsApp is similarly the main way to have IM support, as well.
It seems like this is setting the bar insanely high for success and failure. Meta is a trillion dollar company with growing revenue. One of the most successful companies in the world. Even at half the size, it would be tremendously successful
.
Twitter is a sunk ship - one of the worst business purchases in history.
I googled “twitter active users per year” and similar revenue charts and they don’t support this claim. There is a slight down since 2021, but that was when everyone was locked up and had whole days to speak. Nasdaq has basically the same /\ profile in 2019-2023 range. Taking the whole economy into account, twitter is fine.
Are you sure it’s not just “I left the ship and wish it to sink”? Not a musk fan either, but statements like this feel rather wishful.
None of the numbers you're going to see since the purchase are reliable, given that the company is now private and unlikely to release anything substantive.
The acceleration of the "hype cycle" has to be scary from the view of TikTok. When your hype shot upward that fast, it's liable to drop just as quickly.
TIL that having more daily active users than they've ever had is a "slowly sinking ship."
Most businesses would literally kill for the kind of "slowly sinking ship" where they're making tons of profits from their decades-old primary business that is somehow even more popular now than it was when it was actually cool.
In my personal feed and algorithm, it was showing content from Gaza initially. I started following some of the victims and journalists. Then it stopped, not a single content from Gaza anymore.
To note - the platform’s content is steered for information operations shaped at the demographic of the scroller re: foreign policy goals from CN.
So what you’re seeing is a good content, but worth considering when you get shown policy-charged content - when and why is this in my feed.
Edit - or, to put it more simply, you should try to answer the second part of your comment - why is a state-sponsored social media company the only one showing me this right now?
I think TikToks initial succes was mainly due to a "fair" feed with no algorithmic nudging.
Facebook used to be like that but somewhere around 2012 to 13 posts or articles could not go viral anymore, in the organic avalanche way it would earlier. Facebook wanted you to pay up for the reach I guess.
They’ve been nudging since 2019 at least and built an edge vs lost it.
There is a lot of politics around the TK bans but one true aspect is the Natsec angle. It’s as if FB’s newsfeed was optimized for patriotism, vs ads.
But bc TK pays well and Has a office in SV… blind eye. Blows my mind that westerners work there. There’s bad jingoism and then there’s considering your role in a global power struggle directly based on technology and these companies.
It’s a perfectly fine cause, entirely in line with what I’d expect from them.
Just as nudging their own youth into practicing guerrilla warfare techniques while nudging ours into questioning their gender is in line with what I’d expect from them.
Whatever the platform's intent, the end result is that I get to see content that is censored on other platforms. If China's foreign policy goal is to help the Palestinians, then they're aligned with my views.
Whatever they're doing is super benign compared to the propaganda I'm exposed to day in and day out as a US citizen with nearly every media outlet working to influence me either commercially or jingoistically. A single media platform with a different point of view is healthy, especially when it will host content the other platforms censor.
Social networking hasn't influenced my point of view, but it has allowed me to access voices that I've always wanted to hear from, there was just no way to get to them before.
There is a significant amount of research and public intelligence community discussion to indicate your points are incredibly misguided. Social networks have very likely influenced your point of view. Try spending a month off them and see if your views change, for instance.
> what you’re seeing is a good content, but worth considering when you get shown policy-charged content - when and why is this in my feed.
That's always a worthy, necessary even, consideration.
> you should try to answer the second part of your comment - why is a state-sponsored social media company the only one showing me this right now?
You may be right in this specific case, and I tend to agree - though mostly out of lack of knowlege.
But I gotta object the insinuation that private media is somehow more reliable. Every outlet has an agenda. Al Jazeera English is by far the best journalistic TV I know (disclaimer, haven't watched in a few years). Funded by the government of Qatar…
Last part is a fair point - making no claims in reliability across other media.
Specifically just making a claim on if you vet reliability by national security/global politics topics that we all see playing out in the news, then it’s worth considering your specific role in it as a user or tech employee of TK.
I urge people not to downvote the parent's comment out of political disagreement with the Palestinian cause.
There has been an outrageous amount of censorship of the Palestinian story in most of the US media, and frankly also a lack of nuanced explanation of the dominant Israeli perspective (which is far more nuanced than the typical American perspective).
In general, I recommend the following rules for propaganda hygeine:
- If someone uses the word "terrorist" or "terrorism", subtract a point of credibility. The word is an emotionally charged label that removes clarity.
- If someone refers to the desire of preserving "stability", subtract a point of credibility. This phrasing is typically used to mislead/misdirect.
- If you discover that important information (such as the charges brought before the ICJ) is being suppressed, subtract a point of credibility. Fairly important international law developments that ought to focus the discussion on concrete issues and considerations.
- If someone does not accept the label of apartheid as having a common literal meaning and insists that the word only applies to S. Africa, subtract a point of credibility. Things like Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, etc., are part of many nations' histories. It does not do any good to pretend that these things are impossible today.
There are very credible arguments in favor of both sides in the conflict, but increasingly people seem to believe that suppressing information is the best way to make the world a better place.
>In general, I recommend the following rules for propaganda hygeine:
Here's another: if someone gives you a list of rules that are carefully crafted to only apply to those that are against their preferred narrative, subtract a point of credibility
- If both US political parties agree on it, it's probably a bad idea.
- Any time we are told that a foreign leader is insane or unstable, it's propaganda intended to dehumanize and discredit democratic forces in that country (even if the country is not a strict democracy).
- Logically, asymmetric conflict is going to necessitate different tactics. Don't fall for the idea that smart bombs are civilized but stones thrown are barbaric.
- Don't assume the US or its allies are the good guy. Countries make mistakes and rarely course-correct.
- The humanitarian justifications for war/conflict/killing are rarely the real story. Often there is a national interest-driven motivation, but but making it about a hard-to-disagree-with moral cause the debate about what is actually the national interest is suppressed.
- If someone tells you that it is disrespectful to question your own country or political leaders' competence or motivations, subtract several points. Democracy is a consensus mechanism, not a guarantee of consensus. Dissent is part of the recipe.
The problem is, because they don't censor much, it's also a breeding ground for misinformation and fakes. It's really insane how fast low hate spreads on that platform because of some poor information or misconception, especially with more complex topics.
I recently hired a person who was on the moderation team at TikTok.
I won’t go in to detail but they suffered at the hands of a barbaric company which does not care about its staff or its users. People on the moderation team are SLA’d to death and most have some form of PTSD from the videos they’re subjected to.
I’d love to see Tiktok and all the other attention grabbing shitty apps die a death. But here’s the kicker… despite leaving TikTok due to the stress and anxiety working there caused her she still uses the app!
Addiction is crazy. You see people doom scroll several feeds, in a loop. They’ll see the same status again and again and again, just hoping something changed.
TikTok is, first and foremost, a deplatform American tech play. Thats it, and it is hyper aggressive about getting there. Anyone who works there and thinks otherwise doesn't know whats up.
At least we get to enjoy the American elite losing their marbles over the fact that there is a mass-platform where they have no control over the narrative. Imagine if we had TikTok during the ramp up to the Iraq war. May have turned out differently.
I actually believe any social media platform back in those days would have made things worse. War mongerers seem to scare people to silence in the initial hysteria phase.
Looking at e.g. Reddit today it seems the narrative is controlled by bots. Maybe that would have been hard in 2003.
The War mongers DID scare any opposition into silence or losing big. Recall how professionals lost their careers: The Dixie Chicks lost their career at their height, Bill Maher lost his show etc.
Sure today we are seeing a repeat where Pro-Israel supporters are getting pro-Palestinian newscasters fired, actors are losing their roles, people who place Palestinian flags in their linkedin bios are getting their employers harassed etc.
But with the advent of Tiktok we are at least getting an avenue to see what is happening in Palestine whereas its buried on all other platforms. Maybe its being artificially boosted but the end result is that there are mass protests in all the cities and TikTok is allowing the conversation to continue so the topic remains top of mind in peoples heads. A future president may actually be in one of those protests and Tiktok may have directly contributed to their future world view. A world view where the current power base loses out.
I was way to young at the time to have had any political conscious.
The scary part is that the war mongerers seems to hide in the closet until they collectivly see a chance to war monger. Then they come out in force and there is a window where they control the narrative (relative to their usual share of control of the narrative) until people calm down abit.
There is always this implied "I'll hit you in the face" or "when SHTF I'll shoot you" from those personality types. They are very hard to deal with.
The "narrative" difference on e.g. Reddit vs TikTok or Twitter is baloney.
Reddit is so extremely manipulated nowadays. Not just in this matter at hand regard, but in many questions it is sect like.
>I was way to young at the time to have had any political conscious.
Well its important to learn what happened in the run up to the Iraq war since a lot of the same government officials that ran things then are still around. Its not ancient history.
>The "narrative" difference on e.g. Reddit vs TikTok or Twitter is baloney.
Do you have any additional reasoning as to why? Without it your argument falls apart. From what I can see, the mere fact that you have constant updates flowing on TikTok vs Reddit or other platforms is what makes it stand out.
Sounds like any other Chinese company. The country is run by Engineers vs America being run by Lawyers. On paper is sounds like China is better until you realize that everything shouldn't be run like an engineering project.
Only bureaucrats with an engineering mindset would stamp out a ideology by systematically putting people in camps and their kids into all day long "re-education" schools that teach people to forget their culture and try to "install" a new culture onto them.
This is consistent with meta or any other large social media platform with user uploaded content. They outsource to cheap locations and mods are subjected to the worst videos that are flagged for review.
Not just possible, inevitable. It's why we should demand more interoperability - so platforms have to compete with each other instead of milking a captive audience.
Let's just call it "composting." Something flowers and blooms into a beautiful experience, draws a critical mass of users, which draws the attention of parasites, the flower withers, dies, and turns to crap... compost.
I like TikTok, but the number of TikTok Shop related videos is way too annoying at this point. I would say over half of a set of 10 videos is related to some TikTok Shop item, "eligible for commission" aka random people shilling this product of the week as the "greatest invention ever" and its some cheap dropship product that will break after a few months of use.
I think this all started with the hype around the Ninja Creami, and TikTok saw that if you got enough people on there talking about one product to the point that it drove them to sell out for months they saw their new revenue stream. But there is a difference between real organic word of mouth, and this fake TikTok Shop "eligible for commission" nonsense.
I didn't follow the whole session (only saw the memes about it on TikTok), but in the recent congressional hearing, was the TikTok CEO grilled on misinformation on his platform? I see tonnes of astroturfed content on TikTok, significantly more than other platforms. Russia bots, flat earthers, moon-landing deniers, 9/11 truthers -- obvious misinformation. I've reported these before under misinformation but the report is usually rejected. Does TikTok turn a blind eye to these things, or is it the nature of the algorithm that I'm exposed to more content outside my "bubble"?
There’s ample research to indicate CN govt encourages TikTok’s content to be steered in support of foreign policy goals related to the demographic of the user.
So, when you see a mess of divisive content on there, and you’re in the UK (maybe?, re: “tonnes”), the content is there for a reason perhaps. …Stoke the fires of Western users’ current inability to handle this content without some % of the viewers losing their minds and <last 6 yrs of instability>.
This has been reported on amply by Washington Post the Guardian as early as 2019.
TikTok in early to mid 2020 was truly an amazing place. But as video length has gotten longer, and with the addition of photo slideshows, there's been a rapid falloff in the unique quirkiness that made it more interesting than, say, YouTube. Now it's more like a YouTube where the creators are much lazier about presentation and you have very little control over what you watch.
Live and TikTok shop videos are annoying but easy to skip. Long videos are occasionally useful and aren't that annoying now that you can watch at 2x or skip ahead. Slideshows are pretty great. I enjoy meme slideshows and some of the recurring gags that are just 2 slides (e.g. "I feel like that wasn't my best friend last night ... that was the devil.")
I'm kind of like, 65% confident that TikTok was developed for the US to to be a highly addictive way of seeding and farming apathy, cynicism, and misinformation.
So there would be a great irony that it is so effective it destroys its own userbase first.
The only way to cultivate a lot of good TikTok shops is to allow a lot to be created and then filter them down. TikTok used this strategy with creators in the beginning when it was easy for anyone to go live.
Strategically, TikTok is intentionally sailing into a rough patch in order to launch the e-commerce play without giving an unfair advantage to big/established brands, which would crowd out the "crowd" and defeat the purpose.
> The app is even testing a new feature that uses AI to identify products in the background of regular content and turn every single video into an ad.
I'm about ready to divest from any technology more advanced than a 1980s terminal. Any takers for my Neo-Amish movement? On Fridays we have pancakes and on Sundays we stone ad executives.
Learning how to self-host things on Docker and a NAS has been a lifesaver for me. Almost every SAAS I've wanted to use at a consumer level has an open-source equivalent on Docker that I can reverse-proxy to access from anywhere.
I'm a 40 year old geriatric millennial who is the only one amongst my friend group that loves TikTok. None of them get it. They say "isn't it just a bunch of teenagers dancing?"
Meanwhile, I'm on here following dudes wintering at the south pole, a captain of a container ship in the middle of the indian ocean, an orthodox rabbi in brooklyn, a physicist, a philosopher, a civic designer, and 10,000 hilarious meme makers and comedians who are remixing and lipsyncing and making incredible content that I can't even conceive of doing through a mobile interface. Most of THAT group are not famous anywhere else - their bios don't link to instagram or a management group.
Some of these videos get longer - but nothing more than 5 mins. Concentrated deep dives into a single topic. Heavy on personality but otherwise mostly Signal, not Noise.
Which is why it's also so hilarious folks in this thread rolling their eyes saying that people say that every platform gets ruined, but it never is. No, the NUMBERS go up. But the platforms have been ruined over and over and over again. None of my generation is on Facebook anymore. They are still on Instagram but exclusively to follow celebrities. There is no place in the world to just hang out and catch up with friends anymore - not a ubiquitous one anyway that we had through the 2000's. Even Reddit has lost all culture and is a ghosttown compared to what it use dto be.
I'm not saying Tiktok is that. But what Tiktok has been for the last 3 years is UNIQUE. Special. Distinctive. It's own style, it's own brand of interesting and engaging.
And this:
> Then there’s the videos themselves. In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format. TikTok is even encouraging people to upload photo slideshows instead of videos altogether. On top of that, TikTok just fumbled a relationship with Universal Music Group, which pulled its music catalog off the platform and silenced any video featuring Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, and every other Universal artist.
Will absolutely ruin it, if they don't quickly pivot and turn away. I don't mean "ruin" by pure user/engagement numbers. But ruin what currently makes it special in terms of connecting humanity to one another. That will go away and not come back somewhere else.
It's good to see the other side of this. I don't use most social media apps, but I had a friend who told me they used tiktok mostly to see videos about 'foraging and luthiery', which gave me pause. Sometimes I wonder if I could benefit from the platform if I had the right subs. Maybe even learn something interesting.
Ironic to see that tiktok is being made worse by trying to compete with youtube. I absolutely hate youtube shorts and am annoyed to no end that I can't remove them from my youtube experience. Doubly ironic that I'm more likely to give tiktok a chance than to ever succumb to youtube's wheedling insistence that I click on their 5-second content clips.
I know this is one man's anecdote - but TikTok somehow lost that early magic. I remember it in 2018 and it was much wilder than it is now. It would regularly give me some pretty far-out content and the algorithm would mix it together into a surreal yet cohesive package. In many ways it was a much worse objective experience back then, the duetting which was pervasive at the time often became pretty intense bullying. But it was often genuinely surprising in an almost Monty Python-esque kind of way.
Now I feel they have sanitized it pretty well, and the volume of creators means that each niche is overfull with middle-brow content. I think that has left little room for the truly bizarre stuff that lurks to come out into the light. It still manages to keep me stuck to the screen for hours at a time (the reason I very rarely dare to open the app at all) but I don't have the same belly laugh experience I did when I first used the app. I walk away less often thinking to myself: "what the hell just happened". Mostly it serves me pretty tame content.
I mean, this really just feels like textbook case of Enshittification [1]
There are sponsored posts dispersed through your feed.
Writing this, I've realized that TikTok hasn't made the terms for it's posts/feed obvious. Twitter has Tweets/Timeline, Facebook has Feed, I don't know what I would say to describe a post from TikTok outside of calling the video itself a 'TikTok'
My 1940’s grandma spends more time on tt than yt, like whole evenings. And her brother’s ex too. They don’t spend money on it either and tbh I don’t know what their interaction with it looks like. But “for teens” is a common misconception. I’ve had a few 25..40-ish coworkers who were scrolling it as well.
TikTok is a Chinese propaganda tool right? Honest question. Truly not attempting to make an unfair statement implying other parts of the world including the US don't have plenty of propaganda tools of their our own. But isn't it?
I tried to make the original statement very fair. I think facebook is definitely a propaganda tool. It's a propaganda tool of its high-level employees and moderators, founders and, more recently, US government agencies. The twitter files [1] document pressure from employee culture and various government agencies on twitter, I assume the US government puts the same kind of pressure on facebook. There is absolutely bias. That isn't to say that the bias is bad necessarily, just that it obviously exists and this is isomorphic with it being propaganda.
The only thing the twitter files showed is that the US government sends requests to Twitter to take down illegal content and misinformation, and sends them "scoops" or other information as they would a news outlet or journalist.
You can certainly argue that in this day and age what is "misinformation" has become politicized, but at the end of the day they were only requests.
That that has become a conspiracy theory is a testament to the modern right's understanding of events and facts, as seen through the lens of the media they consume.
I agree your original statement was fair and open, btw, my question was meant to be honest too. (And I didn't downvote you!)
I think every single institution that exists will have bias, so if we say having bias is isomorphic with being "a propaganda tool", then the term "propaganda tool" isn't very useful anymore, covering too much, and not what people think you are suggesting when you say the term.
I guess the interesting thing with tik-tok might be how much influence the Chinese government specifically as an entity has over it's various policies that effect what people see there; but then, I think people discount the influence the US government has over similar US companies too, from overt and more implicit pressure both -- but to literally any company operating in the USA, this isn't meant to be a "conspiracy theory" about say Facebook specifically either.
I appreciate you saying FB might indeed be similar... but generally if we say "TikTok is a Chinese propaganda tool" people think we are saying something different than "not too different from Facebook," and also something much more than "there are biases and interests of the people and organizations involved in decision-making, that necessarily effect what they do."
Which I don't know, it's not obvious to me anyway, or clear to me that the people who think it's obvious actually know what they're talking about. That there's something much more than this, in any of those cases.
The only people who call it a propaganda tool are the ones who can't utilize it for propaganda.
It's a US-based company with insane oversight. Older people can't grasp that youth have different interests and have different political views so they call it propaganda.
This is an interesting take and I think it's a fairly common one. Is it possible that your first two sentences contradict one another? If, in this example, the US government can't repurpose it or use it for propaganda, can it really have insane oversight over it? What does oversight mean here by your definition? Are youth always correct in their worldview and never put at odds with their own societies by external or internal propaganda tools? I can think of a few examples of this in world history, some in the US, Europe and also China - so your statement here seems particularly interesting.
> If, in this example, the US government can't repurpose it or use it for propaganda, can it really have insane oversight over it?
Yes. Much in the same way that the IRS has oversight over a company's financial records but doesn't have much of a say in how the company carries out its business.
> What does oversight mean here by your definition?
Having access to the data, having access to the content moderation policies, as well as having legal jurisdiction over TikTok's executive team.
> Are youth always correct in their worldview and never put at odds with their own societies by external or internal propaganda tools?
Their political positions are usually a lot more extremely conservative or extremely liberal. Although some of their opinions might be formed in the shape intended by propaganda, a lot of the opinions are exclusively rebellion (see: young people drinking, smoking, whatever).
Ultimately youth on TikTok don't think Tiananmen square was a hoax or have deluded views about China's social policies. In fact they meme about China's social credit concept and would rather visit Japan or Korea. This on its own ends the idea of it being a Chinese propaganda tool -- if it really is, the Chinese are failing as miserably as the US at trying to weaponize it.
Beyond this, however, TikTok is essentially giving itself up to the full control of the US government[0] so we might be on the verge on having Twitter-esque style[1] controls.
But pretending that China is the reason that TikTok isn't enough pro-Israeli, or the reason why conservative views are making a resurgence in the younger demographics, or that it's 'dumbing down the Western world' (just as the radio, TV and video games did before) is just a mixture of old people yelling at clouds and propagandists not being able to manipulate a new generation.
It's actually funny how the same voices complaining about it now weren't complaining when TikTok was pushing covid vaccine conspiracies a couple of years ago -- it might have something to do with their viewpoint no longer being represented.
The real solution for TikTok might be to add an age limit. That is, no old people. Let kids be kids -- which is how it started when they were just singing and dancing before it was politicized. Something that republicans take issue with, of course, who want TikTok to push nationalist propaganda instead like they do on the Chinese version.
Based on my wife's experience with Douyin (the original product in China), I get the impression that they're trying to roll out products or features that have been wildly successful in China. The store, for example, seems to be very popular there. TikTok needs to adjust to a very different cultural landscape.
All social media apps have users, but users are not customers. Advertisers are.
Longer videos pave the way for non-skippable, mid-video ads, which they can charge more for.
TikTok Shop is for taking a cut of every transaction on your "territory", like Apple is doing with the App Store. QVC for Gen Z.
The sooner people stop believing this BS about social media apps caring about "connecting people" , the sooner the reality of the business model can be made apparent to everyone.
I think what this article describes is normal & probably "smart" from Bytedance's perspective.
> Social media success is a delicate balance
No it isn't. It's three things:
1. Luck / Startup x-factor: what makes these novel formats flourish to begin with, but it's short-lived: it won't sustain a platform long-term.
2. Money: what Meta have done with Instagram - pushed through by cannibalising instead of innovating by sheer power of investment
3. Inertia: why Twitter has defied all doomsayers' reports of its demise.
TikTok's current trajectory looks more like trying to ape Meta's strategy & ultimately avoid what happened to Snapchat, by abandoning the innovation that got them to where they are & instead take advantage of the power, money & inertia they currently have to sustain themselves in other ways & broaden their audience (beyond the more fickle TikTok-early-adopter-influencers).
> its ad revenue growth is slowing down
Translation: its ad revenue is growing. This is an industry that was being reported as being generally in decline across the board only a year ago - some competitors like Meta have only recently started to show growth again after losses.
187 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThe extreme aversion here to tiktok in particular is not well-informed.
My feed is woodworkers showing their techniques, physicists talking about strange discoveries, and developers talking about what you can do with ai.
As with all social media, it's going to try to show you what it thinks you want to see.
After deleting it, I felt better and my battery life improved too.
People say this about all platforms. As much as I dislike Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, etc, they all are doing fine. The vocal minority/article bias is at play. I don't like TikTok as a platform either, but it's insanely massive and that's not going to change for a while.
Hah, Twitter isn't exactly doing fine
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...
The only who are doing well on Twitter are crypto-scams, Nazis and trolls. But it seems Elon is now in those bubbles active, so maybe that was the intention all along?
This is not true. Like when they censored Turkish opposition.
> less censorship and government interference
> Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk. The company has not refused a single request since Musk took ownership, according to self-reported data.
https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
edit: Not to mention the period bans of Musk's critics.
You don't even need SEO chum and AI generated "content" to understand why search engines suck so badly nowadays. The discussions that used to happen on (indexable) forums, blogs, and comments have largely moved behind pay- or login-walls.
The fact that so many people resort to appending "reddit" isn't so much a testament to the quality of reddit so much as it's a result of that being one of the few large, centralized platforms that could still be indexed.
You get ugly amount of pop-ups there but at least the content will load.
Instagram just shows me a Meta logo or a blank page. Not sure how much this is due to ad-blocking though, and not particularly inclined to disable it to find out. Mostly I just don't click and I ask the friend/whoever to summarize or send a screenshot if it's something I care about. For generic "hey look at this funny post" stuff I just skip it.
Sucks, because links from friends should be fun or useful. It's kinda nuts how many don't work unless you are logged into something snoopy/sketchy.
I do not know about features, that may be true. But unfortunately Twitter seems to be in austerity mode. Unlike most sites, it is not working for wast majority of internet users.
Now you might argue that the social networks are failing. There are definitely some people who I don't see any more.
But really, there are discussion and I can read them when I want.
[1] I am not even American
Most sites are able to operate without login. This is not case for the Twitter. It is operating still yes, but for now in austerity mode.
Edit: and HN, but it isn't driven by add revenue. Im not aware of any besides reddit that do not.
Anecdotally, it's reputation is also far worse than other social media companies. It's hard to go into the office, family gatherings, etc, without hearing people joke about how awful Twitter has become, whereas with other sites I usually only hear that sentiment from other long-time users deeper inside my own bubble.
I think it's gotten worse since Musk took over. But it hasn't moved in "the rankings" compared to other social networks. I wonder if Threads and Bluesky will eventually be as nasty as old Twitter of if they'll manage to foster better discussions somehow.
For a while, everyone joked about Youtube saying "never read the comments section, man!" Or you only need to look at the comments section on any large media outlet (newspaper, tv, etc) article to see the same thing. Person + anonymity + audience, etc.
Twitter was like the comments section for the entire internet. So many people. So much trying to be funny or witty or provocative. Such expected results.
Both of those places seem to have gotten their initial swell of "actually using it" users from anti-Twitter/Musk people and pro-leftist/progressives. They also seem very militant about making sure that they are the gatekeepers/rulemakers of these new kingdoms.
Not sure about BlueSky, though I may not be following active enough people there to notice any change in atmosphere.
It still wasn't "good", but it wasn't a privacy nightmare to the degree that Facebook was, and you could at least trust that things like blue checkmarks actually meant something.
Banning 'freespeech' here... allowing it there...
It was not bought to directly make money. It is still useful tool for people that invested in it.
As an end user, most social media platforms are not doing fine, and have been overrun with abusive behavior and suffer from some form of Enshittefication.
These companies doing fine financially (is Twitter? I don’t think so?) should not be conflated with the end user experience and health of the communities, which in many cases have degraded so thoroughly that they no longer serve their original purpose.
Twitter is a sunk ship - one of the worst business purchases in history.
Pinterest is nowhere near as bad as Twitter. It's maybe "fine" depending on your definition.
TikTok was on a truly incredible growth trajectory. In many ways - it would be impressive for TikTok to make enough bad changes to not at least be "fine". But "fine" is subjective. That growth trajectory is nowhere near as impressive these days.
If that’s not doing fine, what the hell is?
Apple, on the other hand has 2 billion active devices that people paid money for and are on a replacement cycle. Somehow that is only worth twice what a Facebook account is worth in terms of market cap.
One user can own multiple devices. My friend owns an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods as well.
Also, the timeframes are different. Apple consider any device which pinged one of their services within the last 90 days to be active. So it's approximately 1 month vs 3 months in terms of the window of measurement. And we're not even getting into the possibility of devices pinging their services that aren't in true active usage, i.e. an iPad that's just charged and connected to WiFi but not actually used.
Of course, that's still extremely impressive from Apple! It's an amazing achievement which the market has obviously rewarded. But it's very much apples to oranges here. Those two statistics can't be directly compared because they represent different measurements over different periods of time.
The comparison is between 2 billion physical devices that cost real money to buy and replace with 3 billion entries in a users table with a datestamp.
Of course we can make that comparison.
You can grow "users" without actually growing users, by having the same people have multiple accounts.
By what metric?
OP has no idea what they are talking about. Growth is massive.
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
In a lot of those growing markets, Facebook is the main (or only) way of having a web presence for their business. WhatsApp is similarly the main way to have IM support, as well.
I googled “twitter active users per year” and similar revenue charts and they don’t support this claim. There is a slight down since 2021, but that was when everyone was locked up and had whole days to speak. Nasdaq has basically the same /\ profile in 2019-2023 range. Taking the whole economy into account, twitter is fine.
Are you sure it’s not just “I left the ship and wish it to sink”? Not a musk fan either, but statements like this feel rather wishful.
https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1753804822573109393
None of the numbers you're going to see since the purchase are reliable, given that the company is now private and unlikely to release anything substantive.
Most businesses would literally kill for the kind of "slowly sinking ship" where they're making tons of profits from their decades-old primary business that is somehow even more popular now than it was when it was actually cool.
So what you’re seeing is a good content, but worth considering when you get shown policy-charged content - when and why is this in my feed.
Edit - or, to put it more simply, you should try to answer the second part of your comment - why is a state-sponsored social media company the only one showing me this right now?
I think TikToks initial succes was mainly due to a "fair" feed with no algorithmic nudging.
Facebook used to be like that but somewhere around 2012 to 13 posts or articles could not go viral anymore, in the organic avalanche way it would earlier. Facebook wanted you to pay up for the reach I guess.
If TikTok nudge people they will lose their edge.
There is a lot of politics around the TK bans but one true aspect is the Natsec angle. It’s as if FB’s newsfeed was optimized for patriotism, vs ads.
But bc TK pays well and Has a office in SV… blind eye. Blows my mind that westerners work there. There’s bad jingoism and then there’s considering your role in a global power struggle directly based on technology and these companies.
Just as nudging their own youth into practicing guerrilla warfare techniques while nudging ours into questioning their gender is in line with what I’d expect from them.
To claim they don’t nudge is laughable.
Social networking hasn't influenced my point of view, but it has allowed me to access voices that I've always wanted to hear from, there was just no way to get to them before.
That's always a worthy, necessary even, consideration.
> you should try to answer the second part of your comment - why is a state-sponsored social media company the only one showing me this right now?
You may be right in this specific case, and I tend to agree - though mostly out of lack of knowlege.
But I gotta object the insinuation that private media is somehow more reliable. Every outlet has an agenda. Al Jazeera English is by far the best journalistic TV I know (disclaimer, haven't watched in a few years). Funded by the government of Qatar…
Specifically just making a claim on if you vet reliability by national security/global politics topics that we all see playing out in the news, then it’s worth considering your specific role in it as a user or tech employee of TK.
While those glued to TikTok are very offline people.
> Israel's attack on Gaza and the West Bank.
This is true in more ways than you think.
There has been an outrageous amount of censorship of the Palestinian story in most of the US media, and frankly also a lack of nuanced explanation of the dominant Israeli perspective (which is far more nuanced than the typical American perspective).
In general, I recommend the following rules for propaganda hygeine:
- If someone uses the word "terrorist" or "terrorism", subtract a point of credibility. The word is an emotionally charged label that removes clarity.
- If someone refers to the desire of preserving "stability", subtract a point of credibility. This phrasing is typically used to mislead/misdirect.
- If you discover that important information (such as the charges brought before the ICJ) is being suppressed, subtract a point of credibility. Fairly important international law developments that ought to focus the discussion on concrete issues and considerations.
- If someone does not accept the label of apartheid as having a common literal meaning and insists that the word only applies to S. Africa, subtract a point of credibility. Things like Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, etc., are part of many nations' histories. It does not do any good to pretend that these things are impossible today.
There are very credible arguments in favor of both sides in the conflict, but increasingly people seem to believe that suppressing information is the best way to make the world a better place.
Here's another: if someone gives you a list of rules that are carefully crafted to only apply to those that are against their preferred narrative, subtract a point of credibility
A few more:
- If both US political parties agree on it, it's probably a bad idea.
- Any time we are told that a foreign leader is insane or unstable, it's propaganda intended to dehumanize and discredit democratic forces in that country (even if the country is not a strict democracy).
- Logically, asymmetric conflict is going to necessitate different tactics. Don't fall for the idea that smart bombs are civilized but stones thrown are barbaric.
- Don't assume the US or its allies are the good guy. Countries make mistakes and rarely course-correct.
- The humanitarian justifications for war/conflict/killing are rarely the real story. Often there is a national interest-driven motivation, but but making it about a hard-to-disagree-with moral cause the debate about what is actually the national interest is suppressed.
- If someone tells you that it is disrespectful to question your own country or political leaders' competence or motivations, subtract several points. Democracy is a consensus mechanism, not a guarantee of consensus. Dissent is part of the recipe.
Please add more!
This is just such a childish take.
It certainly lacks eloquence compared to a tactic such as name calling...
if zuck goes after the music companies of which there's only like 3, he might win.
I won’t go in to detail but they suffered at the hands of a barbaric company which does not care about its staff or its users. People on the moderation team are SLA’d to death and most have some form of PTSD from the videos they’re subjected to.
I’d love to see Tiktok and all the other attention grabbing shitty apps die a death. But here’s the kicker… despite leaving TikTok due to the stress and anxiety working there caused her she still uses the app!
Looking at e.g. Reddit today it seems the narrative is controlled by bots. Maybe that would have been hard in 2003.
Sure today we are seeing a repeat where Pro-Israel supporters are getting pro-Palestinian newscasters fired, actors are losing their roles, people who place Palestinian flags in their linkedin bios are getting their employers harassed etc.
But with the advent of Tiktok we are at least getting an avenue to see what is happening in Palestine whereas its buried on all other platforms. Maybe its being artificially boosted but the end result is that there are mass protests in all the cities and TikTok is allowing the conversation to continue so the topic remains top of mind in peoples heads. A future president may actually be in one of those protests and Tiktok may have directly contributed to their future world view. A world view where the current power base loses out.
I was way to young at the time to have had any political conscious.
The scary part is that the war mongerers seems to hide in the closet until they collectivly see a chance to war monger. Then they come out in force and there is a window where they control the narrative (relative to their usual share of control of the narrative) until people calm down abit.
There is always this implied "I'll hit you in the face" or "when SHTF I'll shoot you" from those personality types. They are very hard to deal with.
The "narrative" difference on e.g. Reddit vs TikTok or Twitter is baloney.
Reddit is so extremely manipulated nowadays. Not just in this matter at hand regard, but in many questions it is sect like.
Well its important to learn what happened in the run up to the Iraq war since a lot of the same government officials that ran things then are still around. Its not ancient history.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicks (the section on the 2003 era explains how this band got destroyed due to their opposition to the imminent war)
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher#Politically_Incorre...
>The "narrative" difference on e.g. Reddit vs TikTok or Twitter is baloney.
Do you have any additional reasoning as to why? Without it your argument falls apart. From what I can see, the mere fact that you have constant updates flowing on TikTok vs Reddit or other platforms is what makes it stand out.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382
Only bureaucrats with an engineering mindset would stamp out a ideology by systematically putting people in camps and their kids into all day long "re-education" schools that teach people to forget their culture and try to "install" a new culture onto them.
The composting of the internet.
I think this all started with the hype around the Ninja Creami, and TikTok saw that if you got enough people on there talking about one product to the point that it drove them to sell out for months they saw their new revenue stream. But there is a difference between real organic word of mouth, and this fake TikTok Shop "eligible for commission" nonsense.
So, when you see a mess of divisive content on there, and you’re in the UK (maybe?, re: “tonnes”), the content is there for a reason perhaps. …Stoke the fires of Western users’ current inability to handle this content without some % of the viewers losing their minds and <last 6 yrs of instability>.
This has been reported on amply by Washington Post the Guardian as early as 2019.
Betteridge's Law!
[exit pedant, swinging on a vine]
So there would be a great irony that it is so effective it destroys its own userbase first.
Strategically, TikTok is intentionally sailing into a rough patch in order to launch the e-commerce play without giving an unfair advantage to big/established brands, which would crowd out the "crowd" and defeat the purpose.
I thought this was pretty obvious.
I'm about ready to divest from any technology more advanced than a 1980s terminal. Any takers for my Neo-Amish movement? On Fridays we have pancakes and on Sundays we stone ad executives.
Meanwhile, I'm on here following dudes wintering at the south pole, a captain of a container ship in the middle of the indian ocean, an orthodox rabbi in brooklyn, a physicist, a philosopher, a civic designer, and 10,000 hilarious meme makers and comedians who are remixing and lipsyncing and making incredible content that I can't even conceive of doing through a mobile interface. Most of THAT group are not famous anywhere else - their bios don't link to instagram or a management group.
Some of these videos get longer - but nothing more than 5 mins. Concentrated deep dives into a single topic. Heavy on personality but otherwise mostly Signal, not Noise.
Which is why it's also so hilarious folks in this thread rolling their eyes saying that people say that every platform gets ruined, but it never is. No, the NUMBERS go up. But the platforms have been ruined over and over and over again. None of my generation is on Facebook anymore. They are still on Instagram but exclusively to follow celebrities. There is no place in the world to just hang out and catch up with friends anymore - not a ubiquitous one anyway that we had through the 2000's. Even Reddit has lost all culture and is a ghosttown compared to what it use dto be.
I'm not saying Tiktok is that. But what Tiktok has been for the last 3 years is UNIQUE. Special. Distinctive. It's own style, it's own brand of interesting and engaging.
And this: > Then there’s the videos themselves. In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format. TikTok is even encouraging people to upload photo slideshows instead of videos altogether. On top of that, TikTok just fumbled a relationship with Universal Music Group, which pulled its music catalog off the platform and silenced any video featuring Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, and every other Universal artist.
Will absolutely ruin it, if they don't quickly pivot and turn away. I don't mean "ruin" by pure user/engagement numbers. But ruin what currently makes it special in terms of connecting humanity to one another. That will go away and not come back somewhere else.
Ironic to see that tiktok is being made worse by trying to compete with youtube. I absolutely hate youtube shorts and am annoyed to no end that I can't remove them from my youtube experience. Doubly ironic that I'm more likely to give tiktok a chance than to ever succumb to youtube's wheedling insistence that I click on their 5-second content clips.
Now I feel they have sanitized it pretty well, and the volume of creators means that each niche is overfull with middle-brow content. I think that has left little room for the truly bizarre stuff that lurks to come out into the light. It still manages to keep me stuck to the screen for hours at a time (the reason I very rarely dare to open the app at all) but I don't have the same belly laugh experience I did when I first used the app. I walk away less often thinking to myself: "what the hell just happened". Mostly it serves me pretty tame content.
I mean, this really just feels like textbook case of Enshittification [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Writing this, I've realized that TikTok hasn't made the terms for it's posts/feed obvious. Twitter has Tweets/Timeline, Facebook has Feed, I don't know what I would say to describe a post from TikTok outside of calling the video itself a 'TikTok'
I'm not sure what people mean when they say this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files (I know linking wik as a source is lame but lots of additional links here)
You can certainly argue that in this day and age what is "misinformation" has become politicized, but at the end of the day they were only requests.
That that has become a conspiracy theory is a testament to the modern right's understanding of events and facts, as seen through the lens of the media they consume.
I think every single institution that exists will have bias, so if we say having bias is isomorphic with being "a propaganda tool", then the term "propaganda tool" isn't very useful anymore, covering too much, and not what people think you are suggesting when you say the term.
I guess the interesting thing with tik-tok might be how much influence the Chinese government specifically as an entity has over it's various policies that effect what people see there; but then, I think people discount the influence the US government has over similar US companies too, from overt and more implicit pressure both -- but to literally any company operating in the USA, this isn't meant to be a "conspiracy theory" about say Facebook specifically either.
I appreciate you saying FB might indeed be similar... but generally if we say "TikTok is a Chinese propaganda tool" people think we are saying something different than "not too different from Facebook," and also something much more than "there are biases and interests of the people and organizations involved in decision-making, that necessarily effect what they do."
Which I don't know, it's not obvious to me anyway, or clear to me that the people who think it's obvious actually know what they're talking about. That there's something much more than this, in any of those cases.
It's a US-based company with insane oversight. Older people can't grasp that youth have different interests and have different political views so they call it propaganda.
Yes. Much in the same way that the IRS has oversight over a company's financial records but doesn't have much of a say in how the company carries out its business.
> What does oversight mean here by your definition?
Having access to the data, having access to the content moderation policies, as well as having legal jurisdiction over TikTok's executive team.
> Are youth always correct in their worldview and never put at odds with their own societies by external or internal propaganda tools?
Their political positions are usually a lot more extremely conservative or extremely liberal. Although some of their opinions might be formed in the shape intended by propaganda, a lot of the opinions are exclusively rebellion (see: young people drinking, smoking, whatever).
Ultimately youth on TikTok don't think Tiananmen square was a hoax or have deluded views about China's social policies. In fact they meme about China's social credit concept and would rather visit Japan or Korea. This on its own ends the idea of it being a Chinese propaganda tool -- if it really is, the Chinese are failing as miserably as the US at trying to weaponize it.
Beyond this, however, TikTok is essentially giving itself up to the full control of the US government[0] so we might be on the verge on having Twitter-esque style[1] controls.
But pretending that China is the reason that TikTok isn't enough pro-Israeli, or the reason why conservative views are making a resurgence in the younger demographics, or that it's 'dumbing down the Western world' (just as the radio, TV and video games did before) is just a mixture of old people yelling at clouds and propagandists not being able to manipulate a new generation.
It's actually funny how the same voices complaining about it now weren't complaining when TikTok was pushing covid vaccine conspiracies a couple of years ago -- it might have something to do with their viewpoint no longer being represented.
The real solution for TikTok might be to add an age limit. That is, no old people. Let kids be kids -- which is how it started when they were just singing and dancing before it was politicized. Something that republicans take issue with, of course, who want TikTok to push nationalist propaganda instead like they do on the Chinese version.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/dra...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-...
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
https://archive.is/VqSne
Longer videos pave the way for non-skippable, mid-video ads, which they can charge more for.
TikTok Shop is for taking a cut of every transaction on your "territory", like Apple is doing with the App Store. QVC for Gen Z.
The sooner people stop believing this BS about social media apps caring about "connecting people" , the sooner the reality of the business model can be made apparent to everyone.
> Social media success is a delicate balance
No it isn't. It's three things:
1. Luck / Startup x-factor: what makes these novel formats flourish to begin with, but it's short-lived: it won't sustain a platform long-term.
2. Money: what Meta have done with Instagram - pushed through by cannibalising instead of innovating by sheer power of investment
3. Inertia: why Twitter has defied all doomsayers' reports of its demise.
TikTok's current trajectory looks more like trying to ape Meta's strategy & ultimately avoid what happened to Snapchat, by abandoning the innovation that got them to where they are & instead take advantage of the power, money & inertia they currently have to sustain themselves in other ways & broaden their audience (beyond the more fickle TikTok-early-adopter-influencers).
> its ad revenue growth is slowing down
Translation: its ad revenue is growing. This is an industry that was being reported as being generally in decline across the board only a year ago - some competitors like Meta have only recently started to show growth again after losses.
According to https://usds.tiktok.com/ all US user data is on Oracle servers.
Is that still happening?