I dipped into TikTok out of morbid curiosity but found it quickly cottoned on to things I like.
On the whole I now get a mix of interesting factual content that aligns well with my taste - and a frictionless UI that I prefer to most of the alternatives.
Admittedly a fair chunk of the content is ripped from YouTube but it's a great discovery mechanism and you can later subscribe to the source.
Genuine question - have you tried it or are you going on reputation?
Not the person you're asking, but someone who couldve said the same thing as that person.
No, I haven't tried and I won't. Yes, I'm sure it has things that interest me. So what? The point is it's another one of these time sinks that profit off your need for entertainment. Ill entertaint myself, thank you.
Aside from being a time sink, the thing I'm most surprised to see on this site is that more users aren't incredibly wary of where the app is coming from. We all understand dubious data siphoning, yet so many people here are happy to put TikTok on their phone, connect to their wifi, and let it do its hoovering.
I'm fully aware and I make an informed, conscious decision. If the PLA wants to know how many videos on astrophysics and urban planning I watch then I'm fine with that.
This is such a tired retort to the point I'm trying to make. It's not about the quality of the data they're collecting, or how interesting it is. It's the vast quantities they collect, in total, I take issue with. I don't care if you agree, leave the app installed, double down and grant it all the permissions it asks for, whatever. The high-level version of this is that I'm just not ok with the amount of data being collected, and the party that's collecting it, regardless of what that data actually is.
Your argument is the same as "I have nothing to hide, who cares if the government tracks my face everywhere I go and listens to everything I do?" Bad argument, focused too narrowly on personal experience.
> This is such a tired retort to the point I'm trying to make.
Is "tired" here a less polite way to say "you're not the first person to say this and I disagree"? I'm trying to understand whether I need to feel insulted here or not.
> I don't care if you agree
Well you kinda do or else you wouldn't have come back four days later to post this.
> I'm just not ok with the amount of data being collected, and the party that's collecting it, regardless of what that data actually is.
Which strikes me as a fiercely absolutist policy - possibly to the point of being irrational. I actual presume you do care about the amount and type of data collection or else you'd be raging at - I dunno - the national park service tracking aggregate visitor counts. So I'm going to presume that this is a rhetorical flourish, rather than a statement I'm meant to take literally.
The trouble with rhetorical flourishes it that it leaves me in the dark about what you actually do mean and it's therefore hard to respond.
> Your argument is the same as "I have nothing to hide, who cares if the government tracks my face everywhere I go and listens to everything I do?"
No, it's a polite way of saying "this is a low effort, poorly thought out way of hand waving valid concerns," which I would now extend to this comment. Your point isn't remarkably different, or even different in any substantive way.
Everyone's consumer goods are made in China, so why would they care that their social media site is made there? We get our phones, computers, peripherals, cameras, the entire stack of hardware from there, why would end users draw the line at software? End users know, but unfortunately don't care about telemetry.
If TikTok actually declines or dies, it's not going to be because of where the software is made.
The physical objects manufactured in China aren't at risk of subliminally or overtly manipulating your media consumption for propaganda purposes though.
A social media algorithm is a much scarier thing than an inert object, and one controlled by a totalitarian enemy government even moreso.
That's really not the point I'm making at all. You're talking about hardware, which is a whole other conversation about quality. I'm talking about software, data collection, "listening," etc.
We all live with some uncomfortable amount of dissonance on who's collecting our data. I personally take great issue with just opening the door to my life to China by installing TikTok. I don't have other social media (not interested in a semantics debate about what constitutes social media, my purpose in saying this is that I try to avoid data-hoovers in general), but I'm not perfect at avoiding unwanted data collection. I just don't see a need to make it so easy.
So you don't watch any media? TV? Documentaries? I'm not clear what distinction you're making between "good" media and "bad" media. I've never been geek shamed on watching Tom Scott before.
I watch things that I search for based on questions that I ask myself. I don't watch things based on some platform, publisher, media personality, etc, going "look at this aren't you curious?"
If you feel that whatever you're doing is insufficient, you depend only on yourself to change. If not, then I guess we're both happy with ourselves :-)
You're underselling the problem which is that they profit off your addiction. Time you could be spending creating art, exercising, or learning a useful skill is instead spent watching an endless stream of junk videos hand-picked for you by the Chinese government.
Yes, addiction, that's exactly what I had in mind. YouTube, Tok Tok etc, train your brain for craving satisfaction in short bursts and move on to something else. Even the "smart intellectual geeky" content is consumed for 20 minutes, you get satisfied, and then move on with your day/media consumption, and never make the effort to deepen your understanding.
I stopped using that word on HN because whenever I suggest that "screens are addictive" I get down voted (and it's not as much that it bothers me to lose imaginary points, it's that then it gets hidden and people don't get to see it, at which point I'm just yelling into the vacuum).
Not who you asked but one reason I dislike this kind of highly curated media is that it obscures the possibility of being exposed to something completely different. I used to enjoy meandering through the library stacks and coming across some cool book that I never would have found otherwise. Highly curated media is the opposite of that experience; it makes this kind of happenstance virtually impossible.
By “completely different” I mean something that I haven’t encountered before. Something completely outside of and unrelated to my current interests. The old internet allowed for this kind of random discovery. The problem with curated content is that if you do manage to find something new and different, the algorithm will then start serving you related things. There’s no way to truly “wander the stacks” as it will keep showing similar and related content.
I don't know how anyone can enjoy using a platform that throws 20 TikTok shop videos in your face and these "influencers" acting like awful QVC spokespeople of cheap, offshore products.
That, but also how fake it is and has been for years now. I feel bad for all those influencers who fell off or can only do one thing because they created a "niche" and are known for doing that one thing.
Also how sad it is that it ruined many families because fame got in the way of values.
The opposite could probably be said, but as Carl Sagan warned, this medium has done more harm than helped us.
> The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
> The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
I don't have hard evidence but I feel like the uprise of the advertisement monetization model is much to blame for this.
Sagan said that a long time ago. I don't see why this generation's vapid crap is worse than my generation's vapid crap.
We were the ones who turned politics into a 24 hour sports competition. If the kids are watching shitty dances and worse AI generated nihilist absurdism, I consider that a leg up on the permanent "five minutes hate" that takes up too much of the older generation's entertainment.
We managed to survive what Sagan warned about and I bet they will too.
The beginning of the longer quote sets the context that he was speaking in the future of his children and grandchildren’s generation. I did not include that here as it wasn’t as relevant.
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
TikTok is perpetual never ending trash filled with AI generated garbage.
It doesn't have any value at all and I'm happy to see it's finally waning, perhaps the next generation (Alpha, Beta or whatever) will look at TikTok and cringe hard and avoid it.
“Next” generations tend to look at previous gen pop culture and hate it, then they fall into their own generational pop culture bubble of their own that the next generation will despise in turn. It happened to MySpace and it’s happening with Facebook/Twitter, it’ll happen with TikTok and whatever comes after it. Social media is not the first thing that comes and goes in cycles and it won’t be the last.
This article feels like some combination of wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. TikTok, for better or worse, is definitely not on the decline. As this article points out, it is still growing its user base, albeit at a slightly lower rate. In other words, TikTok is reaching diminishing returns at scale. Not quite the same thing as decline.
I refuse to use any social media like Tiktok, Insta, FB as I know how bad it is for my brain. The younger generation doesn't seem to get this yet. I'll stick to my highly curated X whereby I know I will learn something new when I open it.
I have found X/Twitter to be way more insular and less educational than TikTok, personally. TikTok has a lot of dumb trendy stuff, but also some really interesting niche channels.
I don't even use TikTok and I know this is a ridiculously naive take.
TikTok is where all of the content is. Its algorithm is designed to optimize for exactly what you want to see. That's why they're the biggest.
If you're into 3D zbrush art, that's what you're getting. If you like hardware hacking, HDR birdwatching, stem cell culturing, and Blender node exploring, guess what? You're getting that content.
Do you want to learn everything there is to know about kettlebells? You're in luck.
All of the creators, many of the best, are on there putting great stuff out all day.
You're sleeping at the wheel if you think everyone is equally logging in and just doomscrolling through dance videos.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are all fine but I've never felt any desire to explore them. For me, TikTok has been genuinely delightful and interesting to scroll through. I don't think the TikTok algorithm can quite keep up with my diverse interests (absurdist humor, dance, memes, antique machinery, home improvement, wind turbine and power transmission, cats, etc.), but it has still done a great job of showing me interesting, educational, and emotional (e.g. https://www.tiktok.com/@pinupandpigeons/video/71582333179874...) things. It definitely displays too many "Live" and "Shop" videos in my feed for my liking, but it also has the most prominent anti-influencer and anti-consumer content I've seen on social networks. TikTok has really changed my thinking about the youngest generation. Before I probably saw the youngest generation as spoiled brats who are ruining everything. Now I see there there plenty of interesting, creative, dedicated, and hard working young people who are probably the best hope for saving things from the spoiled geriatric ruling class that is too immature and selfish to not hoard and consume everything they can, future generations be damned.
Of the content creators I watch the women seems to talk a lot about Tiktok memes but none of the men has even mentioned anything from Tiktok. So I think 30+ male nerds basically don't use Tiktok, but women do.
You don't get a good picture of how many in a group uses tiktok by looking at tiktok but looking at them in other places and seeing how many of them there uses tiktok. You can find nerds at instagram as well but that doesn't mean nerds in general are into instagram.
Maybe however you must remember there are magnitudes more people consuming content (lurkers) then are creating content on social media sites like TikTok, Reddit, etc. For example someone like cryptoknight [1] has over 38,000 followers and a million likes, majority of which are probably not women under the age of 25 and aren't nerdy.
38k followers is a really small creator. That doesn't really convince me there are lots of Nerds at tiktok, there are tons of nerdy channels at youtube with millions of subscribers.
Looked up some, yeah some of them also uploads to tiktok apparently but get more than 10x more views on youtube than tiktok.
Shadiversity for example produces content that you would think fits tiktok, but he gets an order of magnitude more views and subscribers on youtube than tiktok. Same goes for the other channels I checked. It makes sense for them to upload on tiktok as well since it is cheap to hire an editor for it, but I don't see them focusing on tiktok since the market for tiktok nerd videos seems to be much smaller.
If you look at channels that are a bit smaller, like half a million subscribers, they don't seem to even bother with tiktok, don't think it is worth it then to even have an editor fix it for that format.
So to me this looks a lot like "nerds aren't on tiktok", sure some big channels also uploads there but it doesn't look like they consume tiktok content.
I'm not arguing that there are more nerd creators on TikTok than youtube or which platform they get more views on. I am just saying that they exist and are a significant portion of the TikTok user base. So much so my FYP is filled with such creators.
If someone like marcus hutchins can get a half million followers or cryptoknight can get a million likes, there must be a significant number of consumers for their content.
You are now arguing semantics, the topic is whether 30+ nerds migrated to tiktok, we can from this discussion say that they overwhelmingly stayed on youtube unlike the other demographics discussed. A group having an order of magnitude less representation on one platform is "basically doesn't use" to me, it is hard to find more skewed population choice data than that.
The gender skew on steam is larger, but not much larger, and that is enough that you basically don't want to release on steam with a game made for women, instead you target mobile or similar because your target demographic basically isn't found at steam.
> the topic is whether 30+ nerds migrated to TikTok, we can from this discussion say that they overwhelmingly stayed on YouTube unlike the other demographics discussed.
That maybe what you're discussing but I made no such claim. The two examples I used aren't even youtubers. Cryptoknight only post on TikTok and Marcus only has 88k subs on YouTube compared to his almost half million on TikTok. Professional YouTubers will never migrate from YouTube to TikTok, its impossible to make a living with TikTok's creator fund.
For those who didn't get past the title, most of this article is speculation; numerically, TikTok has only experienced slower user growth (so a negative second derivative):
> [T]here’s also the sharp slowdown in user growth over the past year
Which means that it's still growing. But apparently the app is getting worse, and more monetized.
According to every article on social media every platform is dying simultaneously: Facebook is dying, Twitter is dying, TikTok is dying. Is Reddit dying? Probably in the next few days as it IPOs!
Tumblr has been dying for a whole decade and I bet most people don't even know LiveJournal still exists.
Yes, now that it is number one in these categories it is "mature" and its growth rate as not as fast as it was as it was climbing to these numbers. I don't see how being #1 in the world for app downloads and sales means it is "in decline".
The amount of time they spent in the third paragraph linking to sources should’ve justified quoting at least some of the numbers within those links to help bolster their argument.
It is actually astounding how many people, particularly young women, that stream on TikTok live present phenotypes of fetal alcohol syndrome. I don’t know if it’s modern eyebrow grooming habits and filters accentuating the look or what, but there are so many widely spaced eyes and smooth upper lips on there. Thick regional accents and simple vocabularies, but lots of people throwing attention at them. It’s a strange place to visit.
TikTok is a propaganda machine of the Chinese government, so I go all conspiratorial with all of that.
For example, my answer would be "because the CCP wants to (among other things) emphasize the worst of America, so the algorithm boosts FAS trailer trash". Is that actually true? Can we know? Does it matter? Either way, it's hilarious.
What I find interesting is that the Chinese Tiktok (Douyin) is somehow more engaging than the Western version. Even though both have their share of memes and dance videos, Douyin is more fun to scroll through (even if you don't speak Chinese). But maybe that's just because I don't speak Chinese, so Douyin seems more interesting to me. Who knows. :D
There is an argument that even if you hate TikTok, or Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever, you should not cheer on their demise, because whatever comes after them will be worse. That is, they will be a more effective form of whatever attention eating mechanism the previous one relied on to generate ad revenue for funders. The history of the internet provides many examples of this. But the cost of switching away from the incumbent is sometimes enough to keep these upstart apps from becoming established in the first place. So if you have accepted the fact that our culture won't suddenly go back to not abusing social social media when one of these services shut down, then we who hate them might want the current cast of social media villains to stick around as long as possible.
How is it on decline when Instagram forces you to watch reels of people you don't even follow and YouTube try to force you to watch shorts ever chance they got?
Even if TikTok ceases to exist it has contaminated every other major platform
One thing I find interesting about TikTok (and potentially modern algorithm-driven social medias) is the region-locking. Growing up I was fascinated by the fact I could force people across the ocean to read my broken English, and that was basically how I learned English. Nowadays a lot of English vocabulary has invaded my language in gaming and tech circles, while apps like TikTok have their recommendation algorithms designed with strong regional bias and no way of opting out of that apparently. It's hard for me to tell if TikTok is really the way Americans say it is when, if I try to use TikTok, what I will end up seeing will be in literally a different language.
I hope this doesn't catch on. It makes the world wide web feel a lot less world wide.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadThey're the perfect combination of addicting and entirely useless.
On the whole I now get a mix of interesting factual content that aligns well with my taste - and a frictionless UI that I prefer to most of the alternatives.
Admittedly a fair chunk of the content is ripped from YouTube but it's a great discovery mechanism and you can later subscribe to the source.
Genuine question - have you tried it or are you going on reputation?
No, I haven't tried and I won't. Yes, I'm sure it has things that interest me. So what? The point is it's another one of these time sinks that profit off your need for entertainment. Ill entertaint myself, thank you.
Your argument is the same as "I have nothing to hide, who cares if the government tracks my face everywhere I go and listens to everything I do?" Bad argument, focused too narrowly on personal experience.
Is "tired" here a less polite way to say "you're not the first person to say this and I disagree"? I'm trying to understand whether I need to feel insulted here or not.
> I don't care if you agree
Well you kinda do or else you wouldn't have come back four days later to post this.
> I'm just not ok with the amount of data being collected, and the party that's collecting it, regardless of what that data actually is.
Which strikes me as a fiercely absolutist policy - possibly to the point of being irrational. I actual presume you do care about the amount and type of data collection or else you'd be raging at - I dunno - the national park service tracking aggregate visitor counts. So I'm going to presume that this is a rhetorical flourish, rather than a statement I'm meant to take literally.
The trouble with rhetorical flourishes it that it leaves me in the dark about what you actually do mean and it's therefore hard to respond.
> Your argument is the same as "I have nothing to hide, who cares if the government tracks my face everywhere I go and listens to everything I do?"
No. My argument is remarkably different to that.
If TikTok actually declines or dies, it's not going to be because of where the software is made.
A social media algorithm is a much scarier thing than an inert object, and one controlled by a totalitarian enemy government even moreso.
We all live with some uncomfortable amount of dissonance on who's collecting our data. I personally take great issue with just opening the door to my life to China by installing TikTok. I don't have other social media (not interested in a semantics debate about what constitutes social media, my purpose in saying this is that I try to avoid data-hoovers in general), but I'm not perfect at avoiding unwanted data collection. I just don't see a need to make it so easy.
So you don't watch any media? TV? Documentaries? I'm not clear what distinction you're making between "good" media and "bad" media. I've never been geek shamed on watching Tom Scott before.
I stopped using that word on HN because whenever I suggest that "screens are addictive" I get down voted (and it's not as much that it bothers me to lose imaginary points, it's that then it gets hidden and people don't get to see it, at which point I'm just yelling into the vacuum).
You know - after all that exercise, skill learning and art creating...
I suppose it rests on what is meant by "completely different" but I've been relatively satisfied by the variety.
That, but also how fake it is and has been for years now. I feel bad for all those influencers who fell off or can only do one thing because they created a "niche" and are known for doing that one thing.
Also how sad it is that it ruined many families because fame got in the way of values.
The opposite could probably be said, but as Carl Sagan warned, this medium has done more harm than helped us.
> The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
I don't have hard evidence but I feel like the uprise of the advertisement monetization model is much to blame for this.
We were the ones who turned politics into a 24 hour sports competition. If the kids are watching shitty dances and worse AI generated nihilist absurdism, I consider that a leg up on the permanent "five minutes hate" that takes up too much of the older generation's entertainment.
We managed to survive what Sagan warned about and I bet they will too.
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
It doesn't have any value at all and I'm happy to see it's finally waning, perhaps the next generation (Alpha, Beta or whatever) will look at TikTok and cringe hard and avoid it.
(Is what I think they’d say :)
If you can't moderate yourself then it's good you're not on those platforms, I have them and only use them when I poop.
TikTok is where all of the content is. Its algorithm is designed to optimize for exactly what you want to see. That's why they're the biggest.
If you're into 3D zbrush art, that's what you're getting. If you like hardware hacking, HDR birdwatching, stem cell culturing, and Blender node exploring, guess what? You're getting that content.
Do you want to learn everything there is to know about kettlebells? You're in luck.
All of the creators, many of the best, are on there putting great stuff out all day.
You're sleeping at the wheel if you think everyone is equally logging in and just doomscrolling through dance videos.
Your FYP must be very different than my mine. My FYP is filled with 30+ male nerds, many of whom have entire rooms dedicated to TMNT toys.
TMNT = Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@cryptoknightus
which one of those aren't on TikTok?
Shadiversity for example produces content that you would think fits tiktok, but he gets an order of magnitude more views and subscribers on youtube than tiktok. Same goes for the other channels I checked. It makes sense for them to upload on tiktok as well since it is cheap to hire an editor for it, but I don't see them focusing on tiktok since the market for tiktok nerd videos seems to be much smaller.
If you look at channels that are a bit smaller, like half a million subscribers, they don't seem to even bother with tiktok, don't think it is worth it then to even have an editor fix it for that format.
So to me this looks a lot like "nerds aren't on tiktok", sure some big channels also uploads there but it doesn't look like they consume tiktok content.
If someone like marcus hutchins can get a half million followers or cryptoknight can get a million likes, there must be a significant number of consumers for their content.
The gender skew on steam is larger, but not much larger, and that is enough that you basically don't want to release on steam with a game made for women, instead you target mobile or similar because your target demographic basically isn't found at steam.
That maybe what you're discussing but I made no such claim. The two examples I used aren't even youtubers. Cryptoknight only post on TikTok and Marcus only has 88k subs on YouTube compared to his almost half million on TikTok. Professional YouTubers will never migrate from YouTube to TikTok, its impossible to make a living with TikTok's creator fund.
> [T]here’s also the sharp slowdown in user growth over the past year
Which means that it's still growing. But apparently the app is getting worse, and more monetized.
> TikTok is finally concave down
Tumblr has been dying for a whole decade and I bet most people don't even know LiveJournal still exists.
Yes, now that it is number one in these categories it is "mature" and its growth rate as not as fast as it was as it was climbing to these numbers. I don't see how being #1 in the world for app downloads and sales means it is "in decline".
For example, my answer would be "because the CCP wants to (among other things) emphasize the worst of America, so the algorithm boosts FAS trailer trash". Is that actually true? Can we know? Does it matter? Either way, it's hilarious.
Even if TikTok ceases to exist it has contaminated every other major platform
I hope this doesn't catch on. It makes the world wide web feel a lot less world wide.