So I used a VPN to go to a different country and... I still get the "Tiktok banned" message, which is a little surprisingly honestly. I guess Tiktok have done this on an account basis rather than strictly GeoIP.
The "learn more" link tells you that you can still download your data. I'm not sure how. Website maybe? Because the app only has "learn more" and "close app" as options. Interestingly the fyp still loads and you see a video in the background.
I do think it'll come back this week but it's not clear what the legal mechanism is. Since the ban has gone into effect the extension in the law doesn't seem to apply anymore. This would then seem to require Congressional action and there doesn't seem to be much appetite for that but maybe that's because Republicans in Congress want to give credit for saving Tiktok to Trump when he becomes president on Monday.
Another option being talked about is nonenforcement by the Department of Justice. Some dismiss this by saying "the DoJ can change their mind" but that's not strictly true. Defendants in a case can rely on statements by prosecutors. It's a valid defense. If the Attorney-General makes an official statement saying "we will not prosecute Amazon or Google or Tiktok for 90 days (or whatever) while we work this out", that's absolutely a legal defense should the DoJ ever change their mind.
Basically, this is now a shakedown as some Trump allies will seek forcibly buy Tiktok or at least a large stake in it as a price for its continued operation in the US. It's unclear if Tiktok will acquiesce to this.
Remember though, Bytedance has significant US investors so there are conflicting forces at play here.
Is this a big surprise? The law banning it was rooted in national security, presumably because of location tracking. Them knowing where users are was kind of the problem…
Of course anyone who wanted to, including the Chinese, could just buy that exact data from data brokers in the US. It's readily available.[0] Nobody really believes this was about data.
I think they go by your SIM information or at least that's how they've done it for other regions. Try turning off your eSIM or taking your SIM card out.
I wonder what new and incredible things American teens will learn about themselves and life tomorrow now that their phones are boring. Too bad this probably ends Monday.
It is also weird that a few days ago in the YouTube non official SoaceX channel with millions of subscribers, an artificial
Elon Musk asked people to send cryptocurrencies to an address. This was the biggest scam at scale in realtime that I experienced.
I’ve been getting a lot of garbage grade YouTube ads too, like a video version of the crude weight loss drawing banner ads that ookla used to serve. I wonder if we’re being punished for using adblockers. Or are you saying the actual video was a scam?
>YouTube non official SoaceX channel with millions of subscribers
This is a 50/50 split between YT and SpaceX on the problem.
That spaceX does not broadcast it live on YT leaves an opening for the scammers to get a popular channel up.
Now, the scammer channels you see are what happens when an actual big name channel with a lot of followers gets hacked, all the old videos deleted, then they start that feed of the launch and turn it to a bitcoin scam at/right after the launch part.
It’s worth noting that SpaceX has the freedom to choose not to broadcast on YouTube. However, YouTube bears significant responsibility for addressing scams on a large scale. This isn’t about nitpicking a minor video but about taking action against the platform’s top content of the day when it involves scams.
SpaceX does have the freedom to choose, but as they say, freedom isn't free and comes with costs. In this case the cost is people that are interested in their launches getting scammed.
It's also difficult on the YT side. Users are 'free' to change their channel name. You are also 'free'ish to broadcast the SpaceX stream, as many other non-bitcoin channels do it. It's really the near end of the broadcast where the scam it self comes in.
This said, YT does need to put a special flag in for channel names like SpaceX and do an immediate check or put some kind of very long delay in particular channel name changes.
What you’re essentially saying about SpaceX is akin to arguing that if you’re free to choose not to carry a gun, you lose the ability to defend yourself against asassins, turning the victim into the responsible.
The 170 million users of this digital crack / cocaine platform has now got their supply cut off and its users are desperately running for the next hit. Rednote "Xiaohongshu" appears to be where they are going to.
It is also a test for "Rednote" and if they grow extremely fast in the next 90 days then that will be another ban target. But this is all temporary and they will run back to TikTok again.
But again 170 million users just had their crack / cocaine supply cut off. Now is the time for them to reflect and cure their addiction.
the world would be an infinitely better place if those 170 million people were capable of that. unfortunately, i think, by virtue of consuming short form content in 2025, they are beyond help.
This'll be a pretty interesting psychological experiment. Tomorrow a whole lot of addicted people are going to be experiencing withdrawals at the same time. I have to assume nothing major will come of it, but still, there's not too many instances of this occurring in society, right?
I do think this is one possible outcome. I didn't use TikTok (nor do I use reels or shorts), so I don't really feel educated enough to be as confident as you.
I was browsing r/TikTok and the comments there certainly don't seem to imply that everyone is eager/interested in going to reels/shorts. I hardly even see those platforms mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i4p6s0/rip/ but it could just be sampling bias since I'm reading Reddit comments rather than looking for discussions on YouTube/Instagram.
Still, it takes time to habituate to a new app's UI and culture. Even if people are willing and able to shift to a new platform I think there will be a lot of shared frustration in the short term.
Opinions on Reddit and HN are almost always from the 5% most engaged, most online of any subgroup. These are not regular people. Is every software developer you know represented by the opinions that get upvoted on HN? Thankfully, no. Similarly the kind of people posting to /r/tiktok aren’t your regular TikTok user by a long shot.
They’re going to need their next fix from somewhere so they’ll move pretty quickly… they may complain for a bit but a junkie needs their drugs regardless of the source and quality
To borrow a Tiktok meme... tell me you don't use Tiktok without telling me you don't use Tiktok. This seems like such a surface-level comment from somebody with no familiarity with the platform. People love Tiktok. People on Tiktok hate Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts, for many reasons. Examples:
- IG Reels are limited to 90 seconds compared to 3 or 10 minutes on TT;
- Youtube Shorts can now be up to 3 minutes but that's relatively new (October 2024 IIRC);
- Tiktok moentization is better than these other two platforms, both in terms of ad revenue but more importantly, the Tiktok Shop;
- The comments on Tiktok are truly a league above IG or YT. The latter two are just full of random drivel and vitriol;
- The recommendation algorithm for scrolling on TT is miles ahead of either platform;
- Tiktok is the only platform where people went there for short-form videos. They're native to the platform whereas they were bolted on to both IG and YT as an afterthought, a real "me too" Tiktok response. And they don't quite fit. The user experience on Tiktok is so much better than IG or YT.
- A huge chunk of Reels and Shorts content is simply reposted Tiktoks.
Sundar and Mark may think they'll simply gain Tiktok's user base. I honestly don't see that happening. I'm sure there'll be an uptick in YT and IG but now 170M MAU worth.
- you can't seek in a video either, you just have to watch the whole thing over
- reels interrupts your experience with awful ads every 2-3 swipes
- YT shorts probably has awful ads too, I haven't tried it
The time limit is probably going to be the biggest issue for YT and reels, but the ergonomics of both are so awful that I can't use them for more than a few minutes. I could scroll TikTok until the little video about scrolling too long came up (an hour I think).
that's likely the largest reason it went through. If you think US social networking companies weren't pushing the ban for financial reasons, you're just being silly.
Of course I read that and know the arguments, I'm not an idiot.
But I see through it because once again, I'm not an idiot.
When far more sensitive social media apps like Grindr were sold to Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd, nobody went crazy because it didn't threaten FAANG.
There's many swiping and dating apps owned by chinese firms. You also have chinese capital firms being the primary investor in cloud and photo sharing apps. Plenty of sensitive stuff going through the spindly fingers of the shifty orientals without a peep - for like decades.
There's even Chinese finance apps like WeBull that hold things as sensitive as American's retirement accounts. Apparently also not a problem.
People have Wyze doorbell cameras and TCL smartTVs and Eufy security cameras. They have TP-Link routers and Hisense computer monitors. Chinese cameras, WiFi, and microphones are everywhere in the modern home.
But once something came around that was a plausible competitive threat to FAANG then all these reasons just materialize and get applied to that thing specifically.
I mean seriously. Give me a break.
We like to look back 100 years ago at protectionism and racism and tell ourselves that we were dumber back then and wouldn't fall for it now.
My read on the situation is that this is the beginning of clamping down on _all_ (or most) of this. Also important to note the difference between racism and national security. The notion isn't "wacky chinese people ooh so mysterious so sneky", it's that the government isn't the US's ally and has (valid) reasons to want to reduce the US's grip on the global stage.
It's not (just) that it poses an economic threat to one of the biggest US companies (which as you said, I'm sure plays a big part in why it's suddenly relevant), but that it allows a government-influenced foreign media channel to influence policy indirectly by means of mass dissemination.
As for why now and not before, it's because of how apparent the possible effects are now that there's a very direct and widely spread channel that can pump OUT information, which is vastly more effective and obvious than passive surveillance through cameras or other hardware. (Also cybersecurity people have been calling out this sort of stuff for hardware since time immemorial)
My main gripe is actually a neoliberal sympathy (something I usually don't have).
The framework is progress moves fastest with a global leveling and elimination of friction between markets.
Fundamentally I see this as American companies using government cheat codes instead of sharpening their game, just like with the Chinese electric cars 100% tax.
It stems from my critique of neoliberalism, the failure to invest in foundational societal systems that give an affordance to such positioning: education, mass transit, health care, maternity leave, preschool funding, scholastic enrichment, the stuff that most of Asia is great at we're lousy at.
Chinese people aren't like genetically superior, they just spent the past 50 years investing in their people instead of taking things away and fighting stupid wars.
And these are the chickens coming home to roost just like they did for Hungary, the UK, and Spain.
We've been fucking up for decades and racism isn't going to fix it.
> As for why now and not before, it's because of how apparent the possible effects are now that there's a very direct and widely spread channel that can pump OUT information, which is vastly more effective and obvious than passive surveillance through cameras or other hardware.
This. TT's US popularity plus its fully algorithmic approach to content selection makes it potentially one of the most effective mass influence systems ever. People are easily influenced - especially young people - and the root of that being in China is a clear risk to US sovereignty.
I mean, look at what Xi and his allies would like to see happening in the US, and look at what's happening in the US today. Coincidence?
> Most people will just use Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts. They’re identical
You’re being downvoted. But you’re correct. The vocal minority inflames about this are mostly ideologically offended, based on the calls and letters I’m hearing both blue and red electeds receive.
“Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.”
You're a biased party because you've canvased for the bill and I think it's good to call your stake in the matter out.
If it were this simple then Rep Ro Khanna wouldn't still be posting about TikTok. As far as what happens, as with everything else, we'll see. There's a million variables and Hacker ``Social Media was tantamount to the Fall of Man'' News is not the place I'm expecting particularly fruitful, unbiased analysis.
> You're a biased party because you've canvased for the bill
Eh, I canvassed for privacy bills and that was a total disaster. I believe in the TikTok ban, but I’m not passionate about it.
> then Rep Ro Khanna wouldn't still be posting about TikTok
If I were advising Ro I would absolutely insist he tweet about it. Particularly off cycle. Anyone in Silicon Valley or a district with rich libertarians, for that matter.
Ro Khanna doesn't represent the majority of rich libertarian types who would be in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, and Saratoga. The rest of Silicon Valley tends to be suburban, upper class tech workers with large immigrant populations who are only moderately likely to have libertarian views.
> rest of Silicon Valley tends to be suburban, upper class tech workers with large immigrant populations who are only moderately likely to have libertarian views
And very likely to not be paying attention to him right now to the degree they’ll remember anything come election. Not for tangential issues. Donors, on the other hand, can give now.
They are identical in the same way that my Hacker News and Facebook are identical. They are both places where people post stuff and comment on stuff but the community in each is very different.
If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?
Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?
Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?
100%. I used to love meetups in sf via meetup back in the day, really genuine people wanting to learn new things at the time. When that platform collapsed, it basically wasn’t replaced at all.
Same thing could be said of the academic side of Twitter. It’s now fragmented across Twitter, Bluesky, mastodon, and the level is discussion is very diminished
It depends on what content you watch on TikTok. Many comedy content creators on TikTok have identical, mirrored copies of their content on Instagram (an example is Leenda Dong, who has been very popular on both TikTok and Instagram).
This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/
So I have a relatively large extended family covering a wide age range and we talk pretty frequently in a shared SMS group - most of them have noted the ban with a passing level of irritation but nobody's "freaking out" like if you lost access to a platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Discord that's more oriented around communication rather than consumption.
I understand that people spend a lot of time doomscrolling on it, but even with millions of daily users the optimistic side of me really wants to believe that it won't affect anyone's mental health in any measurable way.
I feel like I see so much negative, anti-America news I am not sure what propaganda you are even talking about. It's all over Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. I would say Reels is suspiciously missing unless you subscribe to people directly.
How old are you? The younger generation grew up post 9/11, post the great recession, post the COVID lockdowns. There has never been a time of economic stability. Combine that with being informed of world events at lightning speed, Its naturally going to lead to pessimism.
That the world isn't a utopian place and economic downturns happen? That was also true in the 20th century. The one with 2 world wars and a cold war between nuclear powers.
Yeah well the unfortunate truth is this pessimist generation saw their parents buy a house and build wealth with a nickel, a piece of bubblegum, and a handshake so your argument will fall on deaf ears.
There won't really be a noticeable effect IMO. It was banned in India a few years ago, everyone pretty much instantly moved to reels/youtube shorts. I don't know how creators managed, but the consumption just moved to another app.
Nothing specific to TikTok either. PUBG mobile was also banned here around the same time, and people just moved to Call of Duty mobile.
Well, in India people are used to authoritarian government banning random online stuff. Or shutting the entire Internet down for days
This is the first largely used anything online the government has banned, and I'm personally still upset it even got this far. The internet was supposed to be free speech incarnate, and banning apps and websites for Americans on it, isn't something I honestly thought I'd ever see
From the POV of the users it doesn't really make any difference whether the government bannd tiktok, vine went bankrupt, google decided wave was not worth it or any other reason a service becomes unavailable. They will cope by moving to a different service or changing their consumption habits
This is silly. It's like a TV channel going off the air. People who need to advertise will use other available channels (Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, etc.) instead.
> those people are probably concerned about their future
As they should be, because they stupidly made their lives dependent on a single platform that anyone with a brain could see was likely to run into trouble sooner rather than later.
The lesson for the is: don't put your eggs in one basket.
Your response is very unempathetic. I am not a "content creator," and hn is the closest thing I use to social media, until TikTok a year or more ago. I won't be following anyone anywhere; I'm not on those platforms.
I listened to the final, farewell videos of several people. Some have leveraged TikTok on other platforms, but for a great many, TikTok was the only platform that let them reach an audience.
TikTok was eating the competition because it was simply better at matching content. It is a completely different beast in that regard.
Calling people stupid who leveraged an unrivaled technology to build a community and/or a business feels particularly anti-human.
> Calling people stupid who leveraged an unrivaled technology to build a community and/or a business feels particularly anti-human.
I'm not calling them stupid for that, I'm calling them stupid because they didn't have a back up plan. Public policy should revolve around what they need or want (e.g. I'm sure some farmer somewhere could make a sob story video about how growing opium poppy has been so good for them, so heroin shouldn't be banned, but it's not about him).
I mean there is still the FSF and there are plenty of interesting projects working in the decentralizing space.
My point it's just really moved to the periphery and is a subculture (and tied to crypto, which has a lot of shady things associated with it). The mainstream tech culture seems extremely nationalistic and terrified of the possibilities of a supranational unregulated unmoderated internet
It was inevitable. Human affairs outside brief chaotic periods are typically regulated in terms of 'legitimate' authorities. The presice constitution of such authority has changed over the aeons (bloodlines, theology etc) but in the modern world has settled on the nation-state. Everything, from the exercise of power, to the financial system and granting licenses to operate is granted by the state.
In retrospect what is surprising is how long it took for such a disruptive new technology to register with existing power structures (at least explicitly).
Decentralisation projects are trying to solve the problem of massive scale without central control.
Why are we trying to build a single unified platform for everything?
Maybe the friction of having different networks/applications based on the specific subculture/group you wish to associate with keeps them all a little less mainstream? Maybe this is a good thing?
Yeah, keeping it within a subculture has its benefits. I don't mean to be overly judgmental or saying how things should be.
I just wouldn't have guessed thing would have gone this way. I'd argue that the early Google was a bit of this nerd ethos going mainstream. And the degeneration was not top down from MBAs as one would predict, but seemingly from the bottom up from a new generation of programmers that don't seem to be in that supranational mindset
Being non mainstream also does present some issues. For instance I'm in China traveling at the moment. Github isn't blocked here but the connection is very flakey and some days it doesn't load at all. But effectively all OSS dev happens on github so I'm just out of luck. It'd be cool if there was some way to torrent repos for instance, but I don't think that's a service hooked up to github in any way
There's a middle ground where you get the worst of all worlds bc the current kinds lame/oring solution works for 90% of people most of the time
Anyway, it is what it is. You don't choose the jungle you live in
> There will always be room to carve out your space and find your people.
That's definitely true. However, what changed is that you didn't really need that 20 years ago to achieve the same thing. It definitely needs more energy and time to get that. 20 years ago you had to go to bullshit sites, now the bullshit comes to you.
During and before StumbleUpon times, when I visited a random site, there was a good chance, that I could trust in the information on that, at least on some level. That's basically 0 for a while now.
Then I started to carve out that space on some selected social media. In the past 5 years, most of the smart people just simply left. Also those spaces (especially when those places became more popular) are slowly flooded with unusable information/misinformation/simple lies shared by others, even from people who I trusted.
Now, even that kind of "carving" is even more difficult, with keeping the possibility to get to know new people. For example, TikTok's, YouTube's, BlueSky's, and Twitter's algorithm are terrible. I tried to teach them with brand new accounts, but they became either very boring quickly, or couldn't filter out even very obvious misinformation.
>In 2004, Barlow reflected on his 1990s work, specifically regarding his optimism. His response was that "we all get older and smarter"
...and then he wrote Mother American Night, which is way more radical and prescient than his declaration. If you are suggesting that John Perry's work tended toward statist notions of internet control later in life, you are mistaken.
Barlow's vision is alive and well. Go to a Billy Strings show and talk to bluegrass hacker hippies that ride the rail there. Or a good traditional Grateful Dead cover band. Or go to one of the more regen/cypherpunk ethereum events (GFEL, Regens Unite, Schelling Point, etc).
John Perry has tons of fans who came up through his songs and have since connected those dots.
The cognitive dissonance is stunning. China is a closed system, corrupt, opaque, and doing business there risks being murdered if you don’t grease the right palms. Or if you greased the right palms today, but in 5 years you bribed someone who’s out of favor, could get death.
Chinese business crying foul over simply forcing an app to change owners is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
Maybe Yahoo owns TechCrunch. Perhaps they’re detecting access from China based on more than just IP address. Since Yahoo was grilled for handing over dissidents’ info to the Party they really went the extra mile to distance itself from China. They even blocked Engadget from China.
Funny enough, the very first foreign chat room that I've ever visited was hosted by Yahoo.com. Seeing people on the other side of globe talk shit feels kind magical, through that you reflect and gain idea of improvements, and it shapes your world view with a more complete (good and bad) picture.
Now days we have way more advanced self-media platforms, but each one is just an island of (both platform-imposed and self-imposed) isolation.
The irony is not lost on this oldie either. We used to truly be anonymous. No real names. No photos or videos posted online. JavaScript was limited to the wonders of DHTML. Web pages were documents. Everything felt decentralized, as was intended. I really miss those days. Ok, not the under construction animated gifs, but everything else.
The text of the bill explicitly holds app marketplaces liable for civil penalties if they distribute "foreign adversary controlled applications". So my guess is that Apple and Google are both opting to prevent distribution, even if ByteDance is willing to delist TikTok itself
A huge shame it'll be undone in 24 hours. Shouting out Trump by name in the ban message is hilarious, they are really doing their best to tie his hands.
Not bizarre at all. Trump doesn’t need to ever acknowledge that he’s the one who made that initial move. Just take credit for saving it now.
Maybe if he’s feeling himself he’ll say it was a 4D chess move to make Biden look like a bozo by being the one to ban it just for him to swoop in and undo the ban in 48 hours.
It’s impossible to gotcha a guy who pretends the past never happened — or who insists that his imagination of the past is accurate.
Exactly. That and trying to bury the lede about the Biden Administration's role in the Gaza ceasefire would send a signal to a huge chunk of voters alienated from the Democratic Party that the Republicans care about them. I'm afraid (though unsure how realistic my fear is) that a enough GenZ and anti-Gaza voters will flip to Trump if Trump keeps TikTok going that the Democrats won't be able to win in the midterms.
A lot of the anti-TikTok sentiment seems to revolve around the mores of college-educated, upper-middle-class white GenX and Millenial mores, which the Republicans have gleefully used as punching bags.
> I'm afraid (though unsure how realistic my fear is) that a enough GenZ and anti-Gaza voters will flip to Trump if Trump keeps TikTok going that the Democrats won't be able to win in the midterms.
There are about 10 million news cycles between now and the midterms, highly unlikely anyone will remember any of this by then.
Gen Z voters are also young, and young people never vote.
Democrats getting trounced by Trump/Republican Party is one of the most embarrassing things to ever happen to the Democratic Party and that is saying something.
If they lose (again) it won’t be because of TikTok. No place left to look but in the mirror.
Not too hard to understand. He sensed he had leverage based on national security concerns to dangle a sword above their heads. One of their investors donated a bunch of money to help get him re-elected, so now he will reverse his earlier position based on some other pretext. It’s all theater.
> * Dems pickup where republicans left off and ban TikTok
So why didn't Biden stop the ban? Instead he signed it and did not intervene. The problem is Biden continued and did not stop it they left Trump to reverse the ban.
It would have been better for the clean up his own mess but again they allowed Trump to "save them" and Biden would have just left TikTok for dead.
He lives to take credit for moments like this. One can only wonder what his actions will be conditional on, but it’s a virtual certainty that it will need to benefit him personally.
He said so himself. "Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.":
I'm really curious and somewhat worried about what the economic effect of this is going to be. There are a number of legitimate small businesses that saw a lot of, if not all of, their business and customer base through TikTok. Business that just will not be able to make the move to somewhere else.
I personally know musicians, actors, and artists that got a lot of work through TikTok. People who actually create things, and people who just used the app to make ends meet who probably aren't going to make ends meet this month
There are other properties to pivot to. ByteDance had the chance to sell, the access to data that even credit bureaus would want is too much for a foreign adversary.
Are there? Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are awful in comparison to the TikTok experience. Red Note is funny, but not really a replacement. Nobody is going to go to Snap.
We utilize every platform equally. TikTok organically grew at least 5x the followership for our business, meanwhile Meta gouges us for advertising to be seen at all and we see worse results and interactions there.
No, these options are not truly equal, and many businesses will suffer.
You can be fully aware of this and still have issues building up your platform elsewhere.
We utilize every platform equally. TikTok organically grew at least 5x the followership for our business, meanwhile Meta gouges us for advertising to be seen at all and we see worse results and interactions there.
The ban of TikTok will have resounding effects even if people are utilizing the alternatives. I've seen far too many people who haven't used TikTok and the alternatives for their business, or are not business owners at all, declare their opinions as facts when they have no actual experience in this space.
I'm not saying this explicitly includes you, I don't make presumptions about your experience in this space.
Regardless, the parent is correct. If you're reliant on a single platform, for whatever reasons, you're vulnerable to being fucked over by that platform. Practically speaking, how is TT being banned different than being arbitrarily banned from TT?
There's nothing inherently special about TikTok. It just happens to be the hot social media platform right now. There were plenty before it and there will be plenty after it. There will be a short period of adjustment and eventually everyone will move on to something else. People aren't going to stop listening to music or buying things.
yeah, tiktok really was (is?) something special because unlike other platforms, their algorithm really increased people's reach out beyond their own community.
youtube shorts and instagram reels seem like they do the same thing on the surface, but they're so much more focused on showing you content that they are certain you'll like, and from people in your network or people who you normally watch. they're a whole lot more focused on keeping people in their existing content silos.
It's the exact reason the platform economy has gotten such a bad rep over the years; drawing people in, taking a (disproportionate) slice of the pie, and providing no guarantees for a sustained income upon disruption.
Because TikTok is where the hip young demographic is. If they all move to say Instagram Reels en masse then Instagram will be the platform that is uniquely good for discovery among that audience.
And let's not pretend that TikTok is filled to the brim with high quality products and small businesses. Yes there may be a couple of feel good stories about a local pizza place or small band that got their big break because of TikTok, but 99.9% of the advertising there is for the same junk/scam products that are on every other influencer-driven app.
I think in 2024, Youtube changed the algo for the front page. Now there is almost always one video in the top two rows with tiny amounts of views. I think it came about when there were lots of complaints about discovery of niche/new stuff.
Lately I've noticed this more frequently with Shorts. It brings about an interesting dilemma because I know for the algorithm to work and benefit creators, people need to watch videos with few views. But I also don't want to spend my time to figure out if a video is worth watching for the benefit of the algorithm.
To your point, TikTok is filled with absolute trash.
For example, there’s a company called “Cerebrum IQ” which scams people out of hundreds of dollars for fake IQ tests. We are painfully aware of this issue because we own cerebrum.com, and we receive at least 100 furious support requests per day from people who have been charged $80.00+ for a subscription they never agreed to, and they somehow confuse us with “Cerebrum IQ”.
They get most of their users from TikTok ads.
We’ve reported them to TikTok many times, with no action taken. Meta at least restricted their ability to advertise.
Reels doesn't provide a true alternative because it's not about features and functionality it's about culture. The culture on Meta's Reels is really not it. And it's not just the user base but also the way the app is managed, and the algorithm.
TikTok's algorithm was amazing, as was the community.
You can't just recreate communities. They're alive, organic, fragile things.
Having used both exclusively for warhammer and blood bowl content the instagram algorithm has been horrible in my very anecdotal experience. It keeps pushing content I have absolutly no interest in, where as TikTok only pushes warhammer and blood bowl content + adds.
This is a typical HN "marketing is stupid" post. TikTok organic and paid are some of the best drivers of leads and sales for businesses, same like FB and Google are as well.
Handwaving TT away as "another social media platform" is like comparing Friendster or MySpace with the ad machine that FB has built. There are countless businesses that will be impacted by this.
their algorithm was inherently special imo. as well as their ad service. instagram seems like the biggest available replacement but it is so offputting for me subjectively with it's worse algorithm and increased and ill-matches ad placement.
some of the fediverse alternatives seem appealing but have less content.
i'm sure something will replace it if the ban remains in place but at the moment there's nothing nearly as good for me
My cousin worked at a place where he would stream for 8 hours a day on tiktok and sell trading card packs and other collectables. I guess it was a bit like home shopping network. But his streams were kinda goofy and playful. I didn't really understand who the customers were. I guess some people found him entertaining and liked what he was selling.
Did nothing to India with its 1B+ users when it was banned there 4 years ago. They just either used a VPN or just moved on.
While I disagree with the ban, I'd rather have a sensible fine just like the ones for Meta, Google (YouTube) and others. At one point it also might have temporarily saved someone's chronic addiction to the platform, then they'll just find another platform to get hooked on.
How? It's a law passed by Congress with support from both parties. Trump can delay the enforcement, but who knows what will happen after he is gone? Is there any guarantee that Apple, Google, or any companies providing services to TikTok won't face massive fines after Trump leaves?
Companies had 4 years, and more recently, 4 months of notice. Theres two other doom scrolling platforms to choose from.
I think people overestimate how much local businesses relied on it, sure a few were booming making "me too" content (looking at you pressure washing companies). But you will still find the goods and services you need.
And now you won't have dozens of bad temu ad's "OH I feel bad for whoever bought this vacuum yesterday because now its 57% off!!!"
I'm more concerned if our domestic economy can face that much hardship at the whims of a foriegn app. Seems like requiring divesting was the right call. Thankfully the bill includes provisions to require divestment much earlier on.
Why do you bash people who have found a way to make an income? We all know tech ain't hiring after everyone was told to 'learn to code'. What else is there to lead a middle class lifestyle?
Consider the proximity of Zuckerberg to the new admin, and the current admin, and remember that this is only market consolidation (data consolidation) around Reels and Shorts.
yup, got to clamp down on the "rise up against the billionaire class" rhetoric. Billionaires want to replace the class war rhetoric with culture war, get the people distracted with bs.
Meanwhile, the greatest grifter in the world is installing his kleptocracy cabinet, pushing more neoliberalism economic policies, tax cuts for the ultra wealthy at the cost of public programs.
Consider the proximity of Zuckerberg to the new admin
I guess you missed the nine million articles over the last few months about how the head of TikTok has been palling around with the new admin and is going to be proudly at the inauguration.
This is a pretty silly take considering the ban has been in the works for over half a decade now, with various parts of the US government and military banning TT for years now.
I'm very surprised no one took on this window of opportunity (as far as I can tell). Any new TikTok-like hip app that is not from any FAANG has a good chance of taking off
I'd like to discuss the pop-up's content. If it comes out to be that one guy, President Trump, CAN pass an executive order that effectively ignores a law that Congress passed AND the Supreme court upheld unanimously, it's a very dangerous precedent.
Do you think he should? Do you think it's a healthy exercise in the country's checks and balances for the president to create a precedent where he directs the justice department to not enforce a law when Congress has drafted it, and the Supreme Court has unanimously upheld it? Last time anything like this has happened, it created devastating national history.
I don't think this compares, but I do see where you're coming from. Whereas the present SC has unanimously upheld this TikTok law, The Court has avoided taking a position on federal non-enforcement of marijuana laws in states where it is legalized
How? The bill gives the president a power. SCOTUS has said the law is legal. Nothing compels the president to use the power. See Biden passing it along.
I mean the same exact criteria happened in Marbury v Madison and it changed the entire nation's check and balance system, lol. Many will claim for better, but the opportunity is definitely there for worse.
Not enforcing laws by executive decision happens all the time. Whenever police "crack down" on something, that means they were previously letting stuff slide.
It's definitely an edge case, but courts are not absolutely mechanical and given the context I think it can be argued either way (IANAL). Especially when the outgoing president just told his DoJ not to enforce the ban and leave it to the next guy. At any rate the delay only gives a stay of execution.
Between the Unitary Executive decision with "official acts" in July, and being able to claim democratic immunity by winning the Popular and Electoral vote - I'm trying to grasp whatever straws we have left. If this one is broken, we don't even have the "2 > 1" checks and balances between the 3 branches of government that's taught in every Govt 101 class, so it's good to spell this predicament out for people.
True, but that's a low hurdle for the new guy. More generally, its worth pointing out that the law as passed explicitly names TikTok/ByteDance, but locates a lot of authority with the president to determine 'adversary' and 'controlled' in potential future applications of the law.
Apparently the law has an explicit clause that allows the executive branch to give a 90 day extension if they feel progress is being made towards divestment.
After deadline, though? Even textualists will be hard-pressed to say the enshrined 90-day extension can be exercised after enforcement is actuated - whether by date or action.
It is a law passed by congress. The only way to reverse it is to (a) have a court invalidate the law (already tried) or (b) have congress reverse the law. Trump can say something about its enforcement, but he can't actually reverse the law (at least according to the constitution, which he also said he wanted to interpret differently).
Sure, when I use ${Chinese_App}, I expect a Chinese bias to the algorithm. Same with every other aggregation service or media provider. Same way I expect a US bias to moderation here or on other US sites.
Of course he will reverse it, but just as obviously he was the one who asked ByteDance to block it today...
Biden said (a day or two ago) he will leave enforcement of the ban up to Trump, and ByteDance have been fighting against the ban since it was ever suggested ... so why do you think ByteDance are now voluntarily shutting down access today?!!
It's really no mystery - Trump has already been talking to ByteDance and agreed to let them continue operations in return for favors to himself which have yet to be discovered. As part of this deal, Trump requested ByteDance to shut it down today, so that he can be the hero and have it reenabled tomorrow or soon after (according to how he wants the optics to play out - pretending to take some time to "make a deal", or an immediate "day 1 - look at how great trump is").
You people are being manipulated like sheep. Calm down, it'll be back very soon.
Lol I'm about your age and I'm sometimes embarrassed about the hour or two I end up watching across all my bathroom sessions but c'mon 25 hours. That's too much.
I'll watch 90 mins of TikTok and think I could have watched an entire movie; then I remember I actually enjoyed myself anyway and stomp down the guilty feeling.
This is unfortunate for women in the US, many of whom were using TikTok to raise consciousness of 4B, a protest movement originating in South Korea that calls for women to fight widespread societal misogyny and boycott men. It went viral on TikTok in the US after Trump's win in November and has been steadily increasing in reach and impact since.
Hopefully this movement will continue on other social media. Though unfortunately none are quite as light on censorship as TikTok is for feminist voices, often unfairly framing these as "hate".
TikTok actively censored videos containing the word "rape", "assault", and "sex", preventing women on the app from honestly talking about their negative experiences with men. I do not think it's a great loss for Feminism to see the app delisted and it's users migrate elsewhere
That isn't a problem in reality as everyone just uses euphemisms which everyone else understands but TikTok doesn't censor. It's been this way for years, we got used to it.
4B was pretty limited in South Korea according to Wikipedia and anecdotally the same appears to be true in US. Anecdotally I see it shared mostly by women who are dating or actively in relationships.
My brother in Christ, the US has done more intense things than this in the past and been fine, and will do more intense things in the future, and (probably) be fine.
TikTok and/or Apple and/or Google probably took the app down themselves. They talk to their lawyers, and tell them "no, Trump/Biden said they weren't going to enforce the law" and their legal counsel goes "no, no, no, you can't go by that, obey the law or you are opening yourself up to huge liability" and that's it.
Specifically the statue of limitations is 5 years. Even if Biden and Trump both decided not to enforce the law, the next president could still go after app stores for hosting it, and impose all fines.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadThe "learn more" link tells you that you can still download your data. I'm not sure how. Website maybe? Because the app only has "learn more" and "close app" as options. Interestingly the fyp still loads and you see a video in the background.
I do think it'll come back this week but it's not clear what the legal mechanism is. Since the ban has gone into effect the extension in the law doesn't seem to apply anymore. This would then seem to require Congressional action and there doesn't seem to be much appetite for that but maybe that's because Republicans in Congress want to give credit for saving Tiktok to Trump when he becomes president on Monday.
Another option being talked about is nonenforcement by the Department of Justice. Some dismiss this by saying "the DoJ can change their mind" but that's not strictly true. Defendants in a case can rely on statements by prosecutors. It's a valid defense. If the Attorney-General makes an official statement saying "we will not prosecute Amazon or Google or Tiktok for 90 days (or whatever) while we work this out", that's absolutely a legal defense should the DoJ ever change their mind.
Basically, this is now a shakedown as some Trump allies will seek forcibly buy Tiktok or at least a large stake in it as a price for its continued operation in the US. It's unclear if Tiktok will acquiesce to this.
Remember though, Bytedance has significant US investors so there are conflicting forces at play here.
[0] - https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-...
As soon as I try to login to my US account it bricks the app.
YMMV.
I found another USA refugee on Canadian TikTok who said he just got Apple to change his app store country and it worked after he redownloaded it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social...
This is a 50/50 split between YT and SpaceX on the problem.
That spaceX does not broadcast it live on YT leaves an opening for the scammers to get a popular channel up.
Now, the scammer channels you see are what happens when an actual big name channel with a lot of followers gets hacked, all the old videos deleted, then they start that feed of the launch and turn it to a bitcoin scam at/right after the launch part.
It's also difficult on the YT side. Users are 'free' to change their channel name. You are also 'free'ish to broadcast the SpaceX stream, as many other non-bitcoin channels do it. It's really the near end of the broadcast where the scam it self comes in.
This said, YT does need to put a special flag in for channel names like SpaceX and do an immediate check or put some kind of very long delay in particular channel name changes.
It is also a test for "Rednote" and if they grow extremely fast in the next 90 days then that will be another ban target. But this is all temporary and they will run back to TikTok again.
But again 170 million users just had their crack / cocaine supply cut off. Now is the time for them to reflect and cure their addiction.
I was browsing r/TikTok and the comments there certainly don't seem to imply that everyone is eager/interested in going to reels/shorts. I hardly even see those platforms mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i4p6s0/rip/ but it could just be sampling bias since I'm reading Reddit comments rather than looking for discussions on YouTube/Instagram.
Still, it takes time to habituate to a new app's UI and culture. Even if people are willing and able to shift to a new platform I think there will be a lot of shared frustration in the short term.
Opinions on Reddit and HN are almost always from the 5% most engaged, most online of any subgroup. These are not regular people. Is every software developer you know represented by the opinions that get upvoted on HN? Thankfully, no. Similarly the kind of people posting to /r/tiktok aren’t your regular TikTok user by a long shot.
- IG Reels are limited to 90 seconds compared to 3 or 10 minutes on TT;
- Youtube Shorts can now be up to 3 minutes but that's relatively new (October 2024 IIRC);
- Tiktok moentization is better than these other two platforms, both in terms of ad revenue but more importantly, the Tiktok Shop;
- The comments on Tiktok are truly a league above IG or YT. The latter two are just full of random drivel and vitriol;
- The recommendation algorithm for scrolling on TT is miles ahead of either platform;
- Tiktok is the only platform where people went there for short-form videos. They're native to the platform whereas they were bolted on to both IG and YT as an afterthought, a real "me too" Tiktok response. And they don't quite fit. The user experience on Tiktok is so much better than IG or YT.
- A huge chunk of Reels and Shorts content is simply reposted Tiktoks.
Sundar and Mark may think they'll simply gain Tiktok's user base. I honestly don't see that happening. I'm sure there'll be an uptick in YT and IG but now 170M MAU worth.
- you can't watch at 2x on reels
- you can't pause a video while watching on reels
- you can't seek in a video either, you just have to watch the whole thing over
- reels interrupts your experience with awful ads every 2-3 swipes
- YT shorts probably has awful ads too, I haven't tried it
The time limit is probably going to be the biggest issue for YT and reels, but the ergonomics of both are so awful that I can't use them for more than a few minutes. I could scroll TikTok until the little video about scrolling too long came up (an hour I think).
- You can seek in a video too. Again, awful UX, the line is super small, but you can. Depends how large the video is, I believe.
Like so much else on Tiktok, this originated elsewhere. In this case, Twitter.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me
404 did an article on it: https://www.404media.co/a-tiktok-ban-is-a-gift-to-meta-and-i...
Even Trump, who we know Zuckerberg had donated to, claims he will try to “bring back TikTok”.
This case was argued and won on the basis of national data security.
But I see through it because once again, I'm not an idiot.
When far more sensitive social media apps like Grindr were sold to Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd, nobody went crazy because it didn't threaten FAANG.
There's many swiping and dating apps owned by chinese firms. You also have chinese capital firms being the primary investor in cloud and photo sharing apps. Plenty of sensitive stuff going through the spindly fingers of the shifty orientals without a peep - for like decades.
There's even Chinese finance apps like WeBull that hold things as sensitive as American's retirement accounts. Apparently also not a problem.
People have Wyze doorbell cameras and TCL smartTVs and Eufy security cameras. They have TP-Link routers and Hisense computer monitors. Chinese cameras, WiFi, and microphones are everywhere in the modern home.
But once something came around that was a plausible competitive threat to FAANG then all these reasons just materialize and get applied to that thing specifically.
I mean seriously. Give me a break.
We like to look back 100 years ago at protectionism and racism and tell ourselves that we were dumber back then and wouldn't fall for it now.
And yet, here we are.
It's not (just) that it poses an economic threat to one of the biggest US companies (which as you said, I'm sure plays a big part in why it's suddenly relevant), but that it allows a government-influenced foreign media channel to influence policy indirectly by means of mass dissemination.
As for why now and not before, it's because of how apparent the possible effects are now that there's a very direct and widely spread channel that can pump OUT information, which is vastly more effective and obvious than passive surveillance through cameras or other hardware. (Also cybersecurity people have been calling out this sort of stuff for hardware since time immemorial)
The framework is progress moves fastest with a global leveling and elimination of friction between markets.
Fundamentally I see this as American companies using government cheat codes instead of sharpening their game, just like with the Chinese electric cars 100% tax.
It stems from my critique of neoliberalism, the failure to invest in foundational societal systems that give an affordance to such positioning: education, mass transit, health care, maternity leave, preschool funding, scholastic enrichment, the stuff that most of Asia is great at we're lousy at.
Chinese people aren't like genetically superior, they just spent the past 50 years investing in their people instead of taking things away and fighting stupid wars.
And these are the chickens coming home to roost just like they did for Hungary, the UK, and Spain.
We've been fucking up for decades and racism isn't going to fix it.
This. TT's US popularity plus its fully algorithmic approach to content selection makes it potentially one of the most effective mass influence systems ever. People are easily influenced - especially young people - and the root of that being in China is a clear risk to US sovereignty.
I mean, look at what Xi and his allies would like to see happening in the US, and look at what's happening in the US today. Coincidence?
You’re being downvoted. But you’re correct. The vocal minority inflames about this are mostly ideologically offended, based on the calls and letters I’m hearing both blue and red electeds receive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If it were this simple then Rep Ro Khanna wouldn't still be posting about TikTok. As far as what happens, as with everything else, we'll see. There's a million variables and Hacker ``Social Media was tantamount to the Fall of Man'' News is not the place I'm expecting particularly fruitful, unbiased analysis.
Eh, I canvassed for privacy bills and that was a total disaster. I believe in the TikTok ban, but I’m not passionate about it.
> then Rep Ro Khanna wouldn't still be posting about TikTok
If I were advising Ro I would absolutely insist he tweet about it. Particularly off cycle. Anyone in Silicon Valley or a district with rich libertarians, for that matter.
And very likely to not be paying attention to him right now to the degree they’ll remember anything come election. Not for tangential issues. Donors, on the other hand, can give now.
If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?
Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?
Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?
Same thing could be said of the academic side of Twitter. It’s now fragmented across Twitter, Bluesky, mastodon, and the level is discussion is very diminished
This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/
https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i4puyg/pov_tiktok_...
I understand that people spend a lot of time doomscrolling on it, but even with millions of daily users the optimistic side of me really wants to believe that it won't affect anyone's mental health in any measurable way.
A new year's resolution to go cold turkey and a chance to change a cure their own addictions.
It is not the end of the world. Just the end of someone's supply of a brand of digital drug.
And tell "go fuck yourself" to FB, Instagram, X ... etc.
Nothing specific to TikTok either. PUBG mobile was also banned here around the same time, and people just moved to Call of Duty mobile.
This is the first largely used anything online the government has banned, and I'm personally still upset it even got this far. The internet was supposed to be free speech incarnate, and banning apps and websites for Americans on it, isn't something I honestly thought I'd ever see
As they should be, because they stupidly made their lives dependent on a single platform that anyone with a brain could see was likely to run into trouble sooner rather than later.
The lesson for the is: don't put your eggs in one basket.
I listened to the final, farewell videos of several people. Some have leveraged TikTok on other platforms, but for a great many, TikTok was the only platform that let them reach an audience.
TikTok was eating the competition because it was simply better at matching content. It is a completely different beast in that regard.
Calling people stupid who leveraged an unrivaled technology to build a community and/or a business feels particularly anti-human.
I'm not calling them stupid for that, I'm calling them stupid because they didn't have a back up plan. Public policy should revolve around what they need or want (e.g. I'm sure some farmer somewhere could make a sob story video about how growing opium poppy has been so good for them, so heroin shouldn't be banned, but it's not about him).
I remember reading this in my mid-teens and it really speaking to me.
Sometimes we tend to forget: nobody is forcing us to use the crap that "the Internet" has become home to.
The Internet isn't the content, it's the network - the map is not the territory and the underlying architecture hasn't changed all that much.
There will always be room to carve out your space and find your people.
My point it's just really moved to the periphery and is a subculture (and tied to crypto, which has a lot of shady things associated with it). The mainstream tech culture seems extremely nationalistic and terrified of the possibilities of a supranational unregulated unmoderated internet
In retrospect what is surprising is how long it took for such a disruptive new technology to register with existing power structures (at least explicitly).
Why are we trying to build a single unified platform for everything?
Maybe the friction of having different networks/applications based on the specific subculture/group you wish to associate with keeps them all a little less mainstream? Maybe this is a good thing?
I just wouldn't have guessed thing would have gone this way. I'd argue that the early Google was a bit of this nerd ethos going mainstream. And the degeneration was not top down from MBAs as one would predict, but seemingly from the bottom up from a new generation of programmers that don't seem to be in that supranational mindset
Being non mainstream also does present some issues. For instance I'm in China traveling at the moment. Github isn't blocked here but the connection is very flakey and some days it doesn't load at all. But effectively all OSS dev happens on github so I'm just out of luck. It'd be cool if there was some way to torrent repos for instance, but I don't think that's a service hooked up to github in any way
There's a middle ground where you get the worst of all worlds bc the current kinds lame/oring solution works for 90% of people most of the time
Anyway, it is what it is. You don't choose the jungle you live in
That's definitely true. However, what changed is that you didn't really need that 20 years ago to achieve the same thing. It definitely needs more energy and time to get that. 20 years ago you had to go to bullshit sites, now the bullshit comes to you.
During and before StumbleUpon times, when I visited a random site, there was a good chance, that I could trust in the information on that, at least on some level. That's basically 0 for a while now.
Then I started to carve out that space on some selected social media. In the past 5 years, most of the smart people just simply left. Also those spaces (especially when those places became more popular) are slowly flooded with unusable information/misinformation/simple lies shared by others, even from people who I trusted.
Now, even that kind of "carving" is even more difficult, with keeping the possibility to get to know new people. For example, TikTok's, YouTube's, BlueSky's, and Twitter's algorithm are terrible. I tried to teach them with brand new accounts, but they became either very boring quickly, or couldn't filter out even very obvious misinformation.
Cyberpunk was already a well established genre in 96, if you didn't see what the net was going to turn into you were already high on your own hopium.
...and then he wrote Mother American Night, which is way more radical and prescient than his declaration. If you are suggesting that John Perry's work tended toward statist notions of internet control later in life, you are mistaken.
John Perry has tons of fans who came up through his songs and have since connected those dots.
https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/track/barlows-jig
Chinese business crying foul over simply forcing an app to change owners is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
Now days we have way more advanced self-media platforms, but each one is just an island of (both platform-imposed and self-imposed) isolation.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
Spirit of the script seems to be stolen straight from the former USSR
Maybe if he’s feeling himself he’ll say it was a 4D chess move to make Biden look like a bozo by being the one to ban it just for him to swoop in and undo the ban in 48 hours.
It’s impossible to gotcha a guy who pretends the past never happened — or who insists that his imagination of the past is accurate.
A lot of the anti-TikTok sentiment seems to revolve around the mores of college-educated, upper-middle-class white GenX and Millenial mores, which the Republicans have gleefully used as punching bags.
There are about 10 million news cycles between now and the midterms, highly unlikely anyone will remember any of this by then.
Gen Z voters are also young, and young people never vote.
If they lose (again) it won’t be because of TikTok. No place left to look but in the mirror.
* Republicans ban TikTok
* For whatever reason ban doesn't go through (was it via executive order)
* Dems pickup where republicans left off and ban TikTok
* Republicans undo ban
Why.....
Especially since it was the same republicans in both cases
So why didn't Biden stop the ban? Instead he signed it and did not intervene. The problem is Biden continued and did not stop it they left Trump to reverse the ban.
It would have been better for the clean up his own mess but again they allowed Trump to "save them" and Biden would have just left TikTok for dead.
He said so himself. "Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.":
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/trump-told-scotu...
I personally know musicians, actors, and artists that got a lot of work through TikTok. People who actually create things, and people who just used the app to make ends meet who probably aren't going to make ends meet this month
No, these options are not truly equal, and many businesses will suffer.
We utilize every platform equally. TikTok organically grew at least 5x the followership for our business, meanwhile Meta gouges us for advertising to be seen at all and we see worse results and interactions there.
The ban of TikTok will have resounding effects even if people are utilizing the alternatives. I've seen far too many people who haven't used TikTok and the alternatives for their business, or are not business owners at all, declare their opinions as facts when they have no actual experience in this space.
I'm not saying this explicitly includes you, I don't make presumptions about your experience in this space.
youtube shorts and instagram reels seem like they do the same thing on the surface, but they're so much more focused on showing you content that they are certain you'll like, and from people in your network or people who you normally watch. they're a whole lot more focused on keeping people in their existing content silos.
And let's not pretend that TikTok is filled to the brim with high quality products and small businesses. Yes there may be a couple of feel good stories about a local pizza place or small band that got their big break because of TikTok, but 99.9% of the advertising there is for the same junk/scam products that are on every other influencer-driven app.
I cannot count how many times minute I’ve been the first to see or comment on a TikTok video.
It let small creators be shown to lots of people in a way no other platform does.
For example, there’s a company called “Cerebrum IQ” which scams people out of hundreds of dollars for fake IQ tests. We are painfully aware of this issue because we own cerebrum.com, and we receive at least 100 furious support requests per day from people who have been charged $80.00+ for a subscription they never agreed to, and they somehow confuse us with “Cerebrum IQ”.
They get most of their users from TikTok ads.
We’ve reported them to TikTok many times, with no action taken. Meta at least restricted their ability to advertise.
TikTok's algorithm was amazing, as was the community.
You can't just recreate communities. They're alive, organic, fragile things.
Handwaving TT away as "another social media platform" is like comparing Friendster or MySpace with the ad machine that FB has built. There are countless businesses that will be impacted by this.
some of the fediverse alternatives seem appealing but have less content.
i'm sure something will replace it if the ban remains in place but at the moment there's nothing nearly as good for me
“You play the guitar on the MTV // That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it // Money for nothing and your chicks for free”
While I disagree with the ban, I'd rather have a sensible fine just like the ones for Meta, Google (YouTube) and others. At one point it also might have temporarily saved someone's chronic addiction to the platform, then they'll just find another platform to get hooked on.
But for now nature is healing.
Indian on contrary are cheap, their profile are worth close to nothing.
Also, unblocked as of now. Told ya.
I think people overestimate how much local businesses relied on it, sure a few were booming making "me too" content (looking at you pressure washing companies). But you will still find the goods and services you need.
And now you won't have dozens of bad temu ad's "OH I feel bad for whoever bought this vacuum yesterday because now its 57% off!!!"
Meanwhile, the greatest grifter in the world is installing his kleptocracy cabinet, pushing more neoliberalism economic policies, tax cuts for the ultra wealthy at the cost of public programs.
This country is absolutely cooked man.
I guess you missed the nine million articles over the last few months about how the head of TikTok has been palling around with the new admin and is going to be proudly at the inauguration.
Zuck is not the scapegoat you're hoping for.
As if merely writing the code is the only prerequisite for making a hundred billion dollar business
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cole_Memorandum
We’ve had almost a century of foreign-ownership limits for media properties [1]. (It’s recently been relaxed but not released [2].)
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...
[2] https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2017/02/articles/fcc-approv...
Biden said (a day or two ago) he will leave enforcement of the ban up to Trump, and ByteDance have been fighting against the ban since it was ever suggested ... so why do you think ByteDance are now voluntarily shutting down access today?!!
It's really no mystery - Trump has already been talking to ByteDance and agreed to let them continue operations in return for favors to himself which have yet to be discovered. As part of this deal, Trump requested ByteDance to shut it down today, so that he can be the hero and have it reenabled tomorrow or soon after (according to how he wants the optics to play out - pretending to take some time to "make a deal", or an immediate "day 1 - look at how great trump is").
You people are being manipulated like sheep. Calm down, it'll be back very soon.
I’m over 1/2-way thru my life. I think I know what I like doing with my time by this point.
The thing that made me confident was that the mentioned Trump by name (telling me they knew he was going to make a change).
Trying to copy TikTok is probably the worst thing Instagram has done. Their “suggested reels” are a cancer.
Hopefully this movement will continue on other social media. Though unfortunately none are quite as light on censorship as TikTok is for feminist voices, often unfairly framing these as "hate".
This is just the state of social media...