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TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

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Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#251

Post by authoritarian »

Invictus0 wrote: post #129
TremendousJudge wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/ >With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they…

I know people that cannot go 60 seconds without picking up their phone, with no purpose except to check for notifications that aren't there and then put it back down. Reposting a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality where people are really struggling to focus.

You say that "a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality" and then go on to say that "people are really struggling to focus" which is essentially the same point, or at least closely related, that the quotes from the xkcd are making. Why are you acting like the quotes are unrelated when they support what you're saying?

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#252

Post by faizshah »

bransonf wrote: post #30

What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed vine. Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move. I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with) First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then i…

New compilations of old Vines still get posted every day and rack up hundreds of thousands of views. It really was only a matter of time.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#253

Post by ksec »

Nextgrid wrote: post #140
ksec wrote: post #28

Outperforming when Instagram is banned in China. I remember there was a vaguely similar services from Twitter, and that somehow never caught on.

Doesn't TikTok use a separate brand and app called Douyin in China with its own app download counts?

Yes, but it was in the report and I quote

"Much of TikTok's growth has been driven by an explosion of users in India, who accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. "

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#254

Post by dang »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #72
komali2 wrote: post #51

Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about v…

[flagged]

This comment breaks at least three of the site guidelines. Would you please read and follow them when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#255

Post by TeMPOraL »

RandallBrown wrote: post #44
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more t…

Videos encode way more information than a snippet of text. If anything, social media is moving the opposite way, where people are requiring more stimulation and information.

More information, at least in the information-theory sense, but much less knowledge. I.e. videos are much less efficient than text, or even static pictures. Take a second of the most insightful video you can find, and in the same space, you could easily cram an entire textbook on the same topic, complete with high-resolution images.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#256

Post by authoritarian »

parliament32 wrote: post #146

The metrics make sense: as a user of both platforms, I'm spending far more time on TT these days than IG. My biggest gripe is Instagram is absolutely filled with ads: you get ads in between stories, ads in between posts, then a good portion of actual posts are "sponsored" (so ads from the posters themselves)... it's just a really bad mire of advertising and people trying to sell me stuff. Meanwhile TikTok is still fa…

In the past I used IG to interact with people from niche communities (primarily aquarium related) but I left both because it was acquired by Facebook and I was seeing the huge increase of ads and sponsored posts/accounts as you describe.

From what I've seen of tik tok it seems it's mostly young kids and teenagers lip syncing music, dancing, and doing comedy sketches.

Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#257

Post by dang »

pingyong wrote: post #95
oarabbus_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I honestly wonder how people get this perception when both reddit and HN are so overwhelmingly pro-HK and anti-China. The only way you would ever see a pro-China comment on reddit is by explicitly searching for it, either by sorting by controversial on China-related topics, or by searching for pro-China subs (which are super small compared to reddit, or even just r/HongKong).

I believe it's because painful experiences are more memorable than pleasurable ones and make deeper impressions. Running into hostile comments and opposing views is painful: they are like verbal smacks in the face. We remember these more, and they quickly accrete into our overall impression of a site.

It doesn't matter how infrequent the comments we dislike are relative to the whole. What matters is the absolute number of them that an individual reader encounters. If it's more than some threshold value N, they will conclude that the entire place is hostile, even if the hostile comments are a tiny minority. At a psychological and even a biological level, that makes sense: once a place has generated N painful experiences, it's dangerous. Percentage of the total is irrelevant. Indeed, it makes a place even more dangerous if most experiences there are pleasurable, since one will be inclined to stay—exposing oneself to future smacks—and to let one's guard down, making the next smack even more painful. We all have a version of this, and though N may vary per person, I bet it's lower than most of us would predict.

This phenomenon has some interesting consequences. One is that it enables you to guess with high confidence what someone's views on a topic are, based on how strongly they believe HN (or whatever forum) is biased against them. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the feeling that it is shows what they find painful and therefore what they disagree with. Also, the intensity of the belief in bias grows with the intensity of their view on the topic. That is, the more passionately you believe X, the more pain an anti-X comment causes, the more strongly you will believe that the forum is anti-X.

Another consequence is that the closer a forum gets to being unbiased, the more all sides will believe that it's actually hostile to their views. That seems weird in the wild, but it's simple: the more diverse the comment stream is, the more likely all sides are to notice disagreeable comments and thus receive painful impressions.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#258

Post by dv_dt »

goalieca wrote: post #172
dv_dt wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can criticize both the Chinese Govt as well as our own government. For instance, China sees no holdback from imprisoning and killing anyone on the thinnest of pretenses, it's basically wielding ultimate authoritarian power to ruin or end lives. On the other hand, the US actually wields a similar authoritarian imprisonment power much more frequently than China, actually more than almost any nation in the wo…

What!? A few thousand migrant families arrested at us border is bad. Agreed. But million minorities in re-education camps with organ harvesting is really bad. Not even close on the scale of shittyness.

Well some of those migrants families have babies who are not learning to speak or read at critical times due to intentional neglect. That's pretty horrific.

But I was referring to our in-nation prisons to clairify.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#259

Post by baddox »

nosianu wrote: post #64
nbardy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time we have the rise of long form podcasts. Producing quite the opposite effect.

Now weigh (e.g. multiply) the number of each with the number of people actually consuming it. Just look at Youtube: If a serious video that teaches you something interesting has a thousand views it can be called "very popular". The latest useless joke video easily gets a million views.

And why is that a problem? So what if I scroll through 200 Twitter memes on my lunch break and then throw on a 2-hour educational YouTube video in the evening? Sure, I've given 200 impressions to the bad kind of content and only one impression to the good kind, but I don't think I've disastrously eroded my ability to focus on things.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#260

Post by pcroh »

hackernewsboy wrote: post #185
partiallypro wrote: post #47

My only concern with TikTok is data collection being funneled to the CCP.

this is a small part, actually. if the younger generation of the us population is brainwashed by the ccp regime's propaganda, what is going to happen when these kids grow up?

They are already being brainwashed by propaganda in the US, both left-wing (the mass media) and right-wing (some online rabbit holes), I don't see this as much worse.
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