Western nations don't have those kinds of wet markets, but we have plenty of our own unhygienic, dangerous practices when it comes to food. Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals. Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous, because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for…
Hygiene in China is like in medieval Europe, nowadays in Europe only big cities are dirty which is in the most cases result of mismanagement of mayor/s. In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see like 30 dogs.
This is the exact discrimination/mindset that @quicklime is talking about. Have you ever been to China?
IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship. What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content fil…
That's hardly "nonwestern" or unique. Big part of the appeal of snapchat was that you could be silly and send goofy shit without leaving a permanent record of it on your feed...
It's not the "wholesomeness" that's unique to China, but the commitment to maintain that wholesomeness systematically as an platform identity which is a trained requisite for surviving Chinese censorship. The issue with many western media platform is they start off wholesome like TikTok but inevitably reach Eternal September criticality with unconstrained growth. Western moderation philosophy is typically to let this run, eyeballs at all cost, until they're forced to respond incrementally to outside forces. This alienates the masses who don't care for the fringe drama. The Chinese model is preemptively tame the space because censorship board diktat is arbitrary so best to constrain space. This accommodates the masses and alienates fringe voices. The enforcement tools use to mean unsophisticated mass deletion, but now there are systems of shadowban, limiting promotion of material etc, i.e. tons of steps to curtail "problematic" content before banhammer. The latter is rarely exercised in west, because other strategies seem to work well enough. This isn't to say masses won't get tired of TikTok eventually like every other media platform, but that it's content philosophy does make it stand out from western counterparts which might explain it's popularity. People are hooked TikTok because it doesn't feel like it's heading towards Eternal September, but maybe it's only a matter time.
From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a different American tech giant.
Is there a way a social app targeted at young people in the US doesn't end up looking as if their success comes from sexualizing girls? I don't use any social media, but Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat also seemed to me like that in their early stages. Maybe Whatsapp is an exception, and that might be why they largely failed here but took off elsewhere.
I think the difference maker is that new social media apps like TikTok are artificially promoting this content from day zero via algorithms as opposed to Facebook and instagram which started by showing that content only from within your own network or through your own intentional curation. Now the second they identify a male you get a discover page full of bikini pictures and women bending over in yoga pants whether you want it or not. And of course this brings all the teenagers to the yard, and older predatory males with deeper pockets... “we’d love to have you model for us!” comments all over the place the second a pretty girl puts her profile to public.
From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a different American tech giant.
Is there a way a social app targeted at young people in the US doesn't end up looking as if their success comes from sexualizing girls? I don't use any social media, but Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat also seemed to me like that in their early stages. Maybe Whatsapp is an exception, and that might be why they largely failed here but took off elsewhere.
IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship. What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content fil…
1. the regulation and AI for Douyin and TikTok is completely separate and different. On TikTok I frequently see anti-China videos. 2. From my experience on Chinese social media, the debate on policies and voices on public grievances are common place. When there is a huge public blacklash for something the government is done, it might be filtered to tone down the "heat", but I believe that is to reduce the chance of t…
I've replied to other comments in the thread, but yes TikTok content varies between regions but the broad point is the algorithm will regress towards the wholesome instead of fragment towards radicalism over time. It doesn't not represent whole of Chinese internet, which your observations cover, but the model that survives censorship laws to reach wide spread popularity by focusing on wholesome content to preempt frequently arbitrary censorship whims. Petitioning and politics and dissent is widespread over Chinese internet, it's not as closed as most in the west believe, but they're happening on other platforms and serve as release valves for complaints and contradictions. Douyin / TikTok is where you go to avoid all that. So if you've been growing up on western internet, seeing Twitter / FB descent into insanity, TikTok is a welcome reprieve, with the caveat that said reprieve is by design and not novelty - it may very well fall out of favor with ban or time, but at it's heart, it's designed to stay wholesome which makes it an interesting alternative model in western market. .
I installed TikTok out of curiosity after reading this article. I scrolled without stopping for a couple hours and then uninstalled the app. An endless stream of algorithmically curated 30-second videos is pure crack to my brain, apparently. I bet a lot of younger folks with still-developing brains are also unable to resist.
There's a classical conditioning loop where you see an attractive woman dancing to a song, which makes you subconsciously start to like the song, then you like videos with that song... it's the combined power of earworms and arousal. If they somehow make it taste like cheesecake we will have achieved full wireheading.
> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…
This is misleading. The founders grew up and went to University in China. Working in California for 5 years likely isn't enough for someone to deeply understand US culture. Same goes for anyone living and working in a foreign country for 5 years. There's some things you can never understand.
> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…
This is misleading. The founders grew up and went to University in China. Working in California for 5 years likely isn't enough for someone to deeply understand US culture. Same goes for anyone living and working in a foreign country for 5 years. There's some things you can never understand.
I wouldn't say you can never . Because I went to Italy and even the first year I started to see the difference between my country/culture and theirs and what business opportunities could benefit one or the other. It's so simple. 5 years is enough especially for someone with an entrepreneurship mindset.
> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…
The musicaly people were already veterans in Silicon Valley tech scene (not young under silicon valley standard & with years of working experience). They raised money to build education product with short videos in it. The education product was not doing well. So they cut everything and kept the short video part. Sounds familiar? YouTube was initially a dating website with videos. Then they cut the dating part and ke…
Am I the only one not hooked on TikTok? It’s just a lot of good looking people repeating similar jokes. Maybe their algorithm haven’t figured me out yet.