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TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

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Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#81

Post by captainmuon »

cloutchaser wrote: post #65
t-writescode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's TikTok experience is different. Although sometimes you do need to long-press on a video and say you're not interested, the experience as a whole tends to be relatively finely tailored per person. For example, many of my videos for a long time were basically short essays about current events, relationship advice, (edit: BIPOC) creators, interesting skits or stories about Marvel or DC characters and so on. S…

You can both be right. It doesn’t take much for TikTok to show 20% learning content to Chinese people and only 5% to westerners. And no one would know. But I think it’s much worse. TikTok is clearly the goto place now for divisive content on LGBT issues, it’s provoking massive political arguments. And I’m sure this is just scratching the surface. I have no doubt it’s a global sentiment manipulation tool for the CCP.…

Maybe what the CCP believes is bad for us (LGBT rights?) is exactly what we need to move forward?

They say divisive content, I say lively political debate. They say stability, I say stagnation. They say decadence, I say liberty.

If there is a masterplan to blow up the west with silly music videos, then maybe our society deserves to be blown up and replaced by something freer and stronger?

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#82

Post by truncate »

askafriend wrote: post #36
timeimp wrote: post #19

I've heard (anecdotally) that the attention span of all the younger users has taken a dramatic shift south. Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged. Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.

Why default to blaming the students/employees? The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers ar…

My personal opinion is that this somewhat leads individuals to become entitled and less independently driven. And where does this end? People should be able to dig into things that are not always rainbows and unicorns. Inspiration is always nice though, but I don't like the idea of being spoonfed and just wrapping everything in nice shiny packages.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#83

Post by [deleted] »

cumshitpiss wrote: post #69
oars wrote: post #17

The Tiktok algorithm we have rewards repetitive dancing in front of the camera, pulling ("fake") pranks and random snippets from movies edited together with dramatic music added. In China (their app is called Douyin), the algorithm rewards things they want their youth to be doing. Content which involves maths, engineering, medicine, etc are rewarded. I'm certain that there is some strategic motive from China to push…

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#84

Post by amelius »

snoopy_telex wrote: post #58
Ekaros wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels that we are thinking all of the social media the same, but in reality some of them are content platforms and some of them are social media and some of them are in between. Facebook trying to become content platform like Youtube or TikTok is killing itself.

I don’t understand why they don’t launch a new app with a content focus. Why destroy what’s there when you could do both?

Because people will choose the content and use the original app only sporadically, hence it becomes unprofitable.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#85

Post by madeofpalk »

captainmuon wrote: post #77

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more add…

I don't think that gap actually exists. That "directory of people" is now people's whatspp/discord/snapchat/instagram/messenger DMs. I think people are over the one giant hirehose of people you're loosely acquainted with, so social media has split into two extremes - a big feed of content from others, like reddit/tiktok/twitter. And a lot more closed/private groups, like DMs, group chats, and discords.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#86

Post by mliker »

wizofaus wrote: post #62
klodolph wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't mean it's not true. It means we should be asking for more than anecdotes. > There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not […] We definitely are churning out geniuses of this caliber. The bar for being a famous genius is higher.

But what made the likes of Newton/Einstein/Beethoven etc. stand out is how much they achieved given the limitations of the times they lived in. The reason I picked those three is all of them were known for being able to devote huge amounts of dedicated time to their specialty (Newton especially, who from memory developed most of the ideas in Principia while under effective lockdown during a smallpox outbreak. But unl…

We have geniuses like the inventor of CRISPR, penicillin, deep learning, etc.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#88

Post by achenet »

mrex wrote: post #70
cumshitpiss wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

[flagged]

> clear aims of world domination

this part I'm not too sure about. Historically speaking, China has been rather "introverted" as a country. They care about making sure their people are well fed and all, but seem to show a distinct lack of imperialism compared to say, the Romans, or Arabs under early Islam, Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#89

Post by jsemrau »

captainmuon wrote: post #77

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more add…

We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much. The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#90

Post by nprateem »

A good analysis. Whether you like it or not, Tiktok is a classic example of disruption. They've not only circumvented the moat of their biggest competitors, but made it a liability - FB & Insta can't just abandon the social graph without disenfranchinsing their existing users. Absolutely textbook innovation.
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