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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

#101

Post by sensanaty »

klodolph wrote: post #32
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.

People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers. There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate. There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote…

Anecdotally as a zoomer ('98, so I guess that's technically just on the precipice of being a zoomer), I definitely feel like a lot of my friends and colleagues my age have some form of attention deficit disorder, myself included (I've got pretty massive ADHD, but it mostly doesn't affect me other than making me hyper to the point of being annoying to others around me with my constant fidgeting and shifting). It's not a small sample size either, and all of us have had technology as an extremely integral/central part of our childhoods. Hell, I've been playing ADHD-fuel video games since I was 7 years old and I continue to do so, I really doubt that was good for me lol

I don't get the impression from talking to older folk that there's as much ADHD going around. You could argue this could be just due to awareness and older folk not getting diagnosed for it, but I think I'm pretty good at sussing out people with ADHD and similar disorders, and it's definitely mostly people my age I've noticed having it, at the very least my generation has more obvious and serious symptoms of it.

I love tech, screens and all that jazz, but I think it has a massive impact on the young brain in a way we haven't really fully studied yet, and even I'm fearing for my 4 year old nephews and their malleable brains, considering they've got access to the same type of tech I've been obsessed with, just at a younger age than me.

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

#102

Post by scoutt »

mrex wrote: post #79
cumshitpiss wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> and by extension the West, there is nothing comparable to this going on.

Maybe today (we don't know now, we will know in the following 20 years), and maybe not in US soil (even if you said "by extension the west") but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state_terror...

Etcetera...

Pretty much FU stuff for "Western plural democracy".

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

#103

Post by wizofaus »

mliker wrote: post #86
wizofaus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fairly sure Fleming didn't have anything like the distractions around now when he developed penicillin nearly 100 years ago! The other examples seem to be very much group efforts, and I'd be impressed if the average guy or girl on the street could name the key figures involved. It's possible we've simply reached a point where all the breakthroughs that realistically could be achieved by individuals have already been made, or that in the world of art there's simply too many artists able to readily share their creations with the world for individuals to stand out to the degree great artists of the past did. But I honestly don't know - it just seems that with so many more of us with access to resources and levels of education prior generations could only dream of we should be able to achieve a lot more than we have been.

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

#104

Post by vishnugupta »

Purely anecdotal.

In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place.

So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.

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

#105

Post by keiferski »

Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction.

I don't know why the author didn't make the obvious connection here. TikTok's emphasis is not on distraction, but on video. TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.

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

#106

Post by moneycantbuy »

Shocking that this spyware app by the Chinese government has been allowed to obtain global dominance. Probability of psychological manipulation at scale is real. Huge national security risk. Sad so many people are eager for such addictive superficial distraction. Soon the AI will be able to make videos itself. Better hope the Social Credit System likes the direction you’re swiping.

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

#107

Post by nivenkos »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #47

Tiktok is a far superior social network compared to Facebook and the others. Good that it is taking over the US.

Yeah, I don't understand all the negativity here.

I met one of my friends on TikTok, on a post about an event going on in the city (when I'd just moved).

It's much more social than Instagram, etc. IMO.

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

#108

Post by unityByFreedom »

sensanaty wrote: post #101
klodolph wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers. There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate. There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote…

Anecdotally as a zoomer ('98, so I guess that's technically just on the precipice of being a zoomer), I definitely feel like a lot of my friends and colleagues my age have some form of attention deficit disorder, myself included (I've got pretty massive ADHD, but it mostly doesn't affect me other than making me hyper to the point of being annoying to others around me with my constant fidgeting and shifting). It's not…

Two issues may be at play here. Both tech and Medication Madness,

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2492547.Medication_Madne...

I agree it seems more prevalent in your generation. We are quicker to diagnose with pills, perhaps due to their availability and our lack of understanding about long term effects.

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

#110

Post by SilverBirch »

mrex wrote: post #98
achenet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>this part I'm not too sure about. Modern China exhibits genuine imperialism. They've even developed and published plans for dominating world standards bodies by 2035[1]. They're crafting a gigantic blue water navy[2]. They maintain a standing army with larger numbers of soldiers than the US, to put on those ships[3]. And they have no qualms about exerting their power globally, challenging freedom of navigation at se…

I'm not sure any of this stands out to me as particularly imperialistic. The standards thing just seems like a sensible move to try and get leadership in high tech industries, which any country would be smart to do. As for the military aspects, I think this is a bit funny. China has 2m active military personnel vs 1.3m US active personnel, which doesn't seem outlandish whey you compare populations.

As for the fleet and the disputes, we are literally talking about disputes between China and the US in the South China sea. All these disputes are quite clearly about China being pissed off that the US is projecting power right on their doorstep. It's similar to Russia parking its missiles in Cuba - completely unacceptable to the US. I don't think it's unreasonable for China to be looking at finding ways to challenge that hegemony.

I'm not going to try and make the claim that US and China are similar regimes- they're not, not at all. I don't beleive for a second that a hegemonic China with power similar to what the US has had would be anywhere near as good as the US has (and I'm not saying the US is perfect). But I do think there's a certain level of asymmetrical judgement here. Why is the US running warships through disputed waters off the coast of China? That seems a lot more like US Imperialism than Chinese Imperialism.

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