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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

#151

Post by vikramkr »

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…

Of all the platforms today, linkedin might be the closest to that. Maybe that's part of why it's become so garbage - in filling a niche as a people directory its accidentally providing a half baked solution to the gap that used to be filled by old facebook.

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

#152

Post by CPLX »

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…

> because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant

What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising.

Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits.

Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them.

But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on.

The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.

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

#153

Post by cletus »

> Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging.

I would go further: celebrities often treat Tiktok as just another distribution channel and they seem to flop because of it.

Another point: Tiktok has incredibly slick UI/UX. IG used to have this but that's been lost in the constant battle of competing interests. Even the search isn't terrible. Probably the best feature is you can search videos you've watched and/or liked. I can't tell you how many times I've found what I've been looking for because of that.

Stitching and dueting are genuinely new formats too. Plus it's not all dance videos (eg [1]). One issue Tiktok does have is brigading/mass-reporting. You have to identify people who make false reports (eg when a video is reviewed and reports are found baseless you could make such reports as false). Collect too many and your reports get ignored (ie you're shadowbanned).

FB/IG managed to successfully steal the stories feature (from Snapchat) but I don't think that's going to work with Reels. As noted, Tiktok isn't really based on a social graph so there's a disconnect there.

Some commenters here have talked about data collection. Literally nobody cares about that.

People forget how controversial introducing the news feed was. IIRC ~10% of users said they'd quite FB over the news feed. But that decision has proven to be correct. What I think is actually the most controversial FB thing did was enable sharing of links. This boosted engagement but I think really killed the use case many had for FB: to find out what friends, relatives and acquaintances were up to. Nobody cares about Aunt Alice's posts about how the pigeons are government cameras.

One area I think FB really dropped the ball on was Groups. For a lot of active FB users this is why they use FB. It should be more central to the experience (IMHO).

Tiktok isn't hte first existential threat to FB. IG was. Back then FB could buy IG. It's why they did. In a decade we've had two existential threats to FB. This is why I don't think government action is really needed in the social media space. It'll work itself out.

Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker.

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRD4rLYo/?k=1

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

#154

Post by ericcholis »

randomsearch wrote: post #138
keiferski wrote: post #105

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: longe…

I think TikTok’s success is based on: (1) far superior UX, (2) showing content from anyone as the default, giving them a large pool to draw from and avoiding the chicken and egg problem, and (3) an excellent (probably quite simple) ML loop that just throws video at you until it finds something you like. TikTok feels like an intense drug hit compared to Facebook. It’s easy to lose time to it, a LOT of time. I didn’t t…

I think TikTok's creator fund has led to quite a large number of influencers across many interests and categories. Perhaps seeing the success that Vine failed to largely capitalize on.

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

#155

Post by TacticalCoder »

mrkramer wrote: post #136
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…

>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. This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like…

> Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.

That's an entirely different thing than individual sharing private details of their personal lives.

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

#156

Post by damnesian »

cletus wrote: post #153

> Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. I would go further: celebrities often treat Tiktok as just another distribution channel and they seem to flop because of it. Another point: Tiktok has incredibly slick UI/UX. IG used to have this but that's been lost in the constant battle of competing interests. Even the search isn't ter…

I 100% agree about Groups. They're sacrificing a huge established userbase using the tool the way that works for them- which is of course what made FB a force- for the sad entropy of an aging platform seeking hotness status but forever being two steps behind. In the meantime FB has unsexy, real-world practical uses that apparently mean nothing to Zuck and company. That genuinely hurts people and organizations.

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

#157

Post by Delwtion »

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 thought I would love Facebook but apparently people don't.

My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures.

No one really shared normal likeable lifevents.

WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's.

And no people also don't care what I do.

People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour.

Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+.

Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example.

While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.

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

#158

Post by rvz »

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…

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself.

I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately.

But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.

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

#159

Post by zuminator »

ryandrake wrote: post #130
magic_hamster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 50s are still a long way ahead of me and yet I didn't last 10 minutes on tiktok.

I check it out every few months or so when there's a new TikTok article on the front page of HN, and I can never understand it. All I see is 20-something nobodies dancing and making faces in front of a camera. I'm in my 40s and it's just not for me.

It's like a hyperactive Netflix. Instead of bingeing taking ten hours, it takes ten minutes. I'd suggest searching for subjects you're interested in, and "liking" videos that appeal to you. After the app learns your preferences, maybe about 75% of the feed will be related to topics that appeal to you. .

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

#160

Post by fallingknife »

mrkramer wrote: post #136
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…

>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. This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like…

When you share your data on Linkedin you get part of the financial value of that data collection. This is different than any other social media platform.
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