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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

#231

Post by _fat_santa »

baby wrote: post #144
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…

> The "people directory" I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because…

The problem I see is that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore. IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon.

The utopian future I would like for social media is if we had a protocol for a people directory social network. It would function in much the same way as facebook pages or your myspace page. Most users will just sign up for a service, technical users will have frameworks and API's they can reach for to build their own "custom" pages. I realize I just described the fediverse but seriously, fediverse needs to go mainstream.

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

#232

Post by dentemple »

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.

As a late 30s individual, there's still plenty of niche communities to be pushed into once the algorithm figures out what people like us actually like.

I haven't seen a single "20-something nobodies dancing" video since the day I downloaded the app. All I get on my feed is DnD stories, interesting math, physics, and history facts, and the occasional standup comedy routine. Exactly the sort of things that keep me, specifically, engaged for far longer than I would like everytime I open the app.

Do a search for your actual interests, quickly swipe past the random things that pop up that you don't like, and soon, after a few days of this, you'll begin to see what tik tok's actually about.

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

#233

Post by skinnymuch »

yieldcrv wrote: post #223
skinnymuch wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this definitively true? Not everyone is great at socializing or having lots of friends or acquaintances where they’ll have other people’s info on the networks mentioned above.

Because the current/younger people all have the different apps that provide that already People understand that their social graph is optionally transportable They can recreate it on any app just by putting in their phone number or letting the app access their contacts

Right so this is all assuming you have people’s numbers. Which was my whole point. You may not have that. I said “other people’s info”

This is no different than when gen X or older millennials were kids on different apps too like IM apps. Which weren’t the same as FB early day either.

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

#234

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

The problem with social media is that most people want to fill their free time consuming social media. But you have to have creators that want to create content for everyone else to consume. So you need to have some kind of addicting reward mechanism to get people to create content. (The simple upvote here and Reddit)

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

#235

Post by hgazx »

mrkramer wrote: post #141
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…

All of a sudden everybody has short attention span but books sales still didn't drop to zero.

http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/1159.jpeg

Looks like it’s dropping anyway. Is there a more updated graph?

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

#236

Post by hgazx »

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.

Use it for longer and it will eventually learn what you like. It’s full of small communities, like Reddit.

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

#237

Post by Mezzie »

wizofaus wrote: post #54
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…

Doesn't mean it's not true. 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 suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having s…

Strongly disagree on distraction being the cause.

I spent a lot of time around potential geniuses growing up, and what sticks out to me is how many of them had their lives all planned out by the adults around them before they were in middle school. If anything, I think the lack of those people is because we've decided original thought isn't a virtue in our geniuses: We'd rather stick them in labs and use them tweaking models than give them the time and resources to explore on their own.

They're also identified and sheltered early enough that some of them don't develop resiliency + become dependent on the accolades they get, which also pushes them towards taking safer options. Big, creative genius disrupts things, and we train our gifted to not rock the boat. Even trying to found a unicorn company and going the VC route to become rich has a 'set path' at this point.

I also would doubt our young Newtons and Einsteins are spending much time on TT, unless they're studying it. It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.

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

#238

Post by Balgair »

thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #210
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are in for big problems. I graduated from college in 2017 and my adult classmates couldn't even pay attention in class. If adults are hooked then children stand absolutely no chance.

The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military. Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017: > Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The…

Nit: Nukes are under the Air Force. So the Air Force Academy would be the one to worry about. And they are having similar problems to West Point. But yes, any nuclear 'go/no-go' would go through the joint chiefs and would include all branches.

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

#239

Post by robertlagrant »

ghaff wrote: post #199
desindol wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.

Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you…

The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.

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

#240

Post by concordDance »

mrtksn wrote: post #55
thematrixturtle wrote: post #35

> 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. This shift is not surprising given TikTok’s phenomenal popularity, but it’s also shortsighted: platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms. This. I on occasion vi…

In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour. Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are ph…

> It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists

I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online. I'd bet at least 40% of Americans have views that if stated online would get them a white supremacist label and I bet the figure for conspiracy theorist is over 70%.

> At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.

Note: It wasn't that it became horrible according to some nigh-universally accepted standard, it just became horrible by the standards of those who (now) control discourse.

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