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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

#271

Post by lovehashbrowns »

ericcholis wrote: post #154
randomsearch wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TikTok is going to eat away at other platforms even more once they increase the fund, and it looks like they have plans to do just that:

https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/introducing-the-200-millio...

Over 1 billion dollars in the US over the next three years.

One common complaint from creators I watch on YouTube seems to be that the fund isn’t high enough for them to do TikTok full-time.

So currently the flow is:

Build an audience on TikTok, have that audience follow you to YouTube where ad revenue reigns supreme.

One day that flow will just be to build an audience on TikTok.

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

#272

Post by mgfist »

wizofaus wrote: post #103
mliker wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's much easier to be a polymath when the subjects are an expert in are pretty relatively unexplored. Today people spend their whole lifetime studying a deep branch in a single field, because the tree of math/physics/bio etc.. is much much more explored.

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

#273

Post by Kiro »

trh0awayman wrote: post #92
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…

I long pressed on videos to say "not interested" that show gross dermatology videos, root canals, and ear cleaning. I would still repeatedly get those when I was using the app.

Pressing "not interested" does nothing. The reason you keep getting these is because you subconsciously enjoy them. You look a few seconds more than someone who truly doesn't want to see it.

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

#274

Post by dwallin »

ironlake wrote: post #255
_fat_santa wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 user…

>fediverse needs to go mainstream. Mastodon has been around for more than five years, and the idea of decentralized social networks long before that. Email, from a user standpoint, was much like Mastodon: a protocol that you consumed with software of your choice. But it was never a great experience for the average user, then gmail made it a great experience. People switched very quickly. The experience has to be firs…

Email and Mastodon have a similar issues in that they combine two different layers of functionality into a single protocol. The bottom layers (identity and social graph respectively) would be better served by not being tied to specific form of communication (the top layers).

If we could separate out these layers I think you would find that the user experience would be easier to improve and evolve more cleanly over time, with multiple formats and protocols being built upon a base abstraction layer.

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

#275

Post by johnthescott »

someonenice wrote: post #52

Tiktok here does not force you to login for watching the videos (unless you want to like / comment / subscribe etc.. ). And also allows downloading the videos right from the app (if the creator has enabled download for the video), so I download the ones that are to be bookmarked. This is in stark contrast to what the FB and Insta like companies do. Since I don't login, I use multiple devices to access tiktok. And I n…

my smart, young hipster friends say tiktok does a phenomenal job of building tools that enhance creators and classify streaming content to consumers, neither of which fb does well. text is dead. spread the good news.

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

#276

Post by popcorncowboy »

dentemple wrote: post #232
ryandrake wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, spe…

> 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.

Or, like.. don't. I mean, great that you're having a blast, but this is a literal endorsement to "design your own skinner box". It's small comfort to be able to choose the colours of the bars on your windows.

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

#277

Post by namarie »

hgazx wrote: post #235
mrkramer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Huh? Ebooks are still books.

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

#278

Post by treasurebots »

fragmede wrote: post #44
mkaic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually worked briefly with an engineer who claimed to have seen the inner workings of the TikTok algorithm when she was consulting for them (she was a software engineer and mathematician), and I was very surprised to hear her say that there was no ML involved in the algorithm! Of course, I'm not sure I believe her, but it definitely raises the question of whether an algorithm of TikTok's caliber is even possible…

Each video is node. Figure out where to add edges to existing content, graph theory some shit and tune for similar content maximizing viewing time of short video clips. No ML necessary. Of course, given the magic ML sometimes seems to be, they could certainly be using it but the inputs and outputs are remarkably simple if you get the data structures right. To be clear, I'm not saying it's easy , just that ML's not ne…

It's all if-then statements, like "If this video has a bird in it, then show it to people who like birds." No ML needed /s

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

#279

Post by dr_dshiv »

throwaway346434 wrote: post #163
dr_dshiv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Once the FOAF standard gets adopted, blogs will take over Facebook!” 2006

Yeah. So. What exactly is your point here? - a distributed, technically suitable protocol existed for describing yourself and your network? - that you had control of it? And thats... bad? - that large social networks saw interoperability and decided No! - it would unprofitable if we didnt own the whole game? Foaf was - and is - a very good vocabulary for a social network. Having a corporate centralist version lead to…

My point is that I miss the mid 2000s. Better vision for the internet. We can still build it, though!

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

#280

Post by chasd00 »

headsoup wrote: post #168
Delwtion wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or, like forums with off-topic sections. Slow paced, the shared interests are obvious, you can private chat if you want and you can join multiple forums to meet your needs. This is only my opinion, but I think forums do everything necessary really, with the only difficult things to manage being: - good moderation - site maintenance Which Facebook et al really fail at with the former. I also personally dislike how Dis…

specific niche forums foster good communities IMO. I've been on a rocketry forum for about 4 years and it's a very close knit healthy community. There's a forum called "the watering hole" for general off-topic discussion, i'm not there often but it looks to be a good place.

It also helps that the only ads/monetization going on are some banner ads from various rocketry store websites. The forum is run just as a service to the hobby and not to make money.

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