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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

#451

Post by Noe2097 »

fragmede wrote: post #337
Noe2097 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate. Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive. FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of pr…

At one point it was estimated that Facebook gets $40/month in advertising per US user - how do you then reconcile that with you only being willing to pay $1-5?

I make a difference between what FB customers pay for promises of brain time, and what the service FB provides actually is worth for _me_ (people are no customers of FB). $40/month/user might be what FB get from their customers. It does not mean that it is the value it is actually providing to its own end users (excluding ad afficionados if that exists).

There is also a difference with what it actually costs to provide the useful part of the service. Mastodon is open source, yes it requires hardware (virtual or actual) and operation, none of which is free, but the cost of these certainly doesn't match the cost of running+developing game changing (advertisment/recommendation) ML models and ultra high scale infrastructure. Running a mastodon server for a thousand users with acceptable availability, and no fancy ML or R&D, I think should be doable for $5.000 a month, yes.

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

#452

Post by ethbr0 »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #442
ethbr0 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook needs to stop being afraid to launch new products. They should have launched a TikTok clone as an independent brand. Instead, they're falling into the Microsoft trap of "Everything has to be shoehorned into our existing userbase and products."

They did in fact launch a clone https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/launching-reels-on-faceboo... but it has not taken the world by storm. The hard work is figuring what dethrones TikTok and building _that_

Yes, within the Facebook app.

Which was the point of my comment: Facebook needs to be more daring and launch non-Facebook brands for products that are not like Facebook. (Or Instagram, etc)

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

#454

Post by wizofaus »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #448
wizofaus wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beethoven's influence on the Western classical music tradition isn't disputed by any expert in that field - it truly was outsized and unmatched by any other individual composer. I'd accept the Beatles probably deserve the same recognition re popular music. It's fair to wonder how transformative they would have been if they'd existed in an era of Tiktok, Tinder and Snapchat.

Beethoven (or the Beatles)'s influence was not what I disputed. Rather, I dispute the assumption that the fact that they are the most influential automatically means they are also the best or most innovative.

I don't see it as a debate about "best" or even really "most innovative", just about individuals (or pairs in the case of Lennon/McCartney) that achieved a level of greatness (in terms of what contributions they've made to human knowledge/creativity) that logically you might expect to see a lot more of today given the vastly greater number of humans in existence now.

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

#455

Post by wizofaus »

Balgair wrote: post #446
wizofaus wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a testable hypothesis if you can get enough people to agree that their kids should be banned access to all such distractions (and such a ban to remain in place into adulthood). Obviously they'd still need access to electronically available information. Whether discussion forums/messaging apps count as distractions might be a grey area. I honestly don't know what the result would be, or how long it would take to…

That doesn't really sound testable to me. I mean, theoretically, yeah. You could do the test if you had some sort of absolute tyranny over people, a ton of money, about 1000 babies to otherwise do nothing else with, staff to raise those babies according to the experiment, and the 20-35 years of time to wait for the experiment to conclude. I'm sure I'm forgetting some crucial variable to control for though. But that t…

Agreed, it's not practical or particularly realistic - I don't think 1000 would be enough either. Maybe 50k? I'm not sure we'd like the results we might get either!

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

#456

Post by UltraViolence »

I'm very concerned TikTok will take over the social media space not because it's a superior product, but because the company ignores all privacy legislation in both the U.S. and E.U. and because advertisers will want to take advantage of the data they collect and use it to their advantage.

For example, both the U.S. and E.U. has strong legal protections for minors. TikTok ignores them and collects data on our minors anyway, including facial recognition, fingerprints, voiceprints, messages, habits and who knows what else.

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

#457

Post by unityByFreedom »

mrex wrote: post #447
unityByFreedom wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fear is a healthy emotion, properly tempered. And it's an entirely rational response to a threat Yes, and, expressing emotions helps us move beyond them. Holding onto them indefinitely is not necessary for them to be part of our experience.

>Yes, and, expressing emotions helps us move beyond them. Yes and sometimes in expressing those emotions we realize that they're underlayed by a logical basis that our instinct was informing us about, as when we fear the rise of a genocidal communist dictatorship as a global power monger.

It's certainly up to you how to feel about being faced with that. I can't say I fear China taking over. Some may perceive power as a position of relaxation, but it's really about responsibility, and I don't think the Chinese government wants that. They just want other countries to let them manage things how they see fit, and they currently view influencing us as a means to achieve that. Also, the subjugation of China's population is aided by the rest of the world, in a sense, when we make purchases primarily based on price. Not to mention issues with language, etc. China is the biggest country the world's ever seen. That doesn't mean they're about to conquer the world. Not saying we shouldn't be prepared though.

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

#458

Post by Agamus »

concordDance wrote: post #314
Agamus wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite. New fancy soapboxes have distorted our understanding of each other, deeply. They amplify, magnify, and otherwise inflate the sense that fringe ideas are more widely represented.

> My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite. Duration/number of datapoints is less important than sampling. What is your sampling? My own sampling is from talking to people next to me on trains around south east England. This is obviously not a completely random distribution, but it's much more representative than my friends, family, colleagues and online acquaintances. Our filter bubbles…

My sampling is diverse and big, in my bad opinion.

I'm in the US, born in New England, and have lived in five states throughout the Northeast, Texas, and the Northwest. I've spent a collective three years living in Germany, Switzerland, France (wife is from France). I have slept at least one night in every state in the continental US. I once hitchhiked across the US and back again, gabbing with every person I could find along the way. I lived in cities for about a collective decade, and in very, very rural settings (log cabin even) for a collective decade and a half. Lots of other stuff in between and on the sides. I communicate with diverse groups, in person and online, from right to left, nix to ms, fantasy to sci-fi, young to old. I'm a 'perspectivist', and am fascinated with the perspectives of others, especially those outside of my frame of comfort and reference. I try to push beyond 'convictions', to uncover 'opinions'; convictions are usually firmly rooted, while opinions often change. A person's background and influences are usually baked into their convictions, while opinions generally reflect where a person is in life, like the kind of music 'you're into right now'.

I was a line cook and an artist, working horrible minimum wage jobs for a decade, was homeless for a year (under a bridge homeless), started at community college, transferred to Harvard, graduated at the top, got prestigious fellowships, and now work in software development and live in a rural area that is within an hour of a big city. I still talk to everyone like they are my partner in life, I don't care what they look like or with which demographic they 'identify', or how long I have known them. I'm gabby - I talk to everyone - I make friends with everyone I meet, from the guy on the street to the gal at the grocery store, to the company leader.

Confession: I'm a thinker and writer in my free time. But I have tried to cast as wide a net in life, and have tried to engage people as people, for what I think is a long time.

My conclusion: we're being gamed. The people underneath are intact. Amazingly, when the game is lifted, the people emerge, largely unscathed, as testament to the endurance capability of our ancestral rodentia.

My sample and data have led me to hold this opinion rather strongly, for what it is worth, which is nothing.

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

#459

Post by zeroonetwothree »

UltraViolence wrote: post #456

I'm very concerned TikTok will take over the social media space not because it's a superior product, but because the company ignores all privacy legislation in both the U.S. and E.U. and because advertisers will want to take advantage of the data they collect and use it to their advantage. For example, both the U.S. and E.U. has strong legal protections for minors. TikTok ignores them and collects data on our minors…

It's hard for US/EU companies to compete when they have to follow the regulations but TikTok doesn't.

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

#460

Post by UltraViolence »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #459
UltraViolence wrote: post #456

I'm very concerned TikTok will take over the social media space not because it's a superior product, but because the company ignores all privacy legislation in both the U.S. and E.U. and because advertisers will want to take advantage of the data they collect and use it to their advantage. For example, both the U.S. and E.U. has strong legal protections for minors. TikTok ignores them and collects data on our minors…

It's hard for US/EU companies to compete when they have to follow the regulations but TikTok doesn't.

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