TikTok’s Poison Pill • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#261

Post by lopis » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:01 PM UTC

meltyness wrote: post #15

thih9 wrote: post #9

> If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Is it really a competitive advantage if a competitor is doing better without it?

Cal has apparently confused his own language here. A graph of details about rich media is still, in some sense, a social graph. Rather than documenting: who do you know? when did you meet them? Capturing: what do you know? when did you learn it? who did you learn it from? what do you call it? how should it be presented? And so on...

> A graph of details about rich media is still, in some sense, a social graph.

Yes, but it's a kind of graph that the user can generate from zero without needing friends or following anyone. It's not social from the user's POV.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#262

Post by system16 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

hiq wrote: post #203

system16 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace TikTok with food, porn, or drugs. At some point the individual has to take responsibility for their actions and seek support if it's something they can't do on their own. Or we just ban everything.

I'm not sure what your point is, we do ban some of these (with various successes and failures), so why wouldn't we do the same for social media? Yes we shouldn't ban everything, but there's a large spectrum of acceptable regulations with different tradeoffs and it's fine to discuss what your society wants in that regard instead of precluding any kind of regulation.

TikTok is not as harmful as drugs (at least I haven't seen anyone end up on skid row over watching too many dancing videos). So if it's to be regulated it would likely be similar to porn or gambling and be age restricted.

OP is clearly an adult capable of making their own decisions, so this regulation wouldn't help them.

So what is your point?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#263

Post by jrm4 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

emptyfile wrote: post #234

mal-2 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real reason behind the FUD in my opinion. Despite all these articles presenting TikTok content as vapid and mindless time wasting, in my experience it's been the opposite. TikTok is full of authentic policial commentary, anti-racist education, historical analysis, and anti-capitalist content. It's doing a lot to give people a voice who otherwise haven't been well-represented on other platforms. It's a big…

Yeah, sure. The entire world revolves around the American Race Problem. As it always does from inside your bubble.

Did you even read to notice that I carved out merely one example that happened to apply to me? Dismissive people like you literally comprise the race problem that you appear to be so annoyed by.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#264

Post by mal-2 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

Milank wrote: post #256

mal-2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many recent boycotts and other activist causes have achieved critical mass through organizing on TikTok. A ton of content there is historical and educational. People misunderstand short-form as shallow and that has never sit right with me. I find creators on TikTok to often go deeper and communicate more clearly than the cacophony of text posts on reddit or Facebook.

It's true that you can find useful content on TikTok. But, let's be realistic - percentage of people using TikTok to learn something is... probably negligible. But there's an example on how the technology can be used in good purpose.

Yeah I don't have numbers to back it up so I can't say for certain. I wouldn't agree it's negligible though, because I often am served educational content that's not an interest of mine (eg nutrition, DIY repair, writing). So the algorithm knows that content is desirable to some users, but is testing if I'm personally interested. Anecdotally I am constantly hearing friends talk about stuff they 'learned on TikTok'. Qualitatively, the content consistently seems more serious and useful than content I see on YouTube, Twitter, or Reddit. So my experience of TikTok has been that it's a mixture of entertainment and serious discussion. I think that balance is a large part of why it's so engaging.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#265

Post by jrm4 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

mal-2 wrote: post #240

emptyfile wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure. The entire world revolves around the American Race Problem. As it always does from inside your bubble.

I can only speak from my bubble, fair enough, but I almost never see this aspect explored in reporting on Tiktok. The articles always focus on the algorithm, never the actual content and community. Evidently something is quite different from Reddit and Twitter since those platforms have about a quarter to a half of the MAU of TikTok despite being around much longer. "Algorithm" is a hand-wavey explanation. No amount…

Fair criticism. It's not quality reporting by any means; I wouldn't say it gives too much intelligent nuance. But it starts the conversation. It's been a slow burn, but I very clearly recall a time when most white people I knew believed police misconduct to be rare, if not nonexistent.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#266

Post by kn0where » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

puppymaster wrote: post #171

nonrandomstring wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make one rule for all. This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground. What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt. We'r…

while many struggles with the mental gymnastic, for me it has always been clear-cut. Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it? Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light? Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopi…

America is more Brave New World than 1984; people can protest the government, but if that protest rarely overcomes the inertia of the status quo, does it even matter?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#267

Post by Kye » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

puppymaster wrote: post #171

nonrandomstring wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make one rule for all. This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground. What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt. We'r…

while many struggles with the mental gymnastic, for me it has always been clear-cut. Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it? Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light? Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopi…

How would you know if someone less famous got disappeared? How would you evaluate the claim from people who say they saw it happen?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#268

Post by ethanbond » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

kn0where wrote: post #266

puppymaster wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while many struggles with the mental gymnastic, for me it has always been clear-cut. Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it? Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light? Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopi…

America is more Brave New World than 1984; people can protest the government, but if that protest rarely overcomes the inertia of the status quo, does it even matter?

Yes of course it matters. Is it sufficient? Probably not. But it’s a substantial improvement over not being able to e.g. protest the government.

Anyway, our government isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting, which despite all its flaws does shift inertia.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#269

Post by 4ggr0 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

cudgy wrote: post #30

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #19

An a non-American the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird, it really does just seem like sinophobia - especially given there's no proof that TikTok is actually being used by the Chinese, whereas Snowden etc. has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this. I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...

They could present videos of dogs that look like cats to influence your opinion to be more favorable about dogs. They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness sel…

> They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country

Are you suggesting that ones sexuality can be changed by being exposed to other sexualities?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#270

Post by ethanbond » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #192

nixcraft wrote: post #5

There is lots of talk going around TikTok, especially now geopolitics has been added to this kind of discussion due to ongoing tensions between two giants. Instead of banning or removing the TikTok app, how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO. Let users download…

TikTok is feared not because of privacy, but because it shows China can do tech too. America placed its economic bets on being a tech superpower and that is now under threat. Restricting American companies in the same way would only serve to also diminish tech in the US.

Eh, not really. There have been plenty of perfectly functional apps working in China for a long time. Makes sense that people are worried about feeding video streams, geolocation data, facial recognition data, social network data, etc. to our adversary who uses the very same data sources to manipulate and control its own population.