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TikTok’s Poison Pill

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Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#321

Post by kevinschumacher »

bioemerl wrote: post #317
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…

Seems insane to me to undercut our own companies because a hostile foreign state is operating in our nation. Kick out the hostile state. That's not hypocrisy.

The comment chain you’re replying to is advocating for reigning in “our own” companies, regardless

Kicking out the hostile state solves the immediate threat from China. But what about threats from our own (current and/or future) government?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#322

Post by okasaki »

ROTMetro wrote: post #249
okasaki wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt. I don't know why though. It should be clear by now that nobody in the west cares about hypocrisy, democracy, standards or corruption.

Remember kids, propaganda doesn't need to convince you of anything to be successful, only to get you to believe in nothing. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” . The intention of 'what aboutism' is to get you to do nothing, especially to not speak up in support if you aren't sure. 'Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good'. Don't let doom posters like this one suck…

What a nice piece of creative writing. The internet truly is a wonderful place to let loose with one's imagination.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#323

Post by bastardoperator »

lghh wrote: post #153

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken…

I wouldn't take it personal. The reality is we all have much shorter attention spans with or without an ADHD diagnosis. Tiktok as of last year had 1 billion active accounts which means a lot of people like or even prefer content in smaller chunks.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#324

Post by djohnston »

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...

By any chance are you German?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#325

Post by closedloop129 »

cwkoss wrote: post #314
closedloop129 wrote: post #250

TikTok is having longer and longer videos. TikTok will become something else. The machine learning only works for short videos. For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. I expect that both technologies will be combined.

Why do you need social graphs for long videos? I'm not sure why that would be the case.

It's becoming more popular to start a long video with a short teaser but in general, long videos need some time to reveal their value. If you show long videos randomly to everybody then the perceived noise increases which may reduce user engagement.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#326

Post by throwfh80h82 »

djaychela wrote: post #51
doctor_eval wrote: post #2

Something I've never understood about these pivots from successful, revenue generating products. Sure, some users will leave Instagram for Tiktok. But isn't it a different product? Wouldn't Meta have been better off creating a new product and integrating it with Instagram, rather than killing the golden goose? This kind of thing seems to happen really often.

From what I've read, Meta's strategy (and valuation) ultimately relies on 'ubiquity' (as they put it) - where everyone on earth has a Meta account and uses it. The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation as a result of this, so they do the classic "what's working for the competition" action. I've not had a FB account for years, and didn't use it other than for messenger fo…

They can't really be relying on 100% market share. Is this hyperbole? Or real?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#327

Post by Aunche »

yibg wrote: post #306
Aunche wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't see a reason for the US not ban TikTok for arbitrary bullshit reasons, simply because China does the same sort of bullshit for American internet companies. Foreign websites often get mysteriously throttled, which encourages people to use their domestic alternatives. The iTunes store was banned, despite following all their censorship rules. They even hacked Google.

I don't think "china does it" is a good reason for the US to do it. There are lots of things China does that we don't want to.

I'm not advocating censorship for censorship sake. The problem I have is with asymmetric rules regarding commerce. If China wants to have free access to US dollars, they need to allow us to have equally free access to their RMB.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#328

Post by a_techwriter_00 »

okasaki wrote: post #322
ROTMetro wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember kids, propaganda doesn't need to convince you of anything to be successful, only to get you to believe in nothing. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” . The intention of 'what aboutism' is to get you to do nothing, especially to not speak up in support if you aren't sure. 'Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good'. Don't let doom posters like this one suck…

What a nice piece of creative writing. The internet truly is a wonderful place to let loose with one's imagination.

Do they still pay you guys 50 cents a post, or is it more these days?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#329

Post by headsupftw »

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…

This top comment is odd, in the sense that the article does not talk about TikTok's privacy and/or geopolitics debacles at all, even though the title "poison pill" might lead some users who didn't read the article to think it refers to TikTok's violation of privacy, or it being created and controlled by an Internet giant based in Communist China, or something along these lines.

The "poison pill" in the title actually refers to TikTok's recommendation model that disregards (or at least de-weights) social graph, versus Facebook/Instagram's approach.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#330

Post by root_axis »

jrm4 wrote: post #187
root_axis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a video app, exercise some self-discipline and self-accountability and uninstall the app.

Great if you're able to do that easily. Please understand that some of the most brilliant minds in the world get up in the morning usually somewhere in California, and work many hours in the day, and their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.

> some of the most brilliant minds in the world

Some of the most brilliant minds in the world are working on anything you could name.

> their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.

I mean sure, but at the end of the day all we're talking about here is an app that shows you a sequence of entertaining videos, it's not streaming directly into your brain stem, it's not fundamentally different from any of the other addictive things that have existed on the internet for years.

Frankly, it's not even that important... So what if you waste your time looking at a bunch of random videos? I personally know people who spend 6+ hours a day on twitch, youtube, minecraft etc, they don't frame themselves as victims being subverted by the insidious machinations of majong, it's understood that they simply enjoy minecraft so they play it a lot, sometimes more than they know they should, but that's just life, there is nothing special about tiktok that merits this subversion of agency narrative.

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