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TikTok and the Sorting Hat

eugenewei.com

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Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#171

Post by dirtyid »

mgraczyk wrote: post #121

> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…

IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship.

What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. Of course, politics and toxicity exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first place. It maybe a bad unitary model for governing cyberspace policy for an entire country, but it's has merits when applied to certain audiences / networks and the west should learn from it even if TikTok gets banned.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#172

Post by titanomachy »

I installed TikTok out of curiosity after reading this article. I scrolled without stopping for a couple hours and then uninstalled the app.

An endless stream of algorithmically curated 30-second videos is pure crack to my brain, apparently. I bet a lot of younger folks with still-developing brains are also unable to resist.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#173

Post by shard »

mrkramer wrote: post #123
vkou wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western nations don't have those kinds of wet markets, but we have plenty of our own unhygienic, dangerous practices when it comes to food. Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals. Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous, because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for…

Hygiene in China is like in medieval Europe, nowadays in Europe only big cities are dirty which is in the most cases result of mismanagement of mayor/s. In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see like 30 dogs.

In my travels to about 8~9 cities in China, I don't recall seeing anything that was dirtier than, say, Amsterdam or New York or Busan. Not having lived in Medieval Europe, I can't say exactly how dirty it was, but saying China is that dirty seems like an exaggeration.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#174

Post by shard »

TheDong wrote: post #154
7786655 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thing the things GP is talking about are indicators of a lesser society. I don't want to look at unattractive people, and there is nothing wrong with a social media service optimizing for that preference.

> there is nothing wrong with a social media service optimizing for that preference I think there is. The world has already reached a point where we live in information bubble, surrounded by things we want to see and that agree with us. People are depressed and feel inadequate. Formerly reputable news sources have realized that people don't want to be informed, they want to be outraged, or feel smug and correct, or s…

I think it's fine that different social media companies target different demographics. There's no need to apply a blanket rule to all companies as to what content should be promoted on its platform. For example, people go to Netflix, Twitch, Youtube, and Pornhub for different types of video content, and it wouldn't make sense to require that they all present the same semi-accurate view of society.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#175

Post by thrownblown »

dirtyid wrote: post #171
mgraczyk wrote: post #121

> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…

IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship. What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content fil…

It's curious comparing that to the more profit motived social networks bias towards outrage because that gets engagement and clicks?

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#177

Post by malka »

rdiddly wrote: post #158
quicklime wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like as of late, when China sees some success that the US does not, there’s a sentiment that they succeeded only because they’re a lesser society. They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom, or TikTok succeeded because Chinese corporations are happy to discriminate against groups that western corporations would obviously protect out of the goodne…

I'm not the GP and therefore I'm not 100% sure the idea of Western social-justice mobs stifling innovation was intended as a compliment to the West. Anyway if anyone takes anything at all from this, it's the idea that the whole source of TikTok's success is in making culture (and therefore culture wars) irrelevant. Want to look at videos of disabled, unattractive, poor people all day? Have at. Not being flippant ther…

What you describe is called fundamental attribution error.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#178

Post by neixidbeksoxyd »

tmpz22 wrote: post #160
Firebrand wrote: post #34

>At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainmen…

From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a different American tech giant.

Is there a way a social app targeted at young people in the US doesn't end up looking as if their success comes from sexualizing girls? I don't use any social media, but Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat also seemed to me like that in their early stages. Maybe Whatsapp is an exception, and that might be why they largely failed here but took off elsewhere.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#179

Post by ontifica »

dirtyid wrote: post #171
mgraczyk wrote: post #121

> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…

IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship. What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content fil…

This doesn't make any sense, I use tiktok and there's plenty of content I wouldn't expect china or america to endorse. There are lots of videos dedicated to communism, capitalism, uyghur muslims, BLM, etc. It's actually fairly open and this type of content gets noticeably boosted by the algorithm if you express interest in it, and gets a ton of likes too. There is also plenty of happy cat videos as well if that's your thing.

Also, ugly people get a lot of attention. I would expect china's social credit system to discredit those who are less attractive, but on tiktok you see less than conventionally attractive creators get a big following. They don't even need to be freak shows, it's just an app that's full of regular people openly talking about regular things. Very much the opposite of what I have heard about the way media works in china.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#180

Post by Firebrand »

kangnkodos wrote: post #26

The article didn't have many details about the "For You Page feed algorithm". Any guesses as to how it analyzes a video, and which properties it looks at?

This gives a general idea of how the algorithm works:

https://www.veed.io/grow/reverse-engineering-how-tiktok-algo...

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