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TikTok’s Poison Pill

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Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#271
post #265
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh no worries I didn't even mean to criticize you, I was mostly responding to emptyfile's post. I agree with you sometimes there is nuance lacking but at the same time there's often more context and nuance than what you hear from a politican's soundbite. Hearing experiences directly from someone's mouth is a lot more impactful than reading it in a news report or political ad, even if the video is short.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies. Now in retrospect, I am glad that those regulations, taxes, and judgmental stares slowly nudged me towards quittin…

Perhaps the real culprits are the digital "gas stations" that make money hand-over-fist with TikTok's engagement loop. Apple, Google, and to an extent, Microsoft are all complicit in letting people make addictive experiences that promote their respective platforms. Much like the gas station, the smartphone is ubiquitous. Everyone passes by the TikTok aisle on their way to texting their mom or Googling a pie recipe, r…

I'm not seeing the connection between the Google/Apple duopoly and the rise of TikTok or other addictive social media. I spend half or more of my waking hours on one Apple device or another, and if I had only things Apple has pushed at me to go by, I'd not even know TikTok exists. What's the sequence of events you expect from removing Google and Apple's platform power, that'll lead to reduced social media activity on their platforms and/or in general? Apple, for their part, seem to have spent a fair amount of effort developing features that exist only to curb addiction-like smartphone use—I'm not sure why they'd have done that if they were that focused on getting you to use your phone as much as possible.

Now, if we were talking about whale-chasing F2P games, I'd see your point, but I don't see the connection with social media.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There have been plenty of perfectly functional apps working in China for a long time.

But, for the most part, they've seen little fanfare outside of China. Even the breakouts, like Alibaba and WeChat, have really only succeeded where they are able to bridge connections with China. They hadn't proven they can develop software for a wide audience. TikTok changed the landscape. TikTok is an app that could have come straight out of Silicon Valley and is successfully going head to head with American players on their own turf.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Because the U.S. has access to and therefore benefits from the data that these companies collect. The exception on that list is TikTok - the U.S. can't access that data, but their rival can. That's why they're keen on banning it.

Respectfully... Does anyone really think the NSA are not able to access Tiktok? Or that Chinese equivalent orgs are not able to access Facebook etc? Really? This whole thing is just the cultural side of people pushing a new cold war for self serving purposes (increase my budget, grant me more powers, buy my newspaper etc). I'm not saying China is great, I'm just saying this seems very much like a made up issue to me.

Everyone is hacking everyone. For true matters of intelligence gathering and national security physical location is no serious object. If it's on a server it's accessible to us, the Russians, the Chinese, etc. etc, basically public. But, and this is a thicc but, the US government and its various enforcement arms really like having a domestic data pile because they can trawl through it some veneer of legal legitimacy. Google's data is only a rubber stamp warrant away and that data can then be used in court. The same is not true for offshore providers like Tiktok. Sure they could probably get access if it's in a friendly country but that's a much higher more expensive bar.

Basically the discussion we're having about Tiktok is the discussion we'd be having about all these data haystacks if it weren't for the fact that there are powerful government interests that like the domestic haystacks.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#275
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…

Which law will be used to reveal the encrypted traffic between the app and server was sending personal data to be used in influence campaigns by the CCP?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#276
post #251

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.

> For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. YouTube is all about long videos and there is basically zero social graph on there.

Right now, YT doesn't have competition, but they will have to improve once TikTok has the content.

According to his parallel discussion [1], suggestions on YT were much better.

[1]

Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32328207

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#277

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.

is there any evidence that the pivots actually "kill the golden goose"? facebook has a long history of making product changes that initially cause a lot of complaining from existing users. they seem to be making a bet that existing users are addicted enough to the product that a change to it won't drive them away. and so far that seems to have worked for them.

Facebook's changes have taken a whole lot of users from "I am on here because it's useful and I actively like it" to "I am on here only because of inertia and network effects, but dislike it and will be happy when I can get rid of it"

May not have killed the golden goose yet, but they've sure sharpened the axe, stretched the neck over the block, and drawn a little X right in the middle.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#278

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…

You don't need a "narrative" to describe western nations as corrupt. All you need to do is look at wealth inequality over time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Wealth_i...

Show me please how wealth inequality implies corruption.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#279
post #267

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…

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

> How would you know if someone less famous got disappeared?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think wealth inequality is an inherent sign of corruption?

Because wealth can be turned into power. Because when power is unevenly distributed a few people can make boneheaded decisions that create misery for the many. To point to the Russian experience the Tsar made the bad decision to take an odyssey the long way around Asia (and Africa for some ships) to attack Japan and they got their asses handed to them in a few hours. That was the first time Lenin and company tried a…

Btw, you still didn't answer the question.
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