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TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

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Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#371

Post by vmception »

Thiez wrote: post #254
vmception wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ever get the CCP validating content like a guy teaching Mandarin in a fun way?

So teaching Mandarin is validating the CCP? God forbid you take a tiny step outside your own culture and pick up the basics of a different language.

The comedy here is that if I only mentioned the mandarin teachers randomly showing up on the feed, someone would have mentioned the CCP involvement, when the reality is that I'm aware and don't care, so I tried to acknowledge the people that would care, but consensus has already shifted to defending the dopamine stream of TikTok

That's rich

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#372

Post by dymk »

curiousgal wrote: post #267
bufferoverflow wrote: post #39

I tried it a couple of times, and found most content stupid. 90% was girls trying to be cute. Some DIY ones were OK, but I'd rather watch 40 minutes of Tech Ingredients on YT.

> 90% was girls trying to be cute And 90% of those girls have an OnlyFans account. For an app that was first / still is targeted towards children and teenagers I find that extremely predatory and dangerous.

Is it really that big of a deal if a teen sees boobies?

And parents need to be the ones deciding if their kid gets to use an app or not by vetting it themselves. Parental controls are an assistive device, not a panacea.

Calling self-employed sex workers "predatory and dangerous" isn't right, though.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#373

Post by fartcannon »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #138
fartcannon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually subscribe to YouTube feeds so that I don't have to ever log in. It's really nice. But on top of that, just small websites that provide RSS. I change it up here and there.

In your experience, is RSS reliable enough to replace Reddit and Facebook as a news feed?

Yeah, I mean if you wanted, you can include reddit (and hacker news) in your RSS feed, so no need for replacement. That said, the entire point of RSS is to curate your own experience so just linking it to reddit (or hackernews) sorta defeats the purpose. I guess its nice to have both in one place.

As for Facebook, I haven't used it since 2008 when it became clear it was a cruddy company led by a misanthrope so I can't speak to that.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#374

Post by aembleton »

baxtr wrote: post #265
johnnyanmac wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and RSS feeds, check Reddit and Twitter daily, and check HackerNews morning and night, and I have no problem finding interesting content every time I open these things (Twitter being least interesting to me out of this list). I think we have the same "problem": "content" doesn't engage us, "discussion" does. It's not so much about the exact topic as much as the ability to…

Wait. Isn’t “discussion” just another form of “content”? How is it really different? I thought you might be referring to “other people thoughts” outside your bubble? Which could hint to why you don’t like Instagram (they try to keep you in one thought bubble) compared to HN/Reddit. PS: I’m actually interested in both, content and discussion. Which is bad because you get addicted to all kind of platforms!

Discussion feeds off ideas raised in previous posts; whereas the content on Instagram is more stand alone.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#375

Post by Method-X »

Micoloth wrote: post #367
sizzle wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand, what does this signal about you personally?

That you (consciously or not) like young dancing girls This might not be a problem, of course, but in other situations might be something you don’t want to make public?

To be fair, assuming he’s a heterosexual male, isn’t it just assumed he would like young dancing girls?

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#376

Post by empiricus »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #241
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not - I was using youtube for 10 years and every year my feed gets worse. Now the original content creators are dissapearing from my newsfeed and uts fetting invaded eith short clips of family guy. Its also will show me same clip again and again. It shows clips from creators i disliked. New uploads of creators i follow sometimes arent on my feed - its a shitshow. Half of comments are trolls and bots.

> family guy Holy crap literally this happened to me few days ago

I made the mistake of watching a couple, what will happen next :)

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#377

Post by nindalf »

Method-X wrote: post #375
Micoloth wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you (consciously or not) like young dancing girls This might not be a problem, of course, but in other situations might be something you don’t want to make public?

To be fair, assuming he’s a heterosexual male, isn’t it just assumed he would like young dancing girls?

Young meaning really young.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#378

Post by CSSer »

ramraj07 wrote: post #87
ogwh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other platforms only look for similar content to what you've already seen. They don't take novelty into account. If you like one picture of a dog on Instagram it'll just show you more dogs and you get bored. Watch a few YouTube videos about one topic and the algorithm gets fixated on it. YouTube is so bad now that if you use it to listen to music the autoplay gets into an infinite loop of songs that sound near identi…

YouTube recommendations used to be quite good for a brief amount of time when google brain originally took over it I think? Now it’s a mess but it’s clearly due to exec meddling. like their absolutely product destroying migration towards videos 8 minutes or longer; most original content is now fully shit because they are filling it up with garbage to pad the time and release in a cadence. All stupid rules imposed by…

I was trying to show a friend some features of a keyboard I just bought that I’m pretty excited about. It’s still in the mail, so we pull up YouTube on the nearest screen and type in the name of the board. The first and most popular video that came up was 14 minutes long, but looked high quality. As we skim through it, we realize that it’s mostly this guy speaking ad nauseam about himself with very few significant shots of the keyboard. We had to go back to search and go all the way to the long tail keyword-wise to find a video that gave us what we wanted. Yeah, YouTube search isn’t what it used to be, and my experience tracks with your suggestion that it’s executive meddling.

If that’s what YouTube wants to be now, that’s fine. My question is now where do I go to find what YouTube used to be (TikTok, maybe)? It’s ironic too, because it’s like they don’t realize that as a millennial I was drawn to YouTube because it _wasn’t_ TV.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#379

Post by kall »

foolfoolz wrote: post #17

tiktok has great features that make its content more addicting to return to than any other platform: - it’s all video means it’s higher quality than an image - every video is guaranteed views which lets anyone go viral - when anyone can go viral you get more organic content. depends on your patterns but i think most people see majority videos by regular people. the content is much more relatable - no need to follow -…

I think points 2-4 is one of the most interesting/innovative parts of it. As far as I've read, when someone (or a new account anyway) uploads a new video, they will always run it against a sizable test audience, so content that's engaging is guaranteed to find an audience. On other social media platforms creators need to hustle to get their presence off the ground.

This way, TikTok can sustain a much broader base of content creators and react much quicker to shifting trends without being dependent on any popular creator's opinion.

Re: TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack

#380

Post by lgvln »

ryanSrich wrote: post #7
woodruffw wrote: post #3

Maybe it's because I haven't used it, but a lot of the language around TikTok feels exceptional in ways that aren't justified: Twitter has (tens of?) millions of "terminally online" users, but we don't compare it to "digital crack." This isn't to say that TikTok isn't addictive; it clearly is. But I think there are strong recency (it's the New Thing) and exoticism (it's a weird Chinese app) biases in how we talk abou…

Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like. It’s both scary and extremely impressive. Twitter on the other hand seems to promote monoculture, and tends to push you towards what everyone else likes. It essentially pushes whatever is popular. Some of the most interesting content and users on Twitter are shadow banned, either intentionally or through…

> Maybe, but TikTok is an order of magnitude above other social media apps when it comes to learning what you like.

I suspect that is because TikTok has different goals compared to other social media companies. Their aim (right now) is to serve you better and/or more relevant content. Whereas other social media companies’ goals are to serve you ads and what do they know about you will not be as apparent to you. I would argue Facebook probably knows even more about you, more than just preferences, but social connections etc from its subsidiaries such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

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