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TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

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Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#391

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #118
captainmuon wrote: post #77

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more add…

> And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society. Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.

What's important isn't whether they're wrong or not; it's whether anyone cares.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#392

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

robertlagrant wrote: post #239
ghaff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you…

The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.

There isn't? I still get phone books every year from my landline provider. I haven't opened one in over a decade, but I still get them.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#393

Post by askafriend »

DocTomoe wrote: post #123
cardamomo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" comes to mind as a well written critique of the kinds of jobs you seem to be describing. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...

Sure. But there are also plenty of very necessary jobs which are not permanently engaging. Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough. All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.

I think in all your examples aspects of the work may indeed be incredibly boring, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately rewarding, fulfilling, or motivating.

At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#394

Post by labrador »

klabb3 wrote: post #383
labrador wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile. I don't see ho…

> I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook I can easily see this pivot lead to a short term growth, but I don't get why this metric is so blindly trusted, when it's clearly more complex. (If there is one thing I really appreciate about engineers, is that most of us understand trade-offs, and our null-hypothesis is that almost everything…

> Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000

I don't think older people who were raised in a longer attention span world (without even flashy jump cuts on TV) will find short attention span videos appealing.

I could be wrong. One thing that would tell me I'm wrong is if there was a robust amount of people over 40 on TikTok. I don't have that data, but Facebook probably does.

Edit: Only a quarter of TikTok users are over 34 years old

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/tiktok-statistics/

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#395

Post by el-salvador »

zjaffee wrote: post #347
mrtksn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour. Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are ph…

I have to disagree with that, snapchat was just as innovative if not more so in the early days of tiktok and musically in the space around camera filters and editing. There are two big things that make tiktok unique. The for you page, and shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly. No other platform has been able to circulate viral videos as quickly as tiktok has proven to be able to, and the for you page,…

> for you page, rather than encouraging people to actually follow individual account.

I like that Tiktok has two feeds.

A feed from people you follow and an algorithmic for you page.

I find this approach better when compared to IG and FB which combine two feeds in one.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#396

Post by Willish42 »

Really makes me appreciate what Twitter has done as a user of both platforms. Twitter kept the chronological feed option, hasn't done the same video content-boosting stuff that FB did, and as a result they haven't grown nearly as much but the product today still resembles what it was a decade ago.

For Facebook that's no longer the case and it really sucks because they got just big enough that nobody will likely get anywhere near the same size of a "book of faces" to check up on friends and family

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#397

Post by el-salvador »

frankosaurus wrote: post #362
zjaffee wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with that, snapchat was just as innovative if not more so in the early days of tiktok and musically in the space around camera filters and editing. There are two big things that make tiktok unique. The for you page, and shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly. No other platform has been able to circulate viral videos as quickly as tiktok has proven to be able to, and the for you page,…

> shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well. While FB always focused on their vaunted friends graph, there was an entirely separate graph waiting to be discovered which had nothing to do with friendship: i.e. A graph of people worldwide who have lipsynced (or danced) to the same tune. It's a clever way to inject novelty (and dopamine) into th…

> Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

Also, shared sounds and music cross languages and boundaries more smoothly than hashtags.

So a Spanish song can suddenly become viral in Eastern Europe, or a Thai song become viral in Latin America.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#398

Post by joegahona »

t_mann wrote: post #381

What's most bizarre is that Meta has two popular and quite distinct social media apps and it now seems to be changing both to mimic TikTok. I'm sure that some smart people have analyses showing that that's what maximises engagement for each product, but from a strategy perspective they really seem to be throwing a potential huge advantage out of the window. Why not just change one app and keep the other one distinct?…

I agree this is poor strategy on Facebook's part. The question is whether it results from FOMO or hubris. It definitely reeks of short-term thinking.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#399

Post by jsemrau »

api wrote: post #171
jsemrau wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much. The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.

TikTok is basically an algorithm to crowd source superficially engaging content in order to keep people staring at the app as long as possible to show ads (and propaganda) while the app hoovers up data.

True. Yet if you look at it from a UI perspective. The name of the "creator" is tugged away on the most left which in most cases you wont see as you swipe away. Yes, you might see the face of the person who made it, but there is a multitude of videos without personally identifying features.

Contrast that with LinkedIn, you see a post and the immediately visible information is the person who wrote it, what's his/her role is, and only then the content.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#400

Post by frankosaurus »

seydor wrote: post #380
nprateem wrote: post #90

A good analysis. Whether you like it or not, Tiktok is a classic example of disruption. They've not only circumvented the moat of their biggest competitors, but made it a liability - FB & Insta can't just abandon the social graph without disenfranchinsing their existing users. Absolutely textbook innovation.

i dont use tiktok, but i see often videos on twitter and youtube with the tiktok logo. Why does youtube want to copy tiktok when it clearly has already lost before it begun. makes them seem such losers

> Why does youtube want to copy tiktok when it clearly has already lost before it begun.

It's no sure thing for youtube, but it's worth trying. Clearly there is a demand.

Also, TikTok can't stay on cruise control. As they inevitably push to monetize, their UX will undoubtedly take a hit. A larger audience means more adversarial actors and trolls which could drive away creators. This has happened to nearly every social network.

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