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Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
431–440 of 546 posts
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#432It appears as though very few Hacker News commenters have spent any time using Tiktok. It is the only enjoyable, enriching social media service I've ever used. Most everything many of us liked about the old/weird internet is present on Tiktok right now: almost no ads or commercial presense, personal content from real people (not hyper produced productions from influencers and pros), weird content, niche content, orga…
TikTok makes me nauseous. It’s literally crazy to me that we’ve normalized an app targeted to kids and teens that encourages them to make hypersexualized mini music videos that rewards the “sexiest” videos with likes/followers/views/trending.
The absolute creepiest part is that anyone can browse and fully download any video without even logging in. You would have to be completely naive to think that there aren’t a million pedophiles on TikTok everyday downloading content of teenage girls and boys twerking to Nicki Minaj songs without a trace. All while we sit back and laugh about it like we’re on Facebook circa 2009.
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#433If the US forced ByteDance to sell Tiktok, the US would lose its last bit of moral high ground in China, the spirit of free market and rule by law. If you are worried about data leakage to China, you set rules and law and enforce them. That is what China is doing. They asked Apple and other cloud service provider to store data in China. The US could setup clear rules and regulations about where to put data of US user…
> you set rules and law and enforce them. That is what China is doing.
Except the law is essentially "whatever CCP wants to do" since the only political entity which can affect its legislation process is CCP. And yes, it's intentionally vague so it can allow CCP to exercise its power in an arbitrary way.
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not exaggerating about the US losing it credibility in China. The US was really the shining city on the hill before 2008 financial crisis. I personally was huge admirer of the US system. I even spent about 1 year in DC just to study the political system of the US. Before the 2008 financial crisis, China tried to copy everything from the US, from finanical market regulations to education system and to some degree…
Do you not realize it was Xi and his propaganda that caused a massive change in opinion of the west? The state news agencies constantly blames everything on foreigners and the west. It has nothing to do with financial crises or BLM or whatever. Financial crisis also happened in 2001 and 80's, they happen all the time. BLM protests are insignificant, US has protests constantly because they are not restricted by govern…
> Do you not realize it was Xi and his propaganda that caused a massive change in opinion of the west? The state news agencies constantly blames everything on foreigners and the west.
I don't know where you got that from. CCP stopped long ago painting the US / western countries as enemies and sources of today's problems of China.
The fact is, Chinese and China in general are much less ideology sensitive now. Given current hostilities from the US, CCP propaganda and China's new medias still haven't called for hate of the US at ideology level. There were hash words against the US, but all targeting very specific actions, for example shutting down of Huston consulate, and specific person, for example Pompeo. There is no ideology level attack.
It is a very large topic to discuss why and when Chinese people stopped admiring the US. I would only say it all started in 2008 financial crisis. It was then China's elites, here I mean both the ones educated in the western countries and the ones with no foreign education background, started to question the soundness of the financial market regulation system of the US and corruption of the US politicians, and then everything else. And when China could produce its own hero startups and entrepreneurs, like Jack Ma of Alibaba, Pony Ma of Tencent, Yiming Zhang of ByteDance, Lei Jun of Xiaomi etc., Chinese people feel more confident that its own system might just work. And Trump administration and the handling of covid19 are the latest blow. CCP doesn't really need to do anything.
All the other matters you mentioned like South China Sea, disputes with India, Xinjiang etc. aren't new problems. They have been there for ages. They are not the factors driving the changes.
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low quality? TikTok videos are much better (in terms of story arc and editing) than Videos on other social networks. And it takes one swipe to go to the next video. The repeated jokes are part of the TikTok culture. Pure copycats will normally not go viral - only adaptions that add their own spin. I agree that it is an insane time killer. But that is because the content is so good and presented in and addictive way.
When I tried tiktok it seemed to only give me videos by British schoolkids. Maybe the content is better in some regions than others but the whole region locking thing stinks.
One of the factors might be region but also:
> Consumers (audience) side: Tik Tok use AI to calculate what content will be the best fit for the consumer. When consumer use the app, consumers even do not need to put their preference. AI will automatically get a sizeable database of the consumers’ behaviors.
Source: https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/tik-tok-us...
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then their comment becomes even more suspect.
Why do you believe simply being Chinese is "suspect"?
You can't really blame people for considering that. We know that China does participate in online misinformation (as does the UK and Russia to be fair).
Additionally, people in China don't have a lot of freedom of speech to criticise the government. So unfortunately it does put a certain gloss on it when someone in mainland China writes something that the Chinese government would approve of. Because of the chilling effect, you start to wonder if you are only getting one half of the picture.
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, Tiktok is the only social media platform I absolutely can't stand. Low quality content, repeated jokes, people desperate for attention, impersonal, memes, and all of it video so there's an unavoidable fixed time cost. With so much good high content available on the internet and how little time people have, it saddens me that so much time is spent on the low quality noise.
There's no fixed time cost, every video can be skipped (swiped) within the first milliseconds. I agree repeated jokes can be boring but it's really easy to skip. I also don't like videos that pick the influencer style "Hi everyone, so today I was in the kitchen and then you'll never believe what happened come on I have to show you, here's the top counter...". Next. As soon as I hear those kind of intro I skip. On Tik…
Note also that if you skip a video quickly, TikTok will show fewer of that type of video, which I think is a fantastic feature
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#438It appears as though very few Hacker News commenters have spent any time using Tiktok. It is the only enjoyable, enriching social media service I've ever used. Most everything many of us liked about the old/weird internet is present on Tiktok right now: almost no ads or commercial presense, personal content from real people (not hyper produced productions from influencers and pros), weird content, niche content, orga…
Tagging along, the TikTok algorithm adapts to which videos you skip. It's unfair to claim that the platform has poor quality content without spending at least some time browsing, much more than 5 minutes
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#439It appears as though very few Hacker News commenters have spent any time using Tiktok. It is the only enjoyable, enriching social media service I've ever used. Most everything many of us liked about the old/weird internet is present on Tiktok right now: almost no ads or commercial presense, personal content from real people (not hyper produced productions from influencers and pros), weird content, niche content, orga…
It's not nearly as revolutionary as the WWW and there's only so much info that you can cram into a short video. So... nah
> there's only so much info that you can cram into a short video
Which is a huge feature. Unlike YouTube, for example, TikTok videos tend to have no boring intros
Re: Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
#440It appears as though very few Hacker News commenters have spent any time using Tiktok. It is the only enjoyable, enriching social media service I've ever used. Most everything many of us liked about the old/weird internet is present on Tiktok right now: almost no ads or commercial presense, personal content from real people (not hyper produced productions from influencers and pros), weird content, niche content, orga…
On the other hand, Tiktok is the only social media platform I absolutely can't stand. Low quality content, repeated jokes, people desperate for attention, impersonal, memes, and all of it video so there's an unavoidable fixed time cost. With so much good high content available on the internet and how little time people have, it saddens me that so much time is spent on the low quality noise.
TikTok makes me nauseous. It’s literally crazy to me that we’ve normalized an app targeted to kids and teens that encourages them to make hypersexualized mini music videos that rewards the “sexiest” videos with likes/followers/views.
The absolute creepiest part is that anyone can browse and fully download any video without even logging in. You would have to be completely naive to think that there aren’t a million pedophiles on TikTok everyday downloading content of teenage girls and boys twerking to Nicki Minaj songs without a trace. All while we sit back and laugh about it like we’re on Facebook circa 2009.