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I was a bit critical of my wife using TikTok until I realized that she replaced the negativity of Facebook with something that, in its current form, is pretty harmless. It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity.
> It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity. ... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.
I absolutely love using TikTok, but would give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement. It has absolutely brought more positivity into my life. I am specifically feeding the algorithm with this intent and I get what I asked for. It is a psychological tool.
> give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement. It's important to recognized that it's not a coincidence that TikTok exists and is run by a Chinese company. In the West that replacement would have been immediately purchased by FB or Twitter and then summarily destroyed. This is literally what happened to the closest Western equivalent: Vine. The Chinese government has many faults, but unlike the US government,…
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> After all, they're not in business to influence politics. Dude, I personally know people who work in Facebook's own lobbying department. I would be very surprised if Twitter didn't have the same thing.
There's a difference between Facebook lobbying and Facebook using its products to disseminate propaganda.
EDIT: Mark Zuckerberg had to appear before Congress in 2018 specifically to address Facebook disseminating propaganda!
I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't…
Instagram seems to be evolving into Home Shopping Network or QVC.
I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't…
I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones. He's correct that the primary political risk of Tiktok is the recommendation algorithm being manipulated. However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either.
This would have been a good chance to really defend free flow of information on the internet, open and swappable recommendation algorithms, personal data ownership, and so on, but the conclusion is basically "it's bad because a China-affiliated company does it". Generally, everything that Tiktok does that is wrong is also wrong when Facebook does it. The reality is that Tiktok is (for now) a superior product in many ways to anything from American tech companies. Why is this?
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> It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity. ... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.
Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.
> Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.
This is a strawman. People dislike the CCP not the Chinese.
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Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.
> Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is: From the OP: > To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifical…
I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.
I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't…
The traditional social media dominated by US companies is about sharing what you eat what you do where you are who do you sleep with and what you are angry about. People are essentially misbehaving when they post funny videos.
TikTok on the other hand is playful and the encouraged behaviour is to be creative.
When someone misbehaves on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook they would post videos that someone else made and A lot of that content is made on TikTok. The only creative space is in YouTube but it's not because YouTube encourages it but because there are people capable if using it like that.
I am not convinced that the issue with TikTok is a security issue, It's just that SV lost it's edge on culture and technology, and the crusade against TikTok or Huawei is mostly protectionism and this protectionism will eventually lead to Israel, EU, Japan, Korea, UK, Australia to spit domestic and global success stories like China does these days.
If the concerns were about security, there would have been regulations to ensure security(like requiring storing US users data on US soil and so on). USA is not doing that, USA is in war mode.
What even worse? People don't even want to hear it.
I am not the biggest fan of Peter Theil but I think he has a point on the monoculture, group thinking, high rents.
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Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways? > I would argue it is one thing to be absorbed by reading in your phone HN or other productive sources. Laughing and dancing on the other hand, after a certain period of time not so much useful.
This is one of the most depressing comments I've read in a long time.