19 ms·

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 spe

• teekert 6y ago
  All I see is girls putting their phone somewhere, dancing in front of it, then getting back into being absorbed by their phones. Can you describe more specifically what is so positive about it? My kids are about to enter the age at which they get a smartphone and these things make me a bit afraid (like, who's watching? Why do they stare at that app for so long? etc). I don't understand the alure, but I want to keep an open mind and not be that old parent that doesn't understand...
  • bstar77 6y ago
    You don't need to understand the allure. Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways? What wrong with people smiling, laughing and dancing? I'm an old parent trying to be open minded as well.
    • RspecMAuthortah 6y ago
      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.
      • bstar77 6y ago
        This is one of the most depressing comments I've read in a long time.
        • Waterfall 6y ago
          This comment chain is one of the funniest I've seen in a while. Literally laughing so hard at your comment thank you.
        • 082349872349872 6y ago
          https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1281092706677243904 https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1281092706677243904 "${RELIGIOUS GROUP}: A man who has an uncomfortable feeling that somebody, somewhere is enjoying themselves." for a different ${RELIGIOUS GROUP}'s opinions on dancing, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591306
        • teekert 6y ago
          Yeah, actually I wish HN would make me laugh and dance, this comment makes tiktok sound pretty good!
          • chosenbreed37 6y ago
            > Yeah, actually I wish HN would make me laugh and dance, this comment makes tiktok sound pretty good! LOL. I find HN highly entertaining. Well...not to the point of breaking into a dance...but entertaining. Quite often I just jump straight to the comments.
    • newswasboring 6y ago
      > What wrong with people smiling, laughing and dancing? There is nothing wrong in it, but there isn't much alluring there too. Its available from so many other platforms.
      • monadic2 6y ago
        Really? Almost the entirety of where I see this is people recording and re-uploading content from tik tok onto Twitter. It’s certainly a distinct communication culture. I mean “Instagram dance” was never a thing the way “Tik tok dance” is a thing.
        • newswasboring 6y ago
          I guess what I'm saying is just because it's distinct doesn't mean it's alluring. It might be a different form of expression but what is being expressed is that entertaining or different from Instagram. It's just a bit less objectifying than Instagram but still feels lacking.
        • newen 6y ago
          I think the dances came from musical.ly, which part of Tiktok used to be. Then, it's just people doing what other people are doing, one upping each other, trying to get popular, etc. Same social media stuff and Tiktok's recommendation algorithm is really good, so people get into it really quickly.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • StevePerkins 6y ago
      The parent commenter asked if anyone could describe what is positive about the app. Since they apparently have no first-hand experience with it, and do not understand the allure from what they've heard or seen so far. You're responding to him or her with "You don't need to understand the allure". And somehow seem offended that he or she doesn't understand what people are laughing about. Come on.
    • saityi 6y ago
      >Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways? Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times. Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.
      • chucksmash 6y ago
        I'm a fan of the "Digital Wellbeing" features that ship with newer phones. I have a social media account which I check approximately biweekly and definitely considered myself someone who wasn't falling into the attention trap in my pocket. I only read HN, a few news sites, send texts, and play chess on my phone. I was amazed to see just how much time I spent doing these things. Even if in some way how I'm using the phone is more virtuous or less problematic ("this hour-long article about the architecture of the classic XBox gratifies my curiosity, is informative and gives me more context with which to understand my field!"), that time and attention sink still comes at the cost of everything else in life.
  • kpennell 6y ago
    Once I started marking 'not interested' on the super basic teenager dance videos, I eventually stopped seeing them. Same with a lot of the memey songs that get tiring to hear after a while. I'll try to make a list of people who keep popping up.
  • bkruse 6y ago
    Having used tiktok for a total of 10 hours now, I get programmer humor, car videos and funny animal videos - exactly what I want That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate
  • nxc18 6y ago
    I get mostly cooking, gardening, life hacks, and occasionally political humor. I'm also on gay TikTok so there's some 'fun' content there. I've learned lots of cool stuff on TikTok - my favorite tip recently has been a trick for partially juicing lemons while leaving them intact; last week I broke my soda habit as a result of easily accessible homemade la croix.
    • teekert 6y ago
      OK sounds good, maybe I should just try it, always good to know what you are talking about, right?!
  • azatris 6y ago
    Since the content is curated strongly by your likes and dislikes, I am afraid your children might actually get some nasty stuff there. There's psychotic horror and soft porn. I don't think I'd trust my child with it unless they're older than 14 or so. The dancing stuff is pretty mild and I'd say even constructive for children. The allure, is hard to describe. The content I see is very human, people describing their experiences, doing harmless jokes on each other, or teaching something. How it differs from YouTube is that it is much more strongly tailored to your likes, and due to time constraints, skips the chuff and gets to the meat of things quicker.
  • cwkoss 6y ago
    It seems to create affinity scores based on which videos you complete watching, like or share. Then they also maintain similar affinity scores for every tag on those videos and the creators of those videos. So as you watch stuff, you feed becomes tuned to your preferences without needing an explicit 'follow' step. Users have little control of what videos they see explicitly, but if you like 5 videos with the same tag, it will present more videos with that tag.
• violetyellow 6y ago
  The blue pill of internet
• bstar77 6y ago
  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.
  • mschuster91 6y ago
    > It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity. ... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.
    • msbarnett 6y ago
      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.
      • redblacktree 6y ago
        Without the racist framing of "sinophobia," fear of the Chinese state is a legitimate one. They are a totalitarian regime engaged in a variety of human rights abuses and dystopian-fiction-made-reality. From Uyghur concentration camps to "social credit scores," there are a lot of reasons to fear the Chinese state that have nothing to do with racism or xenophobia.
        • xapata 6y ago
          Indeed, I know many Chinese people who are afraid of the Chinese state.
          • redblacktree 6y ago
            It looks like they may also be brigading this post. Two downvotes pretty quickly on my comment. Maybe I'm out-of-touch with Hacker News norms, but I didn't think I said anything that warrants downvotes. Edit to add: I don't make this post to complain about downvotes. The point was the potential brigading, since we're talking negatively about the Chinese state.
• baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  > 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, the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation. Facebook did try to buy Musical.ly, the company that became TikTok, and would have likely destroyed it just like Twitter did Vine. If the US government was remotely functional it would put a little effort into challenging the ability of near monopolies to simply destroy any competitor through acquisition. I agree that it's not ideal that the Chinese government is tightly connected with TikTok/ByteDance, but the reason there is no Western TikTok is because our governments (particularly the US) are so deeply aligned with the interests of larger corporations that a viable competitor to these cannot exist.
  • Waterfall 6y ago
    Vine wasn't destroyed, it was bought by Twitter long before it released.
  • creddit 6y ago
    Why assume FB would kill an acquisition? They didn’t kill WA, IG or Beluga. They made them into massive billion+ DAU services.
    • brownbat 6y ago
      It may be harder to monetize short video content than short text or longer videos (maybe that drives YouTube revenue nudges for longer content?). But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you. But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.
  • jorblumesea 6y ago
• kpennell 6y ago
  RIP Vine