26 ms·

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 c

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 need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand. Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me. Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

acchow 5y ago
Tiktok is the anti-Instagram. It rejects Instagram’s focus on aesthetics and instead appeals to playfulness and authenticity.
karpathy 5y ago
I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, but the other side of me is like wait where did 2 hours go? And do I really want this?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- htrp 5y ago
  I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows). My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.
  - kfrzcode 5y ago
    The massive data vacuum is probably part of it.
    - 10000truths 5y ago
      But that’s not at all unique to TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc. have massive amounts of data to play with as well. What else does TikTok have that these other platforms do not?
      - chii 5y ago
        Perhaps they added a way to measure relationships between content, and expand the recommendation to several degrees of separation between related content.
      - novok 5y ago
        From what I've seen from Chinese tech companies, I've always noticed they tend to go one step even further in ignoring privacy. You think FB is bad, wait until you realize what Baidu, Tencent, etc do without even blinking. Probably because what the Chinese government demands of them, the only ones that stay standing are the ones willing to do that. And if your willing to do that, what is doing something similar when your not forced to?
        NGRhodes 5y ago
        Tictok have agreed to a $92 million settlement for lack of notification to users about data collection. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-owner-agrees-92-million-privacy-settlement-us-users-rcna315 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-owner-agrees-9...
- jancsika 5y ago
  Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing." So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes? I'm going to go ahead and guess "pro-unionization rabbit holes." If I'm wrong then the evidence will be me following the link someone gives me of a 2-hour TikTok unionization rabbit hole. I can't lose, internet! edit: clarification
  - GlennS 5y ago
    Your comment is incomprehensible.
    - 37ef_ced3 5y ago
      You're talking to a transformer language model.
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        Really? How do you know? I had a look at their other posts and it doesn't seem like it to me.
    - jancsika 5y ago
      I'll take another stab at it. OP's critique seems to be that TikTok caused engagement with their preferred content for a longer duration than desired. That's not an interesting distinction from what happened back in the day with people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. "Digital crack" is hyperbole if all it means is spending longer on the topics one already likes. My question: is the TikTok algo consistently steering users toward/away from categories of content they would have otherwise had an interest in consuming? E.g., are there pro-unionization users who accidentally spend 2 hours watching pro-unionization TikToks? Or is the recommendation engine steering those users to 2 hours of some less contentious category?
  - gpvos 5y ago
- mym1990 5y ago
  I think the important distinction in 'do I really want this' becomes whether I chose to do that activity, or if I kind of just got sucker punched into it. I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.
  - chefandy 5y ago
    About a year and a half ago, I acknowledged how negatively some reflexive social media habits impacted my life and managed to extricate myself from them. A year or two before that realization I installed TikTok to see what the fuss was about, checked out the stream for a few minutes, looked up at the clock to realize it had actually been about two hours, and immeditealy uninstalled the app. Astonishingly good attention and interest manipulation. Terrifyingly good, in fact. I don't moralize about getting lost in trash entertainment, but there's a significant swath of the population for which this format combined with these design patterns is a big problem.
systemvoltage 5y ago
It's AI is kind of terrible for society. Sure, it is impressive technically, but WSJ did an article Tiktok's effect on teenagers: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investigation-11626877477 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investig... https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-tiktok-related-ticsand-other-disorders-11648248555 https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-ti...
secondaryacct 5y ago
The first Chinese app with some traction and it blows american ones by being delightful and diverse :D Wait for them to start doing TV shows with some non-Chinese focus.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  I think Chinese cultural exports obviously lag behind those of Japan and Korea because the government censors confine their creatives, leaving them less free to create. The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon. I'd love if they proved me wrong.
rvz 5y ago
> Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now. On to the next 'hit' then. The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible. There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™. The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs. Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.
- badestrand 5y ago
  It's just entertainment. You could say the same about books or TV. At least Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social and interactive and encourage people to produce content instead of just consuming passively.
  - wara23arish 5y ago
    Someone’s who’s read a lot of books is called well read. Someone who’s watched a bunch of shows is called a binge watcher. No matter what they’re called, reading specifically requires more active thinking than watching stuff. I wouldn’t say theyre the same.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Someone who read a lot of porn novels wouldn't be called well read, and someone who watch a bunch of college lectures wouldn't be called a binge watcher. What matters is the content, not the form of the content. It is just that simple content tend to choose easy to digest mediums, there is not much demand for low effort literature today since people just watch movies instead.
madeofpalk 5y ago
I understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP. Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees. I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.
- cobertos 5y ago
  I agree though with your last point. I get a lot of queer content and it's usually very welcome. Though some niches in that subset that focus on discussion of harassment of queer people are much more anxiety inducing.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 5y ago
That sucks. Imagine if you worked there and realized that.
throwaway4good 5y ago
They have good editors that know their audience. Sure some what you see is supported by "algorithms"; but what you sense ("playful, authentic, and raw" ) is the result of a deliberate editorial policy done by a group of actual humans.
- throwra620 5y ago
Gatsky 5y ago
One explanation for the difference between tiktok and instagram could be that tiktok doesn’t have a crystallized business model yet and is just focusing on growing its network as much as possible. Presumably it will end up as bad as every other (profitable) social network over time (apart from twitter, which is more like an internet utility).
- math-dev 5y ago
  Good point
- throwra620 5y ago
ur-whale 5y ago
> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it. Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever. What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral? Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?
- fullsend 5y ago
  These are good questions and I think it’s nowhere near as rosy as OP described.
- jpindar 5y ago
  AFAIK the content is permanent. There's a website as well as the app. You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.
mlindner 5y ago
In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Then I'll say it has a relatively minor use among the voting-age population. Most users are children.
    - rndgermandude 5y ago
      It seems voting-age adults are in a large majority, with "only" 28% under-18 and therefore 72% over-18 Tiktok users[0]. However, you have more of a point if you look at typical likely-voters instead of all voting-age people. [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikTokagedemographics https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikT...
AlexandrB 5y ago
I remember hearing similar things about Instagram vs. Facebook many years ago. Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?
- kpennell 5y ago
  It felt like that for a bit but then they (Tiktok) just pushed a release that removed reposts/memes from the main FYP feed. All of a sudden, it became much more interesting again.
- kpennell 5y ago
  But I agree with the overall point that at some point people will learn how to game it.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram. Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live. Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.
- jug 5y ago
  Yes, there is a huge disconnect in the Instagram discovery feed for me as well. I follow friends & family, some astronomy, photography, tech accounts but when I browse Explore it’s full of influencers and fit girls in thighs. It got slightly better a few months ago when I think they did something but only introduced 20% of my tastes rather than 0%.
- foldr 5y ago
  I had to spend hours training Instagram not to show me endless pictures of hot shirtless guys when I go to the 'explore' feed. I follow one or two pop singers who sometimes post sexy photos, but for the most part I just follow people that I really know. I'm not sure how my feed ended up so sexualized. My theory is that Instagram notices that I spend longer looking at hot guys when they do appear than I do looking at other kinds of photos. (I am happy to stare at hot guys, but it's not what I'm actually looking for when I go to Instagram.)
henrikschroder 5y ago
> I legitimately laugh my ass off Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky? Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many diamonds on there! I can easily laugh my ass off every night, because the format is just perfect for a bunch of quick visual gags. The duet feature and the re-use song feature enable so much absolute hilarity, because of the repetition humour. Which is why I watched a TikTok of someone putting a 3D-printed magic wand on top of a sea urchin, set to the sound of someone saying "Avadakadavra" in a really high-pitched voice, and I just fucking lost it. It's brilliant! Brilliant!
- throwra620 5y ago
- arlcode 5y ago
  Because I trust hacker news (somewhat), I just installed tiktok for the first time. 15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested. I just removed it again for that very reason.
  - throwra620 5y ago
  - ozymandias12 5y ago
    3 days and it’s algorithm can figure out what you like, unstoppable after that, it just freaking knows you, brilliant app.
- criddell 5y ago
  I’ve tried it twice now and it just doesn’t click for me. I think the most interesting thing it found for me was a video of a person doing some really excellent welding. Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.
bananamerica 5y ago
Is there a way to remove the overlays? By that I mean the crap above the videos? I really can't use it with those, I'm autistic and it's just too much.
HNHatesUsers 5y ago
agumonkey 5y ago
Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally. It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.
- ejb999 5y ago
  Yet, but it will.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Hey, maybe it will stabilize.. surprises happen :)
- rchaud 5y ago
  It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion. IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics. At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues. At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there. It'll happen to TikTok as well.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    God.. beyond the sad but obvious pattern. It seems the web is just a incoherent runaway. New "platform" > bubbly phase > distortion for bad incentives (money, fame, else) > rot > abandonment for next "platform". It was fun to observe that during the myspace days but it's getting annoying.
    - BoiledCabbage 5y ago
      Huh it's funny. When you put it that way is sounds like all those same arguments people have been making against crypto - except the fallout from the "rot" phase of crypto will have very significant real world consequences. It's as if people who have been on the internet since those days can easily see what's coming.
saiya-jin 5y ago
Imagine all that time spent watching other people do hobbies you would like to have instead be spent actually doing those hobbies. Where would your life be right now and where would it go from there. Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.
codingdave 5y ago
> Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds." Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to make a point, but I don't find the argument compelling that social media really can add value to our lives as long as we ignore the most visible and popular content within it.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  On reddit you need to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff, usually by stumbling across good subs from outside the site. TikTok is better at serving you the things you like as you passively consume them.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few of them, all tiktoks seem to have the same feel and optimization. They're uncanny valley of authenticity, influencers and singers and actors and wives struggling so very very hard to seem amiable and authentic and real based on same evolving playbook, and I feel too weirded out after 30s or so to keep watching :O.
- meibo 5y ago
  I think the thing that makes TikTok successful is that it's so uniquely tuned to whoever owns the account, and that it catches up with your personal interests and preferences very quickly. Your experience on TikTok is probably going to be a lot different to your wife's, at least this has been the case for us.
- zippergz 5y ago
  TikTok’s super power is tailoring the feed to the user, so this uncanny valley stuff is what your wife likes.
  - danielvaughn 5y ago
    It really is wild. You can decide exactly what you want to be shown by how long you spend on a video. You can literally feel the algorithm working alongside you, like you're using river currents while paddling in a kayak. Fucking crazy.
- crubier 5y ago
  Important reminder: don’t talk too much publicly about your (wife’s) TikTok feed, because it says more about you than you’d think. I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.

acchow 5y ago

Tiktok is the anti-Instagram. It rejects Instagram’s focus on aesthetics and instead appeals to playfulness and authenticity.

karpathy 5y ago

I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, but the other side of me is like wait where did 2 hours go? And do I really want this?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
htrp 5y ago
I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows). My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.
- kfrzcode 5y ago
  The massive data vacuum is probably part of it.
  - 10000truths 5y ago
    But that’s not at all unique to TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc. have massive amounts of data to play with as well. What else does TikTok have that these other platforms do not?
    - chii 5y ago
      Perhaps they added a way to measure relationships between content, and expand the recommendation to several degrees of separation between related content.
    - novok 5y ago
      From what I've seen from Chinese tech companies, I've always noticed they tend to go one step even further in ignoring privacy. You think FB is bad, wait until you realize what Baidu, Tencent, etc do without even blinking. Probably because what the Chinese government demands of them, the only ones that stay standing are the ones willing to do that. And if your willing to do that, what is doing something similar when your not forced to?
      - NGRhodes 5y ago
        Tictok have agreed to a $92 million settlement for lack of notification to users about data collection. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-owner-agrees-92-million-privacy-settlement-us-users-rcna315 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-owner-agrees-9...
jancsika 5y ago
Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing." So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes? I'm going to go ahead and guess "pro-unionization rabbit holes." If I'm wrong then the evidence will be me following the link someone gives me of a 2-hour TikTok unionization rabbit hole. I can't lose, internet! edit: clarification
- GlennS 5y ago
  Your comment is incomprehensible.
  - 37ef_ced3 5y ago
    You're talking to a transformer language model.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      Really? How do you know? I had a look at their other posts and it doesn't seem like it to me.
  - jancsika 5y ago
    I'll take another stab at it. OP's critique seems to be that TikTok caused engagement with their preferred content for a longer duration than desired. That's not an interesting distinction from what happened back in the day with people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. "Digital crack" is hyperbole if all it means is spending longer on the topics one already likes. My question: is the TikTok algo consistently steering users toward/away from categories of content they would have otherwise had an interest in consuming? E.g., are there pro-unionization users who accidentally spend 2 hours watching pro-unionization TikToks? Or is the recommendation engine steering those users to 2 hours of some less contentious category?
- gpvos 5y ago
mym1990 5y ago
I think the important distinction in 'do I really want this' becomes whether I chose to do that activity, or if I kind of just got sucker punched into it. I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.
- chefandy 5y ago
  About a year and a half ago, I acknowledged how negatively some reflexive social media habits impacted my life and managed to extricate myself from them. A year or two before that realization I installed TikTok to see what the fuss was about, checked out the stream for a few minutes, looked up at the clock to realize it had actually been about two hours, and immeditealy uninstalled the app. Astonishingly good attention and interest manipulation. Terrifyingly good, in fact. I don't moralize about getting lost in trash entertainment, but there's a significant swath of the population for which this format combined with these design patterns is a big problem.

systemvoltage 5y ago

It's AI is kind of terrible for society. Sure, it is impressive technically, but WSJ did an article Tiktok's effect on teenagers: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investigation-11626877477 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investig... https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-tiktok-related-ticsand-other-disorders-11648248555 https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-ti...

secondaryacct 5y ago

The first Chinese app with some traction and it blows american ones by being delightful and diverse :D Wait for them to start doing TV shows with some non-Chinese focus.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
I think Chinese cultural exports obviously lag behind those of Japan and Korea because the government censors confine their creatives, leaving them less free to create. The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon. I'd love if they proved me wrong.

rvz 5y ago

> Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now. On to the next 'hit' then. The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible. There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™. The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs. Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.

badestrand 5y ago
It's just entertainment. You could say the same about books or TV. At least Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social and interactive and encourage people to produce content instead of just consuming passively.
- wara23arish 5y ago
  Someone’s who’s read a lot of books is called well read. Someone who’s watched a bunch of shows is called a binge watcher. No matter what they’re called, reading specifically requires more active thinking than watching stuff. I wouldn’t say theyre the same.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Someone who read a lot of porn novels wouldn't be called well read, and someone who watch a bunch of college lectures wouldn't be called a binge watcher. What matters is the content, not the form of the content. It is just that simple content tend to choose easy to digest mediums, there is not much demand for low effort literature today since people just watch movies instead.

madeofpalk 5y ago

I understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP. Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees. I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.

cobertos 5y ago
I agree though with your last point. I get a lot of queer content and it's usually very welcome. Though some niches in that subset that focus on discussion of harassment of queer people are much more anxiety inducing.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 5y ago

That sucks. Imagine if you worked there and realized that.

throwaway4good 5y ago

They have good editors that know their audience. Sure some what you see is supported by "algorithms"; but what you sense ("playful, authentic, and raw" ) is the result of a deliberate editorial policy done by a group of actual humans.

throwra620 5y ago

Gatsky 5y ago

One explanation for the difference between tiktok and instagram could be that tiktok doesn’t have a crystallized business model yet and is just focusing on growing its network as much as possible. Presumably it will end up as bad as every other (profitable) social network over time (apart from twitter, which is more like an internet utility).

math-dev 5y ago
Good point
throwra620 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it. Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever. What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral? Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?

fullsend 5y ago
These are good questions and I think it’s nowhere near as rosy as OP described.
jpindar 5y ago
AFAIK the content is permanent. There's a website as well as the app. You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.

mlindner 5y ago

In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.

rndgermandude 5y ago
Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".
- mlindner 5y ago
  Then I'll say it has a relatively minor use among the voting-age population. Most users are children.
  - rndgermandude 5y ago
    It seems voting-age adults are in a large majority, with "only" 28% under-18 and therefore 72% over-18 Tiktok users[0]. However, you have more of a point if you look at typical likely-voters instead of all voting-age people. [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikTokagedemographics https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikT...

AlexandrB 5y ago

I remember hearing similar things about Instagram vs. Facebook many years ago. Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?

kpennell 5y ago
It felt like that for a bit but then they (Tiktok) just pushed a release that removed reposts/memes from the main FYP feed. All of a sudden, it became much more interesting again.
kpennell 5y ago
But I agree with the overall point that at some point people will learn how to game it.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram. Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live. Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.

jug 5y ago
Yes, there is a huge disconnect in the Instagram discovery feed for me as well. I follow friends & family, some astronomy, photography, tech accounts but when I browse Explore it’s full of influencers and fit girls in thighs. It got slightly better a few months ago when I think they did something but only introduced 20% of my tastes rather than 0%.
foldr 5y ago
I had to spend hours training Instagram not to show me endless pictures of hot shirtless guys when I go to the 'explore' feed. I follow one or two pop singers who sometimes post sexy photos, but for the most part I just follow people that I really know. I'm not sure how my feed ended up so sexualized. My theory is that Instagram notices that I spend longer looking at hot guys when they do appear than I do looking at other kinds of photos. (I am happy to stare at hot guys, but it's not what I'm actually looking for when I go to Instagram.)

henrikschroder 5y ago

> I legitimately laugh my ass off Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky? Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many diamonds on there! I can easily laugh my ass off every night, because the format is just perfect for a bunch of quick visual gags. The duet feature and the re-use song feature enable so much absolute hilarity, because of the repetition humour. Which is why I watched a TikTok of someone putting a 3D-printed magic wand on top of a sea urchin, set to the sound of someone saying "Avadakadavra" in a really high-pitched voice, and I just fucking lost it. It's brilliant! Brilliant!

throwra620 5y ago
arlcode 5y ago
Because I trust hacker news (somewhat), I just installed tiktok for the first time. 15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested. I just removed it again for that very reason.
- throwra620 5y ago
- ozymandias12 5y ago
  3 days and it’s algorithm can figure out what you like, unstoppable after that, it just freaking knows you, brilliant app.
criddell 5y ago
I’ve tried it twice now and it just doesn’t click for me. I think the most interesting thing it found for me was a video of a person doing some really excellent welding. Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.

bananamerica 5y ago

Is there a way to remove the overlays? By that I mean the crap above the videos? I really can't use it with those, I'm autistic and it's just too much.

HNHatesUsers 5y ago

agumonkey 5y ago

Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally. It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.

ejb999 5y ago
Yet, but it will.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Hey, maybe it will stabilize.. surprises happen :)
rchaud 5y ago
It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion. IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics. At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues. At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there. It'll happen to TikTok as well.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  God.. beyond the sad but obvious pattern. It seems the web is just a incoherent runaway. New "platform" > bubbly phase > distortion for bad incentives (money, fame, else) > rot > abandonment for next "platform". It was fun to observe that during the myspace days but it's getting annoying.
  - BoiledCabbage 5y ago
    Huh it's funny. When you put it that way is sounds like all those same arguments people have been making against crypto - except the fallout from the "rot" phase of crypto will have very significant real world consequences. It's as if people who have been on the internet since those days can easily see what's coming.

saiya-jin 5y ago

Imagine all that time spent watching other people do hobbies you would like to have instead be spent actually doing those hobbies. Where would your life be right now and where would it go from there. Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.

codingdave 5y ago

> Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds." Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to make a point, but I don't find the argument compelling that social media really can add value to our lives as long as we ignore the most visible and popular content within it.

EamonnMR 5y ago
On reddit you need to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff, usually by stumbling across good subs from outside the site. TikTok is better at serving you the things you like as you passively consume them.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few of them, all tiktoks seem to have the same feel and optimization. They're uncanny valley of authenticity, influencers and singers and actors and wives struggling so very very hard to seem amiable and authentic and real based on same evolving playbook, and I feel too weirded out after 30s or so to keep watching :O.

meibo 5y ago
I think the thing that makes TikTok successful is that it's so uniquely tuned to whoever owns the account, and that it catches up with your personal interests and preferences very quickly. Your experience on TikTok is probably going to be a lot different to your wife's, at least this has been the case for us.
zippergz 5y ago
TikTok’s super power is tailoring the feed to the user, so this uncanny valley stuff is what your wife likes.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  It really is wild. You can decide exactly what you want to be shown by how long you spend on a video. You can literally feel the algorithm working alongside you, like you're using river currents while paddling in a kayak. Fucking crazy.
crubier 5y ago
Important reminder: don’t talk too much publicly about your (wife’s) TikTok feed, because it says more about you than you’d think. I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.