25 ms·

TikTok’s Poison Pill

286 points by yarapavan 4y ago

cm42 4y ago
In case anyone from Facebook thinks people are leaving their platform for TikTok, I'd just like to offer that everybody I know who's quit over the past 6 months or so has quit because of 30-day bans for posting obvious satire. I slowly forgot about it once they required the Messenger app (which had its own data/privacy issues). I seem to recall that coinciding with a WhatsApp exodus among friends with family overseas, but I forget the deal. Anyway, it just ceased to be relevant one day, and we just text or use any of the 93024832048932 other apps now. It's not a bad platform for viewing ads, though, I guess.
doctor_eval 4y ago
Something I've never understood about these pivots from successful, revenue generating products. Sure, some users will leave Instagram for Tiktok. But isn't it a different product? Wouldn't Meta have been better off creating a new product and integrating it with Instagram, rather than killing the golden goose? This kind of thing seems to happen really often.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Launching something new and separate inherently means starting with zero user base.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg could use his influence at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to get a few users to try out a new app he coded up over the weekend.
    - draw_down 4y ago
- prawn 4y ago
  Adjusting your product means you don't start your userbase from scratch, but I do agree that I'd prefer they start a fresh product and leverage the userbase to promote it. But I think it's easier for them to centralise advertising operations where possible and steer the most malleable and lucrative audience rather than appease (what they thought of as) a minority of people.
- djaychela 4y ago
  From what I've read, Meta's strategy (and valuation) ultimately relies on 'ubiquity' (as they put it) - where everyone on earth has a Meta account and uses it. The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation as a result of this, so they do the classic "what's working for the competition" action. I've not had a FB account for years, and didn't use it other than for messenger for years before that, but when I was on there, I felt that most of their growth came from 'copy what other sites are doing, extinguish the competition by doing this' strategy, as everyone is on facebook anyway. It's worked for them so far, just now it's a bigger shift to try to emulate TikTok rather than try to destroy local ads sites or small business site hosting.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation That's because of unrealistic expectation from the stock market, not due to the company's health. A stall in user growth means a limit to the company size, and investors were betting that after the IPO Facebook (that was already used by a large share of the humanity) would still grow by two orders of magnitude.
  - throwfh80h82 4y ago
    They can't really be relying on 100% market share. Is this hyperbole? Or real?
- IshKebab 4y ago
  The "what are my friends up to?" golden goose of Facebook is long dead. The "news feed" is already not really news about your friends so I guess it doesn't matter that they're admitting that and explicitly turning it into something like Tiktok.
- rr888 4y ago
  I'm not into Tik Tok style videos. I recently really cut back using both Instagram and FB because they're just showing me humorous videos and not why I used those apps.
- sct202 4y ago
  They had an app called Lasso a couple years ago that they shut down, I don't know anyone who actually used it though.
- notatoad 4y ago
  is there any evidence that the pivots actually "kill the golden goose"? facebook has a long history of making product changes that initially cause a lot of complaining from existing users. they seem to be making a bet that existing users are addicted enough to the product that a change to it won't drive them away. and so far that seems to have worked for them.
  - trebbble 4y ago
    Facebook's changes have taken a whole lot of users from "I am on here because it's useful and I actively like it" to "I am on here only because of inertia and network effects, but dislike it and will be happy when I can get rid of it" May not have killed the golden goose yet, but they've sure sharpened the axe, stretched the neck over the block, and drawn a little X right in the middle.
  - sheepybloke 4y ago
    There has been push back against the more algorithmic content they are pushing because it gets in the way of the post of people you follow. I use Instagram to follow some artists and design companies, and it's frustrating when every other post is not the people I follow, but some bad influencer vaguely related to your interests begging for likes and follows. Previously, they had suggested posts after you scrolled a bit or after you've caught up with everyone you follow.
- HaloZero 4y ago
  They already have a tab called Reels inside of Instagram, I tried using it instead of TikTok and it was fucking awful at trying to learn what videos I liked. It seems that they're just gonna force the video format on everyone in order to get better learning data?
throwaway4good 4y ago
Wow. An article about TikTok that has the word poison in it, that is not actually anti-TikTok. How far we have gone. And yes! TikTok is how we break the shackles of big tech. TikTok on its own we can handle. But a Facebook backed by the full force of the US military surveillance industrial complex. That is going to kill off the whole planet.
- computerfriend 4y ago
  TikTok is Big Tech. Neither will "kill off the whole planet", but it is so crazy to me that someone who can hate Facebook and the "US military surveillance industrial complex" can consequentially support TikTok. You don't actually have a problem with big tech or surveillance, you have a problem with the US.
  - lizardactivist 4y ago
    Of importance: it has been revealed several times that user identification and data collection has been used for malicious purposes by US intelligence agencies (see NSA and CIA leaks a few years ago) The same has not been proved for China. There have only been accusations by the US government, followed by an absolute reluctance and failure to provide any proof whatsoever. The US accuses China of being a bad actor engaging in data surveillance, refuses to back up accusations, and then commits the very same act themselves. The very definition of dishonesty and hypocrisy.
    - bigtunacan 4y ago
      This isn't really news, many countries collect data on their own citizens in expanding ways. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/actually-most-countries-are-increasingly-spying-on-their-citizens-the-un-says/276614/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/ac... TikTok almost certainly receives requests from various governments to collect data no differently from Facebook/Google/Verizon etc.. I think it's not a question of if China is doing this as well; certainly they are. No politician is going to publicly say though, "Look we know China is collecting data on you from TikTok because, uh duh, that's what we do with all of your US based social media posts." I also don't think our government is all that directly concerned that China is monitoring. I think the concern is more on how the data and the outside control of the platform might be used to influence public opinions. Election tampering and the like.
nixcraft 4y ago
There is lots of talk going around TikTok, especially now geopolitics has been added to this kind of discussion due to ongoing tensions between two giants. Instead of banning or removing the TikTok app, how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO. Let users download and use whatever app they want but keep a firm privacy policy. But, of course, geopolitics will take over, so I have ZERO hope for a tight privacy policy for all apps. Similarly, there is no such thing as a backdoor in apps for good guys (3 letter agencies) vs bad guys. Just make one rule for all. Otherwise, it is all grey areas open to abuse. Also, it is not just geopolitics; big social media like YouTube, Insta, FB and others face colossal competition from TikTok. As a result, they are losing users to TikTok. So they want this kind of ban (emphasis mine ), at least they won't object to it, and it is a slippery slope.
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  You may have noticed this from the attempts or lack thereof over the past two decades to regulate tech to the benefit of everyday people. This is because Congress has been petrified of "breaking Google". It is currently why so much of SV now sits on the POTUS's cabinet. No one knows the totality of how and where these modern day digital East India companies truly operate, and there will never be legislation that broadly protects citizen privacy like in the EU because of it.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Yeah, this sort of protectionist interference in the name of "security" isn't new - look at Boeing.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  No American pundits and politicians just hate TikTok because it is not a US corporation.
- ammo1662 4y ago
  Their business is built on top of collecting and selling users' data. Why will the politicians sponsored by them try to establish a policy to break their own business?
kart23 4y ago
Bring back google+. oh wait, I guess we really can't trust anyone with user data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach >In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article outlining the initial breach and Google's decision to not disclose it to users.[18] At the time, there was no federal law that required Google to inform their consumers of data breaches. Google+ originally did not disclose the breach out of fears of being compared to Facebook's recent data leak and subsequent loss of consumer confidence.[4] In response to the Wall Street Journal article, Google announced the shutdown of Google+ in August 2019.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  What is the definition of a breach? Are all vulnerabilities considered breaches? If a website finds a vulnerability in their code, fixes it, and doesn't find any evidence of attack, do they generally tell the public about that? Disclosure: I work at Google, but never on Google+.
  - leksak 4y ago
    Depends on the vulnerability. It might be prudent to disclose it so users have the freedom to, for instance, change their passwords elsewhere as most people do indeed reuse passwords. I'm not sure how this metaphor holds up under scrutiny but disclosing all vulnerabilities might be akin to considering yourself having had a break-in every time you forgot to lock the door.
    - lrem 4y ago
      From the linked article: > unauthorized access to private users' names, emails, addresses, occupations, genders and ages. Dislaimer: I work in Google, but don't know anything about the breach that isn't in the linked article.
RektBoy 4y ago
Nooo please leave Tiktok be, they didn't do anything wrong.... cough cough OSINT treasure trove cough cough
- maven29 4y ago
  Let's hope we do linkedin next.
  - RektBoy 4y ago
    Yes, linkedin is a pirate treasure trove of OSINT. People...
- est 4y ago
  because collecting meme video feeds are vital to OSINT.
  - RektBoy 4y ago
    Kids or even adults are leaving critical OSINT information in their tiktoks. Where they live, what they're doing right now etc. And from point of view of braindead attacker. All this can be done manually. What if I reverse Tiktok and have everything automated. A lot of people start to stream just for fun or by mistake, for few secs. Post a video by mistake. Bot which watches specific profile 24/7 .... catches everything and more...
  - yorwba 4y ago
    People upload all kinds of stuff. I remember seeing videos with a TikTok watermark of Russian military equipment being moved towards the Ukrainian border before the invasion. E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shows-russian-troop-buildup-during-putins-intimidation-campaign-2022-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shows-russian-troop-b...
    - JasserInicide 4y ago
      Near the beginning of the war, I saw a reuploaded Tiktok of this Ukrainian girl hopping into an abandoned Russian tank and figuring out how to drive it.
thih9 4y ago
> If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Is it really a competitive advantage if a competitor is doing better without it?
- jsemrau 4y ago
  The social graph is a terrible approximation of personal interests.
  - ttyprintk 4y ago
    Yup. It’s not that an echo chamber is inevitable; for me, finding something interesting that’s not represented among my social graph is more likely to be viral/marketable/attractive than something circulating among the most-active 5%. TikTok doesn’t need that graph on an individual’s scale.
    - jsemrau 4y ago
      Hence, it so much more resembles "real life". And I think that's where TikTok thrives, it is a single player experience with networked features. Similar to going window shopping in a Mall with Billions of windows.
- meltyness 4y ago
  Cal has apparently confused his own language here. A graph of details about rich media is still, in some sense, a social graph. Rather than documenting: who do you know? when did you meet them? Capturing: what do you know? when did you learn it? who did you learn it from? what do you call it? how should it be presented? And so on...
  - pantulis 4y ago
    I fail to follow Cal's argument. It seems that he is abandoning his "digital detox" doctrine towards privacy. If the issue with social networks is the time we waste on them, why would an algorithmically generated feed be less addictive than a social network feed?
schnitzelstoat 4y ago
An a non-American the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird, it really does just seem like sinophobia - especially given there's no proof that TikTok is actually being used by the Chinese, whereas Snowden etc. has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this. I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...
- foepys 4y ago
  TikTok has massive reach and influence. Just look at the recent articles about teenagers thinking they have mental illnesses [1]. Misinformation campaigns are very powerful and this is especially worrisome when the most popular platform is controlled by an authoritarian regime with no regards to human rights, democracy, and free press. 1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-diagnosis-videos-leave-some-teens-thinking-they-have-rare-mental-disorders-11640514602 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-diagnosis-videos-leave-s...
- ralusek 4y ago
  > has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this. Ya, you're right, China isn't known to collect or do much with population data. China and the US officially regard each other as adversaries. The CCP outright declares the US to be an enemy. The CCP is also not subject to the rule of law within its own borders, even in theory. Then you get into the economics of it. The liberal west is generally in favor of free markets, but to what degree do we remain free when dealing with a trading partner who doesn't operate as a liberal democracy? China has banned Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram...because they don't want their citizens giving business to foreign powers which they could be directing to their own growing businesses, and they don't want their citizens giving data to foreign powers. So please clarify, is the US banning TikTok "sinophobia" but China banning Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc just something else entirely?
  - christkv 4y ago
    democraphobia ?
- 4y ago
cudgy 4y ago
“… we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.” Like talking and writing directly to a chosen audience of friends instead of acting as an unpaid or low paid content creator / publisher for a social media company? Any examples of recent apps that might accomplish this goal pf authentic human online engagements? Seems like the difficulty is getting enough users on a platform to facilitate a broad level of interests without a company being tempted to turning their users into neurological lab rats to be milked for ad revenue.
- bigtunacan 4y ago
  Vibely comes to mind https://www.vibely.io/ https://www.vibely.io/
- Siira 4y ago
  Telegram channels/groups are good for this.
- carapace 4y ago
  It's not recent but IRC is good for authentic human online engagements.
FeaturelessBug 4y ago
It's really aggravating to me because I use different social media sites for different purposes. I understand that our current business model revolves around making more and more money, but if all of the social media sites are the same then they won't be making any money because people won't want to deal with multiple accounts.
throwaway290 4y ago
TL;DR "all my friends are here" becomes less of a lock-in factor with TikTok-like model (as social graph becomes unimportant). If others follow suit, losing lock-in advantage might encourage competitors in the industry.
Milank 4y ago
It's the flow of nature. Nothing lasts forever. Looking from addiction perspective, TikTok is even worse. But, as the author said, it's more shallow, so it should be easier to move away from. I hope that people (or at least majority) will find a way to move from this mindless fun and finally start using all the technology we have at our disposal in some more meaningful way.
- mal-2 4y ago
  Many recent boycotts and other activist causes have achieved critical mass through organizing on TikTok. A ton of content there is historical and educational. People misunderstand short-form as shallow and that has never sit right with me. I find creators on TikTok to often go deeper and communicate more clearly than the cacophony of text posts on reddit or Facebook.
  - Milank 4y ago
    It's true that you can find useful content on TikTok. But, let's be realistic - percentage of people using TikTok to learn something is... probably negligible. But there's an example on how the technology can be used in good purpose.
    - cwkoss 4y ago
      Do you have any basis for your negligible statement? About half the videos I watch on TT are 'educational'
      - Milank 4y ago
        Ok, I must take a step back. I have only my personal feeling to back the claim. And that doesn't mean much, considering the fact that I barely ever used TikTok. So you might be right. My kids (6 and 8) told me a couple of times about life hacks that they saw on YouTube. And that's the only place they visit online, even that being restricted to less than an hour a day on average. So yeah, new generations might be using that content a bit differently from what I thought. If true, that is great news.
angio 4y ago
It's interesting to read this article from March [0] and then check the tiktok's coverage on the news after that. > Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok > The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. > “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
- simion314 4y ago
  Related to think t the children, I recently read a few comments from women in Romania that told that since around 12-13 years old they got on the Facebook page ads promoting those girls to work as cam girls. Facebook and their ad network should also be analyzed IMO, would make more sense to put all social media under the same standards. Also dudes working in ad industry, tell us why should we not install ad blockers when you put this kind of ads in front of children? FB knows 100% the user account age so is it stupidity? is it "we don't care", "a innocent bug"?
- mncharity 4y ago
  > These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry Has WaPo every managed a similar article on Hollywood catalyzing attacks on tech? Or maybe that's the commonplace politics... Still, nice to see mention of press coverage artifice.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  See also: https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-funding-anti-google-trade-group-since-2007-57953 https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-funding-anti-google-t...
- partiallypro 4y ago
  None of this detracts from concerns about Tiktok and the CCP though. Just as Microsoft funding anti-Google pieces doesn't detract from Google's near monopoly status in online advertising. Competitors do that all the time, you can't let that be a distraction from what the underlying problems are.
everyone 4y ago
All these social media things are pure crap. Who cares.
Rastonbury 4y ago
Twitter and Meta's social graphs competitive advantage will still be there with tiktok like features, what screws them is the dream of growth and every new person having a FB account. If tiktok doesn't have a social graph or relies on one, it looks like there's a gap in the space of FB for the gen Z. Also the title is confusing, I thought Bytedance had a poison pill in a sense it has some governance or legal means to dissuade would be acquirors.
fullshark 4y ago
Legacy media has been openly rooting for FB to die or lose influence for about 8 years now. Nice for the author to reveal their desire for this openly on their own blog.
jmyeet 4y ago
Who writes this? > If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution ... "Digital dictators"? "Web 2.0 revolution"? Seriously? Behind this self-congratulatory word ooze there is a point: the market will "solve" the Facebook "problem". In a decade we've had 2 existential threats to FB (the other being IG). That's just not a monopoyl that requires immediate government action. The social graph will still have value but I think people overstate its importance. Tiktok (as noted) didn't rely on it to grow. And neither did Twitter. Nor Reddit. Tiktok's UI/UX is really top notch. It reminds me of the IG of old before Facebook's Directors of Product Management really sunk their MBA claws into it. There are legitimate security concerns with Tiktok however. The US still has a level of separation between corporations and the government that China doesn't. Chinese companies are extensions of the state. if anything, the US government is an extension of US corporations rather than the other way around. But there's still a level of separation and rule of law nad order in the US. But here's an even bigger issue: trade. Specifically, China cheating on trade. I support reciprocity here. China blocks access to its market to the likes of Google and Facebook. This is protectionist and I personally have no issue with the US doing the same to Chinese companies.
lghh 4y ago
TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok. I had TikTok installed for one day and vowed never again. Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?
- Damogran6 4y ago
  It's not only TikTok. To an extent, nearly EVERYTHING entertainment is designed to be sticky. Candy Crush, Sports Betting, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube...all are designed to maximize engagement.
- dncornholio 4y ago
  You could have left the ADHD part out of your comment and your argument would stand just as true.
  - lghh 4y ago
    Yeah, probably. Having ADHD doesn't help the issue.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- lma21 4y ago
  I installed it for one day, then I removed it. Came back a few days later, then I removed it again, And I've been in this (vicious) cycle for a while now. Whenever boredom hits, something in me thinks of TikTok. It's impressive. Never had that feeling with other platforms, not even Reddit. To fight TikTok, i'm trying a different approach, getting to know what my bored self really wants and feed it something else.
everdrive 4y ago
I do hate the equivocating between Tiktok and other social media services. (eg: "Well, isn't TikTok just as bad as what Facebook is doing?") But that said, the use of the term "poison pill" is excellent, and something that I've been using to describe modern tech in general. It'd be wrong to say that Google maps is "bad." Really, it's incredibly convenient. But it's got a poison pill: it tracks you obsessively, it can be used in a geofence warrant, etc. You could say the same for facebook. It's quite convenient to be able to contact everyone from your life, but it's got a poison pill: (Fill in all the complaints about Facebook over the last 10 years.) I bring this up only because we often get caught between a simple binary: are things better now, or were they better in the past? Usually it's both: one component of things was better in the past, and one component of things is better now.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  You can still use the ways of the past (paper maps, etc). The fact that we don't, show we think the new ways are, on balance, better.
  - everdrive 4y ago
    Maybe so, but I think a sugar/calorie analogy is useful here. "The fact that we [on average prefer unhealthy foods], show we think the new ways are, on balance, better." We might think so, but our preferences are often short-sighted and destructive.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    I don't think anyone's arguing that the new ways are better. However, it's not clear that we're going in the right direction and instead we're stuck in a local maximum. Maybe if we took a step back and had mapping provided as an open source service with offline maps then we wouldn't have the current problems with Google Maps (real-time traffic data can be queried anonymously). Or maybe if we designed streets that were easier to navigate we wouldn't need maps in the first place.
  - psyc 4y ago
    It shows that we don't think the poison pill is going to poison us.
jrm4 4y ago
Broadly, it's fascinating that I think we've definitively moved out of the age of "social media theory" (what might this new form of media do) into "experimentation and iteration" (in which we are absolutely the guinea pigs, but at least for now we mostly know it?") TikTok is especially a wildly mixed bag for me. I fully acknowledge that its manipulation of attention is disgusting and the data it holds is wildly dangerous. And yet, more immediately, it is serving very well the job of being Cory Doctorow's Little Brother which in our current political times (at least in the US) is wildly beneficial. As a black man I especially appreciate the light it shines on behaviors and practices I knew to be valid and yet was repeatedly told "that doesn't really happen." So, next, how to separate one from the other.
- mal-2 4y ago
  This is the real reason behind the FUD in my opinion. Despite all these articles presenting TikTok content as vapid and mindless time wasting, in my experience it's been the opposite. TikTok is full of authentic policial commentary, anti-racist education, historical analysis, and anti-capitalist content. It's doing a lot to give people a voice who otherwise haven't been well-represented on other platforms. It's a big reason why Reels has been a failure imo, there's just not any important conversations happening there. Gen Z is not being given enough credit, they're not just addicted scrollers, they're using a better platform to organize and share culture more effectively.
  - emptyfile 4y ago
    Yeah, sure. The entire world revolves around the American Race Problem. As it always does from inside your bubble.
    - mal-2 4y ago
      I can only speak from my bubble, fair enough, but I almost never see this aspect explored in reporting on Tiktok. The articles always focus on the algorithm, never the actual content and community. Evidently something is quite different from Reddit and Twitter since those platforms have about a quarter to a half of the MAU of TikTok despite being around much longer. "Algorithm" is a hand-wavey explanation. No amount of algorithmic content selection can keep me engaged when the content itself is of lower quality.
dqpb 4y ago
TikTok is cringe
closedloop129 4y ago
TikTok is having longer and longer videos. TikTok will become something else. The machine learning only works for short videos. For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. I expect that both technologies will be combined.
- vecter 4y ago
  > For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. YouTube is all about long videos and there is basically zero social graph on there.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    Like, subscribe and comment are all social interactions and they indeed are counted in recommendations.
    - vecter 4y ago
      That is not the traditional definition of a social graph, which is connecting people who know each other in real life.
  - closedloop129 4y ago
    Right now, YT doesn't have competition, but they will have to improve once TikTok has the content. According to his parallel discussion [1], suggestions on YT were much better. [1] Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32328207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32328207
  - mal-2 4y ago
    Does YouTube organic discovery work for anyone besides toddlers? I can't remember a time I was suggested or autoplayed a video that I actually was interested in.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Why do you need social graphs for long videos? I'm not sure why that would be the case.
notacoward 4y ago
> we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements. HAHAHAHAHA no. What we'll end up with is a different behemoth or small set of behemoths indistinguishable in their behavior from predecessors. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss. (The longer I live, the more prescient that verse seems.) And in this case, the behemoth will be in a country that is even more willing than the US to exert control over such companies. Not really a great deal for anyone except TikTok's owners.
drewda 4y ago
When I read that article in the New Yorker, I did find it odd that a long piece all about video platforms didn't mention YouTube. I can see that the writer wants to make a more specific argument about "social graph" vs. "public" approaches to social media platforms. But YouTube is such a successful version of the latter.
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32273083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32273083 - July 2022 (441 comments)
nr2x 4y ago
Twitter seems to be going a similar route. I barely recognize my feed, it’s 50% I don’t follow, and 25% content I think is idiotic and harmful.
- markstos 4y ago
  The Reddit app is changing, too. My "Home" feed used to be only communities I follow, now it adds algorithmic content that I constantly have to say "less of this". It used to be only the "Popular" and "News" tabs were algorithmic, but now the "Home" tab increasingly is too. For me, it's worse and I open Reddit less.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    Same! I hate the fact companies can’t understand they fill a specific niche.
aaronsimpson 4y ago
The question I have - at what point do Instagram and Facebook converge such to the point that it's not even worth having them as separate apps anymore? At a certain point, I imagine Meta would like these apps to all combine into one united "Meta" app.
- anticensor 4y ago
  They would call it Metaverse.
idomi 4y ago
I doubt it, they got too much traction at this stage.
reggieband 4y ago
TikTok scares me in the same way that DALL-E scare me. DALL-E is very, very good, but still obviously flawed. But behind the flaws I know it will get better. Like the original iPhone vs. the crazy powerful phones we have now. Or the original 3d games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3d compared to modern PC graphics. Or the insane quality of modern movie CGI. In 5 years or 10 years this AI tech to generate incredible images will advance at a similar pace. (Shout out to GPT-3 in this space as well) I don't think we fully understand how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious but it is doing it in a way that most people agree is unsettling. And we are at the very beginning of this journey. There is no way to predict if this is going to be good or bad without us doing it. And every company now realizes that it is both easy to achieve and tremendously effective.
- pas 4y ago
  > how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious it's the same channel surfing that people used to do with TV, only more with more channels and better timing, plus a content recommender. the mechanism is the same dopamine drip. there's a chance to see something that's exciting/interesting/relevant/pleasing/arousing/etc. coub is almost the same (but a lot smaller, caters to an Eastern European audience mostly, plus has a baseline video+music remix content)
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > DALL·E: Creating Images from Text https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ for anybody else out of the loop
Animats 4y ago
"Poison pill" is the wrong phrase here. That has a different meaning. TikTok is not a social network. It's a short-form Youtube competitor. It's an entertainment system. China has WeChat, which is much closer to Facebook in style. It's mobile-first, which turned out to be a good decision. It handles messaging, shopping, ads, banking... It's a closed replacement for the Web. TikTok is mostly push, for timepass (a useful term from India), and WeChat is mostly pull, for doing stuff. Users have both, and they don't compete much. Facebook is trying to be both, and is now doing both badly.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > TikTok is not a social network I mean... it's made up of people "socializing", just through videos. People dancing to trends, doing duets. "hey what's your tiktok so I can see what you post/who you follow/what you like/what defines you as a person socially partially" It for sure has a social aspect. It's kind of splitting hairs to say it isn't a social network. I agree. It isn't Facebook. I'm not catching up with relatives in the DMs of TikTok. But scrolling through "people" and what they post certainly does feel social. People can build a brand for themselves (good or bad). You can interact by commenting + tagging / @ mentioning users, that can lead to jokes/followup videos, etc. Trends/dances/sounds/songs can go viral. What makes something viral? People thinking it's viral. Sounds like social/society to me.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    I don’t think interacting with strangers on the internet has ever been considered “socializing”, regardless of how deep those connections might be. The fact we are replacing one with the other is deeply concerning.
algoatecorn 4y ago
Reading through the comments, I see so much focus on specific companies and the occasional focus on social media as a whole. You gotta keep zooming out if you want to understand the true issue which is the "attention economy". Just stop participating in the attention economy. Well that's impossible of course, but seriously try to minimize your participation. It's a system designed to glean consumer preferences and then engineer marketing strategies for optimal sales. We don't need it. Stop over-consuming and stop feeding the system.
betwixthewires 4y ago
I hope the author is right, and a social evolution toward more open networks would necessarily be the culmination of many factors, but I'm optimistically skeptical. TikTok is like a drug, it is an algorithm that unabashedly and almost directly induces an emotional state. It is similar to amphetamine, opioids, slot machines in that it distils almost to purity the traits needed to solely perform this function. These other addictive things have been around a long time. There's no reason to expect tiktok (or the concept of algorithm interfacing with human to produce chemical happiness) to go away. That said, I hope so. I hope that these other empty social bahemoths chase tiktok to irrelevance, I hope the population gets burned out on the empty calories, but history tells us that this won't happen really. Some people, enough to keep it all going, just can't stop no matter how miserable it makes them.

286 points by yarapavan 4y ago

cm42 4y ago

In case anyone from Facebook thinks people are leaving their platform for TikTok, I'd just like to offer that everybody I know who's quit over the past 6 months or so has quit because of 30-day bans for posting obvious satire. I slowly forgot about it once they required the Messenger app (which had its own data/privacy issues). I seem to recall that coinciding with a WhatsApp exodus among friends with family overseas, but I forget the deal. Anyway, it just ceased to be relevant one day, and we just text or use any of the 93024832048932 other apps now. It's not a bad platform for viewing ads, though, I guess.

doctor_eval 4y ago

Something I've never understood about these pivots from successful, revenue generating products. Sure, some users will leave Instagram for Tiktok. But isn't it a different product? Wouldn't Meta have been better off creating a new product and integrating it with Instagram, rather than killing the golden goose? This kind of thing seems to happen really often.

Havoc 4y ago
Launching something new and separate inherently means starting with zero user base.
- fragmede 4y ago
  I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg could use his influence at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to get a few users to try out a new app he coded up over the weekend.
  - draw_down 4y ago
prawn 4y ago
Adjusting your product means you don't start your userbase from scratch, but I do agree that I'd prefer they start a fresh product and leverage the userbase to promote it. But I think it's easier for them to centralise advertising operations where possible and steer the most malleable and lucrative audience rather than appease (what they thought of as) a minority of people.
djaychela 4y ago
From what I've read, Meta's strategy (and valuation) ultimately relies on 'ubiquity' (as they put it) - where everyone on earth has a Meta account and uses it. The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation as a result of this, so they do the classic "what's working for the competition" action. I've not had a FB account for years, and didn't use it other than for messenger for years before that, but when I was on there, I felt that most of their growth came from 'copy what other sites are doing, extinguish the competition by doing this' strategy, as everyone is on facebook anyway. It's worked for them so far, just now it's a bigger shift to try to emulate TikTok rather than try to destroy local ads sites or small business site hosting.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation That's because of unrealistic expectation from the stock market, not due to the company's health. A stall in user growth means a limit to the company size, and investors were betting that after the IPO Facebook (that was already used by a large share of the humanity) would still grow by two orders of magnitude.
- throwfh80h82 4y ago
  They can't really be relying on 100% market share. Is this hyperbole? Or real?
IshKebab 4y ago
The "what are my friends up to?" golden goose of Facebook is long dead. The "news feed" is already not really news about your friends so I guess it doesn't matter that they're admitting that and explicitly turning it into something like Tiktok.
rr888 4y ago
I'm not into Tik Tok style videos. I recently really cut back using both Instagram and FB because they're just showing me humorous videos and not why I used those apps.
sct202 4y ago
They had an app called Lasso a couple years ago that they shut down, I don't know anyone who actually used it though.
notatoad 4y ago
is there any evidence that the pivots actually "kill the golden goose"? facebook has a long history of making product changes that initially cause a lot of complaining from existing users. they seem to be making a bet that existing users are addicted enough to the product that a change to it won't drive them away. and so far that seems to have worked for them.
- trebbble 4y ago
  Facebook's changes have taken a whole lot of users from "I am on here because it's useful and I actively like it" to "I am on here only because of inertia and network effects, but dislike it and will be happy when I can get rid of it" May not have killed the golden goose yet, but they've sure sharpened the axe, stretched the neck over the block, and drawn a little X right in the middle.
- sheepybloke 4y ago
  There has been push back against the more algorithmic content they are pushing because it gets in the way of the post of people you follow. I use Instagram to follow some artists and design companies, and it's frustrating when every other post is not the people I follow, but some bad influencer vaguely related to your interests begging for likes and follows. Previously, they had suggested posts after you scrolled a bit or after you've caught up with everyone you follow.
HaloZero 4y ago
They already have a tab called Reels inside of Instagram, I tried using it instead of TikTok and it was fucking awful at trying to learn what videos I liked. It seems that they're just gonna force the video format on everyone in order to get better learning data?

throwaway4good 4y ago

Wow. An article about TikTok that has the word poison in it, that is not actually anti-TikTok. How far we have gone. And yes! TikTok is how we break the shackles of big tech. TikTok on its own we can handle. But a Facebook backed by the full force of the US military surveillance industrial complex. That is going to kill off the whole planet.

computerfriend 4y ago
TikTok is Big Tech. Neither will "kill off the whole planet", but it is so crazy to me that someone who can hate Facebook and the "US military surveillance industrial complex" can consequentially support TikTok. You don't actually have a problem with big tech or surveillance, you have a problem with the US.
- lizardactivist 4y ago
  Of importance: it has been revealed several times that user identification and data collection has been used for malicious purposes by US intelligence agencies (see NSA and CIA leaks a few years ago) The same has not been proved for China. There have only been accusations by the US government, followed by an absolute reluctance and failure to provide any proof whatsoever. The US accuses China of being a bad actor engaging in data surveillance, refuses to back up accusations, and then commits the very same act themselves. The very definition of dishonesty and hypocrisy.
  - bigtunacan 4y ago
    This isn't really news, many countries collect data on their own citizens in expanding ways. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/actually-most-countries-are-increasingly-spying-on-their-citizens-the-un-says/276614/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/ac... TikTok almost certainly receives requests from various governments to collect data no differently from Facebook/Google/Verizon etc.. I think it's not a question of if China is doing this as well; certainly they are. No politician is going to publicly say though, "Look we know China is collecting data on you from TikTok because, uh duh, that's what we do with all of your US based social media posts." I also don't think our government is all that directly concerned that China is monitoring. I think the concern is more on how the data and the outside control of the platform might be used to influence public opinions. Election tampering and the like.

nixcraft 4y ago

There is lots of talk going around TikTok, especially now geopolitics has been added to this kind of discussion due to ongoing tensions between two giants. Instead of banning or removing the TikTok app, how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO. Let users download and use whatever app they want but keep a firm privacy policy. But, of course, geopolitics will take over, so I have ZERO hope for a tight privacy policy for all apps. Similarly, there is no such thing as a backdoor in apps for good guys (3 letter agencies) vs bad guys. Just make one rule for all. Otherwise, it is all grey areas open to abuse. Also, it is not just geopolitics; big social media like YouTube, Insta, FB and others face colossal competition from TikTok. As a result, they are losing users to TikTok. So they want this kind of ban (emphasis mine ), at least they won't object to it, and it is a slippery slope.

washadjeffmad 4y ago
You may have noticed this from the attempts or lack thereof over the past two decades to regulate tech to the benefit of everyday people. This is because Congress has been petrified of "breaking Google". It is currently why so much of SV now sits on the POTUS's cabinet. No one knows the totality of how and where these modern day digital East India companies truly operate, and there will never be legislation that broadly protects citizen privacy like in the EU because of it.
nivenkos 4y ago
Yeah, this sort of protectionist interference in the name of "security" isn't new - look at Boeing.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
No American pundits and politicians just hate TikTok because it is not a US corporation.
ammo1662 4y ago
Their business is built on top of collecting and selling users' data. Why will the politicians sponsored by them try to establish a policy to break their own business?

kart23 4y ago

Bring back google+. oh wait, I guess we really can't trust anyone with user data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach >In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article outlining the initial breach and Google's decision to not disclose it to users.[18] At the time, there was no federal law that required Google to inform their consumers of data breaches. Google+ originally did not disclose the breach out of fears of being compared to Facebook's recent data leak and subsequent loss of consumer confidence.[4] In response to the Wall Street Journal article, Google announced the shutdown of Google+ in August 2019.

Thorrez 4y ago
What is the definition of a breach? Are all vulnerabilities considered breaches? If a website finds a vulnerability in their code, fixes it, and doesn't find any evidence of attack, do they generally tell the public about that? Disclosure: I work at Google, but never on Google+.
- leksak 4y ago
  Depends on the vulnerability. It might be prudent to disclose it so users have the freedom to, for instance, change their passwords elsewhere as most people do indeed reuse passwords. I'm not sure how this metaphor holds up under scrutiny but disclosing all vulnerabilities might be akin to considering yourself having had a break-in every time you forgot to lock the door.
  - lrem 4y ago
    From the linked article: > unauthorized access to private users' names, emails, addresses, occupations, genders and ages. Dislaimer: I work in Google, but don't know anything about the breach that isn't in the linked article.

RektBoy 4y ago

Nooo please leave Tiktok be, they didn't do anything wrong.... cough cough OSINT treasure trove cough cough

maven29 4y ago
Let's hope we do linkedin next.
- RektBoy 4y ago
  Yes, linkedin is a pirate treasure trove of OSINT. People...
est 4y ago
because collecting meme video feeds are vital to OSINT.
- RektBoy 4y ago
  Kids or even adults are leaving critical OSINT information in their tiktoks. Where they live, what they're doing right now etc. And from point of view of braindead attacker. All this can be done manually. What if I reverse Tiktok and have everything automated. A lot of people start to stream just for fun or by mistake, for few secs. Post a video by mistake. Bot which watches specific profile 24/7 .... catches everything and more...
- yorwba 4y ago
  People upload all kinds of stuff. I remember seeing videos with a TikTok watermark of Russian military equipment being moved towards the Ukrainian border before the invasion. E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shows-russian-troop-buildup-during-putins-intimidation-campaign-2022-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shows-russian-troop-b...
  - JasserInicide 4y ago
    Near the beginning of the war, I saw a reuploaded Tiktok of this Ukrainian girl hopping into an abandoned Russian tank and figuring out how to drive it.

thih9 4y ago

> If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Is it really a competitive advantage if a competitor is doing better without it?

jsemrau 4y ago
The social graph is a terrible approximation of personal interests.
- ttyprintk 4y ago
  Yup. It’s not that an echo chamber is inevitable; for me, finding something interesting that’s not represented among my social graph is more likely to be viral/marketable/attractive than something circulating among the most-active 5%. TikTok doesn’t need that graph on an individual’s scale.
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    Hence, it so much more resembles "real life". And I think that's where TikTok thrives, it is a single player experience with networked features. Similar to going window shopping in a Mall with Billions of windows.
meltyness 4y ago
Cal has apparently confused his own language here. A graph of details about rich media is still, in some sense, a social graph. Rather than documenting: who do you know? when did you meet them? Capturing: what do you know? when did you learn it? who did you learn it from? what do you call it? how should it be presented? And so on...
- pantulis 4y ago
  I fail to follow Cal's argument. It seems that he is abandoning his "digital detox" doctrine towards privacy. If the issue with social networks is the time we waste on them, why would an algorithmically generated feed be less addictive than a social network feed?

schnitzelstoat 4y ago

An a non-American the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird, it really does just seem like sinophobia - especially given there's no proof that TikTok is actually being used by the Chinese, whereas Snowden etc. has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this. I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...

foepys 4y ago
TikTok has massive reach and influence. Just look at the recent articles about teenagers thinking they have mental illnesses [1]. Misinformation campaigns are very powerful and this is especially worrisome when the most popular platform is controlled by an authoritarian regime with no regards to human rights, democracy, and free press. 1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-diagnosis-videos-leave-some-teens-thinking-they-have-rare-mental-disorders-11640514602 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-diagnosis-videos-leave-s...
ralusek 4y ago
> has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this. Ya, you're right, China isn't known to collect or do much with population data. China and the US officially regard each other as adversaries. The CCP outright declares the US to be an enemy. The CCP is also not subject to the rule of law within its own borders, even in theory. Then you get into the economics of it. The liberal west is generally in favor of free markets, but to what degree do we remain free when dealing with a trading partner who doesn't operate as a liberal democracy? China has banned Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram...because they don't want their citizens giving business to foreign powers which they could be directing to their own growing businesses, and they don't want their citizens giving data to foreign powers. So please clarify, is the US banning TikTok "sinophobia" but China banning Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc just something else entirely?
- christkv 4y ago
  democraphobia ?
4y ago

cudgy 4y ago

“… we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.” Like talking and writing directly to a chosen audience of friends instead of acting as an unpaid or low paid content creator / publisher for a social media company? Any examples of recent apps that might accomplish this goal pf authentic human online engagements? Seems like the difficulty is getting enough users on a platform to facilitate a broad level of interests without a company being tempted to turning their users into neurological lab rats to be milked for ad revenue.

bigtunacan 4y ago
Vibely comes to mind https://www.vibely.io/ https://www.vibely.io/
Siira 4y ago
Telegram channels/groups are good for this.
carapace 4y ago
It's not recent but IRC is good for authentic human online engagements.

FeaturelessBug 4y ago

It's really aggravating to me because I use different social media sites for different purposes. I understand that our current business model revolves around making more and more money, but if all of the social media sites are the same then they won't be making any money because people won't want to deal with multiple accounts.

throwaway290 4y ago

TL;DR "all my friends are here" becomes less of a lock-in factor with TikTok-like model (as social graph becomes unimportant). If others follow suit, losing lock-in advantage might encourage competitors in the industry.

Milank 4y ago

It's the flow of nature. Nothing lasts forever. Looking from addiction perspective, TikTok is even worse. But, as the author said, it's more shallow, so it should be easier to move away from. I hope that people (or at least majority) will find a way to move from this mindless fun and finally start using all the technology we have at our disposal in some more meaningful way.

mal-2 4y ago
Many recent boycotts and other activist causes have achieved critical mass through organizing on TikTok. A ton of content there is historical and educational. People misunderstand short-form as shallow and that has never sit right with me. I find creators on TikTok to often go deeper and communicate more clearly than the cacophony of text posts on reddit or Facebook.
- Milank 4y ago
  It's true that you can find useful content on TikTok. But, let's be realistic - percentage of people using TikTok to learn something is... probably negligible. But there's an example on how the technology can be used in good purpose.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    Do you have any basis for your negligible statement? About half the videos I watch on TT are 'educational'
    - Milank 4y ago
      Ok, I must take a step back. I have only my personal feeling to back the claim. And that doesn't mean much, considering the fact that I barely ever used TikTok. So you might be right. My kids (6 and 8) told me a couple of times about life hacks that they saw on YouTube. And that's the only place they visit online, even that being restricted to less than an hour a day on average. So yeah, new generations might be using that content a bit differently from what I thought. If true, that is great news.

angio 4y ago

It's interesting to read this article from March [0] and then check the tiktok's coverage on the news after that. > Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok > The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. > “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...

simion314 4y ago
Related to think t the children, I recently read a few comments from women in Romania that told that since around 12-13 years old they got on the Facebook page ads promoting those girls to work as cam girls. Facebook and their ad network should also be analyzed IMO, would make more sense to put all social media under the same standards. Also dudes working in ad industry, tell us why should we not install ad blockers when you put this kind of ads in front of children? FB knows 100% the user account age so is it stupidity? is it "we don't care", "a innocent bug"?
mncharity 4y ago
> These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry Has WaPo every managed a similar article on Hollywood catalyzing attacks on tech? Or maybe that's the commonplace politics... Still, nice to see mention of press coverage artifice.
rrdharan 4y ago
See also: https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-funding-anti-google-trade-group-since-2007-57953 https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-funding-anti-google-t...
partiallypro 4y ago
None of this detracts from concerns about Tiktok and the CCP though. Just as Microsoft funding anti-Google pieces doesn't detract from Google's near monopoly status in online advertising. Competitors do that all the time, you can't let that be a distraction from what the underlying problems are.

everyone 4y ago

All these social media things are pure crap. Who cares.

Rastonbury 4y ago

Twitter and Meta's social graphs competitive advantage will still be there with tiktok like features, what screws them is the dream of growth and every new person having a FB account. If tiktok doesn't have a social graph or relies on one, it looks like there's a gap in the space of FB for the gen Z. Also the title is confusing, I thought Bytedance had a poison pill in a sense it has some governance or legal means to dissuade would be acquirors.

fullshark 4y ago

Legacy media has been openly rooting for FB to die or lose influence for about 8 years now. Nice for the author to reveal their desire for this openly on their own blog.

jmyeet 4y ago

Who writes this? > If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution ... "Digital dictators"? "Web 2.0 revolution"? Seriously? Behind this self-congratulatory word ooze there is a point: the market will "solve" the Facebook "problem". In a decade we've had 2 existential threats to FB (the other being IG). That's just not a monopoyl that requires immediate government action. The social graph will still have value but I think people overstate its importance. Tiktok (as noted) didn't rely on it to grow. And neither did Twitter. Nor Reddit. Tiktok's UI/UX is really top notch. It reminds me of the IG of old before Facebook's Directors of Product Management really sunk their MBA claws into it. There are legitimate security concerns with Tiktok however. The US still has a level of separation between corporations and the government that China doesn't. Chinese companies are extensions of the state. if anything, the US government is an extension of US corporations rather than the other way around. But there's still a level of separation and rule of law nad order in the US. But here's an even bigger issue: trade. Specifically, China cheating on trade. I support reciprocity here. China blocks access to its market to the likes of Google and Facebook. This is protectionist and I personally have no issue with the US doing the same to Chinese companies.

lghh 4y ago

TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here. I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok. I had TikTok installed for one day and vowed never again. Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?

Damogran6 4y ago
It's not only TikTok. To an extent, nearly EVERYTHING entertainment is designed to be sticky. Candy Crush, Sports Betting, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube...all are designed to maximize engagement.
dncornholio 4y ago
You could have left the ADHD part out of your comment and your argument would stand just as true.
- lghh 4y ago
  Yeah, probably. Having ADHD doesn't help the issue.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
lma21 4y ago
I installed it for one day, then I removed it. Came back a few days later, then I removed it again, And I've been in this (vicious) cycle for a while now. Whenever boredom hits, something in me thinks of TikTok. It's impressive. Never had that feeling with other platforms, not even Reddit. To fight TikTok, i'm trying a different approach, getting to know what my bored self really wants and feed it something else.

everdrive 4y ago

I do hate the equivocating between Tiktok and other social media services. (eg: "Well, isn't TikTok just as bad as what Facebook is doing?") But that said, the use of the term "poison pill" is excellent, and something that I've been using to describe modern tech in general. It'd be wrong to say that Google maps is "bad." Really, it's incredibly convenient. But it's got a poison pill: it tracks you obsessively, it can be used in a geofence warrant, etc. You could say the same for facebook. It's quite convenient to be able to contact everyone from your life, but it's got a poison pill: (Fill in all the complaints about Facebook over the last 10 years.) I bring this up only because we often get caught between a simple binary: are things better now, or were they better in the past? Usually it's both: one component of things was better in the past, and one component of things is better now.

BurningFrog 4y ago
You can still use the ways of the past (paper maps, etc). The fact that we don't, show we think the new ways are, on balance, better.
- everdrive 4y ago
  Maybe so, but I think a sugar/calorie analogy is useful here. "The fact that we [on average prefer unhealthy foods], show we think the new ways are, on balance, better." We might think so, but our preferences are often short-sighted and destructive.
- xmprt 4y ago
  I don't think anyone's arguing that the new ways are better. However, it's not clear that we're going in the right direction and instead we're stuck in a local maximum. Maybe if we took a step back and had mapping provided as an open source service with offline maps then we wouldn't have the current problems with Google Maps (real-time traffic data can be queried anonymously). Or maybe if we designed streets that were easier to navigate we wouldn't need maps in the first place.
- psyc 4y ago
  It shows that we don't think the poison pill is going to poison us.

jrm4 4y ago

Broadly, it's fascinating that I think we've definitively moved out of the age of "social media theory" (what might this new form of media do) into "experimentation and iteration" (in which we are absolutely the guinea pigs, but at least for now we mostly know it?") TikTok is especially a wildly mixed bag for me. I fully acknowledge that its manipulation of attention is disgusting and the data it holds is wildly dangerous. And yet, more immediately, it is serving very well the job of being Cory Doctorow's Little Brother which in our current political times (at least in the US) is wildly beneficial. As a black man I especially appreciate the light it shines on behaviors and practices I knew to be valid and yet was repeatedly told "that doesn't really happen." So, next, how to separate one from the other.

mal-2 4y ago
This is the real reason behind the FUD in my opinion. Despite all these articles presenting TikTok content as vapid and mindless time wasting, in my experience it's been the opposite. TikTok is full of authentic policial commentary, anti-racist education, historical analysis, and anti-capitalist content. It's doing a lot to give people a voice who otherwise haven't been well-represented on other platforms. It's a big reason why Reels has been a failure imo, there's just not any important conversations happening there. Gen Z is not being given enough credit, they're not just addicted scrollers, they're using a better platform to organize and share culture more effectively.
- emptyfile 4y ago
  Yeah, sure. The entire world revolves around the American Race Problem. As it always does from inside your bubble.
  - mal-2 4y ago
    I can only speak from my bubble, fair enough, but I almost never see this aspect explored in reporting on Tiktok. The articles always focus on the algorithm, never the actual content and community. Evidently something is quite different from Reddit and Twitter since those platforms have about a quarter to a half of the MAU of TikTok despite being around much longer. "Algorithm" is a hand-wavey explanation. No amount of algorithmic content selection can keep me engaged when the content itself is of lower quality.

dqpb 4y ago

TikTok is cringe

closedloop129 4y ago

TikTok is having longer and longer videos. TikTok will become something else. The machine learning only works for short videos. For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. I expect that both technologies will be combined.

vecter 4y ago
> For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. YouTube is all about long videos and there is basically zero social graph on there.
- anticensor 4y ago
  Like, subscribe and comment are all social interactions and they indeed are counted in recommendations.
  - vecter 4y ago
    That is not the traditional definition of a social graph, which is connecting people who know each other in real life.
- closedloop129 4y ago
  Right now, YT doesn't have competition, but they will have to improve once TikTok has the content. According to his parallel discussion [1], suggestions on YT were much better. [1] Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32328207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32328207
- mal-2 4y ago
  Does YouTube organic discovery work for anyone besides toddlers? I can't remember a time I was suggested or autoplayed a video that I actually was interested in.
cwkoss 4y ago
Why do you need social graphs for long videos? I'm not sure why that would be the case.

notacoward 4y ago

> we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements. HAHAHAHAHA no. What we'll end up with is a different behemoth or small set of behemoths indistinguishable in their behavior from predecessors. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss. (The longer I live, the more prescient that verse seems.) And in this case, the behemoth will be in a country that is even more willing than the US to exert control over such companies. Not really a great deal for anyone except TikTok's owners.

drewda 4y ago

When I read that article in the New Yorker, I did find it odd that a long piece all about video platforms didn't mention YouTube. I can see that the writer wants to make a more specific argument about "social graph" vs. "public" approaches to social media platforms. But YouTube is such a successful version of the latter.

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32273083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32273083 - July 2022 (441 comments)

nr2x 4y ago

Twitter seems to be going a similar route. I barely recognize my feed, it’s 50% I don’t follow, and 25% content I think is idiotic and harmful.

markstos 4y ago
The Reddit app is changing, too. My "Home" feed used to be only communities I follow, now it adds algorithmic content that I constantly have to say "less of this". It used to be only the "Popular" and "News" tabs were algorithmic, but now the "Home" tab increasingly is too. For me, it's worse and I open Reddit less.
- nr2x 4y ago
  Same! I hate the fact companies can’t understand they fill a specific niche.

aaronsimpson 4y ago

The question I have - at what point do Instagram and Facebook converge such to the point that it's not even worth having them as separate apps anymore? At a certain point, I imagine Meta would like these apps to all combine into one united "Meta" app.

anticensor 4y ago
They would call it Metaverse.

idomi 4y ago

I doubt it, they got too much traction at this stage.

reggieband 4y ago

TikTok scares me in the same way that DALL-E scare me. DALL-E is very, very good, but still obviously flawed. But behind the flaws I know it will get better. Like the original iPhone vs. the crazy powerful phones we have now. Or the original 3d games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3d compared to modern PC graphics. Or the insane quality of modern movie CGI. In 5 years or 10 years this AI tech to generate incredible images will advance at a similar pace. (Shout out to GPT-3 in this space as well) I don't think we fully understand how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious but it is doing it in a way that most people agree is unsettling. And we are at the very beginning of this journey. There is no way to predict if this is going to be good or bad without us doing it. And every company now realizes that it is both easy to achieve and tremendously effective.

pas 4y ago
> how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious it's the same channel surfing that people used to do with TV, only more with more channels and better timing, plus a content recommender. the mechanism is the same dopamine drip. there's a chance to see something that's exciting/interesting/relevant/pleasing/arousing/etc. coub is almost the same (but a lot smaller, caters to an Eastern European audience mostly, plus has a baseline video+music remix content)
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> DALL·E: Creating Images from Text https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ for anybody else out of the loop

Animats 4y ago

"Poison pill" is the wrong phrase here. That has a different meaning. TikTok is not a social network. It's a short-form Youtube competitor. It's an entertainment system. China has WeChat, which is much closer to Facebook in style. It's mobile-first, which turned out to be a good decision. It handles messaging, shopping, ads, banking... It's a closed replacement for the Web. TikTok is mostly push, for timepass (a useful term from India), and WeChat is mostly pull, for doing stuff. Users have both, and they don't compete much. Facebook is trying to be both, and is now doing both badly.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> TikTok is not a social network I mean... it's made up of people "socializing", just through videos. People dancing to trends, doing duets. "hey what's your tiktok so I can see what you post/who you follow/what you like/what defines you as a person socially partially" It for sure has a social aspect. It's kind of splitting hairs to say it isn't a social network. I agree. It isn't Facebook. I'm not catching up with relatives in the DMs of TikTok. But scrolling through "people" and what they post certainly does feel social. People can build a brand for themselves (good or bad). You can interact by commenting + tagging / @ mentioning users, that can lead to jokes/followup videos, etc. Trends/dances/sounds/songs can go viral. What makes something viral? People thinking it's viral. Sounds like social/society to me.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  I don’t think interacting with strangers on the internet has ever been considered “socializing”, regardless of how deep those connections might be. The fact we are replacing one with the other is deeply concerning.

algoatecorn 4y ago

Reading through the comments, I see so much focus on specific companies and the occasional focus on social media as a whole. You gotta keep zooming out if you want to understand the true issue which is the "attention economy". Just stop participating in the attention economy. Well that's impossible of course, but seriously try to minimize your participation. It's a system designed to glean consumer preferences and then engineer marketing strategies for optimal sales. We don't need it. Stop over-consuming and stop feeding the system.

betwixthewires 4y ago

I hope the author is right, and a social evolution toward more open networks would necessarily be the culmination of many factors, but I'm optimistically skeptical. TikTok is like a drug, it is an algorithm that unabashedly and almost directly induces an emotional state. It is similar to amphetamine, opioids, slot machines in that it distils almost to purity the traits needed to solely perform this function. These other addictive things have been around a long time. There's no reason to expect tiktok (or the concept of algorithm interfacing with human to produce chemical happiness) to go away. That said, I hope so. I hope that these other empty social bahemoths chase tiktok to irrelevance, I hope the population gets burned out on the empty calories, but history tells us that this won't happen really. Some people, enough to keep it all going, just can't stop no matter how miserable it makes them.