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TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article. Scrolling through TikTok it will start showing you live streams eve

by etblg 4y ago

TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article. Scrolling through TikTok it will start showing you live streams every once in a while, and they tend to fall in to patterns like: * baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby * people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not) * people with these vibrating bowls of sand with crystals in them, and they take crystals out of the bowl every once in a while to show you * a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker \* there was also a variation where it was a kid deleting games off their PlayStation when they got a certain sticker * people pretending to sleep, and if you donate different kinds of stickers, it plays different loud sounds or trigger lights to "wake" them * people freestyle rapping on the spot, but it's more like melodic rambling to the same backing track, so you don't really have to rhyme, you just have to rap in a way that sounds like it rhymes or makes sense * and my favourite: some workers in what seems to be a Chinese factory assembling something like AirPods. they take the airpods, they take the case, they put the airpods in the case, and they throw the whole thing on to the completed pile I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on. It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. The whole game is to give viewers a reason to use stickers on the show, which gives the streamer money (and TikTok like 70% of it).

optimalsolver 4y ago
These might as well be reports from some parallel universe.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
That's hilarious and sad at the same time.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Some of those sound like some of those carnival things where you have to throw a ball at a target to have a clown go in the drink. The others sound like "outrage porn", which is most of the content on subreddits like diwhy and shittyfoodporn. Doing things wrong or exaggerated on purpose to elicit a reaction and engagement. Weirdly enough, come to think of it, Epic Meal Time started trends like that over a decade ago - just make stupid, expensive and exaggerated food that doesn't look appetizing at all... yet strangely compelling.
sergiotapia 4y ago
New trend is people saying stuff like "every time someone joins my live I'll do X" - where X is just some gross thing.
sam1r 4y ago
>> I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on. What’s so wild or appealing about this — that would entice someone to continue their time on TikTok?
- ycombinete 4y ago
  The gist of many these sorts of videos, is to do a familiar activity but with steps that don’t make sense. This starts your brain’s little curiosity/real-time-explanation loop. Like the videos of a guy lighting a firework, shoving it in a tube, filling the tube with a potatoes and then covering that with putty. They catch me for a few seconds every time, just slightly longer than a video that made sense would; and I think that extra second or two is all they need to jump up the algorithm’s ratings a little.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  It’s not just this. It’s the “long tail of this”. That particular example might not sound too appealing, but when you scroll through the livestreams, you’ll find hundreds of other niche things. I spend my time watching artists draw, watching people play FF6 for nostalgia, and putting mustaches on Ellie from the last of us: https://imgur.com/a/rLjU7Ux https://imgur.com/a/rLjU7Ux
- etblg 4y ago
  Nothing really, I was just kind of curious what it would look like when she turned it on with a ton of detergent. Turns out it bubbles a bit, the cycle continues as normal. Very mild entertainment.
  - sam1r 4y ago
    I see exactly what you mean. It’s like .. justttttt enough to make one watch til the end. Reminds me of those extended silent close captions videos all over Facebook.
- qjx 4y ago
stefan_ 4y ago
And then you deleted TikTok, after all the only reason this depraved shit exists is because people keep watching it? One thing to go "the algorithm is making them do it", another entirely to fall into its trap.
rvz 4y ago
Sounds like a theatrical live streamed griftopia with TikTok being the middle person at the top of the pyramid scheme dictating who gets paid or not and even if you, they keep 70% and you take the rest with taxes and other fees. As long as the algorithm glues many of its users to their screens as much as possible with the money coming in, the grifting show must go on.
- etblg 4y ago
  Yep. It's like an advanced version of Twitch, with the begging for subs replaced with stickers, the payout being different, and the pretense of playing games or building a community cut out because it's based off of the recommendation algorithm and virality instead.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
> baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby I think I know which baby you’re referring to. If it’s a mom tending to the baby, then that baby is fine. I agree it’s shock value, and in fact is so shocking that I took a screenshot of it: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1512778289676496902?s=21&t=ayb0X3fQ9UQcdG0uh5lvxg https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1512778289676496902?s=2... But the truth is that the baby is profoundly disabled and is barely responsive. Using them for social media attention at least gives you some money to better tend to them. (There are lots of examples in that thread which illustrate your overall point. Tiktok can be quite the carnival.)
- etblg 4y ago
  Close, in the same genre at least. The one I had in mind was this one with a much bigger head: https://www.tiktok.com/@thegorrilagang/video/7127232583808683306?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7127232583808683306 https://www.tiktok.com/@thegorrilagang/video/712723258380868... Disclaimer: severe medical deformity, may not want to click this.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Welp. Thank you for adding to my collection. It’s so interesting that tiktok managed to revitalize this… genre.
    - nwienert 4y ago
      Sideshows continue to be gross even in the rare cases where there’s plausible consent.
      - mr_toad 4y ago
        A lot of social media these days does resemble a travelling circus. And a lot of influencers give off a P. T. Barnum vibe.
- 4y ago
gxt 4y ago
Sounds like beggars as a service.
- antiquark 4y ago
  The new BAAS paradigm!
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I'd be a little more generous and say "Buskers as a service". Stuff like: > * a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker Is clearly performative and meant to entertain the audience.
cyral 4y ago
And no matter how many times you click "Not interested" on the livestream, you will keep getting it every so often. I also get the crying kid with cards, sleep livestream, and deformed baby one all the time. Oh and you forgot the one where they have a calculator app open set to 999,999,998 or something and if they just get two more gifts they will see what happens when you get to one billion, but they are always so awkwardly slow and keep decrementing the number so it never reaches it.
- etblg 4y ago
  That calculate one is a whole genre on to itself: TikToks where there's a goal the streamer is working towards to do something, but they do it so slowly that it never happens. People keep donating to see the thing happen, the streamer doesn't want the thing to happen because then the donations stop, so they only pretend like they're going to do the thing. Like that damned guy stacking bolts in a giant column.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Sisyphus, but with gamification.
falcolas 4y ago
As always with TikTok, your experience will vary based on the videos you watch, favorite, save, and the creators you follow. What appears for any given individual is highly tailored to the things they seem to find interesting. I, in contrast, get gamers (kind of like a lo-fi twitch channel), accounts I follow, and the odd musician. I have honestly never seen any of the live streams you mention.
- not_math 4y ago
  I don't get these kind of comment. What are you trying to say? That the reason this person see this content is their fault? They secretly want to see these type of videos? There are a lot of articles and videos showing that sometimes watching just one video will suggest a ton of videos related to it, no matter if you are not interested. Machine learning and deep learning is not perfect, and sometimes the goal of the companies is not clear and may not align with your goals. Sure, your experience will vary on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok based on the people you follow, that's the goal of hyper-personalized feed. But you still get a trend, a social effect of the network. For example, on Youtube, you need "clickbait" thumbnails. So even Tom Scott, who 's content is educative and entertaining, needs to follow the "trend" of Youtube to get views. But I see these comments every time someone is blaming the weird content they are seeing on their feed: "Oh me I only see nice stuff, stop watching weird stuff". I think we can have a deeper conversation than that.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    What I'm trying to say: It's more complicated than the parent makes it sound. The parent makes it sound like "if you're on TikTok, this is what you see." > TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article. > It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth. TikTok's algorithms are scarily-effective (dramatically more effective at tailoring than all of your other examples), and thus what you see is indeed a direct reflection of what you watch. Any single video (ads excepted), or even trend, just doesn't appear globally on TikTok.
reportgunner 4y ago
There's also multiple streams where the streamer has a mouse click counter with a [+] and a [-] button. They are clicking to get to some outrageous number like 100000000 and every time you give them money they take 10, 100 or 1000 clicks away or they destroy their mouse and they are begging you to let them finish clicking. This goes on for multiple days.
wongarsu 4y ago
To me, the most interesting thing out of the list is that I've only seen two categories from the list: people sleeping and the assembly line workers (covering a wide range of industries). Other kinds of livestreams that seem to be persistent categories: - people in classrooms, libraries or other social settings, livestreaming themselves - insides of mosques, presumably with the camera hidden somewhere - space station footage with random background music. Sometimes footage from space walks, mostly Russian ones I think it goes to show how wildly different people's TikTok experiences can be, depending on what the algorithm decides and what TikTok decides to push in your region.
latexr 4y ago
> people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not) Do a web search for “TikTok fake disorder”. Or specify one directly, such as “tourette” or “ADHD”.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  Related: Munchausen-by-internet
zen_1 4y ago
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRaaVhoJjCE&t=105 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRaaVhoJjCE&t=105 suggests that some of the livestreams may be prerecorded and running on infinite loop
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  This is definitely the case as many TikTok accounts are fake. They’ll take something like a prerecorded live event from Mr. Beast, create a fake TikTok account with a name that looks like Mr. Beast, and then stream the previously recorded live. Without fail there are always THOUSANDS of people watching these thinking it’s the real thing and donating money.
- qjx 4y ago
  happens a lot even on twitch and youtube too. With this tool that shows small channels, there are a lot of channels with the same thumbnail and the channels would have gibberish channel names https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/channel_previews.php?games[]=Just%2520Chatting&sort_by=reverse https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/channel_previews.php?game...
wishfish 4y ago
TikTok live is kinda wild. You never know what you're going to get. One thing I like about it. My favorite was a live stream from a small town festival in Bali. Started off with a bunch of acrobats doing slapstick comedy. Ended with dancers in elaborate dragon masks, and the crowd joined in to make it a big dance party. Was so much fun. I now have a new resolve to go visit Bali. I also really like all the truck drivers who do cab views. There's an ambulance driver somewhere in Vietnam who livestreams his shifts. Oddly mesmerizing to watch him zip through dense city traffic without a care in the world. Quite a few people who seem to found the best hustle possible. They go daily to Disneyland and other parks. Somehow get enough gifts and tips to pay for it. Also like the bars that stream their house bands. That one guy who rides a scooter around downtown LA late at night and gets in weird conversations with drunks. A guy who races Matchbox cars on his track and keeps track of the winners in a pseudo league. An Italian man who looks vaguely like Mr. Bean and does an almost endless stretch of magic tricks. The one that I think about often is this 19 yr old guy in the Ukrainian Army. Only caught him once. Back in the summer. He and his unit were not yet on the front lines but his superiors had him digging a trench anyways. He was half-assing the digging while his comrades relaxed under trees and occasionally yelled something that would make the young guy laugh. He'd perk up anytime someone with a cute girl avatar would say something to him. They'd say something that made him just beam with happiness. I'll always wonder what happened to him. I hope he's ok.
- HEHENE 4y ago
  Disney "influencers" are such a scourge on theme parks. Normal visitors take loads of photos and videos, often at inconvenient times, but when it comes to being in/on the attractions, they usually put their phones away and shut up. Most rides at Disney parks have pre-shows about 3/4 of the way through the line that set up the story for the ride. Sometimes these are audiovisual, sometimes animatronic, but always with audio and almost always dark. Likewise, most Disney rides are "dark rides" where the ride is primarily in the dark with animatronics and the scenery lit by carefully designed show lighting. Influencers have seen these pre-shows and rides a thousand times and don't care about them. They keep there full-brightness phone up and filming for them and talk over them to their audience. It's incredibly distracting and immersion breaking. I imagine Disney sees them as a net-positive though, as I'm sure they drive tons of ticket sales. Most influencers are travel agents who get paid by Disney, or are affiliated with a travel agency.
collegeburner 4y ago
lmaooo facts. you forgot the innumerable 14yr old girl putting on way too much makeup that's half thirst trap and the 8yo fortnite kid raging at his xbox. btw i'm pretty sure i know exactly which live you're talking about with the house of cards guy. about the only kind of lives i actually like are the debate ones which can be kinda interesting.
xnx 4y ago
I love TikTok, but TikTok "live" (most streams seem to be fake prerecordings) is terrible. I can't skip those streams fast enough.
- Thlom 4y ago
  I keep getting an Italian dude in a pizzeria making pizza while he's humming, singing and talking to the audience. And yesterday I got a guy on an assembly line repairing pallets. Best part of tiktok if you ask me. (Worst part is that there's a lot of people with mild developmental disorders that publishes their lives on the app. It doesn't feel right.)
adamm255 4y ago
Sounds like some Black Mirror storylines in there… bizarre stuff
jasonlotito 4y ago
> and TikTok like 70% of it No. This is not true. HN likes to believe it's "smarter" but how do people forget that the app stores take a 30% cut off the top? These aren't charities, these are digital live streaming fits. You see TikTok in the title, and you just blindly believe it. It seems (from doing the math in the article) TikTok is taking ~40% of the cut. You can argue that's still too much, but that's a far cry from 70%. But blindly spewing 70% is ignorant at best.
- tspike 4y ago
  From TFA: > With TikTok declining to say how much it takes from gifts, the BBC ran an experiment to track where the money goes. > A reporter in Syria contacted one of the TikTok-affiliated agencies saying he was living in the camps. He obtained an account and went live, while BBC staff in London sent TikTok gifts worth $106 from another account. > At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69% of the value of the gifts.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    What exactly is "a TikTok-affiliated agency"? Because to me it sounds just like a publishing label that takes a massive cut between the actual content producer (tiktok user) and the platform (TikTok). If that's the case, that's just another situation just like what happened between Spotify and the artists. I heard a lot of noise about it, but turns out Spotify only takes a 30% cut. Why do artists complain about their 70% cut? Oh, that's because artists signed to a label only get a fraction for it, while their label gets the rest. That has nothing to do with Spotify and all with contracts between artists and labels. None of that applies to independent artists with no label, who all get their full 70%. Is "a TikTok-affiliated agency" basically acting as a music label here?
    - jasonlotito 4y ago
      No. The numbers and article make it clear it's something that happens after they withdraw the money. These are outside the realm of TikTok. And again, TT isn't taking 70%. Anyone suggesting that is wrong. They are taking 38% vs 31% that the creators take.
zippergz 4y ago
I watch quite a bit of TikTok and I have never seen ANY of these.
asdfqweqe12 4y ago
Since you are getting comments saying that your experience on live isn't reflective of theirs I wanted to add that my experience is very similar. I see the sleep streams, the disability streams, and I saw the same chinese factory fake airpod one.
- wingworks 4y ago
  I too have seen nearly every he talked about, and keeps popping up.
mgkimsal 4y ago
why didn't any of these experiences end up on Chatroulette years ago? Is it just the size of the user base? Or because it's all mobile now?
- soylentcola 4y ago
  No "tips" to be made on Chatroulette? That's my guess. I do remember one amusing thing we did back when Chatroulette was still fairly novel - hung out at a local dive bar where one otherwise boring evening's entertainment was Chatroulette on a projector screen with a webcam pointed at the bar patrons. Any time we hit a disembodied penis, we would all cheer and laugh. They always disconnected right after. Had some fun talking to folks in other countries and around the US. I think it was a lot more fun when it was still the novelty du jour early on and hadn't quite become 90% (literal) wankers yet.
helios_invictus 4y ago
All of this sounds like dystopia performance art.
zo1 4y ago
Here's another:a guy using tweezers and pliers to peel the egg shell off a...raw egg. Keeping the contents inside the thin translucent layer under the shell that he can't tear or he "loses". Or: people packing sweet boxes. Worst is when you see random people doing streams cause they're bored. They're alone, playing music, answering semi private questions and pandering to strangers. I don't even know what to make of it.
- azinman2 4y ago
  There are a lot of eggs. People in the comments seem to go crazy for it. And the point? At the end he basically pops the egg anyway and starts all over. And yet ppl send him “roses” the whole time.
bastawhiz 4y ago
I don't have TikTok but one of the most impressive things I've seen while watching my mom scroll is the live streams of folks with a thick stack of lottery tickets, scratching them off one by one. They all admit they only have about a 70% return on investment, which means those streams are largely a loss unless they're making a good amount of money on donations.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  You can just loop the footage to cap your capex.
cm42 4y ago
When you order your PSYOPS from Wish
neaden 4y ago
One live it has shown me a couple times, and I'm not sure if it is always the same person or a genre, is someone carefully dissecting an egg, trying to remove all the shell while leaving the membrane intact. I also get a decent number of ones in Spanish of people exploring creepy things, like an abandoned building or a forest at night. As I don't speak Spanish I'm not sure exactly what is going on.
jader201 4y ago
I’ll admit that I have never used TicTok — mostly because it always sounded toxic/unhealthy from the start — and this comment/article seem to reinforce that. It’s really crazy — and a bit scary — how much messed up stuff can proliferate a single app.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  I used it briefly and was disgusted by the amount of political garbage that was flowing. I'm glad I stayed off. There's nothing in the above list that I want to see. I used to tell people that even if Trump had the wrong reasons, he had the right idea when he wanted to ban TikTok.
- stavros 4y ago
  Oh man, if you're wary of TikTok, wait until you see Instagram!
- lavezzi 4y ago
  > I’ll admit that I have never used TicTok I don't think you needed to admit anything :)
- hnick 4y ago
  I used it once with my wife to see what it was, all it seemed to be was EXTREMELY LOUD MUSIC playing over various things, it was annoying. Not everything needs music. We didn't last two minutes.
mikrl 4y ago
As a former obsessive 4channer, wooooow. I’ve seen some wild stuff online but some of this just seems gratuitous. It’s not just for maladjusted kids on an Indonesian throat singing forum either, it’s being beamed to everyone’s phone.
thesuitonym 4y ago
Every time it comes up I see almost this exact same comment--maybe it is the same comment? I kind of wonder. I never see any of this content. Maybe I'm not on it enough, but all I ever see are mostly just people talking. There's a guy who "races" pool balls on a treadmill, but except for that and an occasional person building some strange contraption, it all just seems like extremely mundane (and in my mind boring) chats.
dlandis 4y ago
Is there any way to "report" streams in the app, when you come across them and they seem inappropriate?
supertofu 4y ago
The reason I refuse to get TikTok is that I am certain my psycho-emotional state cannot handle content like this. Especially item number 1. Is this normal? Is it safe for the human mind to consume content like this constantly? How does this affect production of dopamine? Is this what children are seeing? This sounds really scary.
sho_hn 4y ago
The reality we live in today is so much more fucked up already than any of the cyberpunk dystopias we still copy and celebrate in our mainstream media (hello, Cyberpunk 2077). Or it's just regressive: We're back to the traveling circus and the freak show, but different middle men.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  At least we haven’t regressed to gladiatorial combat. Yet.
rednerrus 4y ago
We're one iteration from HJs at Starbucks.
dirtyid 4y ago
Feels like interdimensional cable.
henrikschroder 4y ago
> it will start showing you live streams every once in a while, and they tend to fall in to patterns like: FOR YOU. What TikTok chooses to show you is extremely personalized, I have never encountered any of the live streams you describe above. I mostly get young good-looking guys trying to promote their OnlyFans. ...and I don't think most people on TikTok get livestreams like that, so I would be very cautious about making any sort of sweeping statements of what the experience will be like for other people. That said, I'm absolutely delighted about all the absolutely crazy things and the enormous diversity of stuff you can get on your feed. TikTok feels just like GeoCities did on the early web, it's a bazaar of the bizarre, and trends change so fast that you never get bored, and corporations still haven't been able to suck the joy and life out of the thing yet.
- jerojero 4y ago
  I find odd when people critique tiktok for having some kind of content when it is clear that's what the algorithm has given them or other times they maybe use the app for a couple minutes and never really get to a personalised stage. In any case, I never really encounter very many Livestream when I'm on the for you page. Could this be because I almost always don't engage with them? I'd like to get good looking guys promoting their OF.
  - dillondoyle 4y ago
    Start hitting the heart button whenever you see 'grey sweat season' stimuli. Unintentional will eventually surface clearly intentional thirst trap small business owners. or posts with corn emoji in place of a word that starts with P. Or trends that are really just thrust your hips in loose fitting shorts. Or guys who point to song name which is really their twitter handle. I know this because... Science.
krrrh 4y ago
A few of my favorite genres: * very drunk single women talking about how no one loves them and fishing for comments from wackos telling them how beautiful they are * working class people streaming their entire shifts. Something mesmerizing about watching a guy knocking down trees, a smart ass machinist talking smack while operating a lathe, 4 Uzbeks putting running shoes together, or timber being milled into boards in a very non-OSHA compliant plant in Indonesia. * micro talk shows where only 50 people are watching 4 talking heads who don’t know each other debate politics. These ironically are better than a lot of cable news since you actually get people who have wildly different views talking to each other, and they will take the time to resolve factual disagreements on Wikipedia between making points. When the Canadian trucker protest was going on the media mostly did such a bad job of reporting, but if you dig around on tik tok live it was easy to find the guys in the lead trucks chatting with their friends and families back home about how things were going and how much they loved “driving through this beautiful country”. Sometimes I would be one of 70 people watching. Same goes for the early streams out of Ukraine. The ease and quality of mobile streaming on tiktok feels like a huge revolution in social media that’s just getting started. Real McLuhan global village stuff developing.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  I wonder if the Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube has a TikTok
dillondoyle 4y ago
I spend too much time watching live scratch cards! tiktok is TOO good at micro-optimizing. it's so far above at recognizing the content of a video and then serving it to that specific individual. It's crazy that videos with 100 views, from a poster I've never seen before, fit into the niche of something i'd like. and super telling that I haven't seen like half of the things people are listing in this thread!!!!!

by etblg 4y ago

optimalsolver 4y ago

These might as well be reports from some parallel universe.

edmcnulty101 4y ago

That's hilarious and sad at the same time.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

Some of those sound like some of those carnival things where you have to throw a ball at a target to have a clown go in the drink. The others sound like "outrage porn", which is most of the content on subreddits like diwhy and shittyfoodporn. Doing things wrong or exaggerated on purpose to elicit a reaction and engagement. Weirdly enough, come to think of it, Epic Meal Time started trends like that over a decade ago - just make stupid, expensive and exaggerated food that doesn't look appetizing at all... yet strangely compelling.

sergiotapia 4y ago

New trend is people saying stuff like "every time someone joins my live I'll do X" - where X is just some gross thing.

sam1r 4y ago

>> I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on. What’s so wild or appealing about this — that would entice someone to continue their time on TikTok?

ycombinete 4y ago
The gist of many these sorts of videos, is to do a familiar activity but with steps that don’t make sense. This starts your brain’s little curiosity/real-time-explanation loop. Like the videos of a guy lighting a firework, shoving it in a tube, filling the tube with a potatoes and then covering that with putty. They catch me for a few seconds every time, just slightly longer than a video that made sense would; and I think that extra second or two is all they need to jump up the algorithm’s ratings a little.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
It’s not just this. It’s the “long tail of this”. That particular example might not sound too appealing, but when you scroll through the livestreams, you’ll find hundreds of other niche things. I spend my time watching artists draw, watching people play FF6 for nostalgia, and putting mustaches on Ellie from the last of us: https://imgur.com/a/rLjU7Ux https://imgur.com/a/rLjU7Ux
etblg 4y ago
Nothing really, I was just kind of curious what it would look like when she turned it on with a ton of detergent. Turns out it bubbles a bit, the cycle continues as normal. Very mild entertainment.
- sam1r 4y ago
  I see exactly what you mean. It’s like .. justttttt enough to make one watch til the end. Reminds me of those extended silent close captions videos all over Facebook.
qjx 4y ago

stefan_ 4y ago

And then you deleted TikTok, after all the only reason this depraved shit exists is because people keep watching it? One thing to go "the algorithm is making them do it", another entirely to fall into its trap.

rvz 4y ago

Sounds like a theatrical live streamed griftopia with TikTok being the middle person at the top of the pyramid scheme dictating who gets paid or not and even if you, they keep 70% and you take the rest with taxes and other fees. As long as the algorithm glues many of its users to their screens as much as possible with the money coming in, the grifting show must go on.

etblg 4y ago
Yep. It's like an advanced version of Twitch, with the begging for subs replaced with stickers, the payout being different, and the pretense of playing games or building a community cut out because it's based off of the recommendation algorithm and virality instead.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

> baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby I think I know which baby you’re referring to. If it’s a mom tending to the baby, then that baby is fine. I agree it’s shock value, and in fact is so shocking that I took a screenshot of it: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1512778289676496902?s=21&t=ayb0X3fQ9UQcdG0uh5lvxg https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1512778289676496902?s=2... But the truth is that the baby is profoundly disabled and is barely responsive. Using them for social media attention at least gives you some money to better tend to them. (There are lots of examples in that thread which illustrate your overall point. Tiktok can be quite the carnival.)

etblg 4y ago
Close, in the same genre at least. The one I had in mind was this one with a much bigger head: https://www.tiktok.com/@thegorrilagang/video/7127232583808683306?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7127232583808683306 https://www.tiktok.com/@thegorrilagang/video/712723258380868... Disclaimer: severe medical deformity, may not want to click this.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Welp. Thank you for adding to my collection. It’s so interesting that tiktok managed to revitalize this… genre.
  - nwienert 4y ago
    Sideshows continue to be gross even in the rare cases where there’s plausible consent.
    - mr_toad 4y ago
      A lot of social media these days does resemble a travelling circus. And a lot of influencers give off a P. T. Barnum vibe.
4y ago

gxt 4y ago

Sounds like beggars as a service.

antiquark 4y ago
The new BAAS paradigm!
AlexandrB 4y ago
I'd be a little more generous and say "Buskers as a service". Stuff like: > * a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker Is clearly performative and meant to entertain the audience.

cyral 4y ago

And no matter how many times you click "Not interested" on the livestream, you will keep getting it every so often. I also get the crying kid with cards, sleep livestream, and deformed baby one all the time. Oh and you forgot the one where they have a calculator app open set to 999,999,998 or something and if they just get two more gifts they will see what happens when you get to one billion, but they are always so awkwardly slow and keep decrementing the number so it never reaches it.

etblg 4y ago
That calculate one is a whole genre on to itself: TikToks where there's a goal the streamer is working towards to do something, but they do it so slowly that it never happens. People keep donating to see the thing happen, the streamer doesn't want the thing to happen because then the donations stop, so they only pretend like they're going to do the thing. Like that damned guy stacking bolts in a giant column.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Sisyphus, but with gamification.

falcolas 4y ago

As always with TikTok, your experience will vary based on the videos you watch, favorite, save, and the creators you follow. What appears for any given individual is highly tailored to the things they seem to find interesting. I, in contrast, get gamers (kind of like a lo-fi twitch channel), accounts I follow, and the odd musician. I have honestly never seen any of the live streams you mention.

not_math 4y ago
I don't get these kind of comment. What are you trying to say? That the reason this person see this content is their fault? They secretly want to see these type of videos? There are a lot of articles and videos showing that sometimes watching just one video will suggest a ton of videos related to it, no matter if you are not interested. Machine learning and deep learning is not perfect, and sometimes the goal of the companies is not clear and may not align with your goals. Sure, your experience will vary on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok based on the people you follow, that's the goal of hyper-personalized feed. But you still get a trend, a social effect of the network. For example, on Youtube, you need "clickbait" thumbnails. So even Tom Scott, who 's content is educative and entertaining, needs to follow the "trend" of Youtube to get views. But I see these comments every time someone is blaming the weird content they are seeing on their feed: "Oh me I only see nice stuff, stop watching weird stuff". I think we can have a deeper conversation than that.
- falcolas 4y ago
  What I'm trying to say: It's more complicated than the parent makes it sound. The parent makes it sound like "if you're on TikTok, this is what you see." > TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article. > It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth. TikTok's algorithms are scarily-effective (dramatically more effective at tailoring than all of your other examples), and thus what you see is indeed a direct reflection of what you watch. Any single video (ads excepted), or even trend, just doesn't appear globally on TikTok.

reportgunner 4y ago

There's also multiple streams where the streamer has a mouse click counter with a [+] and a [-] button. They are clicking to get to some outrageous number like 100000000 and every time you give them money they take 10, 100 or 1000 clicks away or they destroy their mouse and they are begging you to let them finish clicking. This goes on for multiple days.

wongarsu 4y ago

To me, the most interesting thing out of the list is that I've only seen two categories from the list: people sleeping and the assembly line workers (covering a wide range of industries). Other kinds of livestreams that seem to be persistent categories: - people in classrooms, libraries or other social settings, livestreaming themselves - insides of mosques, presumably with the camera hidden somewhere - space station footage with random background music. Sometimes footage from space walks, mostly Russian ones I think it goes to show how wildly different people's TikTok experiences can be, depending on what the algorithm decides and what TikTok decides to push in your region.

latexr 4y ago

> people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not) Do a web search for “TikTok fake disorder”. Or specify one directly, such as “tourette” or “ADHD”.

jstarfish 4y ago
Related: Munchausen-by-internet

zen_1 4y ago

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRaaVhoJjCE&t=105 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRaaVhoJjCE&t=105 suggests that some of the livestreams may be prerecorded and running on infinite loop

ryanSrich 4y ago
This is definitely the case as many TikTok accounts are fake. They’ll take something like a prerecorded live event from Mr. Beast, create a fake TikTok account with a name that looks like Mr. Beast, and then stream the previously recorded live. Without fail there are always THOUSANDS of people watching these thinking it’s the real thing and donating money.
qjx 4y ago
happens a lot even on twitch and youtube too. With this tool that shows small channels, there are a lot of channels with the same thumbnail and the channels would have gibberish channel names https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/channel_previews.php?games[]=Just%2520Chatting&sort_by=reverse https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/channel_previews.php?game...

wishfish 4y ago

TikTok live is kinda wild. You never know what you're going to get. One thing I like about it. My favorite was a live stream from a small town festival in Bali. Started off with a bunch of acrobats doing slapstick comedy. Ended with dancers in elaborate dragon masks, and the crowd joined in to make it a big dance party. Was so much fun. I now have a new resolve to go visit Bali. I also really like all the truck drivers who do cab views. There's an ambulance driver somewhere in Vietnam who livestreams his shifts. Oddly mesmerizing to watch him zip through dense city traffic without a care in the world. Quite a few people who seem to found the best hustle possible. They go daily to Disneyland and other parks. Somehow get enough gifts and tips to pay for it. Also like the bars that stream their house bands. That one guy who rides a scooter around downtown LA late at night and gets in weird conversations with drunks. A guy who races Matchbox cars on his track and keeps track of the winners in a pseudo league. An Italian man who looks vaguely like Mr. Bean and does an almost endless stretch of magic tricks. The one that I think about often is this 19 yr old guy in the Ukrainian Army. Only caught him once. Back in the summer. He and his unit were not yet on the front lines but his superiors had him digging a trench anyways. He was half-assing the digging while his comrades relaxed under trees and occasionally yelled something that would make the young guy laugh. He'd perk up anytime someone with a cute girl avatar would say something to him. They'd say something that made him just beam with happiness. I'll always wonder what happened to him. I hope he's ok.

HEHENE 4y ago
Disney "influencers" are such a scourge on theme parks. Normal visitors take loads of photos and videos, often at inconvenient times, but when it comes to being in/on the attractions, they usually put their phones away and shut up. Most rides at Disney parks have pre-shows about 3/4 of the way through the line that set up the story for the ride. Sometimes these are audiovisual, sometimes animatronic, but always with audio and almost always dark. Likewise, most Disney rides are "dark rides" where the ride is primarily in the dark with animatronics and the scenery lit by carefully designed show lighting. Influencers have seen these pre-shows and rides a thousand times and don't care about them. They keep there full-brightness phone up and filming for them and talk over them to their audience. It's incredibly distracting and immersion breaking. I imagine Disney sees them as a net-positive though, as I'm sure they drive tons of ticket sales. Most influencers are travel agents who get paid by Disney, or are affiliated with a travel agency.

collegeburner 4y ago

lmaooo facts. you forgot the innumerable 14yr old girl putting on way too much makeup that's half thirst trap and the 8yo fortnite kid raging at his xbox. btw i'm pretty sure i know exactly which live you're talking about with the house of cards guy. about the only kind of lives i actually like are the debate ones which can be kinda interesting.

xnx 4y ago

I love TikTok, but TikTok "live" (most streams seem to be fake prerecordings) is terrible. I can't skip those streams fast enough.

Thlom 4y ago
I keep getting an Italian dude in a pizzeria making pizza while he's humming, singing and talking to the audience. And yesterday I got a guy on an assembly line repairing pallets. Best part of tiktok if you ask me. (Worst part is that there's a lot of people with mild developmental disorders that publishes their lives on the app. It doesn't feel right.)

adamm255 4y ago

Sounds like some Black Mirror storylines in there… bizarre stuff

jasonlotito 4y ago

> and TikTok like 70% of it No. This is not true. HN likes to believe it's "smarter" but how do people forget that the app stores take a 30% cut off the top? These aren't charities, these are digital live streaming fits. You see TikTok in the title, and you just blindly believe it. It seems (from doing the math in the article) TikTok is taking ~40% of the cut. You can argue that's still too much, but that's a far cry from 70%. But blindly spewing 70% is ignorant at best.

tspike 4y ago
From TFA: > With TikTok declining to say how much it takes from gifts, the BBC ran an experiment to track where the money goes. > A reporter in Syria contacted one of the TikTok-affiliated agencies saying he was living in the camps. He obtained an account and went live, while BBC staff in London sent TikTok gifts worth $106 from another account. > At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69% of the value of the gifts.
- filoleg 4y ago
  What exactly is "a TikTok-affiliated agency"? Because to me it sounds just like a publishing label that takes a massive cut between the actual content producer (tiktok user) and the platform (TikTok). If that's the case, that's just another situation just like what happened between Spotify and the artists. I heard a lot of noise about it, but turns out Spotify only takes a 30% cut. Why do artists complain about their 70% cut? Oh, that's because artists signed to a label only get a fraction for it, while their label gets the rest. That has nothing to do with Spotify and all with contracts between artists and labels. None of that applies to independent artists with no label, who all get their full 70%. Is "a TikTok-affiliated agency" basically acting as a music label here?
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    No. The numbers and article make it clear it's something that happens after they withdraw the money. These are outside the realm of TikTok. And again, TT isn't taking 70%. Anyone suggesting that is wrong. They are taking 38% vs 31% that the creators take.

zippergz 4y ago

I watch quite a bit of TikTok and I have never seen ANY of these.

asdfqweqe12 4y ago

Since you are getting comments saying that your experience on live isn't reflective of theirs I wanted to add that my experience is very similar. I see the sleep streams, the disability streams, and I saw the same chinese factory fake airpod one.

wingworks 4y ago
I too have seen nearly every he talked about, and keeps popping up.

mgkimsal 4y ago

why didn't any of these experiences end up on Chatroulette years ago? Is it just the size of the user base? Or because it's all mobile now?

soylentcola 4y ago
No "tips" to be made on Chatroulette? That's my guess. I do remember one amusing thing we did back when Chatroulette was still fairly novel - hung out at a local dive bar where one otherwise boring evening's entertainment was Chatroulette on a projector screen with a webcam pointed at the bar patrons. Any time we hit a disembodied penis, we would all cheer and laugh. They always disconnected right after. Had some fun talking to folks in other countries and around the US. I think it was a lot more fun when it was still the novelty du jour early on and hadn't quite become 90% (literal) wankers yet.

helios_invictus 4y ago

All of this sounds like dystopia performance art.

zo1 4y ago

Here's another:a guy using tweezers and pliers to peel the egg shell off a...raw egg. Keeping the contents inside the thin translucent layer under the shell that he can't tear or he "loses". Or: people packing sweet boxes. Worst is when you see random people doing streams cause they're bored. They're alone, playing music, answering semi private questions and pandering to strangers. I don't even know what to make of it.

azinman2 4y ago
There are a lot of eggs. People in the comments seem to go crazy for it. And the point? At the end he basically pops the egg anyway and starts all over. And yet ppl send him “roses” the whole time.

bastawhiz 4y ago

I don't have TikTok but one of the most impressive things I've seen while watching my mom scroll is the live streams of folks with a thick stack of lottery tickets, scratching them off one by one. They all admit they only have about a 70% return on investment, which means those streams are largely a loss unless they're making a good amount of money on donations.

charcircuit 4y ago
You can just loop the footage to cap your capex.

cm42 4y ago

When you order your PSYOPS from Wish

neaden 4y ago

One live it has shown me a couple times, and I'm not sure if it is always the same person or a genre, is someone carefully dissecting an egg, trying to remove all the shell while leaving the membrane intact. I also get a decent number of ones in Spanish of people exploring creepy things, like an abandoned building or a forest at night. As I don't speak Spanish I'm not sure exactly what is going on.

jader201 4y ago

I’ll admit that I have never used TicTok — mostly because it always sounded toxic/unhealthy from the start — and this comment/article seem to reinforce that. It’s really crazy — and a bit scary — how much messed up stuff can proliferate a single app.

Tao3300 4y ago
I used it briefly and was disgusted by the amount of political garbage that was flowing. I'm glad I stayed off. There's nothing in the above list that I want to see. I used to tell people that even if Trump had the wrong reasons, he had the right idea when he wanted to ban TikTok.
stavros 4y ago
Oh man, if you're wary of TikTok, wait until you see Instagram!
lavezzi 4y ago
> I’ll admit that I have never used TicTok I don't think you needed to admit anything :)
hnick 4y ago
I used it once with my wife to see what it was, all it seemed to be was EXTREMELY LOUD MUSIC playing over various things, it was annoying. Not everything needs music. We didn't last two minutes.

mikrl 4y ago

As a former obsessive 4channer, wooooow. I’ve seen some wild stuff online but some of this just seems gratuitous. It’s not just for maladjusted kids on an Indonesian throat singing forum either, it’s being beamed to everyone’s phone.

thesuitonym 4y ago

Every time it comes up I see almost this exact same comment--maybe it is the same comment? I kind of wonder. I never see any of this content. Maybe I'm not on it enough, but all I ever see are mostly just people talking. There's a guy who "races" pool balls on a treadmill, but except for that and an occasional person building some strange contraption, it all just seems like extremely mundane (and in my mind boring) chats.

dlandis 4y ago

Is there any way to "report" streams in the app, when you come across them and they seem inappropriate?

supertofu 4y ago

The reason I refuse to get TikTok is that I am certain my psycho-emotional state cannot handle content like this. Especially item number 1. Is this normal? Is it safe for the human mind to consume content like this constantly? How does this affect production of dopamine? Is this what children are seeing? This sounds really scary.

sho_hn 4y ago

The reality we live in today is so much more fucked up already than any of the cyberpunk dystopias we still copy and celebrate in our mainstream media (hello, Cyberpunk 2077). Or it's just regressive: We're back to the traveling circus and the freak show, but different middle men.

mr_toad 4y ago
At least we haven’t regressed to gladiatorial combat. Yet.

rednerrus 4y ago

We're one iteration from HJs at Starbucks.

dirtyid 4y ago

Feels like interdimensional cable.

henrikschroder 4y ago

> it will start showing you live streams every once in a while, and they tend to fall in to patterns like: FOR YOU. What TikTok chooses to show you is extremely personalized, I have never encountered any of the live streams you describe above. I mostly get young good-looking guys trying to promote their OnlyFans. ...and I don't think most people on TikTok get livestreams like that, so I would be very cautious about making any sort of sweeping statements of what the experience will be like for other people. That said, I'm absolutely delighted about all the absolutely crazy things and the enormous diversity of stuff you can get on your feed. TikTok feels just like GeoCities did on the early web, it's a bazaar of the bizarre, and trends change so fast that you never get bored, and corporations still haven't been able to suck the joy and life out of the thing yet.

jerojero 4y ago
I find odd when people critique tiktok for having some kind of content when it is clear that's what the algorithm has given them or other times they maybe use the app for a couple minutes and never really get to a personalised stage. In any case, I never really encounter very many Livestream when I'm on the for you page. Could this be because I almost always don't engage with them? I'd like to get good looking guys promoting their OF.
- dillondoyle 4y ago
  Start hitting the heart button whenever you see 'grey sweat season' stimuli. Unintentional will eventually surface clearly intentional thirst trap small business owners. or posts with corn emoji in place of a word that starts with P. Or trends that are really just thrust your hips in loose fitting shorts. Or guys who point to song name which is really their twitter handle. I know this because... Science.

krrrh 4y ago

A few of my favorite genres: * very drunk single women talking about how no one loves them and fishing for comments from wackos telling them how beautiful they are * working class people streaming their entire shifts. Something mesmerizing about watching a guy knocking down trees, a smart ass machinist talking smack while operating a lathe, 4 Uzbeks putting running shoes together, or timber being milled into boards in a very non-OSHA compliant plant in Indonesia. * micro talk shows where only 50 people are watching 4 talking heads who don’t know each other debate politics. These ironically are better than a lot of cable news since you actually get people who have wildly different views talking to each other, and they will take the time to resolve factual disagreements on Wikipedia between making points. When the Canadian trucker protest was going on the media mostly did such a bad job of reporting, but if you dig around on tik tok live it was easy to find the guys in the lead trucks chatting with their friends and families back home about how things were going and how much they loved “driving through this beautiful country”. Sometimes I would be one of 70 people watching. Same goes for the early streams out of Ukraine. The ease and quality of mobile streaming on tiktok feels like a huge revolution in social media that’s just getting started. Real McLuhan global village stuff developing.

selimthegrim 4y ago
I wonder if the Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube has a TikTok

dillondoyle 4y ago

I spend too much time watching live scratch cards! tiktok is TOO good at micro-optimizing. it's so far above at recognizing the content of a video and then serving it to that specific individual. It's crazy that videos with 100 views, from a poster I've never seen before, fit into the niche of something i'd like. and super telling that I haven't seen like half of the things people are listing in this thread!!!!!