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> In my experience, it's far better than Reddit (mostly because there's far more niche content, and it isn't limited to "recently posted") I find that very har

• preommr 4y ago
  It isn't. What they mean is a continuous churn of surface level stuff. E.g. for woodworking, there's only so many times you can show how the basics of "10 Things you're doing wrong", or why the tape measure moves at the end. You're not going to have that on the top of the subreddit that many times - maybe once a year. On tiktok, that stuff will occasionally pop in, mixed with a bunch of other crap so the repetitiveness doesn't stick out in the short term. You also don't engage with it. There's almost no point to leaving a comment, it's all about mindlessly scrolling from video to video. This leads to lots of really easy to film but superficial stuff in large quantities.
  • mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    > E.g. for woodworking, there's only so many times you can show how the basics of "10 Things you're doing wrong", or why the tape measure moves at the end. It's playing out exactly like elsewhere on the Internet: beginner content is best to produce because they are the biggest audience, and the algorithm snowballs that advantage further because it only sees engagement, not quality.
• britch 4y ago
  I've watched a few 5+ minute TikToks about various things (cars, video games, plants, politics) in the past month I don't think these are hugely popular but they reach some audience. A big video will have 500k to Millions of likes. These longer videos usually cap out at a couple thousand. They're out there but it's not searchable. TikTok has an incredible breadth of content but takes a few days to weeks to get the algorithm to show you what you want. When I use it the algorithm is something I'm actively trying to manipulate. "Up vote" stuff you to see by liking and saving. "Down vote" by quickly scrolling away from a video. Any engagement is a signal to show you more of that -- if you're tired of seeing one type of video, you should immediately scroll as soon as you know you don't want to watch it.
  • saiya-jin 4y ago
    You realize you are training their datasets (its not really an 'AI' in any meaningful sense) to get a very precise picture of your personality and emotions, which will be later used for ads targeting, and character profiling if you become somebody interesting in later years. 'Training the alghoritm' is just carrot on proverbial curated-content stick (you could also select 10 categories of content you like and refine it yourself further down the road, this is just less obvious for the same). People were bashing Facebook/Instagram for this for a decade and many have stopped/rollbacked and just give few likes here and there for personal events of friends. I guess history even in digital world likes to repeat itself...
    • the_lonely_road 4y ago
      I was one of the people that didn’t care Facebook was doing that. I am one of the people who still doesn’t care that TikTok is doing it. I stopped using Facebook because my feed became garbage not because of any kind of privacy concerns. TikTok’s feed has been amazing and consistently feeds me content that I like. History probably repeats itself because a massive body of people don’t care about the things that you care about and are being delivered value that they do care about.
      • hutzlibu 4y ago
        "History probably repeats itself because a massive body of people don’t care about the things that you care about and are being delivered value that they do care about" Yes, it is known that most people do not care about deep stuff, but about food in their belly and beeing good entertained. Panem et circenses. Btw. about the romans, in italy the prime minister is now a person who said she thinks Mussolini was a good politician. So yes, history repeats itself, if too many people do not care. Democracy is actually a quite fragile thing. Many things we take for granted only exist, because people care. And it will erode if people stop caring. So you are still free to submit to FB and TikTok as much as you like and hope this does not change. Because, you know, companies knowing all about you, but you nothing about them and their motives is just a receipe for long term empowerment of them and not you. And in the case of TikTok, there is an actual government behind it and de facto in control, which is not famous for democracy, nor human rights.
• gjulianm 4y ago
  In my experience, subreddits end up being, at best, a "look at what I did" without any actual way I can learn, and usually it's just a photo or something. At worst they are a mess of memes, repeated beginner questions and unmoderated content. Content on Reddit is also very short-lived, and information can get hidden in comments and become invisible. On the other hand, TikTok works fairly well. Videos can be up to 3 minutes long now, most of the time it's enough to at least explain the basics and tell you where to get more detail if you want. Also, the "algorithm-driven discovery" means that creators usually need to focus on the content of the videos. The "video reply to a comment" mechanic is very helpful too, as it encourages making additional first-level content from people's questions instead of burying things in comments.
  • permo-w 4y ago
    yeah reddit has huge issues. it’s difficult to find a popular image-based subreddit that hasn’t descended into repetitive memes. and as you say the fast decay of content means that “progress” is only in the minds of the current users. as soon as they decay, the meta resets. there’s also a shocking amount of astroturfing going on. it used to be useful to search “[product] reddit” - and in some cases still can be - but many companies have cottoned onto this and they can extremely cheaply manipulate a reddit post for very high fidelity advertising. this is especially true for online-centric companies like VPNs and crypto exchanges. the VPN subreddit might as well be an advertising platform I once saw a reddit post asking about VR headsets where the poster specifically stated that they do not want anything Meta/Facebook because they don’t trust them. the top 3 replies? “I recommend the metaquest 2 because it’s the best value for money” as if they’d said nothing at all
    • strken 4y ago
      There's a phenomena where someone posts something like "I want to join two pieces of board to a pole with a nail, but I don't want to use a hammer, what should I do?" and gets back two recommendations to use a screw and screwdriver, three to use a hammer, one to use a nailgun, and one longer answer that explains the question is bad but begrudgingly accepts a nailgun. I think in that situation, the people who suggest a hammer or a screw silently perform some mental arithmetic, assume the person asking the question doesn't understand the problem because they're asking for a very costly tradeoff, and give the best answer that solves the basic problem.
• permo-w 4y ago
  > the last place on the internet where real people post long-form content that is not a single-issue niche forum youtube is the biggest counter-example to this. yes there’s a lot of short-form content, but there’s also a huge amount of long-form, not that the algorithm will tell you that
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    youtube shorts are making this reverse. What used to be a long form platform now has many creators who post tons of 30 second clips that aren't interesting or informative. The shorts are all skippable because if you can hear it in 30 seconds you can read a sentence about it in 5.
    • bakuninsbart 4y ago
      So I'm generally not using any social media, but sometimes try to use it for a week or two to at least understand what is going on in the world. Recently I specifically consumed a bunch of YouTube shorts, and Google should have a pretty good idea at who I am after using there services for 15 years, but even with pressing "do not recommend" on every single Andrew Tate/Jordan Peterson video, it will just incessantly recommend that content to me. The platform is literally unusable for me in that sense, I felt like I was in a social experiment trying to turn me into an Incel or something... In comparison, tiktoks algorithm works far better at recommending me things I actually like to watch.
      • LegitShady 4y ago
        shrug youtube is really good at adding content similar to what you've already watched to your recommendations. If you're getting jordan peterson and andrew tate videos its probably related to what you've been watching. I suspect as well that simply watching shorts over long form content makes the recommendation algorithms assume things about your ability to concentrate on long form content. Even still youtube has a function where you click the dots near a video and say 'not interested' to get rid of channels and topics from recommendations that works fairly well, so if its recommending something you dislike, you have the ability to remove those recommendations and tune future ones. PEBCAK