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What Happens When Everything Becomes TikTok?
- papito 4y agoHopefully that day comes soon. It will make it easier to quit social media and focus on the things that matter. The greatest advantage one can have in the modern world is being able to avoid these distractions while everyone else is turned into an impulse zombie.
- dontbenebby 4y ago[dead]
- teekert 4y agoFitting, my wife showed me Instagram yesterday, and I was like "So this is TikTok?", "No, it's instagram", "Ah I though Instagram was about pictures from people, this is just short, "funny" movie swiping, I thought that was TikTok's thing", "IDK, I never used TikTok".
- mysterydip 4y agoA lot of what's "viral/popular" on instagram is just reposts from tiktok/twitter. If you don't curate a following of actual people, that's much of what the algorithm feeds you.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoFB, IG and now YouTube are becoming indistinguishable from TikTok, thanks to the former all copy-catting and heavily promoting video "shorts".
- webo 4y ago+Snapchat. Twitter also is experimenting (experimented?) with endless video scrolling.
- rchaud 4y agoTwitter needs to figure out how to render video in general, before trying to scrap with the big boys.
- Zigurd 4y agoI accidentally started an fb vertical video and thought "Why does tiktok suck today?" until I realized the hole I had fallen into.
- nkozyra 4y ago"Today?"
- Thlom 4y agoWas it a video that was 27 minutes long teasing the big reveal for 26 minutes and 30 seconds and the big reveal was ... nothing?
- avereveard 4y agoWatch this simple trick that only requires a chain, a paperclip and an arc welder I swear five minutes craft copycats on Facebook are spiraling out of hands.
- Avicebron 4y agoOr my favorite (I've watched probably too many). How to refurbish old rusted gadgets at home* fast. *industrial machine shop not included.
- mysterydip 4y ago"wait for it!!!!!" "LOLemoji watch to the end! LOLemoji"
- the_only_law 4y agoThe YouTube shorts really piss me off, because, afaik there’s no way to seek (and some of them are a bit long for a “short”), at least from what I’ve seen in the mobile UI. It may be behind a gesture or something though.
- nkozyra 4y agoThat's the copycat behavior. It's forced engagement analytics. You either care (and it's boosted for some people) or you don't (and it's devalued for some people). All in the pursuit of perpetual doomscrolling.
- texasbigdata 4y agoHard to save to a playlist too. Find a useful life tip? Forget about being able to find it later.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoI wonder how much noise this adds to their algorithm. The other day my wife wanted to show me some "short" from a content creator she likes, and had to rapidly scroll through ~30 of other "shorts" in her feed until said creator popped up again and she could click on her profile pic. Whatever way YouTube rated those other 30 vids for my wife is completely wrong, unless they happen to have a classification category called "rapidly scrolling down because of your stupid ass UI that doesn't allow backtracking or searching previously seen content". At this rate, in a few years, even non-tech-savvy people will get fed up with increasingly nonsensical and confusing UIs of social media products.
- gbear605 4y agoSometimes you can drag along the bottom to seek, but it only seems to work on some shorts. You can sometimes tell if it will work because it’ll show a progress bar at the bottom. I’m not sure what distinguishes those though, since I’ve seen long shorts (hah) with and without them.
- ta8903 4y ago"Youtube Shorts" is just an alternative frontend, you can replace any url from youtube.com/shorts/XYZ to youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ to watch them with the original UI.
- texasbigdata 4y agoAnd TikTok has a BeReal copy :) Everyone’s just trying to survive. In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features. I believe the instagram book had a similar claim about Sidstorm (sp?). I guess when network effects are life you can’t afford to not be the network. Google was smart to nab YouTube. And android. Meta was smart to grab instagram and WhatsApp (and that same logic, after missing out on making a phone, I bet is why they’re rushing to own VR). Innovate, copy, or die, basically.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoI feel there's a difference between copy-catting an upstart vs. a competitor that already outclassed you. The latter is kind of admitting defeat :). But regardless, what's really annoying here is that this new mode of interaction is pushed so hard that it hides away and starves out the "traditional" one. It's like these companies don't understand we're no longer in an era of a single social networking platform. I don't come to YouTube or Facebook to get more TikTok - I'm fine with getting TikTok on TikTok, I come to YouTube for actual longer-form videos, to Facebook for posts and groups, etc. Seeing YT, FB and IG pushing "shorts"/"reels" in my face only makes me visit them less.
- MockObject 4y ago> In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features. Can you explain what this means? I don't know what a lockdown is. Thanks!
- texasbigdata 4y agoFrom what I understand they would other drop other projects or literally not leave the office until the new feature was built. Again, from a book, you might want to fact check this.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoI installed TikTok last year when the company I worked for switched all of their ad spend from FB to TikTok. I found it addictive in the sense that it was a time waster, yet fun… I have now installed TikTok 3 times. Each time for a week I find it fun, then after about another week I uninstall it because I value my time to create my own stuff (writing and open source). I find YouTube Short to be different. Somewhat fun, but not enough to pull me away from the YT material I watch, like philosophy ‘think’ content, Playing For Change music videos, and minimal political stuff. Using https://Freedom.to https://Freedom.to tools to monitor and limit viewing times is almost always a good idea. Latest macOS/iPadOS/iOS also has very good support for limiting app and specific web site use. These are great tools, at least for my digital life.
- RicoElectrico 4y agoThe correct spelling is right in the submission title.
- teekert 4y agoFixed :)
- edouard-harris 4y agoYep. This is the same strategy Instagram used a few years ago in copying Snapchat's Stories format, and likely has the same goal. The idea is not that Instagram can take back TikTok's audience — those users are well and truly lost — but rather that it can deny existing Insta users any reason to even try TikTok in the first place. (Because they can get the same form factor without downloading a new app.) From what I've heard, the Stories copying strategy did successfully contain (but did not roll back) the Snapchat threat to Insta. So there's some reason to believe they can hold the line against TikTok with this approach too, even absent the possibility of a government ban. I expect this sort of convergence will continue in the future. Whatever one might think of fast-following as a strategy, scale plus rapid copying of features does seem to work.
- UltraViolence 4y agoFacebook is being paranoid and by integrating TikTok-like algorithms into Instagram they're alienating the majority of their users.
- andsoitis 4y agoPerhaps. Or they have A/B tested the new alternative and found it superior (e.g. Instagram users exposed to that new experience come to the app more often, stay for longer).
- UltraViolence 4y agoI usually stop scrolling after I see the check-mark which indicates I'm up to date. Below that there are TikTok-type short reels with all sorts of stupid things.
- kevinventullo 4y agoIt’s a separate feature within IG. People who aren’t interested in short form video scrolling don’t have to use reels.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
- agumonkey 4y agoit's been a subconscious trend since vine I guess vine, snap, insta, tiktok, youtube shorts the notion of time is gonna be a new neurosocial topic
- TrueGeek 4y agoMy wife does this too and I've noticed that a large percentage of the Instagram videos she shows me have the TikTok logo on them. People are just copying them and reposting from one platform to the other.
- XCSme 4y agoThis is the reason I deleted Instagram. It was better than Facebook for keeping up to date with friends, but after an update they added the "Suggested posts" that automatically show as you scroll, after you finished the new posts from friends. They offered no way to disable suggested posts (and simply have, as before, the static feed of your friends post in reverse chronological order).
- tennisflyi 4y agoEh. For me IG is pictures from people (sometimes friends) and then short, movie swiping.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoTikTok, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube... what other apps behave like this?
- skee8383 4y agoAs a millinial i don't use tiktok. i have never used it once and don't care to use it. personally i think it's a detriment to society having been around zoomers and seeing the effect it's having on them. so if "everything" where to become tiktok, i guess i just wont be using the internet anymore.
- paulcole 4y agoI can’t believe the younger generation is doing something a member of the older generation doesn’t care for and is making sweeping proclamations about what will happen if things change.
- Pigalowda 4y agoIt truly is the Abe Simpson meme. I wonder if it was a joke?
- rchaud 4y agoAs a millennial, I was telling college friends in 2005 not to specify their hometown, school or religious affiliation on the then-new Facebook, because a)it wasn't mandatory b)ask yourself why you would need to put that in when the majority of your connections are with people who are right there on campus Some people listened, but most did not. FB was college-only at the time, with no ads. People just wanted to e-stalk others. Not too much has changed, except that people now e-stalk influencers they have parasocial relationships with. And you click a button to throw a couple of bucks at them.
- nabaraz 4y agoIt's pure supply and demand. People want to endlessly scroll for content, that's what they will get.
- onion2k 4y agoPeople want to endlessly scroll for content. I don't think that's true. It's more that society makes it really hard to do anything else. Unless you're doing something to start a business, become an influencer, or because it's your life goal people look down on you for it. So people don't. They doomscroll instead, because you won't be challenged for that.
- pixl97 4y agoI mean heroin is in high demand, but I'm not exactly sure if it's a good idea to give everyone an unlimited diet of it.
- Liquix 4y agoNow imagine heroin had just been discovered ~10 years ago... and corporations were peddling it to average folks who didn't know any better... And it was ruining people's lives... Oh yeah, that happened! Bayer knew on some level it was highly addictive, but it was legal and the money was good. It won't get better until it's regulated.
- walthamstow 4y agoWhy Bayer? By your first sentence I thought you were going to say Purdue. I haven't read anything before about Bayer and opiates.
- andsoitis 4y agoBayer invented heroin. “A century ago, scientists at a German pharmaceutical firm investigated a chemical modification to morphine that made it more palatable as a cough suppressant. The Bayer Co., predecessor to today’s pharmaceutical giant, marketed its popular new remedy as “Heroin.” —- https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/from-cough-medicine-to-deadly-addiction-a-century/ https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/from-cough-medicine-t...
- beckingz 4y agoWhen everything becomes TikTok, nothing is.
- hoseja 4y agoIs there some sort of hazmat suit one can use to, if not participate in, at least see what's happening on TikTok without letting Xi spy on me?
- sempron64 4y agoUse an iphone and don’t give the app any permissions.
- nzoschke 4y agoFind reposts on YouTube or Instagram. By definition if you sign into the TikTok app and service and interact with *anything* you're part of the machine. Of course with my solution you're part of the Google or Meta machine instead.
- cumshitpiss 4y ago
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- nzoschke 4y agoThis is happening and happening fast. I'm not sure saying all the other paltforms are copying TikTok is correct. It's more that TikTok is the natural evolution of of technology that all media platforms are heading towards. - Lower the cost of media production and publishing until its basically free - Lower the cost of distribution by using an algorithm - Lower the cost of moderation by using crowd-sourcing and algorithms (if even that) The results are pretty scary. Political discourse is in free fall. My hypothesis is that a big part of the US political dysfunction is due to the populace consuming the "news" on Twitter and Facebook as a series of low-quality or downright fake posts. It's all hot takes, no meaningful discourse. Entertainment is in a tidal shift. Netflix is trying the high volume, cheap production, let the algorithm sort it out, but will still eventually lose to YouTube. On a positive note, independents are making better cooking "shows" on YouTube than Food Network or Netflix ever produced. Old newspapers and Hollywood had a lot of problems of their own. But there were also big advantages of the professionalism, editorialization and quality control they offered. The question is if we'll find a healthy balance by some combination of the platforms and their users trying to do the right thing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago<< It's all hot takes, no meaningful discourse. About my only somewhat real discussions are with co-workers, who happen to have very different political positions. Frankly, I am doing it against my better judgment ( discussing political matters can get divisive fast ), but the conversations are generally interesting as the other participants are from non-traditional backgrounds so they can offer interesting perspectives. I think this is the part that is missing, but last time I started talking honestly on the train about what I think is happening out of the corner of my eye I saw a kid raise his cell seemingly in an attempt to record the conversation. I wasn't saying anything too radical ( "people are idiots" was the gist of it ), but nothing I would want floating around the net..and so I stopped. I am not sure what the answer is. Best I can hope for is that I will be able to keep my kid away from it long enough.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fdsafdewe 4y agoAs the other "social" giants converge on ultra-short, rapidly-swiped video clips as the current state of the art in user attention draining, my question is - what is the next step? As a now non-owner of even a smartphone, I overtly ogle other people using Tiktok. It's equally amusing and baffling for me, and I feel pity for that person.
- hotpotamus 4y ago> what is the next step? I assume our elite education system is currently fostering the next generation of innovators to answer this question.
- mtalantikite 4y ago> As a now non-owner of even a smartphone... Curious what you're using these days? I've got an old iPhone that I haven't updated past iOS 14 and have been wanting to just drop smartphones completely when this thing dies. I'm just wondering what I'll do for MFA mainly, and here in NYC it's nice to have maps when you're out (even though I remember the time I got myself around the city just fine without them 15-ish years ago).
- harryvederci 4y agoI'm not the one you replied to, but I'd say: Get any random dumbphone for a small amount of money, live with it for 2 weeks. See if you like it. If not, no time wasted deciding on the "best" replacement product. For me, the 2 weeks turned into 5 years (so far). Oh and I've migrated to a different country in that time, and I'm still alive, despite not having a navigation app thingy. No excuses! :)
- fdsafdewe 4y agoI use a Nokia 105 that I found in a desk drawer. >here in NYC it's nice to have maps when you're out I'm very grateful I live in a country where going smartphone-free, a bit like going car-free, is still a viable choice while maintaining a relatively mainstream lifestyle. Good luck! Saying that, colleagues and friends have had a laugh out of some of the escapades I've got myself in to, with no smartphone for navigation. I still maintain that my choice is better for me overall, in terms of time and energy usage.
- thundergolfer 4y agoThis article is too brief and answers the question in a less interesting way than it could have. I thought the article would be exploring the consequences of short-form viral vertical video becoming the dominant medium of our culture (evoking McLuhan, Neil Postman) but instead it's about data security and new AI training possibilities from every increasing volumes of training data.
- _chu1 4y agoI am 14 and haven't interacted with TikTok once. The whole thing disgusts me and I find it funny that a company that's all cozy with the CCP is controlling the algorithm feeding kids around the world shit entertainment and lies.
- UltraViolence 4y agoAnd how exactly does that differ from Facebook?
- hammock 4y agoUnless you believe in the deep state, the difference is that we voted/can vote for the people in power who regulate Facebook, here in the US.
- aaomidi 4y agoWe can regulate TikTok too. For them to sell ads in the US, they are under US jurisdiction.
- UltraViolence 4y agoThey ignore U.S. laws. I even believe their transfer of user data to Oracle is an inside company joke. It's always "pending" and the project never finishes. In the meantime they pilfer our personal data and use it to their advantage.
- aaomidi 4y agoThen enforce the laws and start fining them for non compliance.
- UltraViolence 4y agoI have a better idea: how about we ban them from the Western world! They're obviously up to no good and they ignore our laws. We're always two steps behind as they keep promising compliance yet they never do. Once we find them out they come up with excuses and promise they'll behave next time. Like I said, I believe they're silently making fun of us. Having us run a rat race while they just keep on pilfering our personal info. Ban TikTok!!
- jacooper 4y ago> The shape of our politics, our ideology, and even our fundamental grasp of how the world works is, in some substantial way, up to the algorithms. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, a quarter of people under 30 in the U.S. regularly get their news from TikTok clips. That number is growing. People are even turning to social-media video as a replacement for Google search. > Whether the results of such swipes and searches lead us to enlightenment or drag our worldviews further down toward their least reconciliatory, most conspiratorial depths depends in part on AI. Honestly, what is the solution?, in the eyes of Capitalism, these Companies are the ultimate winners. They are creating more revenue, more activity, crushing the competition other than themselves. Who's going to stop this? especially that no matter how many users complain, the numbers are always going higher, and every monetary incentive is pushing companies towards this AI time blackhole with infinite mass surveillance. You might say regulation, but why would the U.S. ever handicap its companies when they are basically the new U.S. worldwide influence tool? No matter what the people vote, these companies have an infinite lobbying budget. You and me might not use Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, but let's be honest, we are increasingly the minority. > If such a system could, say, rank videos by how happy they are, it might help elevate more positive content and subdue the darker stuff: less vitriol, more virtue. Isn't this even more dystopian? Imagine there is crisis in Afghanistan, or a nuclear Activity in the east. The algorithm would just simply filter all of that out, and leave you living in that mindless unrealistic view of the world. Yes I agree, the algorithms and news coverage are way too negative these days, but removing negativity is not the solution at all, it's basically blinding people from the truth. Instead of promoting miss-info, you are now hiding the news completely.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago> Honestly, what is the solution? It depends on how much of a shock to the status quo you believe TikTok[1] is. Take the invention of the printing press, for example. It was instrumental in the development of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Both undermined the legitimacy of the the Catholic Orthodoxy and the Ancien Régime, respectively. The printing press was used by adherents of Lutheranism, Jan Hus, Zwingli, Calvin, and Gustav V to propagate texts outside the previous monestary-scribe-book economy which, as you can imagine, also served as an orthodoxy-preserving filter. Likewise, Jean-Paul Marat's L’Ami du peuple[2], Le Pere Duchesne(Hébert), and countless others[3] were able to publish revolutionary texts faster than the monarchy could stamp them out. Both are case where technology outpaced social capacity. The question is, "has TikTok and it's like outpaced our social capacity?" What I mean specifically: is throughput and velocity of idea propagation at odds with our current social superstructure? In hindsight, this was clearly the case in the Reformation ad Revolution. Attempts at stamping out the ideas failed and the social order changed to accommodate the technology. Talking today about outlawing the printing press is considered an absurd. I'll argue the same is true for calling a ban or regulation on TikTok. Bans are a technological solution to the social organizational lag problem. Instead, we should be developing and employing social mechanisms that bridge the gap. After developing and deploying these social mechanisms, it will seem just as absurd to advocate for a TikTok ban. We should be looking at the development of social mechanisms post printing press that acted as a counterbalance and learn from them when developing new social mechanisms that work to temper algorithmic feeds today. 1. Or more broadly dopamine-optimized and AI-generated content feeds. 2. Friend of the People 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_under_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_und...
- aaron695 4y ago
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoFound myself accidentally scrolling YouTube TikTok last night, wasn't a good feeling. The SV giants have built a culture where creativity/innovation goes to die and only copying is rewarded. Ironic when thats what they used to say when they looked down at Chinese made software. It's crazy when you see FB did try to make new social apps for a period with their "New Product Experimentation" team, but they would never give any of those new ideas the UI billing they'd give a Snap clone or TikTok clone. Always a bad sign when an org respects the ideas of the competitor more than their own team.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
- taurath 4y agoIt’s interesting to me because the only thing the sites have of any differentiator of value is the userbase. Without that they are really a fairly homogenous set of features, and most of the work has gone into advertising. Tiktok also dispenses of the notion that you’re there to interact with friends - it’s entertainment for your interests.
- tech_tuna 4y agoThis feels like the same conversation from a decade ago when Facebook really blew up and everybody wanted to get into social platforms. Everything will not become Tik Tok.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoIt's funny because I recall somewhere Zuckerberg saying the future of Facebook was all video, and here TikTok is eating its lunch. Everything can't become TikTok though. Facebook has Marketplace, for example, and I don't ever see that able to work like TikTok.
- rchaud 4y agoI remember thinking that Reddit was the best of a bad lot when it came to social networks. Anything good happening on Twitter would get screenshotted on Reddit, same with videos from IG/FB. In some ways it improved the signal-to-noise ratio, as I guess my entertainment tastes were more compatible with the Reddit crowd. Now, every network is becoming indistinguishable. Most Youtube Shorts I see are ripped straight from Tiktok. It has all the irritating telltale signs; wooden AI voiceover, stupid sound effects overlaid on top on the original audio, and of course a 5-second looping clip of some monstrously bad music. It's draining. I now think of it as a reprise of the GIPHY era when lazy people would post GIF replies from [popular TV show] in response to posts.
- EarlKing 4y ago> Now, every network is becoming indistinguishable. Most Youtube Shorts I see are ripped straight from Tiktok. It has all the irritating telltale signs; wooden AI voiceover, stupid sound effects overlaid on top on the original audio, and of course a 5-second looping clip of some monstrously bad music. You forgot the fourth element: Some mid teen/woman preening in front of a mirror (because in 2022 people still can't figure out how to use the front-facing camera).
- pupppet 4y agoThe worst part of TikTok is everyone copying this idea of putting their videos into an endless loop. I don't want to see your stupid video over and over again.