10 ms·

TikTok is adding text posts

89 points by schnitzelstoat 3y ago

bsnnkv 3y ago
[flagged]
- uncletaco 3y ago
  IME most of the content I get from white creators is political in nature, for now. I somehow drifted away from BookTok into witch-don't-kale-my-vibe-tok. I'm too lazy to be intentional with the search function so I'm hoping I will eventually get back to the part of TikTok that's talking about something besides politics. EDIT: I want to throw out there that Belatown is the greatest soap opera of all time. Its a TikTok exclusive.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    I've found the algorithm adjusts quickly -- I'd argue too quickly sometimes. I watched one video analyzing the USWNT game against Vietnam and I felt like I was bombarded with women's soccer videos. And I like women's soccer -- but not that much.
- senttoschool 3y ago
  >The only people I know personally (ie. that I have an inter-personal relationship with) who complain about TikTok are white. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of people from ethnic groups originating in MENA/SWANA that I know personally are extremely positive about TikTok and the content it enables them to both create and be exposed to. >I wonder how much the algorithm tailoring content to different ethnic groups has to do with these impressions. A simpler explanation is that white people are generally more anti-China, and not something to do with the algorithm.
- Aaronstotle 3y ago
  I think the creation and exploration of TikTok is great, I also think that it needs to be explicitly decoupled from Bytedance. Even with the creators on the platform, I think its a net-negative for the world due to its addictive nature.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  I think its less a race/ethnicity thing, but more of two other things: 1. Age. It's just really jarring to many older people. 2. How cultured you fancy yourself to be. If you're someone who values reading 100 pages of a novel to just get into the story, then you will find TikTok to be vacuous. And honestly, that's probably a fair assessment. When I watch TikTok videos I give them about 5 -- maybe 10 seconds. I don't apply this same bar to other media, but I can imagine this is really off=putting for some.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  > Edit: Would love to get some feedback along with the flurry of downvotes. Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote. That's like me saying Jews don't like steak based on my experience.. of a sample size of one Jew who is a vegetarian. I personally know several folks who are Indian, Mexican and various South American nationalities who also deeply detest tiktok. A few Koreans too. The best advice I can make is to maybe get a bigger friend group if you're going to try and make large generalized statements from it. 500 people is a good minimum size.
  - bsnnkv 3y ago
    > Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote. It's very unfortunate that you (and presumably others) read it like that. I am not making an argument or a generalized statement in my post. If in doubt, you can also check my post history to see that I do not have a history of making any such posts. I am expressing curiosity about how the recommendation algorithm might be tailoring content not just based on interests but on the inferred ethnic backgrounds of people (because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other). I'm open to feedback on how this could have been phrased differently.
    - vorpalhex 3y ago
      It's the entire premise that's flawed. As a basic rule, you can't use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. That my particular Korean friends like the cheesesteak place up the street says nothing about Koreans, cheesesteaks or that restaurant. This is because at a basic level my friend group just doesn't look like any kind of general population. If nothing else it's geographically restricted, a tiny subset of classes and interests - and likely indirectly education levels and income. > because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income. And yes, if you target anime, you'll select the Japanese and if you target Webtoons you'll select mostly Korean and Chinese. Your flaw here is not your language but the direction of your reasoning. You can't reason from the specific anecdata up to population level - "my Black friends like tiktok therefore tiktok must target Black people". That's a "the parking lot is wet, it must be raining" sort of statement. You CAN reason down. "Tiktok really does a good job showing content from Black influencers, they probably have a large Black audience".
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
everyone sees the twitter blood in the water
- bmarquez 3y ago
  > Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories Seems more of an Instagram replacement than a Twitter one, the userbase of Instagram is also closer to TikTok than Twitter.
- callalex 3y ago
  What’s a Twitter?
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    It's an eX-website
- numpad0 3y ago
  The bird had touched the water, and sharks are jumping around. None flies, just jumping in the red ocean.
ulfw 3y ago
So it's becoming Weibo?
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  apparently tiktok tokens are already worth real world money? CDBC are here. FedNow is essentially that. also russia just announced DigitalRubles. USA Dollar is now part of a more competitive currency market? maybe? as part of the general public, I can only guess
  - pests 3y ago
    Yes, you can tip people on TikTok and they make money. Same way you an donate Bits on Twitch and the streamer earns.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bootsmann 3y ago
This might be a good example of feature creep for no reason. They already added a weird “multi video” post thing where you can scroll right on top of scrolling left and I feel this is another step into overloading the UI. The big tiktok of 2019/2020 was magically simplistic where you could basically only swipe full content in a tinder-like fashion, I fear this is another step away from that.
- princevegeta89 3y ago
  I am guessing this is a feature aimed to be a more casual way of "tweeting", given that Twitter is under the rubble right now, and competitors want to take their best chances and see what works
- xnx 3y ago
  Aside from live video showing in my For You feed, all the changes I can think of have been good. Longer video lengths have resulted in some content that previously would've only been on YouTube. Horizontal slideshows have become a mini-medium all to themselves. If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads.
  - miroljub 3y ago
    > If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads. It's not like TikTok is behind Threads in any of the relevant metrics right now.
    - pests 3y ago
      For text posts? TikTok is behind definitely behind Threads considering it doesnt support text posts right now. TikTok is ahead of Threads the same way Instagram is ahead of Threads - currently completely unrelated.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  The simple UI was great for onboarding people but, now that the audience is saturated, they can be taught new features.
hooverd 3y ago
Threads are the new stories.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Threads are the new twitter. No one is visiting either.
u2077 3y ago
How many more platforms do we need where users can post all sorts of media and follow other’s content? Every social media site copies features from another, and they are all basically the same item wrapped in a different package. When will people wake up and return to RSS?
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  > When will people wake up and return to RSS? RSS was by techies, and only ever used by techies. Uncontrolled news feeds lacking data collection doesn't sell enough for the giants. Also RSS only thrives if sites put in the effort to support it. Even still, the majority of online users are on social media platforms, not "surfing the www" like the gold ol' days.
aynyc 3y ago
Blood in the water on twitter (x). It’s time to pounce.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Official TikTok news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36847411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36847411
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
silisili 3y ago
This one surprises me. TikTok is so... different of a platform. I find it utterly jarring and revolting, my wife and kid find it fun and engaging, all for the same reasons. It seems like you're either going to get engaged in a video rabbit hole, or turn away. In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory. Threads at least made some sense, as Instagram is still a more slow paced, time to reflect type platform. TikTok less so.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments. I think there's probably a way that text can be built into the app that works alongside what's there and makes it a more interesting experience than just looking at screenshots.
  - 4O4 3y ago
    This is very untrue. It's just your personalized feed that is filled with that, because you happened to watch just enough of them to let the algorithm know you're interested. Other people see one of these videos and just swipe down immediately and never see one again. Please don't try to guesstimate the amount of content on tiktok in any given category just by your personal experience, because it's heavily biased because of just how the platform works.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      There has to be something about TikTok algorithm that it won’t work with quick readers/addicts/those in “the spectrum”. It wasn’t TTS but last I tried I too got series of uninteresting content. The system just didn’t register my fulfillment.
    - drusepth 3y ago
      You can scroll through the "Discover" tab which has depersonalized trends across the whole app. I just took a quick scroll through and it seems like at least ~5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen. There's been at least a few recent trends over the past few weeks that have been almost entirely text (beige flags, all the greenscreen text trends, #groupchat, etc). Anecdotally, I also see clusters of text-only posts every few weeks, even though I always either pause to read or scroll immediately through.
xyst 3y ago
The downfall of Twitter has really left a gaping hole in the market for clones and big companies to fill: - mastodon and fediverse - threads by IG/FB/Meta - blue sky - TT with txt posts
spondylosaurus 3y ago
I don't use TikTok myself, but I'm curious how text posts will be prioritized in people's feeds compared to standard video posts. My understanding is that (at least on paper) there's a minor feedback loop where getting a lot of views on a video = video is recommended to more people = more engagement = more recommendations. And conversely, if too many people scroll past a video without watching it, that video gets de-recommended in the same fashion. So now we throw text posts into the mix. Even if a lot of these text posts have music attached, I'd imagine people on TikTok are way more likely to stop scrolling and watch a video than stop scrolling and read a 1000-character post; unless TikTok's content recommendations specifically account for this discrepancy, I could see text posts getting drowned out pretty fast.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  There are a lot of text posts already on TikTok, but they're just done as videos or slideshows. And some are very popular. Text memes or jokes or "witty observations" often are in this realm. And it also turns out that these are shared quite often -- which is another metric that TikTok's algorithm uses.
  - cwkoss 3y ago
    Videos with lots of text hijack the algorithm a bit - it counts what proportion of the video is watched when evaluating its effectiveness, and if you put a giant wall of text on a 7-sec sound clip, you can get an artificially high watch-through rate with not-particularly-good content. Text without images in the background seems objectively less attention grabbing, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just keep using captions over video.
    - pests 3y ago
      Ive noticed this hijack before. I have to purposefully skip by any text posts now because any interaction just fills my feed with the junk.
      - 3y ago
tamimio 3y ago
Problem with tiktok is there’s a lot of misinformation, and I don’t mean the political ones, no just pure technical stuff, so many times I see some videos of kids claiming technical stuff and spreading a lot of false claims that I am seriously thinking to make an account just to refute such false claims, and because of the userbase is a little uneducated with short attention spans, it spreads quickly with the mindset if “tiktok said it then it’s true”!
rewgs 3y ago
So basically all the social media platforms are converging feature-wise. Twitter/X is leaning into video, TikTok is adding text posts, Meta now has a Twitter clone.
tracker1 3y ago
Seems like an effort to pull more from the Twitter space. I'm not sure how well it will work in the end. I've found that lately, I'm less likely to even engage on social media at all. At least half of the account posts I see (at least in comments to more popular origin posts) are from sock puppet accounts. Facebook groups that I participate in are generally higher quality overall, even though they're a bit ham-fisted when it comes to content moderation. Reddit is/was all over the map, from great communities to absolutely no point in trying to participate if you don't match the cult of the given group.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  Is there a curated list of Facebook communities out there or do you just use the search to discover?
  - tracker1 3y ago
    Mostly search+discover... You can generally search on a topic of interest, and find a group that covers it (or several), the up/down side is some groups only allow visibility to members, so you can't get a feel for that group without joining first. While I appreciate the usefulness, I'm less inclined to want to stay within Facebook's walls, so to speak.
- swah 3y ago
  *X-space
moneywoes 3y ago
I guess functionally users already post image galleries of text as text posts
uhtred 3y ago
I wonder if this is to be able to add an extra way to monetize tiktok content by selling access to the textual data to LLM operators.

bsnnkv 3y ago

[flagged]

uncletaco 3y ago
IME most of the content I get from white creators is political in nature, for now. I somehow drifted away from BookTok into witch-don't-kale-my-vibe-tok. I'm too lazy to be intentional with the search function so I'm hoping I will eventually get back to the part of TikTok that's talking about something besides politics. EDIT: I want to throw out there that Belatown is the greatest soap opera of all time. Its a TikTok exclusive.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  I've found the algorithm adjusts quickly -- I'd argue too quickly sometimes. I watched one video analyzing the USWNT game against Vietnam and I felt like I was bombarded with women's soccer videos. And I like women's soccer -- but not that much.
senttoschool 3y ago
>The only people I know personally (ie. that I have an inter-personal relationship with) who complain about TikTok are white. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of people from ethnic groups originating in MENA/SWANA that I know personally are extremely positive about TikTok and the content it enables them to both create and be exposed to. >I wonder how much the algorithm tailoring content to different ethnic groups has to do with these impressions. A simpler explanation is that white people are generally more anti-China, and not something to do with the algorithm.
Aaronstotle 3y ago
I think the creation and exploration of TikTok is great, I also think that it needs to be explicitly decoupled from Bytedance. Even with the creators on the platform, I think its a net-negative for the world due to its addictive nature.
kenjackson 3y ago
I think its less a race/ethnicity thing, but more of two other things: 1. Age. It's just really jarring to many older people. 2. How cultured you fancy yourself to be. If you're someone who values reading 100 pages of a novel to just get into the story, then you will find TikTok to be vacuous. And honestly, that's probably a fair assessment. When I watch TikTok videos I give them about 5 -- maybe 10 seconds. I don't apply this same bar to other media, but I can imagine this is really off=putting for some.
vorpalhex 3y ago
> Edit: Would love to get some feedback along with the flurry of downvotes. Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote. That's like me saying Jews don't like steak based on my experience.. of a sample size of one Jew who is a vegetarian. I personally know several folks who are Indian, Mexican and various South American nationalities who also deeply detest tiktok. A few Koreans too. The best advice I can make is to maybe get a bigger friend group if you're going to try and make large generalized statements from it. 500 people is a good minimum size.
- bsnnkv 3y ago
  > Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote. It's very unfortunate that you (and presumably others) read it like that. I am not making an argument or a generalized statement in my post. If in doubt, you can also check my post history to see that I do not have a history of making any such posts. I am expressing curiosity about how the recommendation algorithm might be tailoring content not just based on interests but on the inferred ethnic backgrounds of people (because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other). I'm open to feedback on how this could have been phrased differently.
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    It's the entire premise that's flawed. As a basic rule, you can't use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. That my particular Korean friends like the cheesesteak place up the street says nothing about Koreans, cheesesteaks or that restaurant. This is because at a basic level my friend group just doesn't look like any kind of general population. If nothing else it's geographically restricted, a tiny subset of classes and interests - and likely indirectly education levels and income. > because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income. And yes, if you target anime, you'll select the Japanese and if you target Webtoons you'll select mostly Korean and Chinese. Your flaw here is not your language but the direction of your reasoning. You can't reason from the specific anecdata up to population level - "my Black friends like tiktok therefore tiktok must target Black people". That's a "the parking lot is wet, it must be raining" sort of statement. You CAN reason down. "Tiktok really does a good job showing content from Black influencers, they probably have a large Black audience".

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

everyone sees the twitter blood in the water

bmarquez 3y ago
> Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories Seems more of an Instagram replacement than a Twitter one, the userbase of Instagram is also closer to TikTok than Twitter.
callalex 3y ago
What’s a Twitter?
- bloopernova 3y ago
  It's an eX-website
numpad0 3y ago
The bird had touched the water, and sharks are jumping around. None flies, just jumping in the red ocean.

ulfw 3y ago

So it's becoming Weibo?

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
apparently tiktok tokens are already worth real world money? CDBC are here. FedNow is essentially that. also russia just announced DigitalRubles. USA Dollar is now part of a more competitive currency market? maybe? as part of the general public, I can only guess
- pests 3y ago
  Yes, you can tip people on TikTok and they make money. Same way you an donate Bits on Twitch and the streamer earns.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bootsmann 3y ago

This might be a good example of feature creep for no reason. They already added a weird “multi video” post thing where you can scroll right on top of scrolling left and I feel this is another step into overloading the UI. The big tiktok of 2019/2020 was magically simplistic where you could basically only swipe full content in a tinder-like fashion, I fear this is another step away from that.

princevegeta89 3y ago
I am guessing this is a feature aimed to be a more casual way of "tweeting", given that Twitter is under the rubble right now, and competitors want to take their best chances and see what works
xnx 3y ago
Aside from live video showing in my For You feed, all the changes I can think of have been good. Longer video lengths have resulted in some content that previously would've only been on YouTube. Horizontal slideshows have become a mini-medium all to themselves. If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads.
- miroljub 3y ago
  > If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads. It's not like TikTok is behind Threads in any of the relevant metrics right now.
  - pests 3y ago
    For text posts? TikTok is behind definitely behind Threads considering it doesnt support text posts right now. TikTok is ahead of Threads the same way Instagram is ahead of Threads - currently completely unrelated.
devnullbrain 3y ago
The simple UI was great for onboarding people but, now that the audience is saturated, they can be taught new features.

hooverd 3y ago

Threads are the new stories.

ipaddr 3y ago
Threads are the new twitter. No one is visiting either.

u2077 3y ago

How many more platforms do we need where users can post all sorts of media and follow other’s content? Every social media site copies features from another, and they are all basically the same item wrapped in a different package. When will people wake up and return to RSS?

pipeline_peak 3y ago
> When will people wake up and return to RSS? RSS was by techies, and only ever used by techies. Uncontrolled news feeds lacking data collection doesn't sell enough for the giants. Also RSS only thrives if sites put in the effort to support it. Even still, the majority of online users are on social media platforms, not "surfing the www" like the gold ol' days.

aynyc 3y ago

Blood in the water on twitter (x). It’s time to pounce.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Official TikTok news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36847411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36847411

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

silisili 3y ago

This one surprises me. TikTok is so... different of a platform. I find it utterly jarring and revolting, my wife and kid find it fun and engaging, all for the same reasons. It seems like you're either going to get engaged in a video rabbit hole, or turn away. In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory. Threads at least made some sense, as Instagram is still a more slow paced, time to reflect type platform. TikTok less so.

RandallBrown 3y ago
A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments. I think there's probably a way that text can be built into the app that works alongside what's there and makes it a more interesting experience than just looking at screenshots.
- 4O4 3y ago
  This is very untrue. It's just your personalized feed that is filled with that, because you happened to watch just enough of them to let the algorithm know you're interested. Other people see one of these videos and just swipe down immediately and never see one again. Please don't try to guesstimate the amount of content on tiktok in any given category just by your personal experience, because it's heavily biased because of just how the platform works.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    There has to be something about TikTok algorithm that it won’t work with quick readers/addicts/those in “the spectrum”. It wasn’t TTS but last I tried I too got series of uninteresting content. The system just didn’t register my fulfillment.
  - drusepth 3y ago
    You can scroll through the "Discover" tab which has depersonalized trends across the whole app. I just took a quick scroll through and it seems like at least ~5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen. There's been at least a few recent trends over the past few weeks that have been almost entirely text (beige flags, all the greenscreen text trends, #groupchat, etc). Anecdotally, I also see clusters of text-only posts every few weeks, even though I always either pause to read or scroll immediately through.

xyst 3y ago

The downfall of Twitter has really left a gaping hole in the market for clones and big companies to fill: - mastodon and fediverse - threads by IG/FB/Meta - blue sky - TT with txt posts

spondylosaurus 3y ago

I don't use TikTok myself, but I'm curious how text posts will be prioritized in people's feeds compared to standard video posts. My understanding is that (at least on paper) there's a minor feedback loop where getting a lot of views on a video = video is recommended to more people = more engagement = more recommendations. And conversely, if too many people scroll past a video without watching it, that video gets de-recommended in the same fashion. So now we throw text posts into the mix. Even if a lot of these text posts have music attached, I'd imagine people on TikTok are way more likely to stop scrolling and watch a video than stop scrolling and read a 1000-character post; unless TikTok's content recommendations specifically account for this discrepancy, I could see text posts getting drowned out pretty fast.

kenjackson 3y ago
There are a lot of text posts already on TikTok, but they're just done as videos or slideshows. And some are very popular. Text memes or jokes or "witty observations" often are in this realm. And it also turns out that these are shared quite often -- which is another metric that TikTok's algorithm uses.
- cwkoss 3y ago
  Videos with lots of text hijack the algorithm a bit - it counts what proportion of the video is watched when evaluating its effectiveness, and if you put a giant wall of text on a 7-sec sound clip, you can get an artificially high watch-through rate with not-particularly-good content. Text without images in the background seems objectively less attention grabbing, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just keep using captions over video.
  - pests 3y ago
    Ive noticed this hijack before. I have to purposefully skip by any text posts now because any interaction just fills my feed with the junk.
    - 3y ago

tamimio 3y ago

Problem with tiktok is there’s a lot of misinformation, and I don’t mean the political ones, no just pure technical stuff, so many times I see some videos of kids claiming technical stuff and spreading a lot of false claims that I am seriously thinking to make an account just to refute such false claims, and because of the userbase is a little uneducated with short attention spans, it spreads quickly with the mindset if “tiktok said it then it’s true”!

rewgs 3y ago

So basically all the social media platforms are converging feature-wise. Twitter/X is leaning into video, TikTok is adding text posts, Meta now has a Twitter clone.

tracker1 3y ago

Seems like an effort to pull more from the Twitter space. I'm not sure how well it will work in the end. I've found that lately, I'm less likely to even engage on social media at all. At least half of the account posts I see (at least in comments to more popular origin posts) are from sock puppet accounts. Facebook groups that I participate in are generally higher quality overall, even though they're a bit ham-fisted when it comes to content moderation. Reddit is/was all over the map, from great communities to absolutely no point in trying to participate if you don't match the cult of the given group.

moneywoes 3y ago
Is there a curated list of Facebook communities out there or do you just use the search to discover?
- tracker1 3y ago
  Mostly search+discover... You can generally search on a topic of interest, and find a group that covers it (or several), the up/down side is some groups only allow visibility to members, so you can't get a feel for that group without joining first. While I appreciate the usefulness, I'm less inclined to want to stay within Facebook's walls, so to speak.
swah 3y ago
*X-space

moneywoes 3y ago

I guess functionally users already post image galleries of text as text posts

uhtred 3y ago

I wonder if this is to be able to add an extra way to monetize tiktok content by selling access to the textual data to LLM operators.