Seems kind of similar to what supermarket magazines do. Obviously a social media app is not a supermarket magazine, but the premise of cynically using pretty people to drive up engagement is nothing new.
A better comparison might be bottle-service bars where looks or money buys your way in. Which I personally don't mind - if that's your thing, I guess, go for it. Not every place has to be somewhere I want to go, and they're pretty up-front that you need to meet whatever standards or pay crazy money.
Tik Tok, from observed behavior, is weaselly about it.
Combine with the fact that it is obviously part of the Silk Road strategy and likely an intelligence tool, and I'm going to continue to treat is as the radioactive garbage it is.
What in TFA indicates that these policies were intended to stop online bullying? Just as plausible to think that they were intended to create a saccharine user experience in order to promote growth.
I don't think these were intended to stop online bullying as much as they are just another bullying tactic themselves.
Porn also seems like a very reasonable place to draw the line for the app store. It's not like the iPhone has a porn filter, you just have to use a browser to watch your porn.
'Regarding the policy of suppressing videos featuring unattractive, disabled, or poor users, Gartner stated that the rules “represented an early blunt attempt at preventing bullying, but are no longer in place, and were already out of use when The Intercept obtained them.”'