TikTok really is next-generation social media. Interesting that this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
Less monopolies, more so western culture. Many of TikTok's algorithms would be subject to great scrutiny if run by a western company. YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-users-v...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tr...
Perhaps this is true for the very first content you see, but not true once the algo becomes personalized?
The Slate article you linked talks about Facebook doing a similar thing, and facing a similar backlash.
Is it really that hard to believe that a country of over a billion people, with a mature domestic tech industry and startup scene, would eventually produce something that would compete successfully in the west?
Who made this argument?
No one explicitly said that but it was implied pretty heavily especially when you look at how people received the news and interpreted it in memes and whatnot. I sent pictures of Wuhan to some family/friends and they were amazed at how big and impressive of a city it is. They thought it was like a small developing village.
It's kind of how we always talk about China though (regarding your initial comment) and I'm not sure if/when it will ever stop.
While I wouldn't phrase it that way, the so-called wet markets where dozens of live animals are sold in unsanitary conditions are a problem. Western nations do have a variety of health/hygiene laws that effectively make such markets illegal. They are seen as a primitive/backwards/dangerous throwback to something rightly done away with long ago.
Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals. Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous, because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
Now, consider what we are doing about shutting down, or even mitigating the danger posed by those factory farms. Next to nothing - there's a few fringe environmentalist groups, there's a small vegan movement, there's a few yuppies who make sure to tell everyone that they only source organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat that costs them $40/lb. But the average person doesn't give two damns about it - and the average politician in agricultural-heavy ridings is entirely in the pocket of those industries. [1]
Disclaimer: I don't buy organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat, that would cost me $40/lb. I'm part of this problem. There's a lot of utility in cheap meat. Meat is delicious. But alternatives do exist.
[1] See the popularity of ag-gag laws - intended to suppress information, so that the public only gets one side of this story.
In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see like 30 dogs.
Of course it's a huge country and it's not too hard to find an open-air market with meat hanging on hooks or public lavatories that you wouldn't want to enter without a hazmat suit, but people emptying their night soil out the window into the street below is not really a thing anymore.
Not every country on the planet is so egoistic like Americans, where self discipline for greater good means communism /s
Can you clarify what you mean by "lesser society"?
Is it too much to also believe that a company subject to a radically different regulatory regime, and different cultural norms, might field a product that would not be considered acceptable elsewhere?
For example: How does TikTok handle children under 13yo? That is a real headache for western social media firms. Does China enforce similar rules? Would not having to obey such rules not represent an advantage for a product aimed at young people? The lawsuits and imposed fines suggest TikTok is substantially advantaged.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53418077
"The company was fined 186m won (£123,000) by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC). The KCC, the country's media watchdog, said TikTok collected data of children under 14 years old without the consent of legal guardians."
No one believes western companies do it out of the goodness of their heart.
They do it in part because of fear of backlash and in part because their CEO's (especially Twitter's, Youtube's and Reddit's) want to project a philantropist image without actually doing good things.
I think there is. The world has already reached a point where we live in information bubble, surrounded by things we want to see and that agree with us. People are depressed and feel inadequate.
Formerly reputable news sources have realized that people don't want to be informed, they want to be outraged, or feel smug and correct, or see pictures of cats, and so real news is relegated to a lesser status.
I would much rather websites present me with the truth, even if I don't like it as much, than live my life seeing only attractive people and reading only good news, but ending up woefully depressed and un-informed, with feelings of inadequacy and no understanding of what in the world is broken.
I think news agencies have a responsibility to society to present news accurately, even if people find the news less pleasent to read than pictures of cats.
Similarly, I think social media companies have a duty to present a semi-accurate view of society where possible. I would rather have a realistic view of what people look like than have a series of recommendation algorithms and feedback loops result in me seeing only "conventionally attractive" people.
Of course, we've kinda already screwed ourselves here with hollywood/tv/movies. Perhaps it's too late to step back.
Anyway if anyone takes anything at all from this, it's the idea that the whole source of TikTok's success is in making culture (and therefore culture wars) irrelevant. Want to look at videos of disabled, unattractive, poor people all day? Have at. Not being flippant there, although now that I think about it, I bet there are vast differences between some people's publicly-espoused views and their own watching habits, were they ever revealed by TikTok's algorithm.
Edit: Went off on all sorts of tangents, but yes I totally agree with your point. In Trump-era America even success & failure fall into the fact-free zone.
We succeed: Of course! We're awesome! So proud!
We fail: It wasn't fair! Everybody had it out for us!
They succeed: Bunch of cheaters! We took the high road!
They fail: Of course! We're just too awesome for 'em! Better luck next time!
You don't need an algorithm to hide unattractive people. Ever seen a modern TV show or a casting contest or seen the latest comic adaption in cinema? People voting out the unattractive or even unconventionally attractive is an old story, the more mainstream the content the more the stars look like models. On Youtube it happens with Likes and on TikTok it happens through some ML magic, I guess in China there's no fucks given about actually baking it into the algorithm directly but that's hardly more than a technical detail
I look in the US apple store for video editing and I just don't see that kind of variety in the free/low-cost tier.
The wests adoption of the personal computer introduced video editing there, and the companies who make the editing software have mostly kept it there.
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-rush/how-to/premiere-rush-f...
Another interesting factor is that ByteDance has unfettered access to both the Chinese and the Western markets. This makes it attractive to investors who wants to bet on an upstart who can fallback to its mature Chinese business.
I personally think TikTok is still unproven outside of China if you look beyond the hype. But I also agree the big US companies are sleeping at the wheel. But if you are printing money like FB, why not?
In the East, or the North, or the South, if you acquired another company for 1B you’re certainly not an upstart. (Unless you still consider Dropbox, Airbnb, etc. upstarts.)
Am not myself a TikTok user, but my partner is, so I've seen a bunch of it second hand.
I think it is completely meaningful to call it next generation (or second generation where the social graph model is the first generation).
Also notice that this model can be applied to other media formats: Text, pictures, audio ...
don't most social networks have the "sorting hat" in the form of algorithmic feeds?
Compare that with Instagram.
The author states that while western algorithms are based on your follow graph (e.g. Instagram is relatively useless until you follow someone and even then your feed is based on your follower graph, like what people you follow like), TikTok builds this data on video features. This increases TikTok's stickyness because you don't need to do anything other than use the app for it adjust to your tastes. There's no need to "import" your contacts or suggest people you should follow, it just "knows" after you watch a couple videos.
I'll never forget putting one song into Spotify and having it recap my late 90's listening habits over the course of an evening.
I see TikTok as a better version of Vine but I still can't understand if TikTok is so much popular and so much worth why did Twitter shut down Vine? Twitter is like modern MySpace it will fail sooner or later if management doesn't get replaced and if they don't start thinking long term.
Actually, I don't think that this is as easy as you might think. The article goes into this a bit when saying that short video sequences are well-suited for such an algorithm because they provide a high frequency of "inputs" per time unit, but I think the article falls short of describing the other thing that makes videos particularly suitable (and, by extension, makes the assumption that "the TikTok algorithm" had a great future in many other places too, of which I am a bit more skeptical). This other critical thing is that video sequences in general also allow a huge variety of inputs to be gathered from consumption that text, pictures and audio can’t match.
- It is trivial to find out which part of a video a user has seen. This is nearly impossible to do reliably with textual content (assuming you don't have an eye tracker running).
- Instead of a still picture, a video provides much more things for the viewer to see. So instead of just knowing that in a picture there's a cat and you thus deduce the user likes cats, it's basically possible to split a video up in slices of which you know where there's a cat, and where there's a dog, and where there's whatever else, so from just that single video you might deduce info about the users' interest in cat/dog/whatever content all at once (depending on which parts a viewer has seen, which parts were skipped, at which point the viewer aborted, or at which point the like button was tapped).
- Video mostly also delivers audio, hence everything that you can gather from audio, like whether a user tends to prefer female or male voices, or which music style someone prefers, comes as a bonus when gathering info from video viewing
- If your videos' audio features someone speaking some text, you can speech-to-text that content and pump it into the usual machine learning modules, from simple sentiment analysis over trying to determine the topic someone talks about up to full-blown "trying to understand what this person is actually trying to say" and take that as an input for determining a viewers' interests. This is basically text analysis, so it lends itself to textual content as well, and audio too, but not so much to pictures.
Video is just really pumping out the maximum of all of these content formats in terms of potentially relevant data points about someones' interests, and it does so at really high frequency, especially if the length of each video is as short as on TikTok and thus the content producers have already performed the daunting work of condensing lots of content into the least number of seconds possible.
Maybe TikTok comes from China because Communist ideology still influences the Chinese; or because they didn't have a Dick Cavett and a Frank Sinatra, celebrity TV. The ceremonies for the 1980 Moscow Olympics had no celebrities, but a diorama of the dozen Soviet cultures from the Ukraine to Kirghistan. The 1984 Olympics in the US had Lionel Ritchie. But Communists or not, the early promise of the internet was that you could participate, and it doesn't feel you can participate on Twitter.
I haven't seen that many TikTok videos, but I haven't seen many that didn't have music in them, and I don't think any of it was original.
Licensing music has never been easy, and I don't get how two guys (even from silicon Valley) were able to do it from launch.
I don't really see it. We've seen the TikTok model before in Imgur, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Digg, and probably others. It's mostly memes, funny videos, how-tos, and attractive women. They've hit a sweet spot of editing tools and enforced short format to provide a constant stream of quick entertainment. But I don't see anything earth shattering or ground breaking there.
In my opinion the longer length also allowed audio-based trends (which Vine did introduce a year or so before its demise) to really take off. For all that older people mock TikTok dances, there's something to be said for users actively participating in creative trends instead of simply passively consuming them (and there are much, much worse things a teen could be doing on/for the internet than practicing half a minute of choreography).
There is an account I follow that's run by a man who's trying to beat a soda addiction. He's posted a video announcing that he hasn't drunk any fizzy drinks every day for the past fifty-eight days, and he seems to have inspired a lot of people to grab a water instead of a soda at least once. I wish more of my social media experience was like that.
Anyone know if it is possible on TikTok to temporarily check out different genres, but not have them become a part of your profile? Basically an incognito mode I guess?
I would still wait and watch on Tiktok phenomenon. It is a viral thing but has no moat as such and only $0.5 billion in expected revenue for this year. There are enough companies which can move in this space and suffocate it.
Twitter isn't an example of a well run company considering the alienating things they have done to third party devs but I wouldn't call this an effect of monopoly. Even ByteDance acquired Musical.ly which became Tiktok, they just had a clear idea of what to do with it.
Besides stagnation... Could it be also an effect of "the West" becoming more open to collectivist ideals, where the individual is less important, and it's more about what you follow and not who you follow?
I doubt that is the case here, since one could easily make the case that China has more monopolies and government control than the West. More likely, this has more to do with what makes things go viral. TikTok's rise was very much a viral sensation.
The main reason being ByteDance had deep pockets to acquire users. The amount of ad spend on user acquisition was unreal at $3m a day through 2018 and 2019. Literally billions were spent on promoting the app. Any half decent social media app would have done well.
When they get their massive exit, the hype will deflate and the users will grow out of TikTok and find another rockstar social network. Rinse and repeat.
It is the new TV with infinite channels to switch by
Facebook will never be able to match it unless it reinvents itself.
American's will only wake up when it's too late. Zuck will bribe the government in the meanwhile. Corrupt countries become less competitive over time. America is trending on the path of corruption and it's visible to every outsider now, except for unfortunately American's themselves.
Granted, I'm American, and thus biased. I do see corruption in my government, but from what I can tell it's a small drop in the bucket compared to what goes on in China. Although I guess there could be debate on what defines corruption. But I still hear tales of basically needing to openly bribe officials to get contracts through manufacturing.
I'm saying that America is relatively in my opinion more corrupt than the America of the past.
I'm not comparing it to China, China has a different set of systems. Both systems might work.
What do you think happens when a place like ALEC flies politicians on jaunts to get them to accept pre-written legislation?
Outside of political applications, what do you think happens when pharma reps take doctors to "conferences" in the Caribbean to get them to use their new meds?
On an individual level: What do you think that 'fraternal order of police' donation buys you, and what that car sticker is for?
It might be a bit more dressed up than a naked bribe, but it's still a bribe.