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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

TikTok vs YouTube Shorts isn't even comparable. TikTok has a huge amount of creativity and momentum behind it. It's like the early days of Reddit with tons of different communities. The main thing that's different about it vs Instagram or other platforms it that most people are fairly authentic.

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> most people are fairly authentic

That tends to fade quickly as a platform gains popularity.

Already we’ve seen how TikTok and record companies manipulate which songs go viral [1]. Popular creators have banded together to join “hype houses” with major financial backing. Yes, you can still see spontaneous moments captured on video, and random content from small-time creators, but a lot of the most popular material is marketed.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/how-to-go...

There is something important that I want to say is much more basic going on though with respect to "authenticity": Instagram (which I am going to stare at; I appreciate it isn't YouTube Shorts, but I want to juxtapose how amazing TikTok feels) has--for as long as I can remember--and almost exclusively, recommended accounts that repost content from other accounts; it is like an entire industry of people who scavenge Instagram for photos or memes or comics that match some theme and then repost and aggregate the content for purposes of gaming karma and then claiming to be a way for other accounts to get discovered... I never want to follow accounts of that form. I have spent a lot of time on TikTok over the past year and a half, and I have never even seen an account like that there? It isn't a complex concept to execute--I feel like most of the people who do those aggregator accounts are amateurs--and TikTok is assuredly mature enough to be targeted... I frankly get the impression (which might be wrong? I'd love to know if there is something else going on) that if you try to repost content someone else made, for any reason, that that's both sufficiently against the terms of service and sufficiently against the community norms that you will get reported and quickly removed. Like, I appreciate that "authenticity" also often talks to the premise of "an individual with a camera bearing their soul" as opposed to "a corporation creating high production videos", but Instagram--if you aren't actively coming there to follow specific people (maybe friends off of Facebook) and are instead just trying to explore its world--feels like nothing more than a bunch of "content farming spam", which is about the least authentic arena you could possible cause to exist.

Very good observations. On Instagram Reels if I like a video from the original user once, the IG algos will keep showing me the very same video via these aggregation/content farming accounts for good next two weeks — until I eventually select “not interested” a couple of times. The algo is basically working against itself — at that point I dislike the vid not because I dont like it, but because I’ve seen it 20x now ugh. IG doesn’t know seems to know that. Very primitive.

No such nonsense on TikTok — always new original, highly targeted and personalised content.

YouTube has no idea about any of this, just showing random shit that’s trending per country and language lol. Stone Age!

I think what you discribed is already happening on Douyin (the China version), on which the initial novelty had long worn off, people no longer just/or largely post for fun.

It's all about monetization now, any view is meant to generate profit, every poster is peddling something, like the Instagram accounts you described, there are endless regurgitating of news events, movie and TV show digests.

There are content factories searching for beautiful faces to appear in their merchandise tiktoks, but only the face part (kind of a remote job?), not the voice and acutal body, those will be produced in their assemly lines and match with your face.

Maybe western users are accustomed to higher standard videos, but the late stage will inevitably come. And the lower the entry barrier, the uglier the scene will become.

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