TikTok and the Future of Social Media | Hacker News Reader

TikTok and the Future of Social Media

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39 pointslwhsiao71 comments

The content on/recommended by TikTok has two main interesting characteristics as I observed:

- Being very "personally relevant": It doesn't only recommend generally popular stuff. It can be very quick at picking up some niche interests of yours.

- Feel very authentic. TikTok makes it easier for "ordinary people" to get millions of views "accidentally". And as a result, many popular video feels very authentic, which might be preferred compared to curated content like in Netflix or even YouTube.

TikTok actually gives people what they want. For people in my generation (20+-5), no one reads, cares about, or trusts mainstream media. We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok.

Yet, search YouTube for anything newsworthy and you only see mainstream media these days. I don't want establishment bs, give me something different.

I suspect also that most in your cohort could not afford to pay for some of the pricier information sources (and that actually goes for a lot more people). So sidestepping cheap "establishment bs" might actually be the rational strategy.

If you can get 70% of the calories for free, then despite the (usually known, or at least suspected, and generally down-played by the vendor) side-effects can be more attractive than paying full-price. The vendor has a strategy though.

I haven’t read an HN comment this upsetting in a while.

"For people in my generation (20+-5), no one reads, cares about, or trusts mainstream media. We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok."

And this in a nutshell is why I don't have hope for your and future generations. Instead of researched and published stuff you prefer "news" from unknown sources (including nefarious state actors)

That’s quite a dramatic statement.

Let’s be honest, most of the “research and published stuff” is also crap. The majority is built out of reposting things from those “untrustworthy” places, or from “interviewing experts”, that 9 out of 10 times are tangentially linked to the issue.

News has always been more about entertainment than getting information.

>Instead of researched and published stuff you prefer "news" from unknown sources (including nefarious state actors)

And this is why our world is so messed up now, too many older people believing something just because it was it was in the papers or on TV.

Actually I encountered on tiktok few bits of interesting scientific information I haven't seen anywhere else that when I googled them turned out to be pretty well researched.

For example young Hoatzin birds have wing claws like archeopteryx and use them for climbing branches in unbirdlike manner.

I understand why you hate “establishment BS”... the requirement of being, at least to a first approximation, accurate, is a huge constraint on entertainment value.

“JFK clone weds two-headed space alien” is better TV than “Fed announces 1.2% jobs growth in September,” but I hope that in time you start seeking out facts over entertainment.

Listen, every single time I find a piece of information regarding tech in general (often security, cloud or IPOs), whether it’s TV, papers or the internet, they’re wrong on something because the journalist didn’t care about being thorough. This is just about tech because it’s my area of expertise. Now why would I believe that it’s not the case for every single field besides tech? Why would I believe journalists are thorough regarding politics, economics, health, energy? I don’t. That’s why instead of reading journalists pieces, I follow experts I trust on the fields I care about, whether it’s on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube or whatever. And why do I trust them? Because if they know what they’re talking about, they have rock solid sources which is what I expect and that I don’t find in mainstream media. They believe they are the source because they say so, but it’s not how it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

You are kidding yourself if you think mass media is even close to accurate. If not by anything else you should be convinced about this by how easily mass media copied completely false "news" they found on the internet.

You could call them on their BS then only because you have internet too. When it comes to other sources mass media do no better job. You just can't see that easily how crappy they are in approximating the truth.

Mass media isn’t “close” to accurate (something is accurate or not), it’s just more close, on average, than entertainment-oriented news (which includes Daily Kos and Breitbart alike).

Cable news is also entertainment-oriented. All media revolves around engagement, which now typically plays out through appeals to identity or maintaining heightened states of anxiety. Yes that includes your ABCs, CNNs, and MSNBCs.

I’ve noticed people who only watch “real news” tend to have very homogenous anxieties and information about the state of the world that is rarely the most pressing or complete view.

Yes, that is true. For example, if you just read mainstream media, you will not see how the meatpacking jobs have all gone to illegal immigrants in the last 20 years.

Or more realistically, the Alabama miner’s strike that has been going on for four months without a peep on he networks.

For my, the most successful strategy I've found is to have a handful of academics and journalists that you trust and who cover a sufficient breadth of topics, and reading their articles/blogs/twitter feed. Then adding a few contrarians who I strongly disagree with just to challenge me a bit.

If you're not careful, you can fall into the same traps with social media as with mainstream media: 1. getting reporting from people who lack context on the issues, or 2. getting a distorted view of which issues are important.

Yet when you look at the size of the audience, and the ease of spreading misinfo, nothing is more mainstream than social media.

actually quality public-media is startig gaining traction on yt too, e.g. Deutsche Welle is releasing loads of interesting short background docs / reports regularly. Its entertaining and very informative, can highly recommend.

I'm a Danish guy from the same generation and I hope you at least try to get news from something more reliable than reddit.

>We get our news from reddit

Things I learned from reddit:

>Rapes only happen in India

Does reddit filter news about rape in other countries? Because there is plenty to take from just by looking in the crime section in local Danish news. This might be one of the more bizarre biases of reddit.

>The US will soon collapse and Europe needs to prepare

I have been hearing this one since 2011. I am still waiting for American boat refugees.

>Chinese tourists are the worst thing since the killing of Harambe

It seems like reddit can only avoid being racist against a small handful of groups that they care about right now like Black Americans and Muslims. Anyone else is free game. Especially Chinese and Indian people.

Reddit and such places expose stupidity of creation of human culture. Harambe is not any dumber than Billy the Kid.

> We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok.

We are doomed.

You mean that?

I deleted TikTok after a week because anticorona was so popular.

A guy only posted stuff which was fitting his narrative and ignored basic logic for his videos.

He also didn't care at all when I pointed out the issues of his 'reseqrch'.

He posted a study saying that they had issues correlating corona measurements to corona numbers. Eve the researchers and the study itself concluded that it doesn't say Corona measurements are not working they only stated that they were not able to determine the right reasons but postulated why like that talking about measurements can have an effect etc.

He used the study to conclude that Corona measurements are useless!

This is super dangerous and crazy that other people like his videos and get their broken narrative supported.

He is literally part of the probl of missinformation.

He also posted a video from a ex vice president for allergies from Pfizer who worked there 10 years ago and knows nothing about Corona who talks about how crazy and wrong it is.

This guy trusts some dude who is not an expert more than real experts.

I have never could have imagined that it would ever be a problem to allow any person uneducated or not to just freely communicate stuff to someone else.

But this is so ridiculously braindead.

I don't even want to accept anymore that it's okay for someone to not get vaccinated because of their opinion. They are probably not able to properly determine if it makes sense.

Start listing to normal and known media again pls! Listen to experts in their fields first!

Always be critical but do not believe anyone else just because you like more what they say.

I uninstalled TikTok a week ago because it was showing me too much of the same stuff, but I may eventually return after I’ve had a break from using it for a while. Not yet but maybe later. Anyway, I agree a lot especially about getting a lot of views. Though in my case not in the millions and not even in the hundreds of thousands. But one of the first videos I posted to TikTok was seen 50k+ times. And it wasn’t even a good video, just a little bit of nonsense fun. Other videos I’ve posted since then, on a different account, have only gotten a few hundred views each but to me that is a lot still compared for example to YouTube where my experience has been that the videos I’ve posted to YouTube get a handful of views.

And the most interesting part is that the videos I’ve posted to TikTok don’t get a lot of likes. And to me this says that if I am able to make better content (not an easy thing to do btw), then TikTok is very much ripe for getting a lot of views.

And this is encouraging to me, because I’ve always liked the Reddit and HN way of using upvotes and downvotes, and I feel like TikTok does the same for video that Reddit and HN do for text and links, except that with the video format they have they can also use number of loops a video is watched by each person seeing it, in addition to hearts and comments. And the most encouraging thing is seeing the videos getting those hundreds of views because it shows that TikTok really is using this mechanism and that they are showing your video to people to determine if it’s worth watching.

This is interesting both from a software development point of view, and also from a video creator point of view.

Even before TikTok I was thinking about how Reddit/HN style ranking of content could be applied to video. TikTok has the additional strength you mentioned of discovering your preferences. I think the preference discovery is difficult to replicate without a bigger team of people and probably some knowledge about Machine Learning. But I think there might be room for more video services that use the HN/Reddit ranking method like TikTok also does, while being targeted at a specific audience, like individual subreddits are and like HN is. I worked a while on this with some other people, but limited budget made it very difficult to get anywhere and I have had to pursue other paths instead for a while. But we may continue down that line again at a later point.

> It can be very quick at picking up some niche interests of yours.

Except that none of my interests can put anything useful in a 60 second video.

What's an example of a "niche interest" that TikTok picks up and does well on?

TikTok seems to be well adapted to create the ADHD dopamine hit to waste time, but is it of any use beyond that?

TikToks can be up to 3 minutes long and can be multipart. There’s tons of things that you can learn in 3 minutes or less: stuff about plants, music, mechanics, History, fashion, animals, lifestyle… And TikTok has a community vibe, some songs transcend the niches, that’s why everyone has heard the Wellerman song for instance.

Note that TikTok’s success is a response to The artificially 10-15 minutes long videos on YouTube. Strip the ads, the sponsorships and the algorithms which requires 10 minutes and you have TikTok.

My impression is that TikTok is the most shameless exploiter of curating content to maximize attention. You resign all the control and hope to petition "the algorithm" to change what you get to see -- like some kind of a god that ultimatly controls you, no matter what you sacrifice. They are in a position to spread propaganda and prevent imformation from spreading -- or you from being heard. Even more so, this can be individualized (especially with the rise of virtual influencers). I wonder, if it might eventually be able to change someone's mind by slowly nudging them in the right direction, breaking down pre-existing beliefs and positions. And as youtube, twitter, etc. have shown, one of the main ways to increase addiction is to spread controversy. Have people screem and cry at one another, who wants mediation? Society is being reduced to a means of entertainment.

It's very true regarding propaganda. Personally, I noticed that TikTok mirrors my interests and views very precisely in everything but politics – all the political videos I happen to see in my feed are to the left of my views and never to the right.

Probably you watched more political content to the left of your own views. You might like it more, or they may trigger you more, or cause more morbid curiosity.

It's the same for me just because content to the left of my views causes my curiosity while content to the right of my views repulses me quickly with its stupidity.

Not to mention the app skews younger and as a result, left…er

Super offtopic, but how do you understand if something is leaning lefter than your thoughts and not right?

It's pretty simple for me. Anything that suggests that government and taxation is the solution and not the problem is to the left.

As a frequent user of tiktok i have to say that it's the closest think to real (aka non curated) social media.

It shows you stuff you like to engage with and not just viral videos. It shows you popular videos and videos with 10 views, most of it relevant - to the point where it doesn't matter how many views a video has. They have solved the discoverability problem other video platforms have.

Sure, they might ruin it with propaganda in the future, just like twitter/youtube, but atm it's the truest social media app out there.

This reminds me of the saying "the best design in the design you don't notice" (or something like that). Just because it seems authentic, doesn't mean it is not curated. That is not to say that curation is an issue in itself, just that it requires a system that becomes dangerous when abused.

I think TikTok's keys are ease of use - you can just swipe mindlessly, no choices, next, next, next, next. Good algorithm to predict a mix of stuff you'll probably like and new stuff so you can still explore the space. The combination of the two makes it addictive. You keep hitting that Skinner box and you get rewarded.

I personally used TikTok for a bit (only as a consumer) but had to cut it from my phone. It was too addictive. I found myself using the app for longer than I wanted.

While TikTok is entertaining I don't really miss it now that I've removed it. I feel lots of videos there lack substance.

A funny side note here is that ~2018 Facebook was crushing it in terms of minutes/day/user due to auto play videos with good next-video recommendations. Then they decided explicitly to disable auto play. They even switched to a different internal metric to explicitly discourage optimizing for this type of engagement.

That being said, most of the big winners in the auto play era were from professional studios or had some kind of financial backing. TikTok seems to have a lot more viral amateur content. Good for them

If tiktok was about ease of use they would give you a way to go to next movie of the same author that you are currently watching on "for you page".

Swipe left and it brings you to that author's profile with all their videos. Seems easy to me?

Nope. It brings you to the most recent videos they published not to the one you were just watching.

How does TikTok's recommendation algorithm work?

It's the best I have ever tried. I have never found so many people with interesting hobbies on any other platform. TikTok actually learns from when I click "Not interested" unlike Instagram Reels that seem to ignore the "Not interested" button.

That's like asking how Google's algorithm works.

I can say that TikTok's recommendations feel actually under my control. Facebook and Google's recommendations seem to be about what THEY want to show me.

I know in all cases, it's the platforms controlling these recommendations, but no means no. Meanwhile, on my YouTube home feed I keep getting Murdoch/News Corp propaganda under the 'breaking news' section no matter how many times I say "not interested". No, I never click on them.

It feels like the hubris of product managers thinking they know best for me. Well, guess what, we have choices now.

TikTok issued a press release explaining exactly how their recommendation algorithm works.

https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-vide...

Look up collaborative filtering, recommendation systems, etc. A sibling has a informative link but this is an active research area in CS also.

No different to a typical personalisation algorithm then, since they need to track every single action, video, profile and button you click and feed you more garbage to consume; making their algorithm better and more valuable for their shareholders.

As for the creators, they are once again working for the algorithm which can be manipulated and gamed by larger creators.

There is nothing of substance in this article.

Much like in TikTok.

There are a ton of cooking, fitness and home improvement channels that are quite educational actually.

You mean on TikTok?

Not sure if I agree totally...

I will say it's a "convenient" for those who don't want to meaningfully educate themselves on subjects through text.

Well that content benefits a lot by video. As for not being as good as books ok whatever. No need to gatekeep education.

  No need to gatekeep education.

Well, there's a need if one actually wants to learn something. A novice generally isn't in a position to know whom they can trust to teach them.

The internet could use, specifically when it comes to education, a lot more gate-keeping.

Awful and confusingly pretentious take.

Being able to see the desired outcome alongside the steps required to achieve said outcome is far more effective for fitness and cooking than reading about them. Not to mention the time saved, ease of sharing the knowledge, reviewing, etc.

I'm not trying to be too negative on it, but it's because there's zero liability. I luckily had a father teach me a ton about home improvement. Half the videos they host should be seen as negligent at best, criminal at worst. But, it's no worse than YT, in fairness. But if any 'real' business did this, they'd spend all day in court.

So just like PHP tutorials then.

I disagree. Have you tried the app yourself?

I basically agree, I have. My account of my limited experience is above. I never managed to get recommendations beyond kids dancing to pop songs with their dog

Strange. I see things like

• quality original skits & memes

• craftsmen making shorts about things such as the assembly process for a certain furniture

• doctors showing day-in-the-life videos as well as quick health advisories and PSAs

• remixes of existing music and indie artists promoting new music

• experts in niche fields, ranging from logistics, to theoretical physics, to law, to carpentry make quick, shallow-level explanatory videos of things that interest them

• everyday Joes essentially vlogging about interesting things that may be unique to them (like a medial condition, situation, or something else)

• … and yes, dancing teenagers.

But yet I still enjoyed the read none the less.

Totally agree though lack of substance.

A guy wants to know what TikTok is. Instead of installing and using the app, he buy a book about it. I find it quite funny.

You won the internet today IMO

In its defence, this is just a guy posting some observations and a quick book review on his blog, which is awesome. I don't think it was intended as a TikTok analysis for the HN crowd.

TikTok scares me. They have found a way to get you addicted to 6-seconds content that you can watch mindlessly without ever choosing it. Basically like a TV except you have no control and your attention span becomes that of a child.

It's literally a (non-chemical) drug and it should be treated as such.

It’s literally a baby sitting as a service.

I was very resistant to signing up for TikTok because I didn't think I'd enjoy using the app in public with my sound muted. However, while home one evening a few days ago I decided to give it a shot and was completely astounded at just how fast the For You Page was able to adjust to videos I found entertaining and enjoyable. I think it boils down to a few factors, but the main one is simply that it's able to get a ton of interaction data in a very short amount of time. It's basically all the same data points as from YouTube, but nearly thirty times faster. While a YouTube video is typically eight or so minutes, a TikTok video might only be about 15 seconds. And since your entire screen is dedicated to a single video, TikTok is able to make very specific inferences that something like Twitter isn't able to. So after just a few minutes of swiping through videos, liking a few to indicate I wanted to see similar content, and following a few creators, I was able to get a FYP that felt specifically catered to my interests. Over the past few days, it's even changed dramatically, while still feeling personalized to me, whereas I find YouTube takes days, if not weeks of watching to accommodate to a new interest or topic.

All that being said, it's certainly not without its frustrations. For example, there's certain topics I'm interested in that I can't seem to get it to show me videos from (mainly technology topics). I even went as far as searching specific hashtags in the hopes that was enough of a signal, but the FYP still didn't seem to suggest any videos from those topics. It may just be that tech-related videos don't do very well on the platform, and thus the algorithm is unable to collect and process enough data to make useful recommendations.

Finally, I absolutely despise the fact that the Following page isn't chronological. I follow a few creators, and I want to see their new content, so you'd think Following would be the place to do that. Well as of right now, the first video on my Following page is from July 11, despite the fact that specific creator has posted six newer videos since then.

Tiktok does many things well but making videos easy to find is not one of them. It’s a miracle for discovery of new content, but a menace for ever being able to find it again. Video search is hard, but they really aren’t trying- they would rather you have to hit the like button on every video you might want to see again. The problem is that the likes list is also not searchable or filterable. The only way I was able to find a video I really wanted to share with somebody was to request a data export, wait 2-3 days, then run through a long CSV of my whole watch history to locate it. It’s pretty clear that they transcribe all of the content for internal use only-moderation and analytics at least; I wish they could use that for search as well.

I don't think discovery is what TikTok offers either but admittedly I have only seen it in action third hand. How often do you see things that are truly novel to your interests?

My impression was that it's no different to other feed based apps in that it hones in on a few topics and you end up in a pretty narrow content bubble.

That is where it really stands apart- while it can get hyper-specific, its consistently mixing novel content types. Some has appeal based on a look-alike type of matching, others to general appeal, and more still to new and small creators. Once it has a sense that you're in a session you're not likely to abandon it takes greater risks on trying fringe content. Let me put it this way: give it a solid 2 weeks and you'll start discovering new parts of yourself.

I downloaded it, noticed that the initial content I was shown was some kids and their dog dancing to a pop song. Recorded myself drumming a fancy beat with some stick twirling, edited it to a short loop. (Not sure how these folks do anything musically related, the apps loop point setting was coarse and it took me ages to make it loop properly) I opened the app a few more times, saw more videos of people dancing to pop songs. Saw that I still had zero views two days later. I never managed to find any content that didn’t look like a line dance or a wanna be mc-hammer video. More kids dancing to pop music with their dogs. Never managed to find the addictive content.

YouTube has me fairly pegged, however, I can usually safely skip the channel welcome and plea for likes and subscribe and hit meaty content showing me some woodworking or culinary tricks, etc.

The takeaway for me is that a superficial ADHD format results in or best features superficial ADHD content. It’s not like I couldn’t see the restless nature of it and how it could thrive in our short attention span contemporary society, it’s that I felt it to be one more rung down a ladder shortcutting our race to be bottom.

But I’m atypical, admittedly. I have never owned a tv in my life. Don’t Netflix or HBO or whatever is on these days, and YouTube tutorials are about as “vegging out” as I get. I want less screen time in life, not more.

But yay for the tiktok devs, good job on the successful app

TikTok is different from other social media. People seems to be nicer on there. Others have echoed this sentiment. The platform favors talent, it is a great way to learn how to film. You get feedback in terms of views in a very short time.

I see the format as a new way to teach and educate. I coin the phrase “micro lesson” to describe the idea.

Tiktok is fantastic at disguising ads as videos.

In to food? Look at this amazing restaurant, filmed in high quality, with lots of editing, exactly the length of a tv ad. All done because the person just loves the place so much /s

Gay? The person is the advert for their onlyfans.

It seems absolutely chock full of “brand ambassadors” just like Instagram.

I don't hate TikTok, but for some reason (almost?) every time I open the app it wants me to authenticate. In 90% of cases I can't be bothered so I just close the app and open reddit.

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