Could it be addicts trying to justify their addiction to the world (and themselves)? It sounds like TikTok is even more successful at being addictive than previous social media drugs, maybe it's strong enough to hook people who weren't hooked by its predecessors.
I think that's exactly the point.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and (to a lesser extent) YouTube are weapons of psychological warfare that have been optimised to spread political misinformation and outrage.
TikTok, on the other hand, is just hot chicks dancing, stupid memes and Shrugging Black Italian Man. It reminds me a lot of old YouTube in that regard.
I must have accidentally liked a couple things to trigger it, so now I'm ignoring it going to train the algorithm.
It's as deep as you want to make it. As vapid as you want to make it.
This is actually one of the most refreshing things about TikTok. Content density. What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds.
The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
The problem I see is that there's an upper limit to the quantity of information even with this higher density. And that's a hard limit on the range of topics that this format can cover.
Furthermore, I don't think this can be solved by simply increase the time limit as well, since people can't maintain the same level of attention for a long period of time. Say the content needs 60s with max density. It usually needs to spread out to 120s with lower density for it to be understood better.
For the informational content I consume on YouTube, in a 10min video, the parts that can be removed are usually 30s of opening and 30s of closing. For the rest, though it has lower density than TikTok, I don't think it's possible to compress that much and the low density is in some sense necessary.
Of course, this is specific to how people use YouTube and TikTok. And though I am unlikely to use TikTok from this experience, I still appreciate your input.
I'm struggling to comprehend how German artillery tactics in WW2 can be competently covered in 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/3VY10gfnrTQ
I have found some great TikTok tutorials on iPhone photo techniques. For example, hold the phone upside down and on the ground, pour water in front of it, and you get an amazing PoV / reflection shot. The clips that demo'd this were all less than 30 seconds long. There are other tutorials on tool use and knots, by way of example, from which I have learned useful things.
These short-form tutorials are a breath of fresh air compared with bloated YouTube equivalents and their tedious intros. And you can save them to your camera roll.
- @therubberduckiee
- @loewhaley
- @tony.aube
- @cassidoo
- @systems_analyst
There is also urban design tiktok with @mrbarricade.
Let's also be clear that the goal of the app is to entertain and I think it does this really well and cheaply. Then sometimes you learn something that you might use in your work or personal life.
On HN, I give people who I disagree with the benefit of the doubt and assume they're always intelligent. But that doesn't extend itself to believing they're always arguing in good faith. I find it unfathomable that a critically thinking person truly believes a social network with close to a billion users is devoid of any useful content. I "feel" like you're trying to be contrarian and edgy for the sake of being so.
I think my earlier Twitter analogy is apt here. Of course you can't expect TikTok to be on par with Coursera. Similarly, you don't go to Twitter for dissertations. These social networks are entertainment first, and their algorithms and restricted formats lend themselves to a certain type of content. But the natural evolution of social networks at scale is that people easily discover new content that is legitimately useful to them, or find a community based on their professional or side interests.
I went to the #softwareengineering hashtag on TikTok and very quickly found a few helpful accounts. You can do this with any hashtag. Frankly, software dev TikTok feels more friendly than HN at a cursory glance.
https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman
https://www.tiktok.com/@coderintuition
https://www.tiktok.com/@dantechtok
TikTok's audience age skews younger. I'm not saying these profiles will be helpful to you personally, but if I were in high school with a passing interest in development and got exposed to TikTok-style entertainment/info content, I probably would've started coding a lot earlier.
I go to tik tok purely for enjoyment, and for that it works.
Yeah, some of the content looks like it's "teaching" you. But it's doing it in the same way Discovery Channel is (was) teaching you. We find learning certain stuff to be entertaining. If I really wanted to learn about history or biology of physics I'd find other, much better ways. But I still like it when I see a video on how black holes bend light and make it orbit a couple of times before letting it go. It's cool. But it's still entertainment, and that's 100% ok.
LE: And I make sure to like 90% of videos with pretty girls, just because I like tik tok to be entertaining and I never want to curate it to blandness. (It's very gender equalitarian btw, I've seen feeds of my women friends and they're full of sexy men).
But it's great to see competition with SV, competition FAANG, competition with the US even. It's not a solution, but it's a breath of fleetingly fresh error for everyone sick of endless monopoly, acquisitions, and "tech nationalism for me, free trade and dependency for thee".
I also saw a lot of content I'd already seen before. A lot of people mentioned they see TikTok content on YT, reddit, FB. I also see it the other way around, including plenty of classic meme content from years ago before TikTok even existed.
Can the people who're so glowing about tiktok please post their top 3 interesting accounts? At this point I'm not sure whether I'm looking at other stuff, or that my judgement of the same stuff is just different.
Now does it bring __value__ to my life? No
Will I keep participating and creating content just to engage in these niche communities? Yes
You find it fascinating and interesting, you're discovering niche communities and engaging with them. You (presumably) enjoy creating content. That's value. Fun, entertainment and communication all have value.
Also I always read negative comments about TikTok on YouTube and Reddit. I've only read praise for TikTok on hackernews.