TikTok is becoming Amazon for Gen Z | Hacker News Reader

TikTok is becoming Amazon for Gen Z

indiehackers.com

10 pointsheymax0547 comments

The problem with people realizing how useful TikTok is as a discovery engine the more TT themselves will try to extract value from it and ultimately kill the golden calf.

TikTok is an amazing shopping experience (the actual paid-for ads are garbage like always, turns out that out of touch corporate advertisers are cringe) but I’ve discovered so much amazing art, food, music, makeup, clothes, home organization stuff because of videos of people being genuine and excited.

I think I say it on every thread but TT is the most positive, engaging, and fun social network I’ve ever been on. It’s so nice to have a social network based around chance encounters with people like you. And when you watch a low quality makeup tutorial from someone in their bedroom doing winged eyeliner you get to see what it’s actually gonna be like for you.

I think what you're describing is the law of shitty clickthroughts [1]

Every marketing channel goes through it, and TikTok is at the beginning of the whole process.

[1] https://andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/

TikTok is the new mass market feeding trough of the internet. It holds nothing for me, I find it mostly to be weaponized cringe, regurgitated memes and outrage de jour. it’s basically mental poison, with ads.

This exactly.

So there’s two possibilities for this being your TikTok experience — either you haven’t used it much and you’re getting “generic TikTok” which has about the same quality as the YouTube homepage or the content you’re describing is what you engage with. In Reddit parlance you’ve gotta unsub from the defaults.

I don’t engage at all with cringe humor, politics or memes, and TikTok no longer shows me them except when it goes into “testing mode” where it takes a stab at some continent outside my sphere to see if I like it.

If you’re interests don’t translate well to video — dance, art, music, fashion, home decor, hiking, woodworking, skating, cooking, baking, etc. then it still might not be your thing even if you do give it time.

“I’m holding it wrong?” Nah, screw tiktok. Eventually you will see, like all other social media, that it is mental poison. Very uninterested in being assigned to any kind of algorithmic info sphere. The madness can’t end soon enough. Social networks tend to last about 7-10y before the hate gets too much and starts eating people.

Every social network is discovery engine but TikTok power lays in short videos of 10 seconds, that's how much attention span of todays people is. Netflix is also discovery engine but the problem is people are more willing to watch 10 seconds videos all day long than to be mentally exhausted by 2 hours movies. In another words believe it or not TikTok is worth more than Netflix right now. But then again TikTok can be replaced and displaced by some new social network that prays on people's attention with highly engaging content.

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