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Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

I feel like TikTok is significantly underdiscussed, almost like the tech and business press are assuming it's a flash-in-the-pan more similar to Snapchat than Facebook. It is almost certainly having a major impact on the business of some of the most prominent publicly traded companies in the US, yet there are just a handful of articles discussing their impact on Facebook's disastrous quarterly results.

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The aspect that worries me the most is the recommendation: Facebook and Twitter discovered a little late that they had the ability to to influence opinion with simple tweaks. That raised internal questions and that model is under close surveillance by people who have talked about those questions in public and who I know have and would raise, at least internally, their concerns. People can explore the updates from their friends and can identity ommissions. Snap is more secretive, but their employees are loud Californians who can about justice, they have access to journalists if they feel the need to push back. Users can also see updates from their friends and people their follow without just having to trust the flow.

I don’t believe that TikTok has a similar internal culture of debate. I haven’t seen anything published by their academic team. I don’t believe that you can check on your friend’s page to see what they posted lately. They are examples of topics that they have favoured or censored that was worrisome and they didn’t adress the controversy. The pool of possible content is much larger so there’s more opportunity to fill strategically.

I know people who work for one but not the other, so I understand that this influence my judgement but I believe that their are objective difference in company values and product design that make TikTok more able to manipulate.

I haven’t seen anyone discuss that, and I have plenty of people who discuss those questions profesionally in my feed.

>but their employees are loud Californians who can about justice

In my experience, Californians care about justice the same way they care about anything, fashion. Only the injustices that are fashionable to be against ever get any attention.

If you need proof they don't care about justice look no further than they fact the keep electing Peloci.

The users of TikTok are mostly teenagers and young adults, that's why. Nearly everybody in journalism is late 20s or 30+. They just don't get it, though to be fair vine had a similar type of content and that failed.

There is absolutely a strong 20s-30s and even 40s userbase on TikTok. “The Algorithm”, though, is very very good at only showing people what they want to see, so much so that two people can have wildly different experiences.

For example, my TikTok is full of LGBTQ+, PNW housing complaints, DnD and religion.

Edit: and a good percentage of them are around 30.

I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both. It reminds me of the kind of bravado/showing off my peers in middle- and high-school did: because that's essentially what it is. Edit for more context: I happen to be dating someone who is a young adult (early/mid-20s), so I have even more context/insight into what makes this app interesting to them: I stand by what I wrote.

Those late 20s and up journalists get it, but they recognize (correctly) that like all social networks of this sort the early adopters (kids/young adults) are going to turn into adults with spending power and either change the nature of the platform or move on to something else. In either case, what TikTok is now is largely irrelevant (not to mention trite and shallow).

I'm not much younger and tried it after some HN thread. Basically the algorithm is really good, as it should be on more platforms. So if you don't like memes and dance and beauty contents, you won't get that. It can be just DIY videos, niche musicians and short science videos if that's what you want to see.

I don't think it's shallow. I've learned a lot from it. It just gives you what you want to watch and what you want to watch may be based on the idea that you have about the platform.

The algorithm is really good! At overfitting. Snark aside, what you describe is short form videos intended to show off or cash in to a trend: that it’s not stupid cat videos, or dance-offs or whatever doesn’t change that.

If you were writing this in 2019 I would agree with you.

This perception is just already 3 years old now and so that social network has already gotten its additional audiences and many of those high schoolers (and their influencers) have grown up.

There is a similarity of looking at Facebook in 2005 and looking at Facebook in 2008, and add in a much faster adoption cycle and infrastructure.

OTOH what happens to companies with teen users who grow up is that they lose their userbase and they die out along with other big influences of that current generation. You just don't have the time to stare at ticktock for 3 hours at 25 years old that you had at 15 years old, whether you are at the top or the bottom of the economic ladder. We see that trend in every social network.

In one large segment it has turned into a streaming platform like twitch, as in a side screen and additional chat people keep up while also streaming on twitch

I dont see a vine-like fate for tiktok

Bytedance is so much better positioned as well and already monetizing it

> I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both.

What this misses is that TikTok is a radically different experience for different people.

For some people, this description is very accurate. For other people, they would barely recognize TikTok on the basis of this description.

This is what has led to so many mis-representations of TikTok in the media, and the misunderstandings that result from that.

>For other people, they would barely recognize TikTok on the basis of this description.

Not following. Who are the "other people" and how would they describe it otherwise?

TikTok has a very good algorithm for suggesting content for users, and this can end up with different users being exposed to radically different subsets of content offered through TikTok: in scientific terms, it’s very easy to get stuck in different local minima.

So for many users, TikTok will not involve “showing off to friends”, will not involve audio trends, and will not involve memes at all.

These users would describe it as containing short-form video content relevant to whatever their particular niche or interest may be.

Yes, the algorithm is a poor algorithm that overfits. It is not a good algorithm by any reasonable measure, unless the intent specifically is to commit users to such a funnel.

Whether the content is stupid cat videos or a DIY isn't relevant to my original point: it's short-form video content developed by people attempting to cash in on some meme (or niche), and very much in the vein of showing off for one's peers. Some like to think that if it's not an audio meme, but rather an undergrad waxing poetic about just learning Schrodinger's Equation or some handy person displaying his DIY skills that it's not about cashing in/showing off. But it is.

Of course the intent is to commit users to a funnel or funnels.

I still don’t think you get that when you complain about the content being trite or juvenile or commercial(?), you’re outing yourself as someone who will stop to watch that kind of stuff.

Because Tiktok aggressively individualizes the content shown, people with different tastes get radically different videos shown.

If you skip past the memes, fads, dances, etc. it will show you other types of content until it identifies what you will stop scrolling to watch.

I this take is wrong. TikTok might be mostly teenagers but it's not an under the radar platform. It's mainstream and used by all ages.

I wonder if the accessibility as far as the media goes to Facebook staff and willingness to engage with the press exposes Facebook a bit more than TikTok.

That's kinda a scary situation...

Facebook has generated so much well-earned hate that even the most nationalistic Americans aren't going to come to its defense.

An odd contrast considering non-nationalistic Americans are usually the first to defend Big Business and Big Government.

I think you are each using nationalist a different way. I'm pretty sure the GP meant it as "buy American" nationalists and you meant it as "I want an ethnostate" nationalists.

Nobody cares because (it is perceived that) there is no political discourse on TikTok yet.

It was the same for Twitter and Facebook. Then Trump happened and People With Important Jobs started paying attention to them. There has not been such a catalyst event for TikTok yet. Like with Zoom, there is a vague feeling among the security-paranoid that the Chinese are leveraging it for data-gathering, but as long as they get bazillion videos of teenagers pulling faces, who cares?

There was plenty of political discourse on TikTok in the last election cycle. Every tiktok meme had a pro Trump anti Biden version.

That's why I said "perceived". Eventually something will happen and Important People will pay attention. It just has not happened yet.

It 100% depends on what you like. I've been using tiktok forever and a day and all I see is funny stuff that is relevant to me. Very obscure niche things that have 1000 hearts - it's scary good at recommending relevant content.

If you are seeing political content, it's just because you told the algorithm that you enjoy interacting with that type of content.

It exists, but unlike, say, Twitter, it's extremely easy to remove from your attention.

TikTok's recommendation algorithm is really second to none.

In my country (Philippines), TikTok has been one of the main sources of political misinformation besides Facebook and YouTube (for a lesser degree). It's gotten so bad that it's impacting the coming national election wherein the platform of the currently leading candidate is focused on the glorification of the past dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

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