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Comment by kpennell | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand. Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.

Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

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I agree with this. Their ranker is really good and has improved dramatically the more I watch and like. And it's not even fully garbage content, a good amount of it is interesting, useful, inspirational and educational. A rabbit hole of really excellent videos from a professional dog trainer caused me a detour of 20 minutes and pushed me over the edge to create the original tweet. So one side of me is not even mad, but the other side of me is like wait where did 2 hours go? And do I really want this?

I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows).

My sneaking suspicion is product management designed a product that is literally perfect for a recommendation engine.

It really does seem like a lot of the magic here is simply the format. The video lengths are a perfect balance between short enough to be addictive, and long enough to enable content more varied and interesting than just short gags.

Instagram and Facebook get bland real quick. Youtube/Netflix videos are often too long to be really addictive - "just one more" isn't as persuasive if "one more" takes 10 min+. With shorter skits like Key & Peele on Youtube you do get a stronger sense of that addictiveness. Twitter is mostly text and much less expressive, and even influencers treat it mostly as a communication/announcement platform, not a content platform.

Vine was hugely popular when it was shut down by Twitter, and I think it'll go down in history as one of the largest corporate mistakes every made. They were so close on the format - they just needed to allow slightly longer videos (which they did with Twitter message lengths around they same time they shut down Vine!!!).

I'm sure Bytedance's secret recommendation sauce is good, but I think much of their success is simply thanks to them being the first competent executor of the next major social media content format.

> Vine was hugely popular when it was shut down by Twitter, and I think it'll go down in history as one of the largest corporate mistakes every made. They were so close on the format - they just needed to allow slightly longer videos (which they did with Twitter message lengths around they same time they shut down Vine!!!).

Vine's top creators "unionized" and started demanding to be paid a cut. Vine had to be destroyed to defend the principle of not paying social media contributors.

That's somewhat ironic since TikTok pays certain content creators, although apparently not well.

https://youtu.be/jAZapFzpP64

Worth the full watch on video media money. But tldw; TikTok splits a pot of money over the views each video gets. The pot doesn't grow with the revenue they make or total views, so it's pretty exploitative.

I found the opposite. I took a look at TikTok, but the videos are too short to get into anything interesting. There's lot of interesting stuff on YouTube, however. Some of them could be shortened somewhat, but not down to a few minutes.

TikTok has recently introduced 10-minute long videos. Although, I have yet to come across a video that is >3 minutes, or a creator that uses that length of video.

What about Instagram Reels? Is that bland too?

The content creators aren’t there. Most of the good stuff is ripped directly from Tiktok.

Also their recommendations aren’t as good but that could just be a side effect of the above.

Other platforms only look for similar content to what you've already seen. They don't take novelty into account.

If you like one picture of a dog on Instagram it'll just show you more dogs and you get bored. Watch a few YouTube videos about one topic and the algorithm gets fixated on it.

YouTube is so bad now that if you use it to listen to music the autoplay gets into an infinite loop of songs that sound near identical, it's torture if you don't already know what you want to see/hear.

In short the usual algorithms are tailored to find similar content only, rather than finding novel content several degrees of separation away from what the user has expressed interest in.

It also seems very easy to take recommendation into your own hands on TikTok with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible. Once I started to get quite a bit of political / cultural war crap in my feed; I “not interested” a few of them, the feed improved markedly almost immediately. With YouTube I guess you can sort of influence your recommendations by digging into your watch history and deleting a bunch of stuff, but it’s tedious and ineffective. “Not interested” on YouTube front page seems useless, I still get pushed the same repetitive stuff, maybe from another set of channels.

TikTok and HN (to a lesser degree) are the only places that don’t force feed me racial culture war stuff.

> with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible

First time I heard about it. If it's hidden behind an undiscoverable gesture/tap, it's not accessible.

IIRC it’s among the first things they onboard you about. It’s also in the share menu, you should have seen it if you ever tried to download or share a video, or create a duet, or something. Long press is just an easy way to bring it up. Given the percentage of people commenting on TikTok threads who’ve never used it, “first time I heard about it” doesn’t mean much.

"Don't recommend channel" is very effective for me to ignore creators I just don't care about or content I'm at moment not interested in.

YouTube recommendations used to be quite good for a brief amount of time when google brain originally took over it I think? Now it’s a mess but it’s clearly due to exec meddling. like their absolutely product destroying migration towards videos 8 minutes or longer; most original content is now fully shit because they are filling it up with garbage to pad the time and release in a cadence. All stupid rules imposed by YouTube, which just takes creativity out of people.

It’s also possible any recommendation system can only stay pure for a few years until everyone from both sides is gaming them so badly for money it just cannot work anymore.

I was trying to show a friend some features of a keyboard I just bought that I’m pretty excited about. It’s still in the mail, so we pull up YouTube on the nearest screen and type in the name of the board. The first and most popular video that came up was 14 minutes long, but looked high quality. As we skim through it, we realize that it’s mostly this guy speaking ad nauseam about himself with very few significant shots of the keyboard. We had to go back to search and go all the way to the long tail keyword-wise to find a video that gave us what we wanted. Yeah, YouTube search isn’t what it used to be, and my experience tracks with your suggestion that it’s executive meddling.

If that’s what YouTube wants to be now, that’s fine. My question is now where do I go to find what YouTube used to be (TikTok, maybe)? It’s ironic too, because it’s like they don’t realize that as a millennial I was drawn to YouTube because it _wasn’t_ TV.

On the other hand, if I ever fall alseep in front of YouTube with the autoplay on, I will more often than not wake up in front of either Tom Scott's unedited video about sending garlic bread to space[1] or Micheal from Vsauce reciting primes for 3 hours[2] (which tends to result in some pretty interesting dreams tho)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAblynZYhI

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEaYbDWyQE

But if the videos are longer then people stay on the site for longer! It must mean that they like it more.

Or, you know, your platform makes me watch ten minutes to find something that would take 30 seconds otherwise, so fuck your platform.

Same reason why I am absolutely terrified of playing any instrumental music on Spotify. I let one track run till the end and my next 2-3 discover weeklies will be filled only by instrumental music.

i used to instinctively turn on private mode every time i opened the spotify app (on desktop at least, since it was easy enough to get at)

with youtube i usually open a video in a incognito tab anytime im watching something random, otherwise it takes weeks of clicking "not interested" just to get rid of some recommendations. sad times

i basically ignore all the recommendations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have the same experience with vocal music on YouTube Music, funnily enough. I greatly prefer instrumental music but you listen to one vocal album and suddenly all they recommend is singing.

You can use this behavior to your advantage though. I have my browsers set up to delete cookies when they are closed and from the surface this works for Youtube recommendations. If I open the site I only get very generic popular/pushed content.

So after I watch that instrumental music video, there will be a mass recommendation for other instrumental music. And that's nice, because I apparently was in a mood for that. And the next day, I open my browser again and they are all gone! I can dive into the music for the mood of that moment right away.

Huh... I guess I never really noticed, but you're right. I used to listen to entire genres on YouTube and let the recommendation engine pick the next video. I discovered some cool songs that way.

Now, maybe I'll type in a song title, listen to the song, and the next video is a live performance of the same song... Followed by a lyric video of the same song.

YT seems to have made some change to dump regular trending stuff into recommendations.

I really miss the option to tell it that I just really don’t want to see sports.

It's interesting that these companies go into these different product directions, while i assume they're both looking at similar metrics, and optimizing for the same outcome: engagement and number of users.

Somehow YouTube is seeing more engagement by showing more of the same, and TikTok is seeing even more engagement from showing fresh content.

Maybe the risk of an upward trend in outcomes, that blurs the fact that you could see even better trends by done things differently.

For me, YouTube is literally the same - I get the same videos thrown into my feed in repeat. Apparently this converts well for YT and the result is that my feed is maybe 10% genuine discovery. The rest is shit.

YouTube also does this weird thing for me where, for example, I watch a couple of videos of an android related YouTube channel about new phones, and then it’ll recommend me videos from 2008 about phones being released then. Lol

this is Hill climbing, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing

Yes. How do you deal with hill climbing in product management? How do you know that a 10% improvement in outcomes is bad, and a different approach could have given you 50% or 100%? More experimentation, more 'how might we'? Google is known for trying different approaches (many shades of blue for a link), but somehow none of their experiments indicated fresh content is important? Or is it just a matter of product management 'playing it safe' at Google, where they know 10% outcome improvement is good enough to keep their job?

My guess is limited time frames within some standard A/B testing protocol. Give people very similar content over a 1-2 week period, and they'll watch more of it. Give people very similar content over a 6 month period, and they'll get bored and leave. If your testing protocol doesn't look for long term effects, you'll never see the longer effect in any of your tests.

Reddit made a change recently (in the last week or so) along these lines, to start injecting new subreddits in to your feed. They've picked up on this too.

Reddit is getting / is pretty good in my opinion

I've been a long-term subscriber to Google Play Music, now YouTube Music, and the change introduced and reinforced what you say. Each time I open the app it's to meet the same recommendations and automatic playlists; barely anything new. About time I got serious about transferring to Spotify.

Focusing on content rather than a social network.

Most videos you see on tiktok are probably not people you are following, while most on Instagram probably are

They test content on a small circle of users, if metrics are good they keep expanding

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-...

More data beats better algorithms, and Tiktok gets a lot of signals about what you might like based on how long you watch, how many times you watch, what you like, what you comment on, if you go to the profile page of a video you just watched, if you share, etc. Multiply that by all the videos you can see in a single hour, and Tiktok learns more about you than YouTube has in the past 5 years of use.

Absolutely not - I was using youtube for 10 years and every year my feed gets worse. Now the original content creators are dissapearing from my newsfeed and uts fetting invaded eith short clips of family guy. Its also will show me same clip again and again. It shows clips from creators i disliked. New uploads of creators i follow sometimes arent on my feed - its a shitshow. Half of comments are trolls and bots.

Here to say my experience is the exact opposite. My YouTube experience and recommendations have consistently improved over the last decade, and I find so much wonderful, informative stuff there.

TikTok, on the other hand, is a giant waste of my time. I have yet to find a single video I've liked from that platform; very little useful information there.

> family guy

Holy crap literally this happened to me few days ago

I made the mistake of watching a couple, what will happen next :)

I interviewed with them last year, and literally everyone I spoke to was brilliant. I think a lot of their magic is in hiring great people and having a very flat org chart. They get out of people’s way, and let them do cool shit.

Nothing makes me more depressed than thinking about the amount of human ingenuity dedicated to making teens spend as much time as possible consuming "digital crack".

Definitely don't think about all the ingenuity that's wasted on making you click or buy something then.

Potato potato.

Are they an American or Chinese company?

Chinese ! So maybe less focused on absolute numbers in terms of profit and able to be more focused on the product ? Even saying that feels so wrong, right, like US companies really cant enjoy building anything anymore ?

Chinese, but they're building recommendations teams in Mountain View and Seattle.

You’ve to remember that they have an (ancient == valuable ) source of customer data. They started off as a news aggregator and must have had a decade of customer data to utilise while showing these videos. I remember reading in the book (the attention factory) how fanatical the leadership is towards investing in ML talent

> I always wonder what Bytedance is doing differently compared with other social recommendation tools (aka why does no one rave about Twitter's suggested follows).

The thing is, the engine creates the content. Not quite as efficiently as a human producer saying "I want a 30 second video about X", but through the feedback loop of what gets promoted.

Twitter is run by libertarians who prioritise free speech, and therefore what Twitter produces is more and more intense political argument. Once the Tahrir square revolution and the color revolutions happened, that's what the place is locked into.

Instagram created the "influencer": young hyper conventionally attractive women photographed in beautiful locations, advertising products like energy drinks on their own account rather than a traditional modelling agency structure.

Youtube created the "let's play" and the "thirty to 120 minute political rabbithole" and the "shocked face thumbnail" genres.

Tiktok's secret weapon - and I'm not familiar with how it works in detail, but the effects are very clear - is a video editing tool, a content creation system, that is accessible for ordinary people. The evidence of this is that much of the "reels" content on Instagram's Tiktok clone has Tiktok watermarks on it.

I watched my nephew create a training montage for a toy. He takes in some video sequences, adds some music and gets something far more compelling and does so quickly. We just don't have a good natural understanding about what turns raw content into a good video. Tools like this help massively with that.

> Twitter is run by libertarians who prioritise free speech...

Oh wow, I wasn't expecting such a big laugh this early in the morning... thank you!

I haven't tried it, but my understanding from reading the experiences that it is about content not the creators.

Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook all about creators and social "connections" or follows to these. So you get the good with all the ugly and horrible. Want insights, art or jokes. Get the horrible political opinions and signalling too... And then see all the fights.

The massive data vacuum is probably part of it.

But that’s not at all unique to TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc. have massive amounts of data to play with as well. What else does TikTok have that these other platforms do not?

From what I've seen from Chinese tech companies, I've always noticed they tend to go one step even further in ignoring privacy. You think FB is bad, wait until you realize what Baidu, Tencent, etc do without even blinking. Probably because what the Chinese government demands of them, the only ones that stay standing are the ones willing to do that. And if your willing to do that, what is doing something similar when your not forced to?

Tictok have agreed to a $92 million settlement for lack of notification to users about data collection. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-owner-agrees-9...

Perhaps they added a way to measure relationships between content, and expand the recommendation to several degrees of separation between related content.

No other social network lets users send a “dislike signal.

I think the important distinction in 'do I really want this' becomes whether I chose to do that activity, or if I kind of just got sucker punched into it.

I think there is nothing wrong with saying 'I am going to spend X time on social media and get entertainment out of it'. It is very different when you go to do one specific thing, and spend the next 2 hours in a complete daze in rabbit holes.

About a year and a half ago, I acknowledged how negatively some reflexive social media habits impacted my life and managed to extricate myself from them. A year or two before that realization I installed TikTok to see what the fuss was about, checked out the stream for a few minutes, looked up at the clock to realize it had actually been about two hours, and immeditealy uninstalled the app.

Astonishingly good attention and interest manipulation. Terrifyingly good, in fact. I don't moralize about getting lost in trash entertainment, but there's a significant swath of the population for which this format combined with these design patterns is a big problem.

Somewhere in the 80s some concerned parents in Jordache jeans just got kicked out of their mall's little town square facade where they were trying to hand out political pamphlets. And they went, "Oh, so that is the thing."

So... what's the thing here with TikTok? I mean it cannot just be that it's a personally-tailored time suck. What's missing? Is it pro-unionization rabbit holes?

I'm going to go ahead and guess "pro-unionization rabbit holes." If I'm wrong then the evidence will be me following the link someone gives me of a 2-hour TikTok unionization rabbit hole. I can't lose, internet!

edit: clarification

Your comment is incomprehensible.

I'll take another stab at it.

OP's critique seems to be that TikTok caused engagement with their preferred content for a longer duration than desired. That's not an interesting distinction from what happened back in the day with people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. "Digital crack" is hyperbole if all it means is spending longer on the topics one already likes.

My question: is the TikTok algo consistently steering users toward/away from categories of content they would have otherwise had an interest in consuming? E.g., are there pro-unionization users who accidentally spend 2 hours watching pro-unionization TikToks? Or is the recommendation engine steering those users to 2 hours of some less contentious category?

You're talking to a transformer language model.

Really? How do you know? I had a look at their other posts and it doesn't seem like it to me.

Are you referring to some in-joke that I am not getting?

I am curious about the "authentic" part. My wife shows me her favourite daily tiktoks and they all seem... Distilled and optimized and high density, well researched or naturally selected and evolved. Their "authenticity" seems almost desperately infused. Like twitter posts, optimized for engagement in 160chars (I find Washington post and random tatoo artist tweets have same medium-indiced optinized feel), after a few of them, all tiktoks seem to have the same feel and optimization. They're uncanny valley of authenticity, influencers and singers and actors and wives struggling so very very hard to seem amiable and authentic and real based on same evolving playbook, and I feel too weirded out after 30s or so to keep watching :O.

Important reminder: don’t talk too much publicly about your (wife’s) TikTok feed, because it says more about you than you’d think.

I’ve seen so many people complain that “tiktok keeps showing them young girls dancing” lol.

The hard truth. I don't use TikTok right now, but this is the kind of stuff I would see:

https://twitter.com/Vomit_Dragon/status/1506109341484474370

https://twitter.com/WatsyTheOtt/status/1507646007294631941

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1507592587426906114

https://twitter.com/tealeafraccoon/status/150735003807424512...

Some of it is actually from TikTok.

This is spot on. One person I know gets pimple popping on a fresh TikTok feed within minutes. I have no idea how the algorithm can converge on that so fast, but its certainly some dark NN magic.

I don’t understand, what does this signal about you personally?

That you (consciously or not) like young dancing girls

This might not be a problem, of course, but in other situations might be something you don’t want to make public?

I mean why would you even discuss this openly outside of a scathing criticism that TikTok must be corrupting the young minds of children if the algorithm is starting to pollute your (or your wife’s) feed with young kids emulating highly sexualized dance routines, without you ever training it to do that..

The thing is that you DO train it to do that. Not everyone’s feed is like that. It just depends on what TikTok infers from your usage.

So in a way, saying that TikTok is outrageous is a bit hypocritical: it shows what you seem to like, and surely you calling it outrageous can only be a posture.

To be fair, assuming he’s a heterosexual male, isn’t it just assumed he would like young dancing girls?

Young meaning really young.

Not really - just mostly Asian, so perhaps to you they look younger than they are.

Lolll read my message above again!

Most of us get exactly zero Asian girls on our TikTok. You just basically told everyone that TikTok detected that you probably have a (maybe subconscious) attraction to Asian girls.

The only revelation here is that you have zero idea how these app algorithms work.

I don't get those young girls (I mean children as you seem to imply) - but replying to your message, I assume some did. Or rather you did, or else how would you know they are "very young girls"?

It seems really off to accuse random people on the internet to be attracted to kids.

What I was saying is that I was shown young women, but it still annoyed me.

As for attraction - that is what TikTok's algorithm started out with, and I liked some of them, because why not? As I said, they are cute and they put in the effort to do some funny stunts or whatever. I didn't dislike them, so why not press "like"? Doesn't mean I want to see those girls all the time. Also yeah, I am a heterosexual male, so young women are attractive to me.

I probably would have liked a lot of cat videos, too, if TikTok had shown them to me. Doesn't mean I want to see cat videos all the time, either, and also not that I am sexually attracted to cats.

I only tried TikTok for maybe two days, so I really think it is a failure of the algorithm, not a reveal of my subconsciousness.

Since everybody was raving about the TikTok algorithm, which is what made me try it out in the first place, I assumed that I wouldn't have to be super careful in "training" the algorithm. Apparently I assumed wrong.

You confused usernames a bit.

Nothing. Crubier is just an absolute clown that doesn't understand Global and Demographic algorithms also exist, and prioritize pushing content that other people have watched for long and consistent periods.

Young dancing girls is exactly how it was advertised to me, a not-so-young adult, when it was still called Musical.ly. I remember being throughly creeped out by how shameless those musical.ly YouTube ads were.

In my case the algorithm decided I should be slowly forwarded into the arms of a pharmacist prescribing a stimulant to help with a bunch of mildly ADHD/ASD quirks in my personality.

TikTok didn't work for me because of the young dancing girls. Yes, I clicked "like" on some of them, because they ARE cute and put in the effort. Doesn't mean I want to see young dancing girls all the time. TikTok showed me stuff and since I liked it, I clicked like. So TikTok shows me more of the same stuff, and not the other stuff which I might also like.

So I guess you have to be super disciplined to get a nice TikTok feed? Or just try it long enough? Or it only works for women, because they may click less on young dancing girls?

Yeah that's a problem with all of these things. They scrape SO much data, they seem to do SO many nefarious things... and still, if I ever look up a dishwasher (a once every half a decade purchase), amazon and google will forever assume I'm HUGELY into dishwashers. It seems their fancy profiling algorithm is "last in, first out".

Same with youtube - I want to be able to occasionally watch something without it assuming I want that ALL the time, to exclusion of everything else. Yes, I checked out a video on how to change the filter on my laundry machine; yes I needed to fix my snow blower. These things are not my life now! <slap my face emoji>

Basically, I'm stunned how unsophisticated and unhelpful these algorithms are to me as a consumer, though I suppose they are effective to company who wants to drive "Engagement" without caring any further than that.

P.S. And now that I have kids, oh boy are these systems ever confused :D. If I stop to show my kid something on my phone, that's all I'll see for next 3 weeks.

Lol. Assuming you’re not trolling, I’d say yes, you have to be aware that any signal from you (including time spent watching each video) is analyzed by TikTok.

So what? I don't know what you are implying? So you never like videos of young women dancing? You go on TikTok and are very disciplined to only click on videos with CSS hacks or something?

I uninstalled it for two days, so I really don't have a guilty conscience of secretly liking young girls or whatever. It was ultimately just annoying.

I think the thing that makes TikTok successful is that it's so uniquely tuned to whoever owns the account, and that it catches up with your personal interests and preferences very quickly. Your experience on TikTok is probably going to be a lot different to your wife's, at least this has been the case for us.

my fiancée is hopelessly addicted to TikTok and just about everything she shows me from there is wholly devoid of actual authenticity—it's all fake as hell. "cute" moments between couples that were obviously staged and rehearsed instead of being impromptu as implied, young mom's desperately making a big deal out of everything their kids do because she needs Content for the Channel, and more.

I kind of get the feeling that we are passing or have passed some threshold where many, possibly most people can no longer identify Actual Authenticity due to social media overexposure, and I for one find this distressing.

The staged relationship content is just another niche on TikTok. I skip that content almost immediately so it’s rare for the algo to surface any, but it’s popular because enough people really enjoy it. The same type of content is on YouTube and other platforms.

I don’t know, we’ve had staged content presented as reality for a long time(ie almost all “reality” tv) and we seem to be doing ok. The TikTok content you’re describing doesn’t feel terribly different from that.

I agree. Especially with younger people, you can really tell they're pushing their faces to display the right amount of emotion.

TikTok’s super power is tailoring the feed to the user, so this uncanny valley stuff is what your wife likes.

It really is wild. You can decide exactly what you want to be shown by how long you spend on a video. You can literally feel the algorithm working alongside you, like you're using river currents while paddling in a kayak. Fucking crazy.

“Naturally selected and evolved”

Wow I never thought of this applied to algorithms and AI. Very profound to think about in this context, of users selecting the best videos with their clicks and evolving the naturally selected videos to out compete the other videos, in the same vein as survival of the fittest.

> Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.

On to the next 'hit' then.

The addictiveness of the drug 'Instagram™' has now worn off and has no effect on many long time 'users' of the drug since first introduced in the 2010s. A new 'digital crack cocaine' with a new innovative algorithmic black-box formula has been on the streets called 'TikTok™' amassing over 1B 'users' designed to glue you to your screen as much as possible.

There will be a time where this drug will wear off for another generation and they will find the next addictive hit to scramble and hype over just like they did with Facebook™, and Instagram™.

The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user', which is what they call people addicted to a particular drug. Interesting that nothing there has changed since the CEOs, VPs, VCs and product managers know that their products are compared to addictive drugs.

Rinse and repeat I guess. But we'll see in a decades time on what the next 'hit' will be.

One of the best times to start a new product or even promote an existing one (in consumer space) is during the infancy of a new social platform. Not only could there be opportunities to build products around TikTok but advertising on TikTok now could be akin to advertising on FB in 2005, cheap and plenty of chances to make good ROI

But u can’t take advantage of those opportunities unless u become an user first and study what works

> The only way to really win is to not play the game and to not become a regular 'user'

Except meanwhile you can't make normal contact with people because everybody is looking at their phone.

It's just entertainment. You could say the same about books or TV. At least Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social and interactive and encourage people to produce content instead of just consuming passively.

Someone’s who’s read a lot of books is called well read.

Someone who’s watched a bunch of shows is called a binge watcher.

No matter what they’re called, reading specifically requires more active thinking than watching stuff. I wouldn’t say theyre the same.

Someone who read a lot of porn novels wouldn't be called well read, and someone who watch a bunch of college lectures wouldn't be called a binge watcher. What matters is the content, not the form of the content.

It is just that simple content tend to choose easy to digest mediums, there is not much demand for low effort literature today since people just watch movies instead.

I totally agree with you.

Thats why i mentioned reading books also requires more “active” part of the brain rather than passively watching.

I wouldn't call someone "well read" just for reading lots of books. I'd call them a "book worm". "Book worm" still has more positive connotations than "binge watcher" or "couch potato", but "well read" indicates that they read the classics and can talk about them intelligently.

Thanks for clarifying that up, wasn’t aware of book worm vs well read.

My main point really was that reading requires a more active effort than watching which is passive.

Tiktok also has classics, I presume?

> Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places.

This is kinda baffling to me. I got into Instagram because photography is a hobby of mine and curiosity got the best of me. I follow a few photographers ("actual people", as opposed to aggregators) who only post "normal" photography. Sure, they're "pretty pictures", but I'd say it's not really the kind the general population would think of when mentioning Instagram.

Yet, whenever I go on the "explore" tab, I'm inundated with girls in skin-tight clothes or guys showing off their latest sports cars. The "feed" (home button) does seem to have relevant content, although it's quite repetitive outside the people I follow. And for some reason, I keep getting ads for tiny homes, which aren't even a thing in France, where I live.

Also, only being able to use it on a small-screen phone got old fast. And I'm not interested in hauling around a big-ass phone, I already have a laptop.

I had to spend hours training Instagram not to show me endless pictures of hot shirtless guys when I go to the 'explore' feed. I follow one or two pop singers who sometimes post sexy photos, but for the most part I just follow people that I really know. I'm not sure how my feed ended up so sexualized. My theory is that Instagram notices that I spend longer looking at hot guys when they do appear than I do looking at other kinds of photos. (I am happy to stare at hot guys, but it's not what I'm actually looking for when I go to Instagram.)

Yes, there is a huge disconnect in the Instagram discovery feed for me as well. I follow friends & family, some astronomy, photography, tech accounts but when I browse Explore it’s full of influencers and fit girls in thighs. It got slightly better a few months ago when I think they did something but only introduced 20% of my tastes rather than 0%.

One explanation for the difference between tiktok and instagram could be that tiktok doesn’t have a crystallized business model yet and is just focusing on growing its network as much as possible. Presumably it will end up as bad as every other (profitable) social network over time (apart from twitter, which is more like an internet utility).

Good point

I understand (and mostly agree) with what you're saying, but as someone who watches lots of tiktok each night, there definitely still a(n un)healhty amount of pretending-to-be-authentic-but-actually-isnt content on the app. Or at least on my FYP.

Tiktok definitely does have its own aesthetic and style, with different people leaning into (or out of) it to varying degrees.

I will say - I've never seen a social network that's as queer as my tiktok experience is. It's great. I wish I had this when I was younger.

I agree though with your last point. I get a lot of queer content and it's usually very welcome. Though some niches in that subset that focus on discussion of harassment of queer people are much more anxiety inducing.

It's AI is kind of terrible for society. Sure, it is impressive technically, but WSJ did an article Tiktok's effect on teenagers:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investig...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-still-getting-ti...

> Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc

I've never used TikTok before, so apologies for the ignorance, but here's a question nevertheless: one of the really nice thing about YouTube is the sort of "long term archival of knowledge" aspect of it.

Meaning: unless Google decides to purge content for reason X or Y, it is (or seems to) be there for ever.

What about TikTok content? Is it here to stay or is it kind of ephemeral?

Also: at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I really dislike using a phone for consuming content (tiny screen, unwieldy interface, no control on the platform, the list is very long) ... is there a non-mobile way to access it? For content that teaches you about stuff, is there a way to bookmark it and refer to it later?

These are good questions and I think it’s nowhere near as rosy as OP described.

AFAIK the content is permanent.

There's a website as well as the app.

You can look through all the videos you've favorited, but it could be hard to find a specific one. If you want to be sure you can quickly find something, you can share it or copy and paste the link. You can also follow its creator.

In Germany Tiktok actively removes content mentioning LGBT issues. I very much worry about how Tiktok is Chinese controlled and they are already abusing it worldwide to remove things that they consider threatening. It's fine while it's still a relatively minor platform, but that will change as it gets market share.

Tiktok claims to have a billion monthly active users now. That puts them #4 in the social/public-user-generated-content category, behind Facebook (2.9B), Youtube (2.2B), Instagram (1.4B), and well ahead of the likes like twitter or reddit. I wouldn't call that a "relatively minor platform".

Then I'll say it has a relatively minor use among the voting-age population. Most users are children.

It seems voting-age adults are in a large majority, with "only" 28% under-18 and therefore 72% over-18 Tiktok users[0].

However, you have more of a point if you look at typical likely-voters instead of all voting-age people.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#TikT...

I remember hearing similar things about Instagram vs. Facebook many years ago.

Could this just be a honeymoon phase before the SEO experts arrive in force to help make content go viral while ByteDance starts testing different monetization strategies by messing with the feed?

It felt like that for a bit but then they (Tiktok) just pushed a release that removed reposts/memes from the main FYP feed. All of a sudden, it became much more interesting again.

But I agree with the overall point that at some point people will learn how to game it.

> Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content.

I hear some commonality here with how people describe reddit: "Sure, by default it is a cesspool but once you dedicate energy to seeking out the better content, it really is there, hiding deep in the weeds."

Clearly, I'm paraphrasing with added hyperbole to make a point, but I don't find the argument compelling that social media really can add value to our lives as long as we ignore the most visible and popular content within it.

On reddit you need to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff, usually by stumbling across good subs from outside the site. TikTok is better at serving you the things you like as you passively consume them.

They have good editors that know their audience.

Sure some what you see is supported by "algorithms"; but what you sense ("playful, authentic, and raw" ) is the result of a deliberate editorial policy done by a group of actual humans.

Imagine all that time spent watching other people do hobbies you would like to have instead be spent actually doing those hobbies. Where would your life be right now and where would it go from there.

Never got into instagram/tiktok and its less appealing every time I hear about it or see too small kids addicted to it. I am rather too busy living real life interacting with real people - that isn't some smug snobbishness, just that online interaction in such a form simply doesn't cut it for me, too bland, too passive, too shallow and life painfully too short for such mistakes.

Tiktok is the anti-Instagram.

It rejects Instagram’s focus on aesthetics and instead appeals to playfulness and authenticity.

Was instagram genuine and organic at first ? it would be interesting to understand why IG became a faux marketing department, or if it quickly became so naturally.

It's nice to see that tiktok doesn't devolve into a soul sucking fake life stream.

It's the Eternal September effect but for self-promotion.

IG was "genuine" when people were fleeing there in droves to escape the parents and grandparents that had turned FB into a PG-rated blandscape of baby and family pics.

At the time, IG was this new thing that seemed to focus on artistic self-expression. This was when IG filters just recoloured your photos, and didn't smooth out wrinkles or add dog ears and tongues.

At some point people realized that you could take photos with product placement, and it was all downhill from there.

It'll happen to TikTok as well.

God.. beyond the sad but obvious pattern. It seems the web is just a incoherent runaway. New "platform" > bubbly phase > distortion for bad incentives (money, fame, else) > rot > abandonment for next "platform".

It was fun to observe that during the myspace days but it's getting annoying.

Huh it's funny. When you put it that way is sounds like all those same arguments people have been making against crypto - except the fallout from the "rot" phase of crypto will have very significant real world consequences.

It's as if people who have been on the internet since those days can easily see what's coming.

Plausible, except I think crypto ending up as yet another asset class might enjoy a longer life because, allegedly, institutions are playing in it now. They can leave too though.

Yet, but it will.

Hey, maybe it will stabilize.. surprises happen :)

Is there a way to remove the overlays? By that I mean the crap above the videos? I really can't use it with those, I'm autistic and it's just too much.

> I legitimately laugh my ass off

Same here. And then I read all the other comments on this post by people who don't get it, don't think it's funny, isn't getting "good" content, and I start to wonder if I'm lucky?

Except, I haven't really liked or disliked anything on the app. I'm just scrolling, flipping away videos that I don't like, staying on videos I do. Sure, there's a lot of crap, but there are just so many diamonds on there! I can easily laugh my ass off every night, because the format is just perfect for a bunch of quick visual gags.

The duet feature and the re-use song feature enable so much absolute hilarity, because of the repetition humour.

Which is why I watched a TikTok of someone putting a 3D-printed magic wand on top of a sea urchin, set to the sound of someone saying "Avadakadavra" in a really high-pitched voice, and I just fucking lost it. It's brilliant! Brilliant!

Because I trust hacker news (somewhat), I just installed tiktok for the first time.

15 minutes into it I felt it starting to suck time out of my life because the algorithm is repsecting my wishes and (unlike others) seems to recognize that people have more than one interest and that not interested means not interested.

I just removed it again for that very reason.

3 days and it’s algorithm can figure out what you like, unstoppable after that, it just freaking knows you, brilliant app.

I’ve tried it twice now and it just doesn’t click for me. I think the most interesting thing it found for me was a video of a person doing some really excellent welding.

Instagram and HN are really the only social media I regularly use. Instagram because I follow my friends and I enjoy seeing what’s going on in their world and HN because I usually learn something reading it.

Ah, HN in a nutshell:

"I'm having fun on <popular social media>!"

*downvote*

That sucks. Imagine if you worked there and realized that.

The first Chinese app with some traction and it blows american ones by being delightful and diverse :D

Wait for them to start doing TV shows with some non-Chinese focus.

I think Chinese cultural exports obviously lag behind those of Japan and Korea because the government censors confine their creatives, leaving them less free to create.

The CCP really, really likes video clips of happy people doing cheerful things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying that content, but really great films and TV shows challenge us, give us fresh new perspectives, and make us see the world a little bit differently. China may be able to compete with some of the more guilty-pleasure sorts of TV content, but it's hard for me to imagine many high quality films that resonate with the human spirit coming out of China any time soon.

I'd love if they proved me wrong.

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