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Comment by catchclose8919 | Hacker News Reader

...uhm, isn't TikTok practically irrelevant in Russia now that they've stopped allowing users to post new content?! I mean, this is what ppl use it for, viewing new content from ppl like them and posting new content hoping to get "famous".

With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.

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Not sure what your experience is, but when I've used TikTok, only a very small percentage of the content I'm shown is recent. The vast majority is months old, which I think is part of the genius of TikTok; they don't discard good content just due to its age, and instead show it based on novelty to the individual user

To add on to this - a truism of the internet is that most people don't upload content. They only consume content produced by others.

It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those consume-only users will not even notice the new content restriction.

The poster above is referring to the 1% rule of the internet.

Wikipedia as a source is good enough for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

That sounds like YouTube. I’m often recommended almost a decade old videos.

Sure, but this article also shows that even though new content gets uploaded elsewhere (about the war), Russian TikTok-ers will not get to see that.

It doesn't say much about TikTok's algorithm, but it did help me imagine something like the US invading Iraq and me not being able to find out because Twitter blocked new tweets here.

Unless you have a data on number of users, this is just speculation. One could also speculate that with other sources being turned off the young Russians would all turn to TikTok. This site [1] claims 54.9M active users in January.

[1] https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats

Certainly the ones paid to produce propaganda can upload from outside of Russia.

I've tried uploading some SMM content to TikTok for Russian audience using proxy gateways in multiple states. It just ends up as "not found" when accessed from Russian IPs.

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