TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants | Hacker News Reader

TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

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249 pointsfaurosann442 comments

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more addicting. And there was a whole culture around what it meant if you saw somebody (a crush?) visiting your profile, sending a "poke", or commenting on a picture.

I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant, and I believe it was also not inconvinient for FB as they moved from home pages and Farmville to newsfeeds and now videos (which probably earns them more).

Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

“Once the FOAF standard gets adopted, blogs will take over Facebook!” 2006

Yeah. So. What exactly is your point here?

- a distributed, technically suitable protocol existed for describing yourself and your network?

- that you had control of it? And thats... bad?

- that large social networks saw interoperability and decided No! - it would unprofitable if we didnt own the whole game?

Foaf was - and is - a very good vocabulary for a social network. Having a corporate centralist version lead to what exactly? Qnanon? Antivax? Neonazis? Astroturf?

While foaf would not have been immune to this, the seperation between protocol and filtering aggregator would have at least provided a choice.

My point is that I miss the mid 2000s. Better vision for the internet. We can still build it, though!

I don't think that gap actually exists. That "directory of people" is now people's whatspp/discord/snapchat/instagram/messenger DMs. I think people are over the one giant hirehose of people you're loosely acquainted with, so social media has split into two extremes - a big feed of content from others, like reddit/tiktok/twitter. And a lot more closed/private groups, like DMs, group chats, and discords.

Yes, the gap does exist. Back in the day you would meet someone IRL, get home and then find a friend request from them on Facebook because they found your page. Sure a lot of those went nowhere, but I became closer friends with a lot of those people as they kept engaging with my posts and uploads.

Adding someone to private groups has a ton more friction. They need to download the app, you need to send them an invite, etc. It’s nowhere near the same as before.

People the age as you were then are not having that problem now.

Nobody wants that stalker product, and I hate having to play with Gen Xers fawning for the vestiges of that product once per year with new Facebook account just to coordinate with a Burning Man camp.

How is this definitively true? Not everyone is great at socializing or having lots of friends or acquaintances where they’ll have other people’s info on the networks mentioned above.

Because the current/younger people all have the different apps that provide that already

People understand that their social graph is optionally transportable

They can recreate it on any app just by putting in their phone number or letting the app access their contacts

Right so this is all assuming you have people’s numbers. Which was my whole point. You may not have that. I said “other people’s info”

This is no different than when gen X or older millennials were kids on different apps too like IM apps. Which weren’t the same as FB early day either.

its assuming that you have one person’s contact info who is tangentially associated to the other people (number or username or email etc) or that they have yours.

Then you get recommended all the same people and can also browse the same people’s friends.

The recommendation and browsing is the same as Facebook’s early days, the same as now, and very different from instant messaging apps.

None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis. Recreating the mid aughts wont do it either. You have to be proactive in getting a variety of people’s contact info by interacting with a variety of people.

That’s not how IG or TikTok work. Not as well as FB’s recommendation system years ago. For example I had to gather everyone together from an online community on both platforms even though everyone was linked on Facebook. People weren’t finding recommendations to connect with other community people themselves on those platforms.

> None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis

What do you mean? Are you okay?

Recommendation engines break or change every sprint on every app, so I am surprised your community had this issue, but not sure your conclusions are really the direction of these platforms.

Either way, I don't see those as problems or a market gap people want.

Many groups just share a google form or spreadsheet. Accurate observation that this is something that would work even if we were just using old instant message apps since a list of screennames could be shared just as well. But since you already had an existing community to transport, its not a problem there and not a problem I see in my own communities.

The community didn’t have an issue themselves. They weren’t going out of their way at all to find one another. I have an interest in connecting the community members though. What I saw from many years for myself and based on who others follow/are social media friends with is that the FB connections were far higher than the IG or tiktok ones.

Not all communities or links of people will be the same. For example if someone is a 20-something who went to university, they won’t run into any issues yet, they are too young and experienced the world mostly being with a ton of other cohort people.

> None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis

> What do you mean? Are you okay?

There is a well documented loneliness epidemic. Thought you were referring to it inadvertently by fawning over an old form of technology.

Yeah I agree there’s a documented loneliness epidemic. You used “your” the first time with me. Which I found strange. Looking now, I seem to have engaged in assuming bad faith. My apologies.

Tho no I wasn’t referring to it in terms of comparing the aughts with now. I do believe in the loneliness epidemic. However not that it has gotten so much worse in 15 years.

I just met someone at the park - they added me on whatsapp and invited me into a local community group.

We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much. The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.

The assertion wasn't that that model was somehow better or "more engaging" (as if that even means something is better...): it was that it is essentially now missing as Facebook pivots from being a social network to trying to do this other thing that is competing with their strategy to force people to "engage" more with their friends (which I 100% agree doesn't scale as well as engaging with dedicated creators).

TikTok is basically an algorithm to crowd source superficially engaging content in order to keep people staring at the app as long as possible to show ads (and propaganda) while the app hoovers up data.

True. Yet if you look at it from a UI perspective. The name of the "creator" is tugged away on the most left which in most cases you wont see as you swipe away. Yes, you might see the face of the person who made it, but there is a multitude of videos without personally identifying features.

Contrast that with LinkedIn, you see a post and the immediately visible information is the person who wrote it, what's his/her role is, and only then the content.

> people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.

I think social media gives a distorted view given anyone you see has little problem with it. I've met a lot of people (out in the real world) who express disinterest in starting/restarting because of all these little razor cuts and extremely vague upside. In the early noughts, a lot more people expressed regrets like limited computer skills or some other personal limitation as a reason they felt left behind or less involved instead of having a reason they chose not to opt-in.

What I see with my circle and Facebook isn't so much people having rage quit but just a lot lower level of overall activity.

The only reason I keep my Facebook account is because my wife uses it on occasion.

I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.

Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you can often look up a lot more than a phone number and address.

The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.

Do you honestly think that you can't find out a heck of a lot more about people in general quite easily than you could in the white pages? (Which also required you to know the town/city where they lived.) For one thing, if you own a house, that's a matter of public record. Fortunately most of the deep search tools have gone behind paywalls but it's still trivial to find out a lot about someone especially if they have an uncommon name or you already know something about them.

> Do you honestly think that you can't find out a heck of a lot more about people in general quite easily than you could in the white pages?

No. I never said anything of the sort.

Yes it's possible, but not as by design as a book delivered to everyone's dwelling with the express purpose of giving you some of their information.

There are so many services now that have data scraped from various sources - many of them charge money, but they're readily available, even with increasing privacy laws.

> The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it

There was never a big book with everyone in it. Maybe everyone in your city (more accurately, every household). But it was never even close to the scale of the internet. Linkedin has orders of magnitude more people than your phone book ever did.

There isn't? I still get phone books every year from my landline provider. I haven't opened one in over a decade, but I still get them.

Not really. I had to look up the addresses of 50 distant relatives for sending out a graduation announcement and it was almost trivial to find everyone (along with their past addresses and possible associates). It just isn’t on well-known sites.

For some reason before MySpace was high school friends websites, that bordered on stalking platforms. In 1999.

>Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

Like this? https://jasonrobinson.me/ (uses https://socialhome.network/)

> And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant

A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society.

Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.

“Old media” suffered far more from the competition by Craigslist and eBay, which drove away almost all their income in classifieds, which made up around a third to half of all income at average newspapers.

And yet… there just wasn’t any criticism of those companies at any scale comparable to what Facebook gets.

That’s evidende against this theory that journalists are somehow working for the commercial interest of publishers. Which was always quite silly anyway: if there’s one thing a journalist will always brag about, it’s how they screwed over their publisher with some story.

That’s an excellent point. For all of the scams and abuses that could emerge from Craigslist, there was never a concerted media effort to label the platform as dangerous or untrustworthy.

That's the image the media gave but this happened 10-15 years ago before the press turned on companies.

Craigslist was untrustworthy, ebay as well. The whole internet was untrustworthy. Things only became dangerous when non-computer users got a cell phone.

What's important isn't whether they're wrong or not; it's whether anyone cares.

As long as people are unwilling to pay for social media the Insta's and Tiktok's will have to make money with ads which leads to data collection.

Make no mistake the very fact that these services are free lead to their popularity.

I know it will never happen, but I would love a resurgence of micro-blogs.

All this talk of decentralised social media and all these new solutions, just to full circle back to self-hosted personal blogs.

I feel like in the tech circle they never left, but they aren't consumed by the general population.

Microblogs are _the thing_ just have always been "too early". Not sure _how_ this will work but I strongly believe that microblogs are the _end goal_ here.

I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms.

On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?

I don’t think self hosting can win either. As you’re saying. I do like the idea of everything like micro blogs not having to be on a central site. Though even that seems unlikely. It would be nice to have the format of blogs again where there’s different subdomains or domains and you can’t directly click thru to get to the rest of the “social media” bigger org.

I sort of described substack here but a bit more personalization and independence if possible.

is geocities.com available? i like being old enough to witness how back and forth the pendulum swings...

There is NeoCities. https://neocities.org/browse

Or just a personal webpage with a guestbook.

>Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers.

This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like ephemeral content(Snapchat), short videos(TikTok) etc.

Video was and still is huge opportunity and you could see that from the astronomical rise of YouTube since 2005/2006 till today. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and the second most visited website in the world.

Speaking of TikTok; the rise of TikTok was inevitable since Vine was also huge video opportunity but Twitter simple blew it away. If Vine had good leadership TikTok probably wouldn't exist or it wouldn't be as popular as it is today.

And also YouTube and TikTok are sort of hybrid social networks in a way that they are modern form of TV entertainment platforms because you can passively watch videos and get entertained nonstop without interacting with anybody. So they are not really at the same conceptual level as Facebook is.

>I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006.

Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.

> Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.

That's an entirely different thing than individual sharing private details of their personal lives.

Your business career is also your private life. Why would the whole world need to see it or anybody who uses the internet?

Your business career is your public life. You would want people to see it because they may want to work with you.

When you share your data on Linkedin you get part of the financial value of that data collection. This is different than any other social media platform.

You get fast, powerful and easy to use communication tools for free when you use Facebook and its family of apps. Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?

Yes, but the data collection is tangential to that value. With Linkedin, you get direct financial benefit from having recruiters able to search Linkedin's database and target you with opportunities.

>Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?

Is this actually the case? I've heard Whatsapp is popular outside the states (something about differences in phone plans, in the US unlimited SMS texting is basically universal) but it's definitely still in the minority here. Anecdotally I feel like each friend group here has a different, idiosyncratic method of text communication in the US. Some people communicate through SMS, others through instagram/snapchat, others through discord, or whatsapp, or facebook messenger, etc. There are some interesting trends in the distribution along age and gender lines too.

In Germany, it is absolutely the case, yes. We have unlimited SMS as well, but I think we didn’t have it back in 2011 or whenever WhatsApp launched.

Almost everybody is on WhatsApp. Groups for local stuff, extended family, parents of kids classes, whole school classes etc.

Some people are also on Instagram, but not as a first for communication.

Telegram is a thing, but more in working class circles.

Nobody uses Snapchat. Some kids might use TikTok, but hardly as a replacement for WhatsApp. It’s really that strong.

> The "people directory"

I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful.

> I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.

But how would you make as much money as FB does off a very useful tool?

Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate.

Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive.

FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of privacy and brain time. I would rather pay today from 1 to 5 USD a month for a service that works, where I can share my kid's pictures with my direct family and only them, with no ads.

Most people would not be willing to pay for this, QED

If people aren’t willing to pay for it, its either a social service or it shouldn’t exist. Facebook continued existence is subsidized by extremely lax regulation in the advertising industry.

Most people do not agree with your extreme opinion

At one point it was estimated that Facebook gets $40/month in advertising per US user - how do you then reconcile that with you only being willing to pay $1-5?

But that doesn’t mean an equivalent service cannot survive on just a dollar a month.

I think this is why youtube without ads is sooo expensive.

I make a difference between what FB customers pay for promises of brain time, and what the service FB provides actually is worth for _me_ (people are no customers of FB). $40/month/user might be what FB get from their customers. It does not mean that it is the value it is actually providing to its own end users (excluding ad afficionados if that exists).

There is also a difference with what it actually costs to provide the useful part of the service. Mastodon is open source, yes it requires hardware (virtual or actual) and operation, none of which is free, but the cost of these certainly doesn't match the cost of running+developing game changing (advertisment/recommendation) ML models and ultra high scale infrastructure. Running a mastodon server for a thousand users with acceptable availability, and no fancy ML or R&D, I think should be doable for $5.000 a month, yes.

* use the very useful tool to launch other platforms that do not take advantage of the social graph (that you can monetize)

* use the great social graph that you now have to create other useful tools that you can monetize

The problem I see is that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore. IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon.

The utopian future I would like for social media is if we had a protocol for a people directory social network. It would function in much the same way as facebook pages or your myspace page. Most users will just sign up for a service, technical users will have frameworks and API's they can reach for to build their own "custom" pages. I realize I just described the fediverse but seriously, fediverse needs to go mainstream.

I see this as a consequence of the overarching ideology of markets and capitalism standing in the way of humans exploiting the full potential of digital and internet technologies.

at this point this is a social problem to be solved politically

> IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon

It really is not a technological problem, it's a "how do you get everyone to sign up" problem, which FB has solved. I don't think we'll see another company solve this in a very long time, unless they hit the jackpot while really focusing on creating a USEFUL product for their users.

That said, there is a concept of friction for signups, and that's something TikTok does well with their UX. You open the app and are immediately in the app, no sign up. After using the app for a bit you can go and customize your username and such so that you're not a generic username, and you're able to find and be found by friends on the app, but that's optional.

>fediverse needs to go mainstream.

Mastodon has been around for more than five years, and the idea of decentralized social networks long before that. Email, from a user standpoint, was much like Mastodon: a protocol that you consumed with software of your choice. But it was never a great experience for the average user, then gmail made it a great experience. People switched very quickly.

The experience has to be first.

Just want to highlight that this is a very tech-focused perspective. "If we make it good enough people will use it!"

Also is there room in this utopia for people who want their privacy and secrecy? Will they be disadvantaged if they don't participate in this digital phone booth? My gut tells me yes.

Those that don't have Facebook are already disadvantaged in that way. They don't get invited to the party, they aren't told about life updates via the feed. But you soon self-select for friends that don't use Facebook and that do invite you to parties and tell you about things.

That same divide isn't going to go away, no matter the technology. (ofc replace Facebook with whatever app is popular with your group.)

Perhaps from your vantage point. My vantage point is more and more people are ditching the social sites for real connections again. A few years ago when privacy issue after privacy issue came out, and the revelations on how manipulated we all are on social media by algorithms, my circle decided to ditch social media. I was always the "pioneer" in this front, having ditched it around 2015 or so.

The craziest thing started happening when I got rid of it. I started getting these crazy old things called "phone calls." And people started sending out these really cool decorated cards called "invitations" that apparently come to my house through this really old but fascinating technology called "mail". Real life actual people started walking past me on my neighborhood road and inviting me to house parties or get-togethers again. I met so many wonderful neighbors since!

It had this amazing other side effect as well: it acted like a filter for all the events I used to "miss". Suddenly, it's as if the weight of FOMO was lifted off my shoulders.

But illustrative snark aside, I suppose its going to vary from circle to circle and group to group. My hunch tells me a lot more people simply tolerate social media because they realize much of society has hitched it's wagon to it, and they see this as an unfortunate thing, and it will take just one person in the group to break the mold.

I too see people in my circle ditching social media, but the transition seems to have been to messenger apps. People will message directly to each other, or in group chatrooms.

Yes I have definitely seen signal use increase by my very non academic estimate of 10x. I see a "so and so contact has joined Signal!" notification every few days consistently for a while now.

I don’t think they’re making an argument that it’s sufficient to attract people, but that it is necessary.

Obviously any sort of serious effort will need some sort of marketing or other social push, but you can market a pile of dog poop all you want and nobody will be interested.

Email and Mastodon have a similar issues in that they combine two different layers of functionality into a single protocol. The bottom layers (identity and social graph respectively) would be better served by not being tied to specific form of communication (the top layers).

If we could separate out these layers I think you would find that the user experience would be easier to improve and evolve more cleanly over time, with multiple formats and protocols being built upon a base abstraction layer.

I remember switching to gmail only because they offered 1Gb of storage, which at the time other email hosts were only offering for paid subscribers. In my circle this was the biggest reason to switch, not because the UX was much better than any other providers.

Storage capacity is a part of the eXperience story.

Before Gmail's groundbreaking 1GB limit, you had offerings like 15mb or 100mb from yahoo or hotmail. What that meant for your day to day experience would be that you would literally run out of space and then have to manually comb through your inbox to delete things you don't want. And if you wanted stuff, you had to harshly prioritize between treasured message threads.

These are all part of the UX

> that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore.

It wasn't profitable back then either, alas—which is why Facebook has repeatedly pivoted to less useful, more annoying, but more monetizable offerings.

Facebook takes in giant piles of money, it just doesn't have the growth wall street has come to expect.

"if we had a protocol for a people directory social network" -- back around 2004, that's exactly what FOAF was for (Friend Of A Friend). I set up mine, a lot of people did, there was excitement around the blogosphere for this, but in the end it lost out to walled-gardens like MySpace and then Facebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

This might make more sense implemented as personal servers. A linux image you own and run in the cloud somewhere, that has whatever server-side software you want (a blog, your important documents, maybe a discord or minecraft server or whatever) that is easy to move around from one cloud provider to another.

I know server-side software is traditionally hard to run, but there's no law it has to be that way forever (especially if the cloud hosting providers realized the immense untapped sales potential of regular people suddenly having a use for a cloud server, and underwrote some of the open source software that would make them more useful).

Of all the platforms today, linkedin might be the closest to that. Maybe that's part of why it's become so garbage - in filling a niche as a people directory its accidentally providing a half baked solution to the gap that used to be filled by old facebook.

> because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant

What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising.

Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits.

Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them.

But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on.

The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.

I thought I would love Facebook but apparently people don't.

My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures.

No one really shared normal likeable lifevents.

WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's.

And no people also don't care what I do.

People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour.

Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+.

Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example.

While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.

Or, like forums with off-topic sections. Slow paced, the shared interests are obvious, you can private chat if you want and you can join multiple forums to meet your needs.

This is only my opinion, but I think forums do everything necessary really, with the only difficult things to manage being:

- good moderation

- site maintenance

Which Facebook et al really fail at with the former. I also personally dislike how Discourse attempts to make forums more like chat apps.

How does Discourse do that? With their home page design?

specific niche forums foster good communities IMO. I've been on a rocketry forum for about 4 years and it's a very close knit healthy community. There's a forum called "the watering hole" for general off-topic discussion, i'm not there often but it looks to be a good place.

It also helps that the only ads/monetization going on are some banner ads from various rocketry store websites. The forum is run just as a service to the hobby and not to make money.

Google+ fucked up for a variety of reasons. If you had a Google Apps account, you couldn't sign up at first. You had to have an email address ending in @gmail.com. With that move, Google alienated their most enthusiastic users from the start.

When I finally was able to get a Google+ account with my Google managed email address, it immediately had me following some celebrity and it suggested following other celebrities. I use Facebook for the same reason I use(d) instant message protocols like AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. and now still use Facebook, Discord, Hangouts/gchat/whatevergooglecallsitnow, etc.: To talk to my friends, and to share stuff and organize events with my friends. No interest in using anything Twitter-like. So I didn't. Facebook also has surprisingly good private interest groups, still based around talking to people rather than celebrity/influencer culture.

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself.

I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately.

But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.

Does Truth Social have more people than the rest of Mastadon now? I thought it was mostly a dumpster fire. The SPAC stock isn’t doing well nor the insider behavior.

Personally I think Instagram (The core product, not stories or reels) is to today what Facebook and MySpace where back in the day.

Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.

Instagram just did a huge update I think a week or two ago that makes it more like TikTok and people are revolting because it went from "see what friends are up to" to constant ad spam, worse than before.

I always think FB/Meta is about to go the way of Myspace with a popularity drop off but I'm clearly biased as I deleted my account years ago and people still talk about using FB a lot.

This specific decision might actually be that bad and may get rolled back, but people have gone up in arms about Meta’s decisions since the wall was introduced and the news feed was introduced. Plus other features like the FriendFeed acquisition cementing the like button. These are all things that people assume are obvious near requirements for social media and some other Web 2.0 sites.

I was an occasional IG user and that update was really jarring. I figured alright, I guess I’m not an IG user anymore, and I uninstalled the app without much hesitation.

I think the ad spam was what did it. There was enough already, but it’s way over the top now. I had to constantly stop and check if I was seeing something relevant, as though there was never a long enough break from it to just enjoy my friend’s photos.

IG doesn’t have any of the people directory. It’s heavily focused on bigger brands, profiles, influencers, and seeing random stuff from these entities I have no personal relation with.

Facebook of old was like what the OP was saying. IG is only marginally like that with friends pic posts.

This is regardless of whatever tiktok stuff since I don’t use IG much for the same reasons as OP.

> IG doesn’t have any of the people directory

Maybe it's just my country but I can find anyone I know or work with on there by typing their name in.

Facebook was popular in the era when it wasn't used as a people directory however. It was used as instagram is currently until older people came in and the website became very commercialized.

I agree - the best memories of FB I have is when people I know used it to post updates about their lives, often via sharing photos. AKA what Instagram used to be like before Stories took over.

I don’t literally mean a people director but closer to that than what IG is. Are you referring gtfo Facebook pre 2008? That’s a small time period to look at since that’s when it exploded in popularity and would otherwise be a relatively quaint site and company if it stayed the way it was in 2006, 2007. It still remained close enough to the same for me until maybe 2012 at earliest.

I uninstalled Instagram this week because of all the video. Its not what it was when i started using it. Seems crazy that Meta can ruin FB and Instagram the same way at the same time. Bye.

> I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.

I imagine that's actually the point. IG has little need to build for the people currently on Instagram. They're getting that ad revenue already. Their goal is to get new people to join IG and trigger ad views, and TikTok proved that there's a huge crowd of people that can provide for that goal. They just need to expand the product to appeal to them. So that's what they did.

I get what they're thinking but it's very small minded of them to just assume the existing people will stick around if you change the fundamental product they signed up for.

I think it sort of used to be, but now it too, has passed on.

Once Instagram Stories started more and more real friends started just posting Stories clips and less photos and updates. Now my feed has all my friends just posting random Stories clips, and actual photos are dominated by advertising and influencers.

Shameless autoplug. What your friends are doing (and you are invited to join them) is the focus of my app Ferris.app

Not a real directory as it's limited to the core circle of friends.

Also no data-selling, ads.

We probably need a social media craigslist that implements the basic features you are describing and then is ok with keeping things running without the need for growth.

The problem with social media is that most people want to fill their free time consuming social media. But you have to have creators that want to create content for everyone else to consume. So you need to have some kind of addicting reward mechanism to get people to create content. (The simple upvote here and Reddit)

This.

Is such a business model like Facebook circa late 2000s simply not viable? How did Facebook make money back then before they turned "evil"?

They weren't making money, were they?

I guess it depends what you mean by Evil. Force-pushing ads and sharing updates about people you don't know because it could keep you connected so that you could see more ads, made them profitable. A free service that doesn't push ads can't be.

To quote Abe Simpson, "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you..."

Facebook late 2000s was a very utopian vision of the social graph with Obama staffers bragging about the same tactics that were demonized by Cambridge Analytica. If anything, Facebook was more evil because of the data leakage then. The way that they made money then was still ads.

as a FB sceptic and part of a Berkeley data science community, I visited FB on a group tour, in the first weeks of opening the Menlo Park Campus. We were told explicitly, with a ten meter wide screen in the back, that any analytics could run on their Map-Reduce stack for pay. The example was "people who bowl in the Minneapolis area" or something. Some nod to political or sexual extensions to that was implied but not explained. "You can run your code jobs on this data. We have customers now" the spokesperson announced to the Berkeley data science crowd of about 45 people. I regret not recording it on video.

Much later, after personally running away from anything FB, this Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, and a picture of Zuck and wife walking with the King of Spain was publicized, and a picture of FB COO Cheryl Sandberg on a tour of a US Aircraft carrier and the fleet admiral in dress uniform was publicized -- I do not know how these transitions were managed socially but ... ?? How could anyone not see this?

ugly, creepy.. against the whole FB consolidation here, from Day Zero.

Have you looked at Tumblr lately? It always sounds just like what people say they miss nowadays from social media. Its feed is chronological by default (for now), and it does allow you to customize your own page in a lot of ways. I feel it's inevitable that it'll become a soulless ad space like all others eventually, but it's not there yet.

They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day.

Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.

Yeah I very much agree about tumblr. I’d plug mastodon as well.

I think we basically do have social websites that work, are enjoyable and aren’t soulless.

A big question is why are people complaining about one platform when they could be on another.

Social graph lock-in. :( I use Mastodon and love it, but all of my IRL [weak ties] are on FB and IG.

[weak ties]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties

Tumblr puts an ad for the Tumblr app on your pages even if you put it under a domain. I don't mind plugging the platform I use, like the customized Posthaven plug on my blog, but I don't want an app install nag.

I think there's a substantial part of society who don't want to be part of the people directory.

I completely agree that the “people directory” isn’t coming back due to to social hesitation. And I think I stand counter and say it was an anomaly that it existed. It existed solely because it was new. People have different identities across the internet and it’s best to keep them separate. You don’t use your work email for personal stuff. You don’t use your LinkedIn account when you want to create a Tinder account for a reason.

I also agree that the “old media” trashed tech until people finally agreed it was bad. I think some of it’s justified but not all. I’ve long complained about the bias here. I think the shift of democratizing the voice of the people is only going to change society more (in the short term we may call this bad for democracy but I think it’ll be good in the long term). For example, no news site would have run a story about George Floyd, but thanks to social media we don’t need them to. The flip side is misinformation, of course.

I think facebooks drive to video is probably benign trend chasing. I don’t know if it earns them more but I’m sure they’re lowering ad value in the short term until advertisers figure out how to make good ads on it. I don’t have data but I suspect the “home page and FarmVille” era died on its own and the newsfeed was facebooks way of injecting new life (as opposed to the NF killing individual postings)

>because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

People may say they're afraid of big data, but it's just mindless repetition of something they heard and doesn't affect their behaviour at all.

70%+ of them are mobile users on a first party app and happily receive targeted ads.

Realistically, how many people use instagram etc. on a browser with an adblocker (especially on mobile), less than 1%?

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon. Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self.

Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server. Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.

"This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups."

I agree with the authors perspective that if Facebook and Twitter try and capture the TikTok market they will only in the end up hurting themselves. In fact the reason I don't use Facebook much anymore is because of the changes they have made...

When I login I may see a funny video of a guy falling in Texas (Who I don't know) or an attractive women in exercise pants doing somethings quasi provocative.

I am not coming to Facebook for national news, for TV 3.0 like entertainment... I am coming to check in with friends, family see some pictures of relatives and see what people have to say about what is happening in their life.

The further they move away from this model.... IMO could lead to further decline in the platform.

My two cents.

I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile.

I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook

>I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces.

People said you were wrong, not because you were technically wrong, but because what you said was dilute to the point of being meaningless.

All great things die. Look at the great companies of old: GE, Sears, IBM. They all suck now. One day FB, Google, Apple, etc will join them. That's the natural cycle of things

So just saying 'FB is dying' is like stating the Earth is dying because the sun explodes in a couple billion years. Yeah we get it... and?

Mean while though, during an economic down turn, they came in missed revenue by 1% while microsoft missed by 3%. They still make 20B+ dollars per quarter.

So like, what's your point?

Point taken. Ok, how about "Facebook faces declining interest in key demographics after years of explosive growth."

I've read young people say over and over again that Facebook is for old people. Becoming more like TikTok is not going to change their minds.

If you'd like to catch up on the conversation we had 4 months ago here it is:

Ask HN: Is Facebook Dying? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30860859

I found the conversation to be very instructive. Many people seem to agree with you that it is not dying. I'm not convinced (and I'm not talking about $, I'm talking about overall cultural relevance and interest in the platform. I'm sure they'll find ways to squeeze money out of old people like me. I've been seeing a lot crypto ads lately)

"He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying" - Bob Dylan

It seems like you've hijacked the definition of the word "dying" to justify an existentialist screed. People generally use the word "dying" to indicate that something is close to death, not that it will eventually die.

Nobody would look at a healthy young man on his first day at college and say he's dying. So no, the original point does not appear to be dilute.

Facebook groups and events is basically the only reason I use Facebook, and while it’s very anecdotal I’m not the only one in my also anecdotal network.

It’s not actually the functionality that works for Facebook, it’s the fact that people have a Facebook account that they check. As more and more people quit, it becomes more and more of a bother to continue using Facebook to organise things, but when they have 3 billion users, they’ll probably remain a good place for groups and events for quite a long time to come, unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has.

As others point out, social media sort of leaves a gap as far as being “the people registrar” or a modern form of the yellow pages. But as long as so many of us remain on there because it is what it is, then they can really continue to fuck around quite a bit before “dying”. I think it’ll be legislation that kills them in the end, because unlike other large American tech companies, Facebook doesn’t seem to have a plan that doesn’t involve making money off privacy data. Even though Google is obviously struggling with being an advertisement company first, they could potentially shift to other products, but what can Facebook really do?

> unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has

Which they've also hijacked... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

> unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has.

Unfortunately e-mail is slowly dying for normal users. Most apps are now emphasizing phone numbers, and some of them don't even allow E-mails to sign up.

> I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook

I can easily see this pivot lead to a short term growth, but I don't get why this metric is so blindly trusted, when it's clearly more complex. (If there is one thing I really appreciate about engineers, is that most of us understand trade-offs, and our null-hypothesis is that almost everything is a tradeoff. Growth is NO exception)

Concretely, Facebook sits on arguably the most valuable asset in ad-tech today: the most complete real life social graph that has ever existed. Secondary, they have been very successful with mindless doom-scrolling that drove up the value of their business like crazy.

Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000, and they've been spreading like crazy. Of course that takes away ad-views from FB. FB is in panic mode and going on a meth-like crunch to copy-paste-rebrand tiktoks engagement machine. This may seem sound, doom-scrolling makes a lot of money after all.

But here's the problem: there will be more tiktoks in the future, and the barrier of entry isn't insane anymore. Building a social graph, however, one that includes uncles and grandmas for the entire world? That's a LOT harder. If I were Facebook (and a cynical douche) I would weather out the storm, carefully learning from tiktok and others, slowly evolving the product while "respecting" (low bar) the current user base.

Now I have no doubt that FB and IG can pivot to become a worse tiktok and yet still call it a success, making engagement shoot up short term. But by doing so, they dilute their product even more. Lots of people, like me, have primarily left because of this ongoing pivot - others are less sensitive and stay, for now. But pivoting so aggressively is a very risky move. If 20% of the local pottery/yoga/parent group refuses to use fb, the next casual group will go somewhere else instead. At the end of the day, FB is making itself more and more replaceable.

> Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000

I don't think older people who were raised in a longer attention span world (without even flashy jump cuts on TV) will find short attention span videos appealing.

I could be wrong. One thing that would tell me I'm wrong is if there was a robust amount of people over 40 on TikTok. I don't have that data, but Facebook probably does.

Edit: Only a quarter of TikTok users are over 34 years old

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/tiktok-statistics/

I have observed almost the opposite. Sure, younger people are early adoptors but the older folks don't have a natural resistance and are easily hooked. People addicted to Facebook are increasingly middle aged.

That's another reason why I think fb needs to calm their tits and chill out a bit – sure, Tiktok is super popular at the moment but this level of addiction is something I expect younger generations to cope with better. It wouldn't surprise me if the tiktok reign will be short lived.

TV is a good example, because it had a similar effect on hijacking previously unexplored attention mechanisms. It's also a good example because it deteriorated into an irrecoverable ad-hell, yet younger generations found refuge in higher quality substitutes (Netflix etc) and now cable is dying slowly (as they should). Thanks to a modernized and relatively sane approach, tv as a medium is better and makes more money than ever. It speaks to the fact that in the long run, consumers will go elsewhere when giants feed them crap products and – importantly – by the time they do, the giants are unable to keep up.

Facebook needs to stop being afraid to launch new products.

They should have launched a TikTok clone as an independent brand.

Instead, they're falling into the Microsoft trap of "Everything has to be shoehorned into our existing userbase and products."

They did in fact launch a clone https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/launching-reels-on-faceboo... but it has not taken the world by storm.

The hard work is figuring what dethrones TikTok and building _that_

Yes, within the Facebook app.

Which was the point of my comment: Facebook needs to be more daring and launch non-Facebook brands for products that are not like Facebook. (Or Instagram, etc)

> Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction. This shift is not surprising given TikTok’s phenomenal popularity, but it’s also shortsighted: platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms.

This. I on occasion visit Facebook to keep up with what friends are doing. If they turn it into TikTok, I will have zero reason to go there any more.

It feels that we are thinking all of the social media the same, but in reality some of them are content platforms and some of them are social media and some of them are in between.

Facebook trying to become content platform like Youtube or TikTok is killing itself.

I don’t understand why they don’t launch a new app with a content focus. Why destroy what’s there when you could do both?

Because people will choose the content and use the original app only sporadically, hence it becomes unprofitable.

In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour.

Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are phenomenal and people are using them so creatively.

IMHO, the traditional social media giants optimized for profit only, destroyed any potential competitors and up until TikTok we have been left to terrible state of the social media.

If you recall, FB and others were involved in political manipulations and accused of spreading extremism.

It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists and the tech giants were blamed for spreading that in the name of engagement. At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.

No disrespect, but....Chinese spying company? It's free and you are definitely not the product, but your information and contacts and photos and videos sure look tasty to the CCP.

I'm not American, most of the people aren't and from our perspective FB and TikTok are exactly the same.

In fact, Europeans and British can positively say that FB had a substantial life changing impact due to personal data misuse and political manipulation.

It's one of the core reasons most Europeans would like to see their data protected and Tech giants held accountable. Be it American or Chinese or another one.

You might argue about EU/US alliance and say that CCP are the devil but the fact is, US is documented to spy on scale, have spying partnerships with US tech giant(Google for Snowden and WikiLeaks), rich history of organising coups and political movements and most importantly the political situation in US is also not stable and it's quite possible for Americans to elect EU-hostile president with questionable ties to Russian oligarchs like the last time.

The situation with TikTok might be a new phenomenon for the Americans but it's how the rest of the world has been living in the last 30 years.

Are you really trying to compare a dictatorship state to America? And I say this as as foreigner....you are creating quite the false equivalency here. But muh both sides....People need to stop looking at things in black and white.

> People need to stop looking at things in black and white.

How saying that USA is the absolute angel and China is the absolute devil is not a black and white but saying that USA and China pose similar risks is black&white?

Besides, a large number of Americans[0] are disputing the integrity of American elections, claim that America is ruled by a secret elite, claim that elections change nothing, claim that USA is about to be a dictatorship the moment gun control laws are introduced. Of course I don't believe in any of this BS but the movement of people who believe in this stuff is frightening and very weird things happen on the 6th of January in 2021 and things might change dramatically in near future. So yes, I do compare the USA and China in sense of a risk for Europe.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...

Comparing things that are equivalent is pretty pointless, because the outcome would always be the same: "they are the same". We compare things that may be similar but actually different. Comparing things highlights differences and commonalities.

> It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists

I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online. I'd bet at least 40% of Americans have views that if stated online would get them a white supremacist label and I bet the figure for conspiracy theorist is over 70%.

> At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.

Note: It wasn't that it became horrible according to some nigh-universally accepted standard, it just became horrible by the standards of those who (now) control discourse.

> I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online.

My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.

New fancy soapboxes have distorted our understanding of each other, deeply. They amplify, magnify, and otherwise inflate the sense that fringe ideas are more widely represented.

Agreed. It was hard seeing a professor whom I admired slowly transform over the course of the last ten years into a conspiracy theorist and alt-right content propagandist. He used to reliably offer the on-the-other-hand perspective, but knew what he was doing and generally kept a level head. Once his “devil’s advocacy” started getting him attention and likes on social media, it started to be more and more his focus until the persona became the person.

Very sad to see. He has fewer friends among his students and colleagues but a cadre of online followers gathered from who-knows-where.

> My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.

Duration/number of datapoints is less important than sampling. What is your sampling?

My own sampling is from talking to people next to me on trains around south east England. This is obviously not a completely random distribution, but it's much more representative than my friends, family, colleagues and online acquaintances.

Our filter bubbles are incredibly strong.

My sampling is diverse and big, in my bad opinion.

I'm in the US, born in New England, and have lived in five states throughout the Northeast, Texas, and the Northwest. I've spent a collective three years living in Germany, Switzerland, France (wife is from France). I have slept at least one night in every state in the continental US. I once hitchhiked across the US and back again, gabbing with every person I could find along the way. I lived in cities for about a collective decade, and in very, very rural settings (log cabin even) for a collective decade and a half. Lots of other stuff in between and on the sides. I communicate with diverse groups, in person and online, from right to left, nix to ms, fantasy to sci-fi, young to old. I'm a 'perspectivist', and am fascinated with the perspectives of others, especially those outside of my frame of comfort and reference. I try to push beyond 'convictions', to uncover 'opinions'; convictions are usually firmly rooted, while opinions often change. A person's background and influences are usually baked into their convictions, while opinions generally reflect where a person is in life, like the kind of music 'you're into right now'.

I was a line cook and an artist, working horrible minimum wage jobs for a decade, was homeless for a year (under a bridge homeless), started at community college, transferred to Harvard, graduated at the top, got prestigious fellowships, and now work in software development and live in a rural area that is within an hour of a big city. I still talk to everyone like they are my partner in life, I don't care what they look like or with which demographic they 'identify', or how long I have known them. I'm gabby - I talk to everyone - I make friends with everyone I meet, from the guy on the street to the gal at the grocery store, to the company leader.

Confession: I'm a thinker and writer in my free time. But I have tried to cast as wide a net in life, and have tried to engage people as people, for what I think is a long time.

My conclusion: we're being gamed. The people underneath are intact. Amazingly, when the game is lifted, the people emerge, largely unscathed, as testament to the endurance capability of our ancestral rodentia.

My sample and data have led me to hold this opinion rather strongly, for what it is worth, which is nothing.

Facebook was never a peoples directory at the start. It was similar to how instagram is now because you could only find your friends and other people your age in your area. Instagram keeps this by not being a peoples directory and thats how the original facebook users want to keep things.

From the perspective of Europe and Asia at least, the rise of the far-right and far-left was already in motion by 2006 and was catapulted by a combination of increasing tensions with Muslim minority groups and the Great Recession. It is almost a steady rise rather than something fueled by social media. The social media in these regions is probably too left-wing for the mainstream.

I have to disagree with that, snapchat was just as innovative if not more so in the early days of tiktok and musically in the space around camera filters and editing.

There are two big things that make tiktok unique. The for you page, and shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly. No other platform has been able to circulate viral videos as quickly as tiktok has proven to be able to, and the for you page, rather than encouraging people to actually follow individual accounts, means that people are actually seeing the videos that keep them on the app the longest (and in turn off other apps), rather than having to curate their own feeds.

I like Snapchat, though I never properly used to because I don't know anyone who uses it. I have been entertaining that app only because of its originality and I do appreciate their innovative spirit. I believe FB has copied their features and Snap continues to be an underdog.

Also, FB apparently was running VPN apps in disguise to monitor the traffic of the younger audience[0] to identify upcoming competition and crush it.

IMHO, this behaviour of the established players destroyed the innovation in America, lost it to China. I remember, at one point it became unfashionable to create new social networks or invest in them but it turns out, FB is not the end of history.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

> shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly

Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

While FB always focused on their vaunted friends graph, there was an entirely separate graph waiting to be discovered which had nothing to do with friendship:

i.e. A graph of people worldwide who have lipsynced (or danced) to the same tune. It's a clever way to inject novelty (and dopamine) into the system!

Seems obvious in retrospect, of course.

> Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

Also, shared sounds and music cross languages and boundaries more smoothly than hashtags.

So a Spanish song can suddenly become viral in Eastern Europe, or a Thai song become viral in Latin America.

> for you page, rather than encouraging people to actually follow individual account.

I like that Tiktok has two feeds.

A feed from people you follow and an algorithmic for you page.

I find this approach better when compared to IG and FB which combine two feeds in one.

They already moved from being this useful tool to keep track of friends and people you meet to being a noisy content platform. BUT, you can still use it (via messenger) to keep track of your friend, so people (including me) still use it for that. It is still a shame that they didn't preserve the old utility of facebook and created the noisy content platform as a separate thing.

Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists - they exist within an era and eventually become legacy/classic and irrelevant to the new youth culture.

No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.

which is why facebook was smart to buy instagram (checks notes) 10 years ago. Time for them to buy the next gen interface for socializing with friends for zoomers

People weren't happy with Instagram selling to Facebook, but the bigger problems and general drag of Facebook being Facebook didn't exist at the time. Now selling to Facebook is almost a surefire way to lose street cred. Snapchat famously said no to $3bn, and TikTok probably wouldn't consider it for any amount.

I really can't imagine any situation where a younger gen z kid finds anything Facebook owns cool. I think their window has closed, and as the parent comment says, Facebook can't do it anymore simply because they're Facebook.

> I really can't imagine any situation where a younger gen z kid finds anything Facebook owns cool.

Really? Things must be different now, I remember Instagram being the most popular social media platform at my high school.

I'm specifically talking about younger gen z... 14 and 15 year olds today.

I might be basing too much on a few anecdotes, but it seems Instagram is heading the way of Facebook in terms of generational "coolness." I suspect it's just starting to hit a wall similar to Facebook did. TikTok is eating all of it.

Oh, I guess. I don't really think most people care about "coolness" these days though, if they gave half a shit about privacy or security then they wouldn't be wooed by software like TikTok. I'd imagine most of them use whatever is ubiquitous, kinda like how WhatsApp isn't glorious, but almost everyone outside the US uses it.

My impression of the younger Gen Z is that they don't really care about internet optics. For better/worse, many of them developed motor skills after they learned how to use YouTube, and it's not uncommon to find them using the sketchiest of ad-infested websites just to watch Johnny Bravo. If Millennials are characterized as narcissists empowered by technology, Gen Z is a wave of rats trained to check off the Terms and Conditions box for their cheese. In large part, this is Microsoft and Apple's fault for designing computers so simple that a baby can use them. In Frank Herbert's prescient words, "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

All of this is to say, I think the average 14 year old would be equally excited to unbox an Oculus Quest and an iPhone. Even if they're largely different devices (even different price points), they're probably not concerning themselves with the ethical implications of owning a VR headset. Most of them will probably Google how to sideload Pavlov or VRChat on it within 15 minutes of turning it on. That's just my $0.02 though, perhaps things are different outside of the northeastern US.

I'd prefer that facebook just fade into obscurity, and also hopefully face some kind of consequence for the incalculable harm they caused the world along the way.

Meta might not be legally able to buy “the next big thing” in international markets. Neither the EU nor the US are particularly “friendly” to them right now, and pretty much anything Meta does in the social media category is going to run up against anti-trust regulation.

Instagram was probably the last time Facebook could have gotten away with that sort of thing in the North American and European markets. I’m being cautious to only include those markets because I’m not familiar with the regulatory environment elsewhere.

I don't doubt that this is the case to some extent, but I also think that good products (and apps are no exception), once they become popular, inevitably get ground into dust by the unending desire for unlimited growth at any cost.

Eventually bad managers make bad choices. Inventors dilemma happens, etc.

But iPhones are still cool

and iphone is a teenager

> Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists

I don't think this is necessarily true. All of these social media companies serve different purposes with a focus on different types of content. When a new content format appears, users will flock there until they either get bored or a competitor iterates on that format and provides a better experience.

The first era of mainstream social media was really kicked off by Myspace, which was overtaken by FB only a few years later. Though, I think attempting to draw parallels from that era to today is foolish. Myspace gave users way too much control which made their site completely unusable. The app was also just flat-out broken in many places. They drove their own users away. There also was no young vs old divide there, in fact, the average age of FB was probably higher than Myspace.

Instagram threatened Facebook with their focus on "good" photography taken in the moment, tagged to specific locations. Facebook quickly acquired them but both apps continued growing and retained much of the same user base for a long while.

Snapchat launched after Instagram and there were similar talks of them killing Instagram, but then Instagram launched the same functionality and overtook Snapchat, bringing many of those younger users into their network.

Now we are seeing the rise of TikTok with their top-notch recommendation algos and short-form video content. In this case, I think Instagram moved too slowly in cloning TikTok's experience/content, but it's still too early to tell what will happen.

As another example, take a look at Reddit. It's been on a steady rise since its inception. There was Digg at the beginning, but again, they (like Myspace) were responsible for their own demise. It was not a cultural battle between the young vs old. Reddit has maintained their existing demographic, while consistently keeping the younger generation engaged. In Reddit's case, they are the best aggregators of content so that's where people go.

My point is that this idea that younger users just want to use a different social network to define themselves or get away from the older generations doesn't prove out in the records. It comes down to different experiences that facilitate different types of content. If the existing players are able to improve on that experience that results in the same (or better) level of content, they can steal those users back (or in the case of Reddit, achieve such dominance that nobody comes even close).

It takes time. We haven’t crossed over yet but eventually Reddit will be massively rejected. It’s still young, give it about 5-8 more years.

20-year increments feel right.

Still, young people actually listen to 60s, 70s and 80s pop music.

I was careful in my wording to say the previous generation. It’s almost always uncool. For instance, 80’s music went out of style almost immediately when Nirvana came about. Then 10 or so years later some 80’s music was enjoyed ironically and now today the beat of it is preserved as “classic”. It’s OK for anyone to enjoy but it isn’t influential any longer.

I would add the distinction that the "classic" stuff can be cool, but with a caveat that they aren't enjoying it at the same time as the old-timers in the same venue. Retro 80's party with a bunch of twenty-somethings? Cool. Retro 80's party with a bunch of 50 year olds? Well, the young-in's wouldn't find that fun.

Right - the young people participate in the simulation of 1980’s culture and the 50 year olds in the reality. Although they use some of the same artifacts they are entirely different experiences.

Tiktok here does not force you to login for watching the videos (unless you want to like / comment / subscribe etc.. ). And also allows downloading the videos right from the app (if the creator has enabled download for the video), so I download the ones that are to be bookmarked.

This is in stark contrast to what the FB and Insta like companies do.

Since I don't login, I use multiple devices to access tiktok. And I noticed that the stream content is different on my phone (mostly used while traveling / outside home and contain news and semi serious random stuff), tab (mainly used in the bed and contain light funny contents) and computer (serious stuff - arts, tech etc..).

BTW - I am only a tiktok consumer and not creator.

Surely Tiktok will change to do exactly this in the future, that's what they all do.

I don't think they will. Tiktok is a creator platform. More audience is better.

Instagram has left a huge gap by forcing everyone to login.

IMO, Instagram and Twitter are using the wrong metrics which ignore non-login users. They focus on converting users to logged-in. They don't focus on delivering maximum value.

For downloading, I can see that go away though.

Twitter and reddit are doing this. I imagine youtube make it a pain to look at content as well if you’re not signed in

Reddit and YouTube don't require logging in.

When I say "not require logging in" means that there is a home feed with interesting content for non-logged in users

my smart, young hipster friends say tiktok does a phenomenal job of building tools that enhance creators and classify streaming content to consumers, neither of which fb does well. text is dead. spread the good news.

A good analysis. Whether you like it or not, Tiktok is a classic example of disruption. They've not only circumvented the moat of their biggest competitors, but made it a liability - FB & Insta can't just abandon the social graph without disenfranchinsing their existing users. Absolutely textbook innovation.

Is there innovation? Seems like Tiktok is just a more "evil" iteration of Vine.

The algorithm™. ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, had previously launched one of the most popular news aggregators in China, running on the same / a variation of the same algorithm (machine learning, etc. based afaik).

Thats why its taking off so much - just like ByteDance's other products. That AI or whatever it is is very, very effective at understanding what you want.

I think their core innovation is that you don't pick what to watch, and they see how long you watch it instead of if you actively "like" it. So with both "selecting" AND "liking" out of your active control, the algorithm can see what you ACTUALLY like.

Well not every attempt at innovation will catch on - luck plays a role too. But in terms of positioning it offers something distinct from YT/FB/Twitter/Instagram with short form video, a focus on entertainment, and like the article points out, it doesn't depend on the social graph. That puts it in a strong position vs the incumbents who are struggling to compete since they assumed customer value required other things. The innovation, whether conscious or not, was in challenging the assumptions and conventions of social media.

The trouble the incumbents have is how to compete since they can't just change their core products without a backlash. They need to find a new niche. More likely another startup will compete better and FB will try to buy them. This is just like old media's battle with 'traditional' social media.

lol, why do you think tiktok is evil?

seems the xenophobic propaganda is being successful. there isnt a single valid arguement that 'tiktok is evil' that doesn't apply even better to facebook or youtube.

I wouldn't classify it as "evil", but it's clearly a different situation from a geopolitical perspective than facebook or youtube due to its ties to the CCP.

i dont use tiktok, but i see often videos on twitter and youtube with the tiktok logo. Why does youtube want to copy tiktok when it clearly has already lost before it begun. makes them seem such losers

> Why does youtube want to copy tiktok when it clearly has already lost before it begun.

It's no sure thing for youtube, but it's worth trying. Clearly there is a demand.

Also, TikTok can't stay on cruise control. As they inevitably push to monetize, their UX will undoubtedly take a hit. A larger audience means more adversarial actors and trolls which could drive away creators. This has happened to nearly every social network.

I've heard (anecdotally) that the attention span of all the younger users has taken a dramatic shift south.

Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged.

Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.

Was there ever a time in recorded history where this was not claimed?

Both your statement and OP’s statement can be true at the same time.

The whole "younger generation bad" thing, yeah. But the specific claim of loss of attention span caused by internet / social media, no. And I think there is something there, because I don't just notice in in the younger generation, I notice it in myself. e.g. I find it very much harder to sit down and read a book than I used to.

Youngsters and modern times have been condemned since times immemorial

https://redd.it/7btv14

https://xkcd.com/1227/

People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers.

There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate.

There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote it down.

Doesn't mean it's not true. There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having so many easily accessible forms of distraction on hand may well be part of the problem.

> Doesn't mean it's not true.

It means we should be asking for more than anecdotes.

> There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not […]

We definitely are churning out geniuses of this caliber. The bar for being a famous genius is higher.

But what made the likes of Newton/Einstein/Beethoven etc. stand out is how much they achieved given the limitations of the times they lived in. The reason I picked those three is all of them were known for being able to devote huge amounts of dedicated time to their specialty (Newton especially, who from memory developed most of the ideas in Principia while under effective lockdown during a smallpox outbreak. But unlike those of us under lockdown in recent years, there were no electronic gadgets distracting him either.)

We have geniuses like the inventor of CRISPR, penicillin, deep learning, etc.

Fairly sure Fleming didn't have anything like the distractions around now when he developed penicillin nearly 100 years ago! The other examples seem to be very much group efforts, and I'd be impressed if the average guy or girl on the street could name the key figures involved. It's possible we've simply reached a point where all the breakthroughs that realistically could be achieved by individuals have already been made, or that in the world of art there's simply too many artists able to readily share their creations with the world for individuals to stand out to the degree great artists of the past did. But I honestly don't know - it just seems that with so many more of us with access to resources and levels of education prior generations could only dream of we should be able to achieve a lot more than we have been.

It's much easier to be a polymath when the subjects are an expert in are pretty relatively unexplored. Today people spend their whole lifetime studying a deep branch in a single field, because the tree of math/physics/bio etc.. is much much more explored.

>"It means we should be asking for more than anecdotes."

Does reason not suffice for the purposes of this online discussion? What is so hard to believe about the assertion?

We're not producing celibate boys

Strongly disagree on distraction being the cause.

I spent a lot of time around potential geniuses growing up, and what sticks out to me is how many of them had their lives all planned out by the adults around them before they were in middle school. If anything, I think the lack of those people is because we've decided original thought isn't a virtue in our geniuses: We'd rather stick them in labs and use them tweaking models than give them the time and resources to explore on their own.

They're also identified and sheltered early enough that some of them don't develop resiliency + become dependent on the accolades they get, which also pushes them towards taking safer options. Big, creative genius disrupts things, and we train our gifted to not rock the boat. Even trying to found a unicorn company and going the VC route to become rich has a 'set path' at this point.

I also would doubt our young Newtons and Einsteins are spending much time on TT, unless they're studying it. It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.

> It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.

"I understand and now no longer care" is one of the most freeing feelings out there.

Woah, woah, who says we're not churning out geniuses? The rate of scientific research is doubling every ~18 months[0]. The arts have had an explosion of growth and creativity in the last decades. Some of the best musicians ever are currently living. Some of the greatest revolutions in science are currently on going. I mean, we got the vaccine to covid worked out over a weekend!

[0] https://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-mont...

Sure, there are plenty of people born these days who presumably have the capacity for genius of the greats of the past. And yes, the sheer number of scientists working today, with access to knowledge and facilities far beyond what was available centuries ago is producing a stream of research and increased scientific understanding that is far greater than it's ever been. None of that invalidates the hypothesis (which is all I'd call it) that there'd potentially be more stand-out geniuses if we didn't live in a world with so many distractions available in devices we carry around with us all the time.

Wait. How can you disentangle the distractions of the world we live in from the result that there are more top-tier people working today? Saying that the variables are independent isn't enough. I'd say that the null hypothesis is that great communications technology is the root cause of both distractions and more 'geniuses'. You can't have one without the other to my eyes.

It's a testable hypothesis if you can get enough people to agree that their kids should be banned access to all such distractions (and such a ban to remain in place into adulthood). Obviously they'd still need access to electronically available information. Whether discussion forums/messaging apps count as distractions might be a grey area. I honestly don't know what the result would be, or how long it would take to determine the outcome one way or another.

That doesn't really sound testable to me.

I mean, theoretically, yeah. You could do the test if you had some sort of absolute tyranny over people, a ton of money, about 1000 babies to otherwise do nothing else with, staff to raise those babies according to the experiment, and the 20-35 years of time to wait for the experiment to conclude. I'm sure I'm forgetting some crucial variable to control for though.

But that test is never going to be run. Nobody has that kind of time, that kind of money, that lack of morals, nor that energy to devote to this. There isn't a review board on the planet that would allow for this to occur, for good reason.

Agreed, it's not practical or particularly realistic - I don't think 1000 would be enough either. Maybe 50k? I'm not sure we'd like the results we might get either!

Alternative (but not exclusive) explanation: the easy pickings for geniuses have been picked over, and it takes longer than before to achieve genius-level accomplishments as a solo prodigy. Neither Einstein nor Beethoven contributed to multiple fields like Newton or Leonardo DaVinci did.

[Though Beethoven—or any musician—may be bad example(s) to include here: music is a field that is much less objective in ranking quality of ideas compared to ranking impact]

Beethoven's influence on the Western classical music tradition isn't disputed by any expert in that field - it truly was outsized and unmatched by any other individual composer. I'd accept the Beatles probably deserve the same recognition re popular music. It's fair to wonder how transformative they would have been if they'd existed in an era of Tiktok, Tinder and Snapchat.

Beethoven (or the Beatles)'s influence was not what I disputed. Rather, I dispute the assumption that the fact that they are the most influential automatically means they are also the best or most innovative.

I don't see it as a debate about "best" or even really "most innovative", just about individuals (or pairs in the case of Lennon/McCartney) that achieved a level of greatness (in terms of what contributions they've made to human knowledge/creativity) that logically you might expect to see a lot more of today given the vastly greater number of humans in existence now.

I wonder if "levels of greatness" is a relative quantity. If fourteen living composers are objectively as good as Beethoven/Lennon/McCartney (as one may expect with a much larger population), none of them will be recognized as great as Bach.

Anecdotally as a zoomer ('98, so I guess that's technically just on the precipice of being a zoomer), I definitely feel like a lot of my friends and colleagues my age have some form of attention deficit disorder, myself included (I've got pretty massive ADHD, but it mostly doesn't affect me other than making me hyper to the point of being annoying to others around me with my constant fidgeting and shifting). It's not a small sample size either, and all of us have had technology as an extremely integral/central part of our childhoods. Hell, I've been playing ADHD-fuel video games since I was 7 years old and I continue to do so, I really doubt that was good for me lol

I don't get the impression from talking to older folk that there's as much ADHD going around. You could argue this could be just due to awareness and older folk not getting diagnosed for it, but I think I'm pretty good at sussing out people with ADHD and similar disorders, and it's definitely mostly people my age I've noticed having it, at the very least my generation has more obvious and serious symptoms of it.

I love tech, screens and all that jazz, but I think it has a massive impact on the young brain in a way we haven't really fully studied yet, and even I'm fearing for my 4 year old nephews and their malleable brains, considering they've got access to the same type of tech I've been obsessed with, just at a younger age than me.

Two issues may be at play here. Both tech and Medication Madness,

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2492547.Medication_Madne...

I agree it seems more prevalent in your generation. We are quicker to diagnose with pills, perhaps due to their availability and our lack of understanding about long term effects.

I think this is true in the US (from the stories I've heard/read about at least), I grew up in Southeast Asia though, there isn't much of a culture for over-prescribing (or prescribing anything really :p) people medication there. I've never even been medicated for my ADHD, and only 1 or 2 of my friends have as well and that was well after they turned 18.

I think tech really does have a bigger impact than we'd like to think, and certainly prescribing kids things like Ritalin at young ages when they're naturally a bit hyper definitely doesn't help either.

> I think this is true in the US (from the stories I've heard/read about at least), I grew up in Southeast Asia though, there isn't much of a culture for over-prescribing (or prescribing anything really :p) people medication there.

Yes, in some ways Asia has the opposite problem, not prescribing strong enough meds for emergency situations.

> certainly prescribing kids things like Ritalin at young ages when they're naturally a bit hyper definitely doesn't help either.

Yeah, I don't get this. Kids can't sit in class all day, with two parents working and too tired at home to bring them out after hours. People need exercise for their brains to work.

Curious, what video games?

These days Vermintide 2 with its endless hordes and mechanical skill ceiling have been drawing me in (around 700 hours clocked so far). Feels like a game tailor-made for people with ADHD, considering there's barely a millisecond of gameplay with no action, at least on the higher difficulties

As a kid I would switch a lot, but God of War and the Devil May Cry series drew me in, for similar reasons to Vermintide these days. Was also partial to some Unreal Tournament and Quake multiplayer, I think highly mechanical games tend to work great for restless people like me since it's a good outlet for my fidgeting ticks!

All of a sudden everybody has short attention span but books sales still didn't drop to zero.

http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/1159.jpeg

Looks like it’s dropping anyway. Is there a more updated graph?

Huh? Ebooks are still books.

If you cherry-pick anecdotal complaints from the last 3000 years you can claim "People have been saying that for centuries" for any topic you want.

The reality is that there is a huge dopamine industry trying to fuel additive consumption including social networks and video games.

There is ongoing sociological and psychological research showing that decreased attention span is real.

Why default to blaming the students/employees?

The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.

I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers are doing to keep students engaged and feeling motivated by what they do.

David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" comes to mind as a well written critique of the kinds of jobs you seem to be describing. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...

Sure. But there are also plenty of very necessary jobs which are not permanently engaging.

Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough.

All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.

I think in all your examples aspects of the work may indeed be incredibly boring, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately rewarding, fulfilling, or motivating.

At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.

Thanks for sharing this. I just spent last 10 hours reading it, but I need to stop to get some sleep now.

Not every one, and maybe not even majority, of our actions can be "engaging" and "motivated". When you finish the school and start working, don't expect that all work will be engaging or that someone exists in the company to motivate you. Probably nobody is engaged while doing grocery shopping or running errands. Deep work? It is _not_ fun, trust me, but often very rewarding _in the end_.

> The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.

I disagree. A business isn't a summer camp or a YMCA, and while schools should obviously help a student to find their own way, it also exists to instruct without the teacher being required to act like a tik tok influencer in front of a class of 30+ students.

What with the constant infantilization of employees or students in US? My boss or my teacher aren't there to entertain me like I'm in a daycare.

I’ve heard people refer to work (half jokingly) as “adult daycare.” At face value, I dismissed it, but if you think about it from a societal perspective, it’s not completely false. Most of us are toiling away so that society keeps running. It’s like being in a fiefdom and our overlords need to supply bread & circus for our pleasure- difference being were being issued tokens to find bread & circuses on our own.

My personal opinion is that this somewhat leads individuals to become entitled and less independently driven. And where does this end? People should be able to dig into things that are not always rainbows and unicorns. Inspiration is always nice though, but I don't like the idea of being spoonfed and just wrapping everything in nice shiny packages.

I don't think we need to think of it on the basis of blame at all, on the societal level. Individually, I think you have a better life if you have or learn conscious control of your attention. But on a large scale, if the population doesn't have immunity, it is a problem to deal with somehow. Either by "engaging" or changing the structures of institutions. But we have to have some methods of doing this, which are hard to come by when the problems are new.

The methods of engaging me employed by modern video games and fast-cut video platforms seem off-putting to me. More importantly I don't see how we can do anything meaningful when communicating like this. Life is largely search, not only exploitation of rewards.

If I was a teacher maybe I'd come up with some strategy, probably a compromise, but don't treat it as a thing they don't do just because they're lazy. It's like expecting that all people will deal with smog by designing and building their own air cleaning devices.

Hmm, we kind of did deal with smog by requiring everyone to get their own air cleaning device (catalytic converters). They didn’t have to design and build it themselves though.

When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.

I don't think that is necessarily true.

If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube.

The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1].

Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80.

Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see).

I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends.

There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication.

Everything else has been in the single digits.

So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale.

But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching.

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

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

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIF7ZLbl_FM

This just reeks of entitlement. “Entertain me and engage me! Let no moment of my life ever be touched by confusion or struggle! Spoon feed me everything I can ever want or need!”

Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better figure out how to learn what you need to know, whether it’s engaging or not.

As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.

The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.

Don't worry about me. I work very hard, made it through difficult programs at top schools, made (and continue to make) significant contributions at leading companies and my compensation is probably top 0.01% in the world.

I'm familiar with hard work and struggle, having come from nothing. In fact the only thing that was handed to me was values around education and how important it is - I still believe in that deeply.

I still disagree with your framing.

Let's take this example:

> As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.

You don't see the problem here? Losing talent is not a winning strategy. If I'm a company leader, I take it as MY responsibility to create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work? There is none. Having employees that are working purely from a place of fear and not being able to pay bills is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

In short - I will bet against your version of leadership any day. I think it's anti-leadership and I would love to have you as a competitor company.

> The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.

I don't disagree with you here. We're in complete agreement. I just think this point gets over-emphasized and my original point doesn't get talked about enough - which is why I originally commented.

> Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot.

Also want to respond to this. I agree with you here as well. However I think there is a distinction between school and education. It is the environment of school that I'm talking about in particular and the way some subjects are taught (History is a pet peeve of mine. As an adult, I LOVE history and learning about history - I do it in my free time. In school, history education is fundamentally broken IMO).

> create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work?

Working towards goals that are meaningful doesn't mean that you will be entertained and engaged with fun things to do all the time. Often quite the opposite. Personal growth and bettering your life also entails doing things that may not be very engaging.

If you focus on attracting people who want to be engaged and spoon fed and will refuse to do any work that they don't find immediately rewarding, sure, I'll be happy to compete with you.

I don't know where you got the words "entertained", "fun things to do all the time", or "spoon fed" from. I didn't use any of those words and I think we actually agree that meaningful things doesn't equate to parties all the time.

When I say engaged and meaningful - I mean it in the purest sense of the words, whereas you seem to equate it to "unserious".

Back to concrete questions: Are business leaders and educators presenting problems in a way that people connect with and see the value of? Are they providing an environment that makes people want to work hard and makes them feel empowered to take on difficult challenges?

Take History education for example. I'd say the answer to the above questions are "no".

* Most students who take a History class in a typical American school don't see how memorizing dates for tests connects to anything meaningful in their life or understanding of the world.

* I'd say educators don't or can't spend much time or effort connecting the dots or presenting information in a way that inspires people to ask deeper questions.

Instead, the focus is on rote memorization in preparation for flawed standardized state tests which themselves serve as the basis for obtaining federal funding to run the school itself.

Not to mention teachers themselves are underpaid and under-resourced while the students are forced to wake up at 6am (often not getting enough sleep) to catch the bus, sit in uncomfortable chairs for 8hrs a day with no agency, and then we're surprised that they're not excited by people talking at them all day?

Put another way, let's say you show up to a restaurant that serves shitty food, has a shitty environment, and the server get your order all wrong - you pay for this with your time and money. Do you think it's reasonable for the head chef to complain that customers are ungrateful and should be happy they got food at all? If the restaurant down the street takes the care to get all these things right, are customers entitled for choosing that restaurant every time instead?

Yes, it would be really nice if every teacher could be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society or Joe Clark from Lean On Me but that just isn't the case and it isn't ever going to be the case.

Work is work and you can choose to engage yourself with it or not. Obviously, employers should not mistreat their employees, but ultimately they're all there to do whatever it is the business does and the point is to all succeed together as a business, not to nurture the personal growth of the employees.

If a server can't be bothered to make sure an order is correct the customer doesn't care whether the environment was sufficiently engaging or not, they only care about their order being right.

It's not that long ago that most people's "job" was growing enough food to survive. Nature didn't care if you found this fulfilling or engaging, you either did it or you starved. I can guarantee that if your life and your family's lives depended on growing enough potatoes to last through the winter, you'd be very interested and engaged in how to grow potatoes. It is an incredible luxury that we can even consider things like whether we feel engaged or meaning in our work.

There's meaning to be had in all honest work that serves a purpose. It's up to you to find it. If people are going to sit around and passively wait for someone to "inspire" them, they're either going to be very unsatisfied with their lives or fall prey to the first charismatic huckster that comes along. Nobody else can tell you how to find meaning in your life, you have to make it for yourself.

> As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.

Now all the employees have moved on and we have a labor shortage. Now what?

Then we as a society just live without that job being done.

If it’s really important, the people who want the job done will do it themselves or increase the pay enough for someone to want to do it.

One reason to at least first suspect something other than educators is that education hasn't changed all that much in a long time. As far as I can tell at least the way elementary school and high school worked when I was in them circa 1970 is the same way it had been working for at least 20 years before that and the way it continued to work for the next 50 years until we had a year of pandemic disruptions.

When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.

From this article[0] it seems the claims about attention span come from an unreliable source.

Given ‘kids these days’ have been cited as being disrespectful to their elders for thousands of years[1], I wouldn’t be surprised if the attention span is actually different between today’s Zoomers and a teenage boomer/millennial/X.

0: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790

1: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916

They probably said this about paperbacks.

kids are in school 9 hours a day, 5 days a week for 12+ years. if we are not using that time to facilitate developing their attention spans then the blame lies solely on the educators. if kids aren't focusing in school, first and foremost look at the content and ask if any of it is actually engaging or meaningful. in my experience we largely dedicate them to shuffling around paperwork for which their greatest possible reward is a gold star and... more paperwork. we rob kids of agency or any sense of purpose and then snipe at them for not being sufficiently engaged in imp math 4.31, section 12, worksheet 29

the rudolph steiner/waldorf model is kooky in a lot of ways but one thing i do believe they got incredibly right is that they constantly have kids making actual things with their hands in the real world and all the technical concepts are buried within a grander narrative. also they let kids actually go outside.

Or maybe the concept of developing an attention span is nonsense

I think we are in for big problems. I graduated from college in 2017 and my adult classmates couldn't even pay attention in class. If adults are hooked then children stand absolutely no chance.

You're assuming they could in 1987

I'm assuming it was easier.

The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military.

Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017:

> Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The faculty is expected to somehow drag them through the academic program until they manage to earn a passing grade. As a result, professors have lost hope and faith in the entire Academic Board process

And this is supposed to be the most prestigious institution in the armed forces, the people who will have nuclear weapons in their hands...Chilling. That's how the West ends up with leaders who do not know how to lead, reporters who do not report, officers who are clueless about real war, and diplomats who are incapable of being diplomatic

Nit: Nukes are under the Air Force. So the Air Force Academy would be the one to worry about. And they are having similar problems to West Point. But yes, any nuclear 'go/no-go' would go through the joint chiefs and would include all branches.

Is that a problem of shortened attention spans pervading the entire populace or the overall quality of recruits going south thanks to politicians who insist on using them as muscle for unnecessary wars?

Probably because class is boring. People are happy to watch three hour criminal psychology interrogation videos on YouTube. It's the educators who need to change, not the students.

I've learned a lot more on YouTube than I did in a classroom, and I don't buy the idea that reading is somehow a superior form of learning than video.

I have a friend who is just at the end of finish her university degree in Germany in a sub field of economics. She cannot calculate with fractions.

She can also not write a 10-paged paper about shallow topics. I don't know what she can do tbh and I am really not trying to be arrogant or shitting on her. She uses her sister, who is smart but easily manipulated by younger sister with big pleading eyes, as a ghostwriter to pass all exams during Corona.

And she really isn't the only one. Some universities are incapable of guaranteeing a minimum baseline of quality of their graduates.

I've (also anecdotally) observed this as an employer and in social settings. It's almost as if there's a correlation between being a heavy Tiktok user (who are predominantly pretty young) and having trouble focusing. It feels like a more advanced case of what happens to me when I use my phone a lot for basically any reason.

I feel like I started this way (in middle school and high school), but grew out of it over time. Basically had a video game addiction and could not for the life of me long-term-goal anything outside of school.

I think eventually I found that these short-term sweets are quite unfulfilling in the long-term, and now enjoy less immediately-stimulating hobbies like fitness, reading, learning, etc.

Hopefully people can grow out of this as they age.

think this is the new "opium" war that China engages in, our minds. Reduce the young generation to become emotional, depressed from dopamine fatigue, reduce their attention span and they have zero chance of rebellion.

hmmm yes but its a different type of addiction. In video games you still had to pay attention and at worst you'd develop some type of muscle memory or familiarity with a level but you were still focused on the game for hours.

TikTok and other short term media seems to have disastrous consequences for the young developing minds. Your setting up your brain to focus in short bursts and it immediately expects a dopamine hit.

I think we are already seeing signs of this amongst the Z generation, mental illness and well-being is reportedly lowest out of all demographics, and its puzzling why policy makers aren't taking note of this.

If I wanted to make the young generation of a hostile nation weak, ineffective, this is how I would do it. Create something that appeals to them, and turn the into dopamine fiends. It's no different than creating addicts that relies on other substances but because nothing is ingested, this type of neural behavioral programming is not seen as urgent.

I'm glad I don't have kids, I would be so stressed out about them in today's world. It's a completely different environment than the one we grew up with.

I have heard that (anecdotally) every 20 years or so

Just accept that the world is moving as/to a much faster iterations. Nowadays most companies are trying to be as efficient as they can (JIT model, etc), leaving less room to relax (Amazon of course).

In software sector, current ci/cd makes deployment and releases very fast and more often, as opposed to monthly/quarterly patches in the past. Newer technologies makes development faster and more efficient.

There are more contents being published than humanity can consume at a time. Messages are instant and distance is almost meaningless in face of internet. At the same time media providers are researching the best way to increase engagement.

TikTok is pretty diverse. I get zero view / like videos. Facebook got tiring all anyone did was call out / be offended / be outraged. Nothing fun anymore . TikTok has a surprising amount of fun stuff.

Their algo is super reactive at times with the right threshold of tuning for expanding/exploring new content. It’s also great at leaning back into familiar stuff.

Overall it’s a really well done ML model.

I actually worked briefly with an engineer who claimed to have seen the inner workings of the TikTok algorithm when she was consulting for them (she was a software engineer and mathematician), and I was very surprised to hear her say that there was no ML involved in the algorithm! Of course, I'm not sure I believe her, but it definitely raises the question of whether an algorithm of TikTok's caliber is even possible without ML.

Hand crafted recommendation algorithms are on par with current ML offerings if not better - but they take much much longer to develop.

Each video is node. Figure out where to add edges to existing content, graph theory some shit and tune for similar content maximizing viewing time of short video clips. No ML necessary. Of course, given the magic ML sometimes seems to be, they could certainly be using it but the inputs and outputs are remarkably simple if you get the data structures right. To be clear, I'm not saying it's easy, just that ML's not necessary.

It's all if-then statements, like "If this video has a bird in it, then show it to people who like birds." No ML needed /s

You jest, but at this point YouTube’s recommendation system sees even less complicated than this. Just random videos from years ago will one day become blessed by the algorithm and receive millions of views.

YTs algorithm now just seems to amplify very, very small fluctuations in view counts. 3 people just happened to watch the same video at the same time? It must be trending! Shove it in front of everyone. It’s like Google has used all of machine learning to recreate taking a derivative.

TikTok has its share of enraging material if you go looking for it. The genius of their presentation is it effectively doesn't exist unless the algorithm decides to show you that content. When presented with that content, if you scroll away fast enough, it won't be presented again.

You can also long-press on a video and say "not interested" if you never want that stuff again.

> if you scroll away fast enough

I love that quote, its like being in the jungle and if you can't run away fast enough you'll be attacked by the flesh eating bugs.

That's exactly what it was like for me. I played with it for a couple of months. I had a tendency to frown at, SMDH at, rubberneck some dumb videos for a half second too long it seems. That magical FYP of great stuff never happened for me. I got like 70% stuff that makes me... huh, I don't know what the emotion is, but it's negative. Irked maybe.

At any rate I ultimately decided I absolutely do not need any part of TikTok in my life.

It's pretty pathetic how the algorithms were supposed to be this passive thing that just worked and if used properly would be showing people what they want to see. But instead it was so obvious how it works that people became very aware of it and change their behaviour to not give any bad input into the algorithm.

I don't know how many years it's been now that I pop into an incognito window to watch a YouTube video of which I don't want similar videos suggested to be for the next 3 months. Tiktok is the same, where if you see something that doesn't interest you, you have to not only not like it, but also don't give it too much attention or that will be taken as a sign that more of that will keep you more engaged.

Seeing it from afar, basically just Libs of Tik Tok, it doesn't seem that fun. (Although I guess the point of that is to highlight extreme stuff.)

Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction.

I don't know why the author didn't make the obvious connection here. TikTok's emphasis is not on distraction, but on video. TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.

I think the shortness of videos hijacks the dopamine system hooking users thanks to constant, fast-moving novelty. I doubt they'd have been as successful with long-form, ad-free videos.

I think TikTok’s success is based on: (1) far superior UX, (2) showing content from anyone as the default, giving them a large pool to draw from and avoiding the chicken and egg problem, and (3) an excellent (probably quite simple) ML loop that just throws video at you until it finds something you like.

TikTok feels like an intense drug hit compared to Facebook. It’s easy to lose time to it, a LOT of time.

I didn’t think I’d like it until it figured out I enjoyed DIY / makers videos. Then 30 mins went by before I realised and deleted the app.

I think TikTok's creator fund has led to quite a large number of influencers across many interests and categories. Perhaps seeing the success that Vine failed to largely capitalize on.

TikTok is going to eat away at other platforms even more once they increase the fund, and it looks like they have plans to do just that:

https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/introducing-the-200-millio...

Over 1 billion dollars in the US over the next three years.

One common complaint from creators I watch on YouTube seems to be that the fund isn’t high enough for them to do TikTok full-time.

So currently the flow is:

Build an audience on TikTok, have that audience follow you to YouTube where ad revenue reigns supreme.

One day that flow will just be to build an audience on TikTok.

> TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.

There's nothing legacy about long videos and it's not television that introduced them.

I long stopped be a user of Facebook.

In the beginning I liked the easy way it afforded me to keep in contact with friends and acquaintances. Then it included more and more "other" stuff, and I just lost interest in it. Shame really. In the beginning it was so useful and I honestly did not mind being shown some ads in exchange for that.

But now my data would be used not only to selects ads but also the other content, blurring the difference between what is an ad and what is "content". Facebook lost its way, and it looks like they're not looking for a path back.

I log in to Facebook about once a year, and my feed is just a panel of outrage. It's exhausting just thinking about it. But I do genuinely miss the early days when it was just the stuff my friends and family were doing, a great way to keep in touch. But no more.

i use facebook in a write-only mode. I just post pictures of various life events ( vacation, bdays, those kinds of things) for my family to see. I don't think i've ever gone to facebook to consume content.

edit: well, i do goto facebook marketplace when looking for things to buy like tools or computer parts.

I could never get Twitter. I remember friends being excited by it, but to me it was just adding short text to a page that probably nobody is going to see anyway. Then Instagram - I couldn't get that either. I put my photos up and what? I could do that on a forum with people with common interest. Eventually forums got closed so I realised you can add a # with the topic you photos / videos are about. But this is so limited and there is no guarantee people who are interested in it are actually going to see (because algo won't show them). Then I installed Tik Tok to see what's the fuss about. So it's clearly aimed at people with short attention span. It was entertaining, but you can quickly catch the patterns of a typical Tik Tok video and it becomes boring. Basically the same themes just different people, locations and music. I couldn't watch that. Then Facebook filled the niche of forums with their groups, but this is a dumpster fire - they hide comments, posts are not coming up chronologically and so on. These platforms are not for you to learn anything or enterntain you, they just want your money.

Facebook was just a way to talk to your friends and replaced Yahoo! Messenger, except that you could find new friends your age in your area as well. This worked because the rest of society wasn't aware of Facebook. LinkedIn might be a better candidate for a personal directory.

Twitter and Instagram are both ways to connect to people you do not know, but the former is genuinely about finding people to which you share some interest, whereas the former is still mostly about adding friends that you already know. Instagram replaced most of the functions of Facebook that I described in the first paragraph.

TikTok is basically the video version of Twitter with a good algorithm that finds new content you might like.

The author of this article is Cal Newport. A computer science professor and the author of my favourite non-fiction book: Deep Work. It's the one book I recommend to any knowledge worker.

Nice to get his perspective on this topic.

With the decline of Instagram, and Facebook's like of vision and product, I wonder if it's time for a new site to share pictures (and specifically not video since it seems to be cursed) with friends.

I see people uploading pictures to Instagram less and less each day, where they'd have over a hundred at once before, but it's not that they don't want to, it's just that the app feels too complex and repelling.

For Twitter, however, arguably the most important event of 2009 was not these publicity bonanzas but the introduction of the retweet button... As with Facebook, the larger that Twitter’s social graph grew, the more attractive the network became. Pretenders to the short-message throne, such as Parler or Gab, struggled to get traction, as their networks lacked sufficient size and numbers of influential users to compete in a battle for attention. By 2011, Twitter, following in Facebook’s footsteps, passed the milestone of a hundred million users.

While discussing the time period from 2009-2011, the article claims thats Gab and Parler "struggled to gain traction", but those services didn't launch until 2017 and 2018.

TikTok is crazy addictive. I’m in my 50s and I watch it for an hour when I wake up and an hour before I sleep. It’s entertaining as hell but I know it’s bad for me.

The fact that Instagram is copying them is sad.

My 50s are still a long way ahead of me and yet I didn't last 10 minutes on tiktok.

I check it out every few months or so when there's a new TikTok article on the front page of HN, and I can never understand it. All I see is 20-something nobodies dancing and making faces in front of a camera. I'm in my 40s and it's just not for me.

Don't forget the obnoxious robotic voice plastered over every video. I only come across TikTok videos on Reddit, but the moment I hear the voice I move on.

It's like a hyperactive Netflix. Instead of bingeing taking ten hours, it takes ten minutes. I'd suggest searching for subjects you're interested in, and "liking" videos that appeal to you. After the app learns your preferences, maybe about 75% of the feed will be related to topics that appeal to you. .

Topics yes (or rather, sort of), the content, no. For me at least.

As a late 30s individual, there's still plenty of niche communities to be pushed into once the algorithm figures out what people like us actually like.

I haven't seen a single "20-something nobodies dancing" video since the day I downloaded the app. All I get on my feed is DnD stories, interesting math, physics, and history facts, and the occasional standup comedy routine. Exactly the sort of things that keep me, specifically, engaged for far longer than I would like everytime I open the app.

Do a search for your actual interests, quickly swipe past the random things that pop up that you don't like, and soon, after a few days of this, you'll begin to see what tik tok's actually about.

> Do a search for your actual interests, quickly swipe past the random things that pop up that you don't like, and soon, after a few days of this, you'll begin to see what tik tok's actually about.

Or, like.. don't. I mean, great that you're having a blast, but this is a literal endorsement to "design your own skinner box". It's small comfort to be able to choose the colours of the bars on your windows.

I've had multiple conversations about the enjoyment of cultivating your algorithm on tiktok.

If you don't use the app the way it's intended, you won't get the best experience. And since most people are actually aware of how Tik Tok works, then there's not much of a point of complaining about Tik Tok's lack of "interesting" content for you if you're not actually willing to engage with the software.

Use it for longer and it will eventually learn what you like. It’s full of small communities, like Reddit.

As another comment said, the more you use it the more it understand what you like and it gets better, and more addictive.

When I first started watching TikTok videos, I got the videos of 20-somethings dancing to the same song over and over and over. It was annoying. But now my "feed" is largely chefs making interesting dishes, like-minded people with opinions on politics (yes, I know echo chambers are dangerous), wood working, lawn care and pressure-washing videos for that dose of satisfaction, and then your random 10-second bytes of this generation's "America's Funniest Home Videos".

I don't watch every day, maybe a few days a week. But when I'm done watching, I'm usually grinning and feeling like it was time well spent, emotionally.

To each their own.

I've heard this from various places, but it doesn't work for me. Maybe I'm "unlearnable" or something. I spend a couple of hours on it, get tired of it because it's not appealing to me, come back a few weeks later, do the same thing, and nothing improves.

Or it somehow comes to understand that there's certain general topics I'm interested in more than others, but they're all seemingly variations on the same theme, just applied to different topic areas.

I'm either completely missing something or the death of TikTok will become the fact that it is so predictable that it's memeable. Inevitably someone will make a TikTok satirizing TikToks, and then everyone will move [back] to something else.

Social media sometimes feels like an echo chamber to me, never quite right. Blogs, websites, forums, and so forth (yes, YouTube) all make sense to me. Sites focused on bottlenecking communication all lose something key imho. It's like they're taking something meant to be supplementary and trying to force it as the main conduit.

How are you responding to the content given? Skipping it or long pressing to select “not interested?”

Perhaps you are engaging with these videos you are not interested in by finishing the videos, etc.

What's most bizarre is that Meta has two popular and quite distinct social media apps and it now seems to be changing both to mimic TikTok. I'm sure that some smart people have analyses showing that that's what maximises engagement for each product, but from a strategy perspective they really seem to be throwing a potential huge advantage out of the window. Why not just change one app and keep the other one distinct?

Especially the old Facebook-style 'keep up with friends and family' app would seem to have potential for sustained long-term use from a different user base than a TikTok clone.

I agree this is poor strategy on Facebook's part. The question is whether it results from FOMO or hubris. It definitely reeks of short-term thinking.

> Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging.

I would go further: celebrities often treat Tiktok as just another distribution channel and they seem to flop because of it.

Another point: Tiktok has incredibly slick UI/UX. IG used to have this but that's been lost in the constant battle of competing interests. Even the search isn't terrible. Probably the best feature is you can search videos you've watched and/or liked. I can't tell you how many times I've found what I've been looking for because of that.

Stitching and dueting are genuinely new formats too. Plus it's not all dance videos (eg [1]). One issue Tiktok does have is brigading/mass-reporting. You have to identify people who make false reports (eg when a video is reviewed and reports are found baseless you could make such reports as false). Collect too many and your reports get ignored (ie you're shadowbanned).

FB/IG managed to successfully steal the stories feature (from Snapchat) but I don't think that's going to work with Reels. As noted, Tiktok isn't really based on a social graph so there's a disconnect there.

Some commenters here have talked about data collection. Literally nobody cares about that.

People forget how controversial introducing the news feed was. IIRC ~10% of users said they'd quite FB over the news feed. But that decision has proven to be correct. What I think is actually the most controversial FB thing did was enable sharing of links. This boosted engagement but I think really killed the use case many had for FB: to find out what friends, relatives and acquaintances were up to. Nobody cares about Aunt Alice's posts about how the pigeons are government cameras.

One area I think FB really dropped the ball on was Groups. For a lot of active FB users this is why they use FB. It should be more central to the experience (IMHO).

Tiktok isn't hte first existential threat to FB. IG was. Back then FB could buy IG. It's why they did. In a decade we've had two existential threats to FB. This is why I don't think government action is really needed in the social media space. It'll work itself out.

Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker.

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRD4rLYo/?k=1

I 100% agree about Groups. They're sacrificing a huge established userbase using the tool the way that works for them- which is of course what made FB a force- for the sad entropy of an aging platform seeking hotness status but forever being two steps behind. In the meantime FB has unsexy, real-world practical uses that apparently mean nothing to Zuck and company. That genuinely hurts people and organizations.

IG has like 4 different UIs running at once, depending on where you are in the app. It's bizarre. They're so disjointed they could be released as wholly independent apps.

TikTok really nailed their interface.

I hope someone working at YouTube see this. I was watching Shorts and it's infested with literal horse fucking videos from countless India spam channels. NSFW example: https://youtube.com/shorts/8Pd4s07vIq0?feature=share

Well you watched one and so the AI's decided that's what you're in to now.

hilariously dystopian

I have mixed feelings about this. For all their fault, social media websites (e.g., fb) reflected our reality, but amplified the controversial parts to increase "engagement".

TikTok, OTOH, is shaping our reality by literally altering our culture. I'm not that old, but even 10 years ago, the concept of dancing in front of a camera on the street was odd, but now almost every teenager and college student does that. What worries me is the constant pressure to "conform" by TikTok which could potentially result in a generation of young people without real life skills.

In previous generations, other forms of popular culture filled the same role, and hordes of young kids conformed in exactly the same way. From the beats and hippies all the way to skate culture in the 00s. I'm sure my parents felt the same way about me skateboarding and wanting to buy crap at the mall.

Part of me feels relieved that TikTok will probably have faded by the time my small-ish children are teenagers. The other part of me fears what will replace it.

TikTok itself will have faded. Massive propaganda machines with builtin surveillance hidden behind quick dopamine fixes will only have improved. Do you think the media world will abandon such a massively popular concept?

I mean, TikTok is just the evolution of Reddit or Facebook.

TikTok does better at not being too political though. Reddit is basically a political left wing news site, and Facebook has a lot of politics on it.

Almost certainly something that normalizes the hyper sexualization of kids even more than TikTok already does. Almost makes me think we had it better when we were all conventionally deluded under religions.

The same thing was happening with Instagram selfies in years past. It's not that different besides the fact that it is now animated.

At least there’s some creativity to it - making stuff vs. just doom scrolling ads and images.

I’d feel better if it wasn’t filtered by the CCP though.

Or used for profiling each person in a way Google and Facebook consider too intrusive. When the CCP calls, you give them what they want.

“Responds to videos of X stereotypes 30ms faster than the median, which corresponds to these following methods of political manipulation.”

> but now almost every teenager and college student does that

This is simply not true. There will always be people thirsting for attention and validation, chasing the latest fad; and there will always be people that don't. It's fine.

>TikTok, OTOH, is shaping our reality by literally altering our culture

that's in the nature of every technology. 20 years ago nobody took selfies, a hundred years ago nobody took pictures (probably, idk when people got cameras)

Honestly it's quite a leap from kids doing fortnite dances for likes to assume they fall off the wagon and attain no real life skills. I think that's just called getting old.

> a hundred years ago nobody took pictures (probably, idk when people got cameras)

In the 1820s.

That's when cameras started existing, not when people got them.

This is a very silly tangent, but it's actually remarkable how early cameras became an economical (albeit slightly luxurious) way to preserve personal histories: I have pictures of ancestors from the 1870s and 1880s, despite living in a one horse shtetl in the middle of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The Kodak Brownie[1] was arguably the first "mass market" camera, and it's 122 years old this year.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Brownie

Rich people got them in the 1890s. $10 a "roll" back then; ~$300 today. You had to mail the camera back to Kodak to get the film developed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090306221410/http://www.kodak....

The Eastman Museum in Rochester is worth a visit if you're in the area.

https://www.eastman.org/about

The first easily affordable and poortable camera was the box brownie which is about 120 years old.

Social media prior to TikTok has MASSIVELY shaped our culture, to suggest otherwise is incomprehensible to me.

Media prior to social media MASSIVELY shaped our culture.

I think you may not be old enough to realize how social media shaped our reality when it came on the scene. Before that, it was the media giants that controlled the airwaves.

It's been happening for forever. Welcome to the circus.

Are we being shaped by social media to a greater extent than before or not (and by how much) is probably the question we should be asking?

Every new technology with mass adoption reshapes our reality. Otherwise, what would be the point? Whether that's good or bad depends on what you do with it.

> even 10 years ago, the concept of dancing in front of a camera on the street was odd, but now almost every teenager and college student does that.

This is not true. Before youtube started aggressively curating/deranking/demonetizing, there were thousands and thousands of dancing teenager/young adult videos on youtube. Youtube actively purged the TikTok inside of it.

Purely anecdotal.

In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place.

So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.

We have a similar experience in Latin America.

WhatsApp has become the main method for sharing messages, pictures, video or memes.

WhatsApp groups here are what Google+ Circles attempted to be.

With smaller audiences people are more open to express their real selves in groups.

It's also an integral part of business, like even used for negotiating loans with the bank, getting covid test results or day to day stuff like ordering lunch.

Influencers culture has killed social media platforms, most ppl want to be influencers today to make easy money. Back in the days social media platforms were used to connect with friends and maybe strangers just for the sake of socializing. Not anymore

Even before “influencers” young people often wanted to be media or athletic stats of some sort, so that isn’t new.

The drive to increase “engagement” and ad reviews is killing it (which is related to influencers). YouTube is basically unwatchable without an way to block ads. Young people began to abandon Facebook when they opened it up to everyone and let boomers spam their family and friends with every political chain letter and video they come across.

I wanted to be on Americas Funniest Home Videos, the prelude to YouTube and TikTok. Oof.

Influencers are just the byproduct of social media platforms commoditizing interaction as means of driving growth and engagement, since just keeping up to date with your friends doesn't drive much engagement. Once you add metrics for engagement like likes, retweets or whatever, it is only natural that interactions become gamified once you put these incentive structures into how the system functions.

mobile phones set us on a trajectory from the internet back to TV. No doubt the next big social network will be an auto-advancing video feed, i.e. a TV channel that won't be called a tv channel. It's what people want, nothing was killed, just people played with the toys for a while, got bored and moved elsewhere

Does anyone here remember Path - the social network for close friends?

Mobile first, beautiful UI, some sort of limit on how many connections / followers / friends you can have. Would seem a perfect time for a revival of this

Path was so beautiful. My friends didn’t care for it though since no one was on it

same. You had a get a cohort together off platform and all agree to use it. Beautiful app, they should simply revive it, the moment for it is now

I'm very concerned TikTok will take over the social media space not because it's a superior product, but because the company ignores all privacy legislation in both the U.S. and E.U. and because advertisers will want to take advantage of the data they collect and use it to their advantage.

For example, both the U.S. and E.U. has strong legal protections for minors. TikTok ignores them and collects data on our minors anyway, including facial recognition, fingerprints, voiceprints, messages, habits and who knows what else.

It's hard for US/EU companies to compete when they have to follow the regulations but TikTok doesn't.

Really makes me appreciate what Twitter has done as a user of both platforms. Twitter kept the chronological feed option, hasn't done the same video content-boosting stuff that FB did, and as a result they haven't grown nearly as much but the product today still resembles what it was a decade ago.

For Facebook that's no longer the case and it really sucks because they got just big enough that nobody will likely get anywhere near the same size of a "book of faces" to check up on friends and family

Irony bells are ringing with the New Yorker magazine chasing its own TikTok dreams, autoplaying an utterly unrelated video halfway down the article.

Facebook and twitter are out of ideas. What bothers me the most is the failure of both executive teams on multiple levels, but yet again it's the workers that end up with the short of end of the stick.

Zuckerberg says be on the lookout for low performers so he can cut 10% of his staff, he needs to look in the mirror...

I still wish for a clone of Google+ v1 to succeed and replace Facebook.

Sometimes i still wonder why it failed.

I would still argue it didn't. It worked alright and created long lasting communities that still miss the platform. Of course, it did not kill facebook, but that seemed always like a laughable short term goal.

Everything else was just googles M.O., wasn't it? Create new shiny platform, rebuild everything around it, annoying a lot of people but also creating some value for those that opt in. Than never address the issues that arise, change strategy midway and remove all integrations, but maybe create new ones when you do the inescapable surface-level redesign that only creates more issues than addressing existing ones (Because now there is a new "strategy"). Repeat until product is canceled.

IMO Facebook used to be perfect, and can still be if they split the content platform from the close social networking platform. Not because you are forced to use the content platform, but I think it drives people away. I got a close friend who deleted his facebook account and I can't find him anymore, nobody knows how to contact him, I went twice to his city and couldn't reach out to him.

LinkedIn would be the best replacement for a peoples directory because it has a certain professional air to it. Facebook initially was a casual platform similar to Instagram.

Always used fb for that and it was always great up until some point. Linkedin always felt spammy “hey pay for this feature” and only for professionals

Real name policy. Now you practically need to send an id and a birth certificate to get a free email address, but the overton window hadn't been completely forced yet during the period Google+ needed growth. Combine real names with they fact that they would pull your youtube (and any other google property) account in, and it was really repulsive to people. And Google held strong and kept trying to push that for years before shutting it down.

I think they thought that it was necessary to leverage the rest of Google to give them an advantage in social media, to draw people into a Google ecosystem, but really they just needed to do Facebook better, and take advantage of whatever anti-consumer move that Facebook would make and market "That doesn't happen here!" You can close the net once people are in. Instead people with gmail addresses and youtube accounts felt like they were under attack.

> they would pull your youtube (and any other google property) account in, and it was really repulsive to people

Here's a fun anecdote that comes to mind whenever I think of Google+ :

On YouTube I had either liked or commented on a video where comedian/pianist Tim Minchin performed his song, White Wine in the Sun. To give a simple summary, this song is about how he likes Christmas, even if he thinks the whole religious aspect of it is silly.

This was around my late teens, when I was quietly pulling myself out of my Christian upbringing and had decided I didn't really want to continue pretending I believe all that stuff (part of the reason I was drawn to Tim Minchin in the first place).

Well wouldn't you know, apparently interacting with any YouTube video publicly posted your interactions to your Google+ page, where I had added some random people here or there, including my sister who had seen this "post," watched the video, and proceeded to question me a day or two later as to why I shared that video.

I can't say that left a great impression on me to continue using Google+

Recent Verso author interview along similar lines, a little anti-business for my tastes, but be that as it may

https://youtu.be/g0euZ9iGGqI

TikTok (and its clones) is perversely addictive. It's effects are yet to be understood on teenagers and adults. I am glad it's banned in my country. However, Instagram reels and YT shorts remains.

I wonder about the "social media is addictive" end-game. Will we continue to develop new social media apps that are more and more addictive? Can we continue down that path forever? To the maximally addictive social media app? What does that world look like? Does anyone want to live there?

I'm curious how "addictive" became a positive term.

The AI has won, hands down. It's all ultimately a game of who wins the game of dopamine cycle, and the AI recommendation models has found out a better way to game it. It is a new beginning for sure.

TikTok is more like TV. Instagram at least until a few months ago was more like Facebook 2.0. They do compete on attention though.

The Tower of Babel is almost complete!

Shocking that this spyware app by the Chinese government has been allowed to obtain global dominance. Probability of psychological manipulation at scale is real. Huge national security risk. Sad so many people are eager for such addictive superficial distraction. Soon the AI will be able to make videos itself. Better hope the Social Credit System likes the direction you’re swiping.

This is fear mongering. The US has dominated culture and entertainment for 100 years now yet my country hasn't turned into batshit insane Jesus freaks. While the US Supreme Court was overturning Roe vs. Wade my parlement was extending abortion rights.

Now every single app is trying to copy TikTok. It'd be great if they just respected our time.

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Facebook

How long before Twitter becomes Tiktok?

They pioneered this space, remember vine? Didn't take off for whatever reason.

The Tiktok algorithm we have rewards repetitive dancing in front of the camera, pulling ("fake") pranks and random snippets from movies edited together with dramatic music added.

In China (their app is called Douyin), the algorithm rewards things they want their youth to be doing. Content which involves maths, engineering, medicine, etc are rewarded.

I'm certain that there is some strategic motive from China to push American children in the wrong direction with the invention of this app. Kids and teenagers spending their time and energy on unproductive activities which will lead to the next generation being ever-so slightly behind.

Is there any reference for this? Haven't heard this before

Got source? The social media market in China is fiercely competitive and TikTok (Douyin) got to be king of the hill by delivering exactly what its users want, not what the CCP wishes they wanted.

Oh sweet child

Obviously Douyin is censored, everything in China is, but there's a loooong history of cat and mouse as apps and creators push the envelope and the state stomps down when they go too far.

The censor can remove content they don’t want people to see, but not push people to see what they don’t like. At least not without monetary rewards.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We ban accounts that do this because we're trying for a different sort of forum here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

"My source is that I made it up"

It's not the big eaters that are all rage in Asia, including China?

Since people don't know much about the topic https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53840167 Or back in 2017 https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2118386/meet...

Everyone's TikTok experience is different. Although sometimes you do need to long-press on a video and say you're not interested, the experience as a whole tends to be relatively finely tailored per person.

For example, many of my videos for a long time were basically short essays about current events, relationship advice, (edit: BIPOC) creators, interesting skits or stories about Marvel or DC characters and so on.

Silly dance junk and pranks are certainly not what I see. There is _some_ dance stuff, but it's in subgenres I'm interested in and so I've given those the watch time.

You can curate yourself to things you're interested in. It's not that hard and it's strongly recommended.

You can both be right. It doesn’t take much for TikTok to show 20% learning content to Chinese people and only 5% to westerners. And no one would know.

But I think it’s much worse. TikTok is clearly the goto place now for divisive content on LGBT issues, it’s provoking massive political arguments. And I’m sure this is just scratching the surface. I have no doubt it’s a global sentiment manipulation tool for the CCP. Why wouldn’t they do it is the question that should be answered.

Maybe what the CCP believes is bad for us (LGBT rights?) is exactly what we need to move forward?

They say divisive content, I say lively political debate. They say stability, I say stagnation. They say decadence, I say liberty.

If there is a masterplan to blow up the west with silly music videos, then maybe our society deserves to be blown up and replaced by something freer and stronger?

>If there is a masterplan to blow up the west with silly music videos, then maybe our society deserves to be blown up and replaced by something freer and stronger?

I'd be much more sympathetic to this line of thought if society getting blown up - even if it ultimately results in improvement - didn't usually involve unbelievable amounts of suffering and death.

I long pressed on videos to say "not interested" that show gross dermatology videos, root canals, and ear cleaning. I would still repeatedly get those when I was using the app.

Pressing "not interested" does nothing. The reason you keep getting these is because you subconsciously enjoy them. You look a few seconds more than someone who truly doesn't want to see it.

And that's one of the problems. If I say I'm not interested, I'm not interested.

Not sure about you but my TikTok algorithm just shows anime hot takes, quick facts about world events, and a goat named Billy Earl who can't stay off of the neighbor's damn house.

If all you see are pranks and dances it's probably what you went on there looking for.

It's easy to blame the user for what the algorithm selects, but unless you go search for eg "math", it's difficult for the algorithm to decide you want to view any of the content that's harder to digest than the trivial dance videos. Given the app's roots, it's not surprising it see's dances as the primary content to start surfacing to new accounts to start engagement.

> push American children in the wrong direction with the invention of this app

Even American apps (Facebook/Instagram/Twitter) have performed no better in this regard. Maybe the reason is the underlying demand for such content rather than any malicious intent.

Youtube is already full of this stuff, Instagram is full of narcissist people, Twitter is full of angry people and so on. I don't think we need China.

TikTok doesn't just show inane dance videos in America. It shows them throughout the world. If China had some evil plan to poison the minds of youth they are not just targeting American kids.

In reality, Hanlon's razor applies. It's better explained by apathy rather than an evil masterplan. China simply doesn't care about non-Chinese kids, they consider that the American government is responsible for American kids' welfare.

When an APT like China is concerned (or, eg the CIA), you'd be foolish to wantonly apply Hanlon's razor. I'm not saying it never applies, but some of the lengths nations go to in order to gain an advantage over their adversaries is astounding. Think NSO iPhone hack†. It's been documented that the CCP requires a party member be allowed to see into the company's private business dealings, or else face the same fate as Jack Ma‡. The Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is heavily scrutinized, eg (from down-thread) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53840167.

†https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

‡https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/world/story/jack-ma-arre...

What's an APT?

An advanced persistent threat. A sophisticated targeted attack.

I have not wantonly applied Hanlon's razor. You missed the first part where I said that TikTok is the same in every non-Chinese market. Friend or foe. There is no targeted attack towards America. They simply do not care about non-Chinese kids at all.

Obviously China does care about the Chinese internet, it is heavily censored as we all know. But it is a giant leap from "China censors Chinese-TikTok" to "China is trying to make American kids stupid with dance videos". The corollary is that the people claiming this want China to heavily censor American TikTok so that it is more like Chinese TikTok!

In someways China is ultra-capitalistic. They will sell what people want. And it seems that many people want to see dancing teenagers.

Maybe China isn't doing anything. They just allow a company to deliver exactly what people want and people eagerly lap it all up.

>In someways China is ultra-capitalistic. They will sell what people want.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Pornography, anything deemed prurient by the government, anything deemed corrosive to social values, even trivial things like the depiction of zombies and ghosts in media, is strictly controlled by the communist government of China without respect for corporate profits.

Are you sure it's a difference in algorithm? I would not be surprised if that was the natural outcome of heavy censorship where pranks and lewd dancing get removed or accounts banned.

Where did you get the idea that douyin pushes math and engineering? It would never gain popularity in that way. In fact, the Chinese haters say the exact same thing as you do, that douyin is full of dancing and movie cuts, is a poison of mind and only for the stupid people.

> I'm certain that there is some strategic motive from China to push American children in the wrong direction

I don't buy that. Engaging content is engaging content. Math is boring everywhere. You can push on trends at the edges, but there's no way Douyin is going to succeed, even in the PRC, as a social virtue nag. And there's no need to invoke a conspiracy theory to explain why western kids are drawn to fashion and fun.

This is not true. If you search "popular douyin" in Youtube (yes, it gets uploaded in ytb as well), you'll find similar types of videos as you can find in tiktok. One difference is that girls will be wearing more as the culture in China is more conservative on that perspective.

tiny nitpick:

> competition became all but impossible

This means competition became everything but impossible, no? So, possible.

No. This common phrase is not literal.

No, it is literal. It means that there exists every form of difficulty that you could enumerate in competing with them, except impossibility. It's possible in the way it's possible to shoot a bullet through a wall without either being damaged if their atoms are arranged in the right way at the right moment. It's not only literal, but very precise (and hyperbolic in that precision.)

So, when used, the phrase always literally refers to situations where precisely every possible difficulty is present aside from any that result in impossibility? You believe that??

Live by literal interpretation, die by literal interpretation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9609619

When used this way "all but" means nearly or almost. Another strange English idiom.

Do you have a source for this? Any mainline (or whichever) dictionary pick this up yet? Because as far as I know, it's just a misunderstanding, which most people don't notice.

Tiktok is a far superior social network compared to Facebook and the others. Good that it is taking over the US.

Yeah, I don't understand all the negativity here.

I met one of my friends on TikTok, on a post about an event going on in the city (when I'd just moved).

It's much more social than Instagram, etc. IMO.

Oh my God. You met one of your friends on TikTok and that's reason enough to absolve it of any negatives?

I just think it's less negative than Instagram, etc. IMO.

How do you communicate on tiktok? Direct messages?

Yeah exactly, comments then DMs.

Having just moved to Austin, this is something I’m curious about. How easy is it to be social on TikTok? From my limited outside perspective, it seems the primary use of TikTok is watching videos, which doesn’t lend itself well to discussion or actually getting to know someone.

tiktok is not a social network

Not with that attitude!

I never really "got" social media and TikTok is no exception. People here call it addictive, but it doesn't seem to work on me.

I dunno, I guess I like long-form content like Youtube over this stuff.

TikTok is fun until but it’s becoming a place that’s mostly women shaking their parts. I explicitly don’t like like on them and I even go so far as to block the most prevalent ones but the algorithm just doesn’t get it

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