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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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