What Happens When Everything Becomes TikTok?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
In the meantime they pilfer our personal data and use it to their advantage.
They're obviously up to no good and they ignore our laws. We're always two steps behind as they keep promising compliance yet they never do. Once we find them out they come up with excuses and promise they'll behave next time.
Like I said, I believe they're silently making fun of us. Having us run a rat race while they just keep on pilfering our personal info.
Ban TikTok!!
If collecting personal info is bad, then let's ban that rather than pick and choose our companies?
I want an actual source, an actual study.
> I want an actual source, an actual study.
So no I dont buy the CCP is bad and the US is good.
why are you advocating chicoms get special privileges to be let in without proving they're good relative to us having to do the same in china?
This is 100% bullshit. I’ve used Douyin and it’s just the same as TikTok, and even if I haven’t, anyone with surface familiarity with human nature would know there won’t be a social media network without dancing and “bad influences”. Now, Douyin literally means trembling/dancing musical notes, guess where it got started?
Douyin does have a “youth mode” where supposed bad influences are more limited. It’s opt-in however, and through talking to actual Chinese teenagers I gathered that nobody uses it, because guess what, teenagers like the “fun” content. Enabling this youth mode is actually a prank they pull on friends.
Also, search for posts from Chinese parents trying to block Douyin on their router, you’ll find a ton. Guess why?
Normally I would chalk things up to differing perspectives, but your claim here about “all good positive influences” is so absurd I have to conclude you’re straight up lying.
The only thing keeping the western version from turning into a complete sewer are the advertisers. The TikTok Algo prevents people who are fat, wrinkly, too old, or unsemmterical (unattractive) from bubbling up. This is know from leaked internal documents supposedly.
I just opened the Douyin app and seven of the first ten human videos have people with colored hair. Tattoos tend to be subtle and obviously won’t be seen in most videos, but you see them all the time if you pay attention. Dying hair is so normal in China especially for women (usually to shades of brown, but some will use more lively colors), you can hardly film a crowd without capturing a ton of colored hair. There’s of course also a whole world of cosplay for every popular game and anime on Douyin. I don’t know where people are getting these ridiculous clips of misinformation and confidently spreading them around without thinking twice.
Edit: As an example, I just looked at the Genshin Impact cosplay tag. Tons of videos with hundreds of thousands to more than a million likes. Every single one of them has colored hair — purple, red, pink, green, blue, white, you name it. Conspicuous tattoos in maybe 10% of them. Go figure.
Also, any kind of addiction may have essentially irreversible side effects for those who are susceptible.
I swear five minutes craft copycats on Facebook are spiraling out of hands.
*industrial machine shop not included.
"LOLemoji watch to the end! LOLemoji"
All in the pursuit of perpetual doomscrolling.
The other day my wife wanted to show me some "short" from a content creator she likes, and had to rapidly scroll through ~30 of other "shorts" in her feed until said creator popped up again and she could click on her profile pic. Whatever way YouTube rated those other 30 vids for my wife is completely wrong, unless they happen to have a classification category called "rapidly scrolling down because of your stupid ass UI that doesn't allow backtracking or searching previously seen content".
At this rate, in a few years, even non-tech-savvy people will get fed up with increasingly nonsensical and confusing UIs of social media products.
Everyone’s just trying to survive. In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features. I believe the instagram book had a similar claim about Sidstorm (sp?).
I guess when network effects are life you can’t afford to not be the network. Google was smart to nab YouTube. And android. Meta was smart to grab instagram and WhatsApp (and that same logic, after missing out on making a phone, I bet is why they’re rushing to own VR). Innovate, copy, or die, basically.
But regardless, what's really annoying here is that this new mode of interaction is pushed so hard that it hides away and starves out the "traditional" one. It's like these companies don't understand we're no longer in an era of a single social networking platform. I don't come to YouTube or Facebook to get more TikTok - I'm fine with getting TikTok on TikTok, I come to YouTube for actual longer-form videos, to Facebook for posts and groups, etc. Seeing YT, FB and IG pushing "shorts"/"reels" in my face only makes me visit them less.
Can you explain what this means? I don't know what a lockdown is. Thanks!
I have now installed TikTok 3 times. Each time for a week I find it fun, then after about another week I uninstall it because I value my time to create my own stuff (writing and open source).
I find YouTube Short to be different. Somewhat fun, but not enough to pull me away from the YT material I watch, like philosophy ‘think’ content, Playing For Change music videos, and minimal political stuff.
Using https://Freedom.to tools to monitor and limit viewing times is almost always a good idea. Latest macOS/iPadOS/iOS also has very good support for limiting app and specific web site use. These are great tools, at least for my digital life.
From what I've heard, the Stories copying strategy did successfully contain (but did not roll back) the Snapchat threat to Insta. So there's some reason to believe they can hold the line against TikTok with this approach too, even absent the possibility of a government ban.
I expect this sort of convergence will continue in the future. Whatever one might think of fast-following as a strategy, scale plus rapid copying of features does seem to work.
vine, snap, insta, tiktok, youtube shorts
the notion of time is gonna be a new neurosocial topic
As a now non-owner of even a smartphone, I overtly ogle other people using Tiktok. It's equally amusing and baffling for me, and I feel pity for that person.
I assume our elite education system is currently fostering the next generation of innovators to answer this question.
Curious what you're using these days? I've got an old iPhone that I haven't updated past iOS 14 and have been wanting to just drop smartphones completely when this thing dies. I'm just wondering what I'll do for MFA mainly, and here in NYC it's nice to have maps when you're out (even though I remember the time I got myself around the city just fine without them 15-ish years ago).
For me, the 2 weeks turned into 5 years (so far).
Oh and I've migrated to a different country in that time, and I'm still alive, despite not having a navigation app thingy. No excuses! :)
>here in NYC it's nice to have maps when you're out
I'm very grateful I live in a country where going smartphone-free, a bit like going car-free, is still a viable choice while maintaining a relatively mainstream lifestyle. Good luck!
Saying that, colleagues and friends have had a laugh out of some of the escapades I've got myself in to, with no smartphone for navigation. I still maintain that my choice is better for me overall, in terms of time and energy usage.
A good middle ground I found is the Light Phone. You can send and receive texts, load music and podcasts onto it, and it has GPS navigation. But, it has no web browser, no appstore and a monochrome e-ink display.
Wearables, AR/VR appendages and implants. I know, not the answer you were looking for
The tech is getting a bunch of hate right now for some reason (possibly the open disgust the Meta thing seems to provoke, inherited directly from the already loud anti-Facebook voices), but it seems shortsighted to me. I wish Facebook had just stayed Facebook and kept Oculus going as a separate brand-- in some ways they've almost harmed the market with their choices.
VR can be great fun for anyone who can tolerate it, and even many of those with motion sickness issues can overcome it (I did). It also gets you moving around, something that doesn't get enough credit.
That said, I think AR will absolutely dwarf all else in a nearer time frame. People are going to come up with all kinds of wild body sensory interfaces with friends and/or internet audiences, and I'm not even talking about sex stuff.
Accessories which light up specific colors or patterns based on anything from biometrics to video views to investments, cascading emoticon displays sewn into clothing fed by live feed responses, sunglasses showing secret geocache stashes (or human contacts) related to alternate reality games... the kids are gonna come up with all kinds of ways to be cooler than their parents, as they always have.
What could it possibly be? There's just text, images, audio, and video. All these social media companies are just riffing on those same formats with their own spin (filters, formatting, expiration time, content length, etc.) Same as with like/dislike, follow/subscribe, share, etc. actions. Same as with instrumentation/telemetry to harvest data and sell to advertisers. What else is there? Main difference nowadays is the recommendation algorithms for keeping users engaged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
From the Max Headroom episode 1 synopsis: Investigative TV news reporter Edison Carter uncovers the disturbing secret of a new TV advert technology in use by his own employers, Network 23, called "Blipverts", high-intensity high-speed commercials with the ability to overload people's nervous systems, causing them to short circuit or explode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)#Seaso...
The SV giants have built a culture where creativity/innovation goes to die and only copying is rewarded. Ironic when thats what they used to say when they looked down at Chinese made software.
It's crazy when you see FB did try to make new social apps for a period with their "New Product Experimentation" team, but they would never give any of those new ideas the UI billing they'd give a Snap clone or TikTok clone. Always a bad sign when an org respects the ideas of the competitor more than their own team.
Now, every network is becoming indistinguishable. Most Youtube Shorts I see are ripped straight from Tiktok. It has all the irritating telltale signs; wooden AI voiceover, stupid sound effects overlaid on top on the original audio, and of course a 5-second looping clip of some monstrously bad music.
It's draining. I now think of it as a reprise of the GIPHY era when lazy people would post GIF replies from [popular TV show] in response to posts.
You forgot the fourth element: Some mid teen/woman preening in front of a mirror (because in 2022 people still can't figure out how to use the front-facing camera).
Tiktok also dispenses of the notion that you’re there to interact with friends - it’s entertainment for your interests.
By definition if you sign into the TikTok app and service and interact with *anything* you're part of the machine.
Of course with my solution you're part of the Google or Meta machine instead.
And I have to say that I'm terrified of it. I hate how alarmist and dramatic that is, but the utter falsehoods and vitriol that seems to go viral on there is just evil. I hate that a bunch of middle school children might be exposed to so much propaganda. From political messages to anti-vax fake science to "did you know?"-style rewriting of history, it's just awful. And so much of it is spread/re-shared by young, hip, people that kids will identify with as cool and/or trustworthy.
And there's no real way to actually engage with any idea. Not only are the videos extremely short--way too short to actually make any legitimate points or arguments about a complex topic--but even the text replies are Twitter-style and only allow some handful of characters, so again, it's basically impossible to even refute any of these ridiculous falsehoods. The only possible discourse is to insult each other or share vacuous slogans, memes, and truisms.
I know conspiracy theories and lies have always existed, and of course I realize that we were all taught history with some bias, etc. But the speed with which this stuff spreads is incredible. My partner has an 11 year old who was on TikTok and I was CONSTANTLY needing to correct him (gently, of course) when he would share a "fact" he "learned". A recent one was that the T-Rex skeleton's arms as we know them are actually backwards, and that "we" now know that they were more like little chicken wings. This was, of course, a fairly benign example, but I've had to correct him (with evidence) on other topics that make me much more concerned. Luckily, he's not on TikTok anymore.
In my defense, my kid is still too young to engage in this stuff so that might be the reason I am less alarmed. I hate to say it, but my parents did a fair amount of watching with us and they tried to put things in context ( I still remember my dad scolding me after I repeated blatant propaganda line I heard on the news ).
The time you spend correcting your kid is not wasted.
We'd hear it from 'that guy' at school, laugh and get on with our day. TikTok is that guy today, and unlike the '90s, he lives in your pocket and can deliver other such interesting tidbits on a variety of topics, 24 hours a day.
It is not that different from the TV panic. There are differences, but similarities are striking.
I am confused. Are you arguing for social media government oversight?
Beyond that.. what can we do? I would not mind effectively forcing 230 to make all platforms define themselves as publishers or not. Clearly, some sort of re-alignment is needed. Maybe we could force everyone to think twice before posting anything on the net?
As you can see, I do not know what the answer is. All I can do is what is best for my family.
Well, yes. In the 90s, the speed at which I could acquire stupid ideas from the internet was still VASTLY slower than today. First, I had to actually get home from school and sit in front of a computer because I didn't have an internet-connected device in my pocket at all times. This meant that I couldn't be absorbing nonsense during car rides or dinner time, either. Then, I had to make sure that my family members weren't using the telephone. And while there were lots of questionable forum-style websites, there wasn't like a single-digit number of hubs online where everyone got the same nonsense info at the same time, or where someone who produces said nonsense would know to go to maximize their reach.
I would say that information moves much faster today than it has even when Facebook unseated MySpace (which was well after the 90s).
> I know that it is easier to ban stuff than teach critical thinking skills, but I genuinely think the latter is preferable long term.
Sure, and I didn't suggest otherwise. Education is the most important and resilient way to combat all kinds of terrible ideas. However, the concern I expressed in my comment was specifically about children. Children can't be educated almost by definition- it takes time to become educated and well-versed in basic logic and reasoning. I'm fortunate that my step-son found this information "interesting" enough to share with us so that I had the opportunity to explain to him that the vast majority of content being shared with him is from non-experts or people who are actively trying to manipulate people into agreeing with them on something. Did he take that to heart? Not really; because it happened multiple times and I had roughly the same conversation with him multiple times. He's not there yet in his education.
And then there's the other issue of the adults that are consuming and spreading nonsense at record speed. And a lot of that nonsense is currently aiming to turn people AGAINST science and education. "Those damn academics are lying to us!", "Don't trust your kids around teachers- they're 'groomers'!", etc.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't feel good about the future for our kids.
The worst part is that I almost completely agree with you, because I am almost certain I will be facing similar hurdles. That said, if the issue is the internet connected device, isn't an instant 'fix' to replace said device with one with no access and then take school to task to enforce similar ban ( the most common objections I heard was:'i need to be able to reach my kid in case of emergency'; dumb phones still exist so that could work?
Ehh, I can already tell local PTA will hate me.
The question is, "Is quantity a quality itself?"
And while yes, there were plenty of bullshit urban legends and propaganda pieces (generally from ones own government) out there, 'plenty' was still a rather limited number.
I'm not sure how old your kid is, but once they reach the age of infinite recursion 'why' loops you'll quickly learn that you don't have the time and energy to fend off the firehose of falsehood and will succumb to the bullshit asymmetry principle and realize that the internet can feed your kid crap much faster than you can even reply to if you don't moderate their access.
Everything will not become Tik Tok.
I don't think that's true. It's more that society makes it really hard to do anything else. Unless you're doing something to start a business, become an influencer, or because it's your life goal people look down on you for it. So people don't. They doomscroll instead, because you won't be challenged for that.
It won't get better until it's regulated.
“A century ago, scientists at a German pharmaceutical firm investigated a chemical modification to morphine that made it more palatable as a cough suppressant. The Bayer Co., predecessor to today’s pharmaceutical giant, marketed its popular new remedy as “Heroin.”
—- https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/from-cough-medicine-t...
Video games use it to keep you in a ever grinding loop to stay in their game like a hamster in a wheel and hope you don't realize you can leave at any time.
People don't wake up and say "I want to waste 4 hours of my day watching stuff".
> Whether the results of such swipes and searches lead us to enlightenment or drag our worldviews further down toward their least reconciliatory, most conspiratorial depths depends in part on AI.
Honestly, what is the solution?, in the eyes of Capitalism, these Companies are the ultimate winners.
They are creating more revenue, more activity, crushing the competition other than themselves.
Who's going to stop this? especially that no matter how many users complain, the numbers are always going higher, and every monetary incentive is pushing companies towards this AI time blackhole with infinite mass surveillance.
You might say regulation, but why would the U.S. ever handicap its companies when they are basically the new U.S. worldwide influence tool?
No matter what the people vote, these companies have an infinite lobbying budget.
You and me might not use Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, but let's be honest, we are increasingly the minority.
> If such a system could, say, rank videos by how happy they are, it might help elevate more positive content and subdue the darker stuff: less vitriol, more virtue.
Isn't this even more dystopian?
Imagine there is crisis in Afghanistan, or a nuclear Activity in the east.
The algorithm would just simply filter all of that out, and leave you living in that mindless unrealistic view of the world.
Yes I agree, the algorithms and news coverage are way too negative these days, but removing negativity is not the solution at all, it's basically blinding people from the truth.
Instead of promoting miss-info, you are now hiding the news completely.
It depends on how much of a shock to the status quo you believe TikTok[1] is.
Take the invention of the printing press, for example. It was instrumental in the development of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Both undermined the legitimacy of the the Catholic Orthodoxy and the Ancien Régime, respectively. The printing press was used by adherents of Lutheranism, Jan Hus, Zwingli, Calvin, and Gustav V to propagate texts outside the previous monestary-scribe-book economy which, as you can imagine, also served as an orthodoxy-preserving filter. Likewise, Jean-Paul Marat's L’Ami du peuple[2], Le Pere Duchesne(Hébert), and countless others[3] were able to publish revolutionary texts faster than the monarchy could stamp them out. Both are case where technology outpaced social capacity.
The question is, "has TikTok and it's like outpaced our social capacity?" What I mean specifically: is throughput and velocity of idea propagation at odds with our current social superstructure? In hindsight, this was clearly the case in the Reformation ad Revolution. Attempts at stamping out the ideas failed and the social order changed to accommodate the technology. Talking today about outlawing the printing press is considered an absurd.
I'll argue the same is true for calling a ban or regulation on TikTok. Bans are a technological solution to the social organizational lag problem. Instead, we should be developing and employing social mechanisms that bridge the gap. After developing and deploying these social mechanisms, it will seem just as absurd to advocate for a TikTok ban.
We should be looking at the development of social mechanisms post printing press that acted as a counterbalance and learn from them when developing new social mechanisms that work to temper algorithmic feeds today.
1. Or more broadly dopamine-optimized and AI-generated content feeds.
2. Friend of the People
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_und...
Everything can't become TikTok though. Facebook has Marketplace, for example, and I don't ever see that able to work like TikTok.
I'm not sure saying all the other paltforms are copying TikTok is correct.
It's more that TikTok is the natural evolution of of technology that all media platforms are heading towards.
- Lower the cost of media production and publishing until its basically free
- Lower the cost of distribution by using an algorithm
- Lower the cost of moderation by using crowd-sourcing and algorithms (if even that)
Political discourse is in free fall. My hypothesis is that a big part of the US political dysfunction is due to the populace consuming the "news" on Twitter and Facebook as a series of low-quality or downright fake posts. It's all hot takes, no meaningful discourse.
Entertainment is in a tidal shift. Netflix is trying the high volume, cheap production, let the algorithm sort it out, but will still eventually lose to YouTube. On a positive note, independents are making better cooking "shows" on YouTube than Food Network or Netflix ever produced.
Old newspapers and Hollywood had a lot of problems of their own. But there were also big advantages of the professionalism, editorialization and quality control they offered.
The question is if we'll find a healthy balance by some combination of the platforms and their users trying to do the right thing.
About my only somewhat real discussions are with co-workers, who happen to have very different political positions. Frankly, I am doing it against my better judgment ( discussing political matters can get divisive fast ), but the conversations are generally interesting as the other participants are from non-traditional backgrounds so they can offer interesting perspectives.
I think this is the part that is missing, but last time I started talking honestly on the train about what I think is happening out of the corner of my eye I saw a kid raise his cell seemingly in an attempt to record the conversation. I wasn't saying anything too radical ( "people are idiots" was the gist of it ), but nothing I would want floating around the net..and so I stopped.
I am not sure what the answer is. Best I can hope for is that I will be able to keep my kid away from it long enough.
I want to believe that those that pay their attention to and engage with their local community will have a higher quality of life.
Debating politics on the Internet is generally a waste of time. Debating with a real, intelligent person can sharpen your viewpoint and improve your relationship with that person.
Best of luck teaching the little ones this!
a)it wasn't mandatory
b)ask yourself why you would need to put that in when the majority of your connections are with people who are right there on campus
Some people listened, but most did not. FB was college-only at the time, with no ads. People just wanted to e-stalk others. Not too much has changed, except that people now e-stalk influencers they have parasocial relationships with. And you click a button to throw a couple of bucks at them.