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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

I have almost no idea what is compelling about these. I feel like I am reading another language.

A man dancing poorly. A woman riding a train? What's so compelling?

I guess i am finally middle aged.

It makes you feel better I don’t get short form videos either. The content is, well, mostly devoid of content. But I at least conceptually understand how it might be entertaining in the same way I somewhat understand how people find Marvel movies entertaining.

For me the biggest breakthrough was understanding that this is not primarily a visual or audio medium, but an idea medium. This is why objectively poor video or scrappy / copied audio makes no difference to success, instead something deeper is being created and propagated.

Yes! You are the only person in this whole comment thread who gets it. That makes me so sad. It makes me feel like I didn't do a good job communicating in this post.

Ha, thanks, but you did a great job so I sent it to many folk who have been sceptical or nonplussed on the topic.

Yeah, I don't see the appeal either, but I didn't like social media when live journal and myspace were big in my college days.

There's probably going to me a meme about this sometimes: showing your TikTok feed to others and getting blank stares. It's just too personal to also be shareable.

But it's definitely not just fluff. More than once my feed got overly intellectual and long form, and I had to keep liking every not-very-dressed female video just to get back to "funtok".

It's also moderately good to keep up to date with news, at least in the areas you're interested about. At least for the James Web telescope I basically got the front seat, with every little detail explained from several PoVs.

Depends on your interests and what videos you get. Although I don't use tiktok I do use youtube and with its movement towards shorts I recently started seeing some excel tip videos. And some of the tips are helpful and have made my use of excel more efficient so I think like all media platforms how useful something is depends on the user and how they use it rather than the platform.

Not really, I sat with my dad a couple weeks ago as he loves that thing and I wanted to understand what's so cool about it. To me, it's yet another brilliant platform for marketers but can not see the point of using it as a regular user

Don't worry, it just means your brain is still functioning. I was in high school when Vine came out and even back then I thought it was a waste of time.

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