TikTok is adding text posts | Hacker News Reader

TikTok is adding text posts

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This might be a good example of feature creep for no reason. They already added a weird “multi video” post thing where you can scroll right on top of scrolling left and I feel this is another step into overloading the UI. The big tiktok of 2019/2020 was magically simplistic where you could basically only swipe full content in a tinder-like fashion, I fear this is another step away from that.

Aside from live video showing in my For You feed, all the changes I can think of have been good. Longer video lengths have resulted in some content that previously would've only been on YouTube. Horizontal slideshows have become a mini-medium all to themselves. If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads.

> If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads.

It's not like TikTok is behind Threads in any of the relevant metrics right now.

For text posts? TikTok is behind definitely behind Threads considering it doesnt support text posts right now.

TikTok is ahead of Threads the same way Instagram is ahead of Threads - currently completely unrelated.

I am guessing this is a feature aimed to be a more casual way of "tweeting", given that Twitter is under the rubble right now, and competitors want to take their best chances and see what works

The simple UI was great for onboarding people but, now that the audience is saturated, they can be taught new features.

This was very noticeable in sharing.

Early days - share anywhere with a single link, autoplays in most messengers, no account needed to scroll forever, etc.

It was almost comical how quickly they went from that to more or less total lock-down.

Of course. As soon as they reach a critical mass of users, ease of onboarding stopped being a priority.

there was even video download, which was wild to me

Seems like an effort to pull more from the Twitter space. I'm not sure how well it will work in the end.

I've found that lately, I'm less likely to even engage on social media at all. At least half of the account posts I see (at least in comments to more popular origin posts) are from sock puppet accounts. Facebook groups that I participate in are generally higher quality overall, even though they're a bit ham-fisted when it comes to content moderation. Reddit is/was all over the map, from great communities to absolutely no point in trying to participate if you don't match the cult of the given group.

Is there a curated list of Facebook communities out there or do you just use the search to discover?

Mostly search+discover... You can generally search on a topic of interest, and find a group that covers it (or several), the up/down side is some groups only allow visibility to members, so you can't get a feel for that group without joining first. While I appreciate the usefulness, I'm less inclined to want to stay within Facebook's walls, so to speak.

*X-space

I don't use TikTok myself, but I'm curious how text posts will be prioritized in people's feeds compared to standard video posts.

My understanding is that (at least on paper) there's a minor feedback loop where getting a lot of views on a video = video is recommended to more people = more engagement = more recommendations. And conversely, if too many people scroll past a video without watching it, that video gets de-recommended in the same fashion.

So now we throw text posts into the mix. Even if a lot of these text posts have music attached, I'd imagine people on TikTok are way more likely to stop scrolling and watch a video than stop scrolling and read a 1000-character post; unless TikTok's content recommendations specifically account for this discrepancy, I could see text posts getting drowned out pretty fast.

There are a lot of text posts already on TikTok, but they're just done as videos or slideshows. And some are very popular. Text memes or jokes or "witty observations" often are in this realm.

And it also turns out that these are shared quite often -- which is another metric that TikTok's algorithm uses.

Videos with lots of text hijack the algorithm a bit - it counts what proportion of the video is watched when evaluating its effectiveness, and if you put a giant wall of text on a 7-sec sound clip, you can get an artificially high watch-through rate with not-particularly-good content.

Text without images in the background seems objectively less attention grabbing, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just keep using captions over video.

Ive noticed this hijack before.

I have to purposefully skip by any text posts now because any interaction just fills my feed with the junk.

i think pausing subverts the metrics skew, but yeah, I mostly just skip because it usually isn't worth reading.

Is anything on TikTok worth consuming?

Yes, its a bit better than any american social media platform. There's still a ton of garbage, but a slightly higher proportion of good content.

Which platforms are TikTok better than? Because I can't think of any. It's junk food for the brain, and I've heard even teenagers tell me that themselves. I think in the future TikTok will be looked back at not unlike the tobacco industry in the 20th century.

Reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram.

You should actually try tiktok instead of regurgitating the opinions of sinophobic nationalists. The algorithm reflects yourself better than any other app, so whether you get junk is entirely up to what you choose to watch.

> Reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram.

Yea I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because I find your statement that TikTok is superior to each of these absurd and comical.

Why are you assuming I've never installed and tried TikTok?

The company is worth almost 100 Billion.

Maybe?

The heroin, crystal meth, opioids, and other destructive drugs' markets are also fairly large.

No. There is nothing of value on TikTok. People may say otherwise but they use TikTok so their intelligence is minimal.

The video algorithm is a lot more precise. If you spend ~3 seconds on 2 girl scout videos before swiping on, and less than 1 second on body building, you suddenly get a surge of girl scout videos like the whole app is sponsored by them. Someone else never noticed a single video in the subject. It feels magical that the app happens to have thousands of videos for your specific likes and none for content you don't like. I wouldn't be surprised if it went down to measuring your attention to a hundredth of a second

Saying all that, if you read 1000 characters, according to the TikTok way of sorting, you're already hooked. There will be plenty of posts where you swipe on after ~10 characters (in terms of swiping on within X hundreds of a second)

People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text

> People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text

I predict a lot of high-quality, well-researched text posts doing great on tiktok

Given how a significant, significant majority of content on TikTok is propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation, I see text posts doing as great as a wet fart in a hot tub.

This one surprises me. TikTok is so... different of a platform. I find it utterly jarring and revolting, my wife and kid find it fun and engaging, all for the same reasons. It seems like you're either going to get engaged in a video rabbit hole, or turn away.

In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory.

Threads at least made some sense, as Instagram is still a more slow paced, time to reflect type platform. TikTok less so.

A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments.

I think there's probably a way that text can be built into the app that works alongside what's there and makes it a more interesting experience than just looking at screenshots.

This is very untrue. It's just your personalized feed that is filled with that, because you happened to watch just enough of them to let the algorithm know you're interested. Other people see one of these videos and just swipe down immediately and never see one again. Please don't try to guesstimate the amount of content on tiktok in any given category just by your personal experience, because it's heavily biased because of just how the platform works.

There has to be something about TikTok algorithm that it won’t work with quick readers/addicts/those in “the spectrum”. It wasn’t TTS but last I tried I too got series of uninteresting content. The system just didn’t register my fulfillment.

You can scroll through the "Discover" tab which has depersonalized trends across the whole app. I just took a quick scroll through and it seems like at least ~5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen. There's been at least a few recent trends over the past few weeks that have been almost entirely text (beige flags, all the greenscreen text trends, #groupchat, etc).

Anecdotally, I also see clusters of text-only posts every few weeks, even though I always either pause to read or scroll immediately through.

I would argue that "5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen" is a huge moving of the goal post from the original claim in this sub-thread: "just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments".

I definitely used to get videos with walls of text that are obviously trying to game the algorithm by getting you to read an essay to increase watch time. Once I habitually scrolled away from them I stopped getting them. That isn't even related to the claim of voices reading screenshots of tweets or reddit comments.

I absolutely believe that videos exist where there are text-to-speech readings of tweets or reddit comments and that the commenter referencing them sees a decent amount of them in their own feed. But I do not believe they represent a "decent amount" of the majority of TikTok users feeds.

I guess it depends on what you consider a "decent amount". Within the overall context of whether text posts would be popular or not on TikTok, 5-10% of globally-trending posts being text-heavy seemed like a decent amount to me but YMMV.

But, you are right that I was talking about text posts in general rather than directly responding to the videos about reading text from reddit/twitter that this subthread was discussing though. I see those often but I don't see them currently trending.

Aren't you also generalizing how much content is in a category based only your personal experience?

> A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments.

Not for me, I get exactly zero videos like that. I always chuckle when I read someone say "Most videos on TikTok ..." since they seem totally oblivious to the fact that there isn't a single TikTok experience. You get what you get and I get what I get.

It reminds me of an older guy I know who stated in front of a bunch of young men "All of the videos on TikTok are scantily clad 13 year old girls doing dirty dances". It was second-hand cringe embarrassing.

I think baby boomers, gen-x and a decent portion of millennials still think of social media as being broadly targeted like TV stations used to be. Even YouTube doesn't come close to the insane customization of TikTok.

Ever heard of first impressions? Not everybody is going to spend time tweaking some invisible algorithm. If it doesn't show them what they're looking for, why should they stick around? It's not like people sign up to Tiktok to keep in touch with friends.

Somebody new to YouTube is going to think there's nothing on it besides Mr Beast, iPhone reviews and culture war nonsense, because that's what the front page shows to a signed out user. I imagine Tiktok is similar.

> Not everybody is going to spend time tweaking some invisible algorithm

Well, there are exactly two options with TikTok. Either you use the app or you don't. If you don't use the app then you probably shouldn't be making definitive statements about what content is on the platform.

If you do use the app then it will quickly (I mean within less than 1 hour of use) customize itself to your preferences. There is no "tweaking". Just by interacting with the app (swiping up on videos, viewing comments, allowing videos to replay, etc.)

So if you have been on TikTok for roughly 1 hour or more then you are getting a significantly customized experience that almost no one else on the platform is going to get. That isn't true on YouTube or really any other kind of media experience that existed prior to it. That is why older internet users can't really reason about it effectively and tend to make statements that sound out-of-touch to younger users.

> If you don't use the app then you probably shouldn't be making definitive statements about what content is on the platform.

One can use the app for any amount of time, and make any comment they wish.

If there's a critical mass of people making the same criticisms of the app, maybe the explanation isn't "you're using it wrong".

Does it matter if it's not for you if it is for other people?

It's like saying "There's no video game videos in my feed so why would TikTok make a feature related to gaming?"

Threads was also aiming to fill a vacuum left by Twitter. A vacuum that I suspect doesn't exist for TikTok users in the same way.

There's a category of user that wants short form video, who started on Vine, did not move to Twitter after Vine was killed, and then ended up on TikTok. TikTok's success seems to be in part specifically because those users did not want (at least originally) a text focused social network, even one that had reasonable UX around short form video.

>In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory.

It will most certainly live in a different tab than the main video feed.

Right now, the tabs are: Video | Shopping | IM | Account

It'll just become: Video | Text | Shopping | IM | Account

Or account will move to top right corner.

I find basically all social media sites too confusing to use, starting with when I first attempted to use Facebook around 2010 and couldn't figure out where the hell anything I posted "went" or where anything I saw was "coming from" and couldn't figure out the distinctions between various pages or types of posts. I'm told by a longer-time user buddy that the UI made a lot more sense in the early, .edu days.

I spent years not realizing Instagram posts could have more than one image. Now they have videos, too—are mostly videos, even—which just seems wrong to me.

Twitter confuses the hell out of me. Tiktok is constant frustration, if I try to use it.

I swear, I'm not even that old and was definitely not old when I first encountered a lot of these sites. IDK how they're so successful when I find their UIs totally unusable. Must be a me-problem, I guess. I manage to figure out shit like Paradox Games UIs without too much trouble, and they're regarded as exceptionally dense and hard to learn, so it's not a general problem of mine with all UIs.

Don't feel bad friend, I'm basically the same way. I ended up just giving it all up anyways, other than text based forums like this one.

You should have seen me try to use Snapchat for the first (and only) time!

I recently came to the realisation that I've been trying to rediscover h2g2 ever since I left it. It's the only social media site which has ever made good sense to me. I'm currently on Mastodon, and disliking it intensely.

How do you find it revolting when all it does is show you content similar to the stuff you like?

It's uncanny at recommending videos that are highly specific to niche content I like. Nothing comes close.

Oh, not the content of the videos, more the noise and autoplay nature of it. I was searching for a better word, but landed there.

FWIW, I feel the same way about Shorts. Apparently, if the last thing you watched was a Short, the next time you open the YouTube app, it just starts playing some random video. I loathe this feature.

It shows really short videos which means if I like it it's over anyways. The search is basically broken and trying to find specific videos on topics is impossible. The videos I want more of never come.

It's like a typical early internet video: a 15 seconds video labelled wink where someone does a closeup of an eye and winks. Cool when that was a technical achievement kind of lame now.

As someone who used to use TikTok, I do laugh when people describe it as a place where there are "people shuffle dancing". Yes it might have been what initially made the platform successful, but it far far beyond that now.

Each person's experience is different of course.

The downfall of Twitter has really left a gaping hole in the market for clones and big companies to fill:

- mastodon and fediverse

- threads by IG/FB/Meta

- blue sky

- TT with txt posts

Blood in the water on twitter (x). It’s time to pounce.

Official TikTok news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36847411

I wonder if this is to be able to add an extra way to monetize tiktok content by selling access to the textual data to LLM operators.

everyone sees the twitter blood in the water

> Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories

Seems more of an Instagram replacement than a Twitter one, the userbase of Instagram is also closer to TikTok than Twitter.

What’s a Twitter?

It's an eX-website

The bird had touched the water, and sharks are jumping around. None flies, just jumping in the red ocean.

I guess functionally users already post image galleries of text as text posts

So basically all the social media platforms are converging feature-wise. Twitter/X is leaning into video, TikTok is adding text posts, Meta now has a Twitter clone.

Threads are the new stories.

Threads are the new twitter. No one is visiting either.

So it's becoming Weibo?

apparently tiktok tokens are already worth real world money?

CDBC are here. FedNow is essentially that. also russia just announced DigitalRubles.

USA Dollar is now part of a more competitive currency market? maybe?

as part of the general public, I can only guess

Yes, you can tip people on TikTok and they make money.

Same way you an donate Bits on Twitch and the streamer earns.

Problem with tiktok is there’s a lot of misinformation, and I don’t mean the political ones, no just pure technical stuff, so many times I see some videos of kids claiming technical stuff and spreading a lot of false claims that I am seriously thinking to make an account just to refute such false claims, and because of the userbase is a little uneducated with short attention spans, it spreads quickly with the mindset if “tiktok said it then it’s true”!

How many more platforms do we need where users can post all sorts of media and follow other’s content? Every social media site copies features from another, and they are all basically the same item wrapped in a different package. When will people wake up and return to RSS?

> When will people wake up and return to RSS?

RSS was by techies, and only ever used by techies. Uncontrolled news feeds lacking data collection doesn't sell enough for the giants.

Also RSS only thrives if sites put in the effort to support it. Even still, the majority of online users are on social media platforms, not "surfing the www" like the gold ol' days.

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