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1. Age. It's just really jarring to many older people.
2. How cultured you fancy yourself to be. If you're someone who values reading 100 pages of a novel to just get into the story, then you will find TikTok to be vacuous. And honestly, that's probably a fair assessment. When I watch TikTok videos I give them about 5 -- maybe 10 seconds. I don't apply this same bar to other media, but I can imagine this is really off=putting for some.
EDIT: I want to throw out there that Belatown is the greatest soap opera of all time. Its a TikTok exclusive.
Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote.
That's like me saying Jews don't like steak based on my experience.. of a sample size of one Jew who is a vegetarian.
I personally know several folks who are Indian, Mexican and various South American nationalities who also deeply detest tiktok. A few Koreans too.
The best advice I can make is to maybe get a bigger friend group if you're going to try and make large generalized statements from it. 500 people is a good minimum size.
It's very unfortunate that you (and presumably others) read it like that. I am not making an argument or a generalized statement in my post.
If in doubt, you can also check my post history to see that I do not have a history of making any such posts.
I am expressing curiosity about how the recommendation algorithm might be tailoring content not just based on interests but on the inferred ethnic backgrounds of people (because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other).
I'm open to feedback on how this could have been phrased differently.
As a basic rule, you can't use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. That my particular Korean friends like the cheesesteak place up the street says nothing about Koreans, cheesesteaks or that restaurant.
This is because at a basic level my friend group just doesn't look like any kind of general population. If nothing else it's geographically restricted, a tiny subset of classes and interests - and likely indirectly education levels and income.
> because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other
They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income.
And yes, if you target anime, you'll select the Japanese and if you target Webtoons you'll select mostly Korean and Chinese.
Your flaw here is not your language but the direction of your reasoning. You can't reason from the specific anecdata up to population level - "my Black friends like tiktok therefore tiktok must target Black people". That's a "the parking lot is wet, it must be raining" sort of statement.
You CAN reason down. "Tiktok really does a good job showing content from Black influencers, they probably have a large Black audience".
I think you missed the point again, because my post was not trying to use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. It was an expression of curiosity and a desire to see data, which at least in my mind is quite opposed to drawing assumptions (or making an argument, or a generalized statement as you had previously written).
Nevertheless, this is an interesting post with some good information and I appreciate the time you took to write it out.
> They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income.
This part in particular was very informative; I'll be doing some more reading on this thanks to your explanation.
>I wonder how much the algorithm tailoring content to different ethnic groups has to do with these impressions.
A simpler explanation is that white people are generally more anti-China, and not something to do with the algorithm.