TikTok Is Destroying Itself from the Inside Out
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
People say this about all platforms. As much as I dislike Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, etc, they all are doing fine. The vocal minority/article bias is at play. I don't like TikTok as a platform either, but it's insanely massive and that's not going to change for a while.
Hah, Twitter isn't exactly doing fine
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...
The only who are doing well on Twitter are crypto-scams, Nazis and trolls. But it seems Elon is now in those bubbles active, so maybe that was the intention all along?
This is not true. Like when they censored Turkish opposition.
> less censorship and government interference
> Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk. The company has not refused a single request since Musk took ownership, according to self-reported data.
https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
edit: Not to mention the period bans of Musk's critics.
You don't even need SEO chum and AI generated "content" to understand why search engines suck so badly nowadays. The discussions that used to happen on (indexable) forums, blogs, and comments have largely moved behind pay- or login-walls.
The fact that so many people resort to appending "reddit" isn't so much a testament to the quality of reddit so much as it's a result of that being one of the few large, centralized platforms that could still be indexed.
You get ugly amount of pop-ups there but at least the content will load.
Instagram just shows me a Meta logo or a blank page. Not sure how much this is due to ad-blocking though, and not particularly inclined to disable it to find out. Mostly I just don't click and I ask the friend/whoever to summarize or send a screenshot if it's something I care about. For generic "hey look at this funny post" stuff I just skip it.
Sucks, because links from friends should be fun or useful. It's kinda nuts how many don't work unless you are logged into something snoopy/sketchy.
I do not know about features, that may be true. But unfortunately Twitter seems to be in austerity mode. Unlike most sites, it is not working for wast majority of internet users.
Now you might argue that the social networks are failing. There are definitely some people who I don't see any more.
But really, there are discussion and I can read them when I want.
[1] I am not even American
Most sites are able to operate without login. This is not case for the Twitter. It is operating still yes, but for now in austerity mode.
Edit: and HN, but it isn't driven by add revenue. Im not aware of any besides reddit that do not.
Anecdotally, it's reputation is also far worse than other social media companies. It's hard to go into the office, family gatherings, etc, without hearing people joke about how awful Twitter has become, whereas with other sites I usually only hear that sentiment from other long-time users deeper inside my own bubble.
I think it's gotten worse since Musk took over. But it hasn't moved in "the rankings" compared to other social networks. I wonder if Threads and Bluesky will eventually be as nasty as old Twitter of if they'll manage to foster better discussions somehow.
For a while, everyone joked about Youtube saying "never read the comments section, man!" Or you only need to look at the comments section on any large media outlet (newspaper, tv, etc) article to see the same thing. Person + anonymity + audience, etc.
Twitter was like the comments section for the entire internet. So many people. So much trying to be funny or witty or provocative. Such expected results.
Both of those places seem to have gotten their initial swell of "actually using it" users from anti-Twitter/Musk people and pro-leftist/progressives. They also seem very militant about making sure that they are the gatekeepers/rulemakers of these new kingdoms.
Not sure about BlueSky, though I may not be following active enough people there to notice any change in atmosphere.
It still wasn't "good", but it wasn't a privacy nightmare to the degree that Facebook was, and you could at least trust that things like blue checkmarks actually meant something.
Banning 'freespeech' here... allowing it there...
It was not bought to directly make money. It is still useful tool for people that invested in it.
As an end user, most social media platforms are not doing fine, and have been overrun with abusive behavior and suffer from some form of Enshittefication.
These companies doing fine financially (is Twitter? I don’t think so?) should not be conflated with the end user experience and health of the communities, which in many cases have degraded so thoroughly that they no longer serve their original purpose.
Twitter is a sunk ship - one of the worst business purchases in history.
Pinterest is nowhere near as bad as Twitter. It's maybe "fine" depending on your definition.
TikTok was on a truly incredible growth trajectory. In many ways - it would be impressive for TikTok to make enough bad changes to not at least be "fine". But "fine" is subjective. That growth trajectory is nowhere near as impressive these days.
If that’s not doing fine, what the hell is?
Apple, on the other hand has 2 billion active devices that people paid money for and are on a replacement cycle. Somehow that is only worth twice what a Facebook account is worth in terms of market cap.
One user can own multiple devices. My friend owns an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods as well.
Also, the timeframes are different. Apple consider any device which pinged one of their services within the last 90 days to be active. So it's approximately 1 month vs 3 months in terms of the window of measurement. And we're not even getting into the possibility of devices pinging their services that aren't in true active usage, i.e. an iPad that's just charged and connected to WiFi but not actually used.
Of course, that's still extremely impressive from Apple! It's an amazing achievement which the market has obviously rewarded. But it's very much apples to oranges here. Those two statistics can't be directly compared because they represent different measurements over different periods of time.
The comparison is between 2 billion physical devices that cost real money to buy and replace with 3 billion entries in a users table with a datestamp.
Of course we can make that comparison.
You can grow "users" without actually growing users, by having the same people have multiple accounts.
By what metric?
OP has no idea what they are talking about. Growth is massive.
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
In a lot of those growing markets, Facebook is the main (or only) way of having a web presence for their business. WhatsApp is similarly the main way to have IM support, as well.
I googled “twitter active users per year” and similar revenue charts and they don’t support this claim. There is a slight down since 2021, but that was when everyone was locked up and had whole days to speak. Nasdaq has basically the same /\ profile in 2019-2023 range. Taking the whole economy into account, twitter is fine.
Are you sure it’s not just “I left the ship and wish it to sink”? Not a musk fan either, but statements like this feel rather wishful.
None of the numbers you're going to see since the purchase are reliable, given that the company is now private and unlikely to release anything substantive.
Most businesses would literally kill for the kind of "slowly sinking ship" where they're making tons of profits from their decades-old primary business that is somehow even more popular now than it was when it was actually cool.
I won’t go in to detail but they suffered at the hands of a barbaric company which does not care about its staff or its users. People on the moderation team are SLA’d to death and most have some form of PTSD from the videos they’re subjected to.
I’d love to see Tiktok and all the other attention grabbing shitty apps die a death. But here’s the kicker… despite leaving TikTok due to the stress and anxiety working there caused her she still uses the app!
Looking at e.g. Reddit today it seems the narrative is controlled by bots. Maybe that would have been hard in 2003.
Sure today we are seeing a repeat where Pro-Israel supporters are getting pro-Palestinian newscasters fired, actors are losing their roles, people who place Palestinian flags in their linkedin bios are getting their employers harassed etc.
But with the advent of Tiktok we are at least getting an avenue to see what is happening in Palestine whereas its buried on all other platforms. Maybe its being artificially boosted but the end result is that there are mass protests in all the cities and TikTok is allowing the conversation to continue so the topic remains top of mind in peoples heads. A future president may actually be in one of those protests and Tiktok may have directly contributed to their future world view. A world view where the current power base loses out.
I was way to young at the time to have had any political conscious.
The scary part is that the war mongerers seems to hide in the closet until they collectivly see a chance to war monger. Then they come out in force and there is a window where they control the narrative (relative to their usual share of control of the narrative) until people calm down abit.
There is always this implied "I'll hit you in the face" or "when SHTF I'll shoot you" from those personality types. They are very hard to deal with.
The "narrative" difference on e.g. Reddit vs TikTok or Twitter is baloney.
Reddit is so extremely manipulated nowadays. Not just in this matter at hand regard, but in many questions it is sect like.
Well its important to learn what happened in the run up to the Iraq war since a lot of the same government officials that ran things then are still around. Its not ancient history.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicks (the section on the 2003 era explains how this band got destroyed due to their opposition to the imminent war)
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher#Politically_Incorre...
>The "narrative" difference on e.g. Reddit vs TikTok or Twitter is baloney.
Do you have any additional reasoning as to why? Without it your argument falls apart. From what I can see, the mere fact that you have constant updates flowing on TikTok vs Reddit or other platforms is what makes it stand out.
Only bureaucrats with an engineering mindset would stamp out a ideology by systematically putting people in camps and their kids into all day long "re-education" schools that teach people to forget their culture and try to "install" a new culture onto them.
I'm about ready to divest from any technology more advanced than a 1980s terminal. Any takers for my Neo-Amish movement? On Fridays we have pancakes and on Sundays we stone ad executives.
The extreme aversion here to tiktok in particular is not well-informed.
My feed is woodworkers showing their techniques, physicists talking about strange discoveries, and developers talking about what you can do with ai.
As with all social media, it's going to try to show you what it thinks you want to see.
After deleting it, I felt better and my battery life improved too.
I'm not sure what people mean when they say this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files (I know linking wik as a source is lame but lots of additional links here)
You can certainly argue that in this day and age what is "misinformation" has become politicized, but at the end of the day they were only requests.
That that has become a conspiracy theory is a testament to the modern right's understanding of events and facts, as seen through the lens of the media they consume.
I think every single institution that exists will have bias, so if we say having bias is isomorphic with being "a propaganda tool", then the term "propaganda tool" isn't very useful anymore, covering too much, and not what people think you are suggesting when you say the term.
I guess the interesting thing with tik-tok might be how much influence the Chinese government specifically as an entity has over it's various policies that effect what people see there; but then, I think people discount the influence the US government has over similar US companies too, from overt and more implicit pressure both -- but to literally any company operating in the USA, this isn't meant to be a "conspiracy theory" about say Facebook specifically either.
I appreciate you saying FB might indeed be similar... but generally if we say "TikTok is a Chinese propaganda tool" people think we are saying something different than "not too different from Facebook," and also something much more than "there are biases and interests of the people and organizations involved in decision-making, that necessarily effect what they do."
Which I don't know, it's not obvious to me anyway, or clear to me that the people who think it's obvious actually know what they're talking about. That there's something much more than this, in any of those cases.
It's a US-based company with insane oversight. Older people can't grasp that youth have different interests and have different political views so they call it propaganda.
Yes. Much in the same way that the IRS has oversight over a company's financial records but doesn't have much of a say in how the company carries out its business.
> What does oversight mean here by your definition?
Having access to the data, having access to the content moderation policies, as well as having legal jurisdiction over TikTok's executive team.
> Are youth always correct in their worldview and never put at odds with their own societies by external or internal propaganda tools?
Their political positions are usually a lot more extremely conservative or extremely liberal. Although some of their opinions might be formed in the shape intended by propaganda, a lot of the opinions are exclusively rebellion (see: young people drinking, smoking, whatever).
Ultimately youth on TikTok don't think Tiananmen square was a hoax or have deluded views about China's social policies. In fact they meme about China's social credit concept and would rather visit Japan or Korea. This on its own ends the idea of it being a Chinese propaganda tool -- if it really is, the Chinese are failing as miserably as the US at trying to weaponize it.
Beyond this, however, TikTok is essentially giving itself up to the full control of the US government[0] so we might be on the verge on having Twitter-esque style[1] controls.
But pretending that China is the reason that TikTok isn't enough pro-Israeli, or the reason why conservative views are making a resurgence in the younger demographics, or that it's 'dumbing down the Western world' (just as the radio, TV and video games did before) is just a mixture of old people yelling at clouds and propagandists not being able to manipulate a new generation.
It's actually funny how the same voices complaining about it now weren't complaining when TikTok was pushing covid vaccine conspiracies a couple of years ago -- it might have something to do with their viewpoint no longer being represented.
The real solution for TikTok might be to add an age limit. That is, no old people. Let kids be kids -- which is how it started when they were just singing and dancing before it was politicized. Something that republicans take issue with, of course, who want TikTok to push nationalist propaganda instead like they do on the Chinese version.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/dra...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-...
> Social media success is a delicate balance
No it isn't. It's three things:
1. Luck / Startup x-factor: what makes these novel formats flourish to begin with, but it's short-lived: it won't sustain a platform long-term.
2. Money: what Meta have done with Instagram - pushed through by cannibalising instead of innovating by sheer power of investment
3. Inertia: why Twitter has defied all doomsayers' reports of its demise.
TikTok's current trajectory looks more like trying to ape Meta's strategy & ultimately avoid what happened to Snapchat, by abandoning the innovation that got them to where they are & instead take advantage of the power, money & inertia they currently have to sustain themselves in other ways & broaden their audience (beyond the more fickle TikTok-early-adopter-influencers).
> its ad revenue growth is slowing down
Translation: its ad revenue is growing. This is an industry that was being reported as being generally in decline across the board only a year ago - some competitors like Meta have only recently started to show growth again after losses.
if zuck goes after the music companies of which there's only like 3, he might win.
Longer videos pave the way for non-skippable, mid-video ads, which they can charge more for.
TikTok Shop is for taking a cut of every transaction on your "territory", like Apple is doing with the App Store. QVC for Gen Z.
The sooner people stop believing this BS about social media apps caring about "connecting people" , the sooner the reality of the business model can be made apparent to everyone.
I had a few mini viral videos. It was incredible that I could reach so many people with my phone.
That feeling is totally gone now. I see many accounts that I follow that use to get hundreds of thousands to millions of views per video now are lucky to break a thousand views per video.
The feeling that it is a platform for creators is gone.
Tiktok had the lead in short form video, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts were just copying their lead.
You can feel that the content on your for you page is not as original, quirky, and authentic as it was.
TikTok positioned itself as a mobile app you could create video on. They even own the video editing app CapCut.
Their move to focus on long form video will be a failure in my opinion. People are not going to create and edit 30 minute videos on a phone. Only those with dedicated computers for video editing are going to be able to produce 30 minute videos.
And the audience? I for one would not watch a 30 minute video on my phone. If I want to watch a 30 minute video, I go on my PC and watch it on YouTube.
I think someone with the right funding could figure out a way to create a 2021 version of TikTok where people on a phone could go viral without anyone's thumb on the algorithm.
I think this all started with the hype around the Ninja Creami, and TikTok saw that if you got enough people on there talking about one product to the point that it drove them to sell out for months they saw their new revenue stream. But there is a difference between real organic word of mouth, and this fake TikTok Shop "eligible for commission" nonsense.
Isn't the lesson from Instagram "user backlash is temporary, keep doing what you're doing and the users will return"?
Meanwhile, I'm on here following dudes wintering at the south pole, a captain of a container ship in the middle of the indian ocean, an orthodox rabbi in brooklyn, a physicist, a philosopher, a civic designer, and 10,000 hilarious meme makers and comedians who are remixing and lipsyncing and making incredible content that I can't even conceive of doing through a mobile interface. Most of THAT group are not famous anywhere else - their bios don't link to instagram or a management group.
Some of these videos get longer - but nothing more than 5 mins. Concentrated deep dives into a single topic. Heavy on personality but otherwise mostly Signal, not Noise.
Which is why it's also so hilarious folks in this thread rolling their eyes saying that people say that every platform gets ruined, but it never is. No, the NUMBERS go up. But the platforms have been ruined over and over and over again. None of my generation is on Facebook anymore. They are still on Instagram but exclusively to follow celebrities. There is no place in the world to just hang out and catch up with friends anymore - not a ubiquitous one anyway that we had through the 2000's. Even Reddit has lost all culture and is a ghosttown compared to what it use dto be.
I'm not saying Tiktok is that. But what Tiktok has been for the last 3 years is UNIQUE. Special. Distinctive. It's own style, it's own brand of interesting and engaging.
And this: > Then there’s the videos themselves. In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format. TikTok is even encouraging people to upload photo slideshows instead of videos altogether. On top of that, TikTok just fumbled a relationship with Universal Music Group, which pulled its music catalog off the platform and silenced any video featuring Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, and every other Universal artist.
Will absolutely ruin it, if they don't quickly pivot and turn away. I don't mean "ruin" by pure user/engagement numbers. But ruin what currently makes it special in terms of connecting humanity to one another. That will go away and not come back somewhere else.
Ironic to see that tiktok is being made worse by trying to compete with youtube. I absolutely hate youtube shorts and am annoyed to no end that I can't remove them from my youtube experience. Doubly ironic that I'm more likely to give tiktok a chance than to ever succumb to youtube's wheedling insistence that I click on their 5-second content clips.
Strategically, TikTok is intentionally sailing into a rough patch in order to launch the e-commerce play without giving an unfair advantage to big/established brands, which would crowd out the "crowd" and defeat the purpose.
I thought this was pretty obvious.
So, when you see a mess of divisive content on there, and you’re in the UK (maybe?, re: “tonnes”), the content is there for a reason perhaps. …Stoke the fires of Western users’ current inability to handle this content without some % of the viewers losing their minds and <last 6 yrs of instability>.
This has been reported on amply by Washington Post the Guardian as early as 2019.
> TikTok Shop launched in September and has quickly been littered with cheap, fake products. However, the online marketplace is profitable, raking in $4 million every day in the United States.
I want to destroy myself like that!
According to https://usds.tiktok.com/ all US user data is on Oracle servers.
Is that still happening?
So there would be a great irony that it is so effective it destroys its own userbase first.
The composting of the internet.
Now I feel they have sanitized it pretty well, and the volume of creators means that each niche is overfull with middle-brow content. I think that has left little room for the truly bizarre stuff that lurks to come out into the light. It still manages to keep me stuck to the screen for hours at a time (the reason I very rarely dare to open the app at all) but I don't have the same belly laugh experience I did when I first used the app. I walk away less often thinking to myself: "what the hell just happened". Mostly it serves me pretty tame content.
I mean, this really just feels like textbook case of Enshittification [1]
Betteridge's Law!
[exit pedant, swinging on a vine]
Writing this, I've realized that TikTok hasn't made the terms for it's posts/feed obvious. Twitter has Tweets/Timeline, Facebook has Feed, I don't know what I would say to describe a post from TikTok outside of calling the video itself a 'TikTok'