TikTok Live became 'a strip club filled with 15-year-olds' (2022)
forbes.com
forbes.com
Current relevant discussion:
The TikTok documents: Stripping teens and boosting 'attractive' people
I’m not sure about Twitter
I agree that their UI is terrible, but it doesn't fit in the list
Two academic studies argue that TikTok favors Chinese government views, and a new analysis says TikTok's parent firm is entangled with government propaganda organs. https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/tiktok-says-not-sprea...
Ironically, if you tune your TikTok feed carefully, it can offer plenty of great learning material on human psychology and cultural cognition, I highly recommend it.
I also recommend the YouTube channel Asian Boss, I enjoy watching how frequently Asian people pause to think before answering questions posed to them, they seem unable to immediately know the correct answer like most westerners.
I informed you that you are describing a model. And asked you a question about it, which you did not answer.
You are presenting your uncharitable take as representative of my stance, and then knocking it down with ease.
Might the same be happening with China in discussions in Western media (mainstream, social, etc)?
How could "worseness" of various platforms and these two countries even be calculated in a reasonably objective, unbiased manner? Is such a thing even possible?
But for clarity: do you believe your performance here to be error free?
If the mind is like muscles and needs exercise to become stronger, this culturally normal approach may not be to our long term advantage.
Making a counter-assertion of fact is not a requirement. In fact, making claims of fact when one lacks the expertise is generally a poor idea, though it is extremely popular.
If you are so smart, why can you not answer simple questions about your facts?
Possibly related:
More speculatively: I think there may be a way to get someone to transcend their cultural conditioning and admit when they slipped up in this manner, something that inevitably happens to all of us.
[1] the misinformative rhetorical nature of it is going to lose people like me, but I suspect I am an outlier in this regard, misinformation aligned with culturally conditioned subconscious bias appeals to almost everyone in my experience.
In my opinion it is absolutely bad for most people's mental health.
Essentially all other social media platforms have now copied TikTok and do the same.
I still refuse to use TikTok and I never YouTube shorts.
Strangely, you'll find many people, specifically on HN that want to attribute a separate maniacal agency to tiktok as if it's some cold war brainwave voodoo project sabotaging America. As if twitter, reddit, tumblr, youtube and instagram don't have similar problems.
This is about a long history of the west attributing secret conspiracies to Asian people. We acknowledge this when it's about things like Cholera conspiracies in the 1800s but somehow cannot see it when it happens in our own time.
Social Media is inherently exploitative regardless of the nationality doing it. This problem is not platform exclusive and pretending like it is makes solving it impossible just like how the Chinese exclusion act didn't cure Cholera. (https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinese_as_Medical_S...)
Add sexy content, and you have formula for addiction. Heck, I’m struggling with fly fishing shorts and tv show clips on Instagram and YouTube. 30-60 minutes 3-4 times per week. Meanwhile my Stackoverflow, EDx, and smart people podcast consumption has gone to zero. I feel like a nerd bum.
https://a16z.com/podcast/tiktoks-algorithm-and-creativity-ne...
I don't remember if there's even a downvote button. I had the same experience you did, but in the opposite direction gender-wise, and it took a bit longer to get too young, but it got there.
If you dislike something and watch it, that's engagement. They'll of course want to show you more of it.
Rage and anger are engagement too. They're perhaps the best forms of engagement.
Literally right after you said that, you described why a dislike button is necessary:
> If you dislike something and watch it, that's engagement. They'll of course want to show you more of it.
> Rage and anger are engagement too. They're perhaps the best forms of engagement.
Your suggestion was,
> Maybe someone should make a TikTok competitor where you swipe left or right on a video to indicate your approval.
The audience for this would be small. Social media platforms have found that users engage with content they "don't like". If showing users content they don't like resulted in less overall engagement, the platforms would rewrite their algorithms in a heartbeat.
A competitor to TikTok already faces an enormous uphill battle. If such a platform chooses to remove a proven strategy for traction and engagement, then it's doubling down on the headwinds and infirmities. I wouldn't count on it being a successful venture.
If you're looking to start a competitor, you need to differentiate somehow. Not using "rage and anger" to drive engagement would be pretty appealing to a user.
It's also worth noting that the context of this thread was two users who deleted the app because it showed them stuff they did not want to see. And the wider context has been TikTok has been utterly clueless handling concerns from the public and regulators, so I don't think reasoning from the assumption that whatever TikTok does is necessary is the right way to go.
And if you are right, it's just more proof that modern capitalism doesn't incentivize making things people want, rather it incentivizes making the things that exploit them most effectively. The appropriate political adjustments should be made to beat those companies until their users' morale improves.
> Your suggestion was,
Wasn't my suggestion.
I think the source of your confusing is that you wandered into a conversion between users while thinking you were a platform.
My read is that they're disingenuously trying to spin obviously intentional sexual content as, rather, a matter of interpretation of the wide range of imaginations of the viewers.
And they experimentally made a "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" swimwear category, while they figure out how to keep milking the intentional sexual titillation content, while still keeping advertisers happy.
(Related: The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue wasn't about sports, nor about travel, nor about anything else other than the obvious.)
I find the culture around this fascinating. We've got platforms trying to find the right balance of moderation in an attempt to not appear to be porn sites because that would be perceived as bad by society, while taking as much of that traffic as they can and normalising this type of content at the boundary, and while also trying to appease their own sources of moderation such as advertisers and payment processors. We've got content creators who may well not identify as sex workers, convincing themselves that they're different because of some boundary, and children looking for attention and emulating the increasingly normalised behaviour at the encouragement of a platform that prioritises views and exposes harmful metrics.
Absent abuse situations, pre-pubescent humans have basically no interest in sexual behavior, and, except in very rare cases of truly deranged individuals, adults have basically no sexual interest in pre-pubescent minors.
Historically, I believe puberty roughly coincided with the age of marriage for girls. One can argue about the mental maturity of a 17 year old and whether they are ready to make important life decisions, but there is clearly a huge mental difference between a 17 year old and a 13 year old, and puberty shifting earlier did not come with a forward shift in mental development.
So now we have essentially mental children who are interested in sex and related behavior (e.g. suggestive dancing), in a way that I believe is probably unprecedented in all of human history.
Also, while it is gross to consider, I’m guessing that many viewers of these 15 year olds are actually adult men of all ages. This problem is significantly amplified by a shift to earlier puberty, since I’m guessing in a counterfactual where the dancing girls are pre-pubescent, these men would feel disgust and move on instead of guiltily lingering.
Article:
Children are entering puberty younger than before, according to recent studies, raising concerns that childhood obesity and hormone-contaminated water supplies may be to blame.
However, our archaeological research suggests that there’s nothing to worry about. Children in medieval England entered puberty between 10 and 12 years of age – the same as today.
In England, just before the industrial revolution, historical sources suggest menarche occurred between 12-14 years. By the 1840s, girls had their first period between 14-17 years.
Author:
Mary Lewis Associate Professor in Bioarcheology, University of Reading
And that's not to negate Tiktok/Bytedance's negatives.
So what if it’s caused by changes in nutrition? That has no impact on the practical effects of the change.
Average height has increased significantly due to nutrition. Would you say that modern height increases are a total fallacy?
I’m not making any claims about chemicals or whatever people on the internet often ramble about.
> In England, just before the industrial revolution, historical sources suggest menarche occurred between 12-14 years. By the 1840s, girls had their first period between 14-17 years.
And just to point out another factual error in the OP's post, those women were also getting married in their mid-to-late 20s back then:
https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/07/11/what-age-d...:
> In fact, the majority of women and men married considerably older than [their teens] in the past. The graph below shows the average age at marriage over the long sweep of English and Welsh history. Apart from a few decades in the early 1800s, the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below age 24 was during the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
Perhaps Romeo and Juliet had a bit too much influence on my historical perspective :,)
And royalty/nobility. It mentions that marriage ages for them were younger.
Which makes sense, because my understanding is those weddings were political and royalty would obviously not suffer the same economic pressures as the lower classes.
The real problem we have to deal with is every smartphone, tablet and laptop is potentially a porn production device and we're not going to restrict their use to 18+ because they're so generally useful. I think the real solution is some kind of AI to block the content from being recorded unless the bill payer unlocks it on the idea that 15 year olds usually aren't paying their own cell phone bill.