i have watched tiktok regularly for 2-3 years, and till this day I only get pandas/ hippo videos. It seems it depends on viewer nature.
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.