As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever was and a lot of the most popular creators are already mirroring their content there?
There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling, nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think spite is a far simpler answer.
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
> In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment offices through pressure or deception. The authorities claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine and choose elderly Russians as their victims. The Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of their claims. Russian business newspaper Kommersant claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
Emphasis mine.
> Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens
You don't really have to imagine this.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for some citizens to feel the same
Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence, agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and throw me in some dark pit.
China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital presence, including my finances. But the US government could easily skip a few steps and just declare those finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more difficult to undo.
Sure, individually. If you think about more than yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
> could also blow up into a giant international controversy
Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?
Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.
The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam#...
It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
> if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM?
Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
> India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil?
I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to me you're talking about someone who had strong connections to India and would be generally perceived as Indian.
> What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)"
That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well, sure; so what?
My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason. "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
Her father would also be upset if she starts learning Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another culture and learning a foreign language.
I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often some I find interesting in a long enough window of time — the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my personal signal is just nonexistent.
Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood. There's such a huge difference between how much people like TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me in particular.
In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy longer format posts and articles more in experience.
I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think about it.
I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like it was targeting some specific demographic by default and never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for me.
- avoid attempts based on "unliking" things, I'm pretty sure it treats it as engagement. Instead swipe bad content away.
- avoid "accidentally engaging", like replying to a comment you feel is wrong or watching something you don't like because you were trying to see where the speech was going. Disengage ASAP with unwanted.
- positive feedback for whatever video starts getting close to what you want.
- positive implies staying the whole clip, liking, viewing comments, commenting, liking comments and the strongest of all, sharing the video (you can send it to a telegram conversation with yourself or whatever, not sure if the link you shared ever being opened is accounted for but I think nope). Do this on purpose, like if a video is cool just open the comment section and like all comments without looking.
-try to "navigate". If you want to see tech and it's currently showing you music, maybe engage with music production or Spotify tricks when they appear. It might not be the tech you're looking for, but it's closer to tech than a teenage girl dancing. You'll eventually be shown things more relevant to you, at which point you grab that current.
Also do not try to rush the process. I think updating your interests is not instant, and session time might be a metric as well.
This is just completely foreign to how I consume media. The idea that I need to try and "trick" an algorithm into showing me what I want is just completely unappealing. I'd much rather go somewhere else and actively seek out the content that I want, rather than trying to fight a system that seems like it would prefer me to be a passive consumer.
"Passive" not in the sense that I shouldn't be engaged, clearly, as the algorithm rewards engagement. But passive in the sense that I should not be seeking out what I want to see, I should just be reactive based on what I am shown, and then the platform will decide from that what I really want.
Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
To a first approximation, TikTok simply shows you more of what you watch. If you swipe away a lot of stuff in the first second or two, it stops showing you that kind of stuff. If you watch complete videos, it shows you more like that.
So I am specifically trying to sus out how common it is among tiktok users to have this sort of strategic thinking around the algorithm, since it's not something I've heard much of before.
Yup. It was new to me, as I learned from younger friends. To them it's obvious it's ride or be taken for a ride - not doing this active navigation, they'd compare it with surfing reddit using just the default frontpage unlogged.
In fact people even troll each other, for example by sending someone a mormon speech or an untranslated meme from India to screw with their feeds.
I have to say that in a way it's way better than YouTube or Instagram, where you can't really tame the thing and it will suddenly decide for a month that you like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro because you watched a video about bodybuilding.
>Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
Because a huge amount of interesting content is there. I also prefer the old style, but I'd rather begrudgingly adapt than be left behind in progressively decaying platforms - it is what it is.
In general, it "just works" after a short period of maybe searching for specific terms just to "seed" the algorithm.
But if you're used to your media telling you who to be instead of having media be responsive to who you are, it might feel very disconcerting.
If you have more time, then you can watch normal youtube videos or TV shows...
If their only differentiating feature is the algorithm, Insta would eat them for lunch eventually the same they did for Snapchat after knocking off that app's big/only claim to fame (stories).
The discussion seems to be TikTok's algorithm is so good no one could ever possibly compete. I really don't think that's the case and TikTok really has no moat whatsoever.
I'm not seeing this sentiment. More that none of its competitors are so obviously ahead of the pack that we can easily predict TikTok's natural successor.
It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?
It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or Youtube where you do not bother to go because you permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious users.
In comparison to instagram I have found it far easier to explore, for instance, black women making leftist political critiques of Harris engaged in long conversations with black women who were actively supporting Harris.
Similarly, it has been much easier to find discussions about Palestine, labor rights, indigenous US culture, and numerous other topics.
I think those conversations are probably find-able on Ig or Yt, but I have had much more difficult time with those platforms. It's been hard for me to find much engaging content that is close enough to my (admittedly anarchistic) political and cultural views that the conversation changes what I think in useful ways, so I avoid that work on things like FB. These platforms do suck for doing anything other than keeping up with pictures of my nieces.
My feeling is that in general the TT algo doesn't really care about US politics so it just shows me engaging content, whatever that might be for me.
People here can call that "addictive", but in doing so it quickly discards any agency for people who have any actual political disagreements with the radically centrist US political mainstream.
I am used to that flippant dismissal- Allen Dulles would have rather believed in mind control than believe that US military personal who encountered Koreans were swayed by genuine empathy for a legitimate political-economic position.
By contrast, my feeling is that various other governments don't really care what folks in other countries think about the world so as long as it's not objectively porn or gore they just let conversations happen.
That is, of course, quite dangerous if your power relies on maintaining narrative consistency for the population you rule- that's why China and other authoritarian folks do things like limit what can happen on social media in their countries...
If it were true than the countless nations which turned to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain themselves would be still standing. Instead, they invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop believing anything (or supporting their own government) and at that point their collapse is already imminent - even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet Union.
Or for some predictive power - once China's economy reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the books and redefine exactly how things are measured just to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their entire political system will collapse. People would be happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day, so long as their economy and society was booming from the average person's perspective. It's only when things slow down that people start looking more critically at the systems they live under.
The evidence is all around you.
I do think that you have toan incredibly reductive view of belief formation to think that simply showing someone a series of short videos is enough to change how they think about the world.
There's a whole dialect in our existence within language, but most folks I know think that they are the sole authors of their beliefs while other folks are entirely a product of whatever happens to be in front of them. It's very reminiscent of the Fundamental Attribution fallacy...
It sows ideas that are net-beneficial to the propagandist. Leans into the ones that get traction. Manipulates the conversation. Provides simplistic (but advantageous) refutations of more complex (but more true) criticisms.
This is Psych 101 material here. Not at all complicated. You just need to think on a wider horizon and a longer time frame. Stereotypically, this is a cultural weakness of US Americans. Certainly of its leaders. Other cultures have contrasting reputations, some of which appears to be earned.
Or consider things like the USSR where the government strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite jokes from the time is, "Why do we have two newspapers, "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And indeed once they started allowing some degree of expression, it was basically all anti-establishment, leading to some notably great Soviet music from the 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.
I do think media can have an influence on things people know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk. War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever about the conflict. But then over time people begin to learn more and formulate their own views and learn more about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.
And in cases where people already have preformed opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The obvious example in recent times would be the media effort to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they already had their opinions and so the media propaganda was mostly completely ineffective.
Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it. And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a product of their developmental environment to begin with.
Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework for thought is provided to them by the group. These groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely, defined. There is always a fringe. But independent thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of people.
This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can you?
People pick their worldview and biases, and media (in current times) sees it as their role to deliver on those biases. When they don't - the audience leaves and moves on to somebody who will.
The only real superpower media has is to overtly lie to people. And on issues that people know nothing about it is generally effective. But as they learn more about the topic, the views shift more towards what people again choose to individually think about an issue. And as a longer term side effect of this, this superpower is completely self defeating because people begin to completely distrust the media. I could show polls on that but I'm sure you already know trust in media is basically nonexistent. The funnier one is this. [1] The perceived ethics of journalists lies literally right between lawyers and advertisers.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/467804/nurses-retain-top-ethics...
While it's true that people follow their affirming media (e.g. Tucker Carlson), they also accept a lot of what he says, without critical thought.
The "facts" he presents are the basis for their beliefs, and since he is very selective and slanted about the information he presents, they believe it to be further affirmation of their preexisting beliefs or biases.
This is the essence of propaganda and manipulation. Fill in the gaps of people's knowledge/belief with something that's plausible and favorable to you, even if it's only part of the story.
Content generation is Propaganda 101. Editorial control of a trusted entity is a higher level. Algorithm manipulation of a (perceived) neutral/noninvolved source is a higher level yet. And personalized algorithm manipulation is basically spear phishing. Which works extremely well!
Contrast this against the NYTimes. People follow it for the woke, pro-hegemony, pro-establishment stuff. But as per the example with Senator Tom Cotton, if they veer to far from this ideology, far from just accepting it - they rant and rave, and if NYTimes didn't promise to get back on track - they would also have left.
Media has absolutely wised up to the fact that contrarian attitudes are common amongst Americans. These companies know that if they repeat something nonstop and make it as obnoxious as possible, a large number of people will quickly adopt the opposite viewpoint. That's the desired result.
Reverse psychology is something elementary school kids learn about and use to torment others or do their bidding. It doesn't end in elementary school.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
It's very transparent.
A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth - Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left trying to make claims that are simply false - the opposite of all of the above would be an example.
As for governments freaking out - it's because of self interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are holding them accountable and anti-establishment candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously living through a geopolitical inflection point with the decline of one great empire and the rise of [something else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire), and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will likely geopolitically define the next century.
This is not the truth, very far from it. Western observers are fooled by the official statistics because they've literally never experienced a government blatantly lying and posting completely fabricated numbers. They recognize when governments tweak definitions and try other manipulations, but they are utterly unequipped to recognize completely made up numbers.
For Russian economists, this is nothing new. They are openly sarcastic when they reference figures like the official inflation rate (9.5%), because they estimate the true number to be far worse, 20-25%. They used to base their opinions on independent market research companies like ROMIR that tracked consumer spending habits, but Russian government shut them all down in late 2024.
Russia is getting hit with a similar inflation wave like the world saw during and after Covid, but unlike the rest, Russia cannot climb out of the hole, because they are unwilling to stop the war against Ukraine. War spending is the main cause of the inflation. Russian government is flooding the economy with insane payouts to mercenaries for their utterly unproductive "work" on the battlefield while the production of goods is stalling and the availability of foreign goods is much lower as well due to sanctions. Growing amount of money in the system + less goods available = money loses value relative to goods (inflation).
Vladimir Milov, the former Deputy Minister of Energy, gave an excellent interview where he broke it all down: https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/war-deficits-and-the-r...
When the Russian economy was briefly under substantial strain when the huge sanctions attack first landed and the ruble fell rapidly, not only did their official numbers reflect this, but they had a more negative expectation than third parties!
For that matter there are a zillion videos you can watch on YouTube of people doing walking tours through various supermarkets and places looking at the availability/prices of stuff. Here's one from some lady a month ago that clearly leans ideologically Western, but nonetheless affirms prices to be somewhat lower than would be expected from the official rates, while complaining about it - https://youtube.com/watch?v=m01-iYSPDt0
Made even sillier if you're aware of Russia's economic history since the end of the 90s. Their economy has for decades been seeing substantial inflation (5-10%) yet even more substantial wage growth. So complaining about prices without even mentioning the change in wages is the sort of behaviour one should expect from people of this sort of bias.
I don't think anyone believes that they're being successfully targeted by Russian propaganda. A lot of people believe, or claim to believe, that their political opponents have been successfully targeted by Russian propaganda, or that ideas that they don't like are Russian propaganda. But that's not really because they've been convinced of something that strongly goes against their interests/predispositions; it only requires them to believe that their opponents are stupid and they are smart, which they were already predisposed to believe. (And I suspect most of them know on some level that this is something they're professing rather than something they think is literally true)
> people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it
Oh no, people enjoy righteous indignation and so media serves it to them. But the media establishment is not organised enough to direct that, certainly not through some 5D chess logic. Yes you do occasionally see false/slanted stories spread as outrage bait by people on the other side, but when those happen they're done by, like, literally 3 guys, and one of them spills the beans shortly after.
If you want a contemporary example, look at the UK media suppressing coverage of muslim child rape gangs for the past 10 years or so that's now kind of bubbling over into the mainstream discourse. Yes, it's creating a backlash effect, but if that was the deliberate intention then a propaganda payload that takes 10+ years to deliver results is not going to be useful for day-to-day politics (is Russia still going to be at war in 10 years, and if so, with who? Will e.g. Belarus be an ally or an enemy at that point?). And even at level 0 it was never really effective in changing minds - maybe it gave the people who wanted to pretend it wasn't happening an excuse to pretend it wasn't happening, but the people who cared about it managed to find out.
Theories of propaganda masterminds are comforting in the same way that conspiracy theories are - the idea that there's actually some competent entity that's got it all worked out. But in fact any entity large enough to spread propaganda is ipso facto too unwieldy to push anything but the simplest messages.
Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.
Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also hate that my likes are public on reels.
e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide color to an earnest question
But I would be curious how to make sure I get that kind of content I would love philosophy and current events.
Somehow I’ve trained my algorithm is only show me superhero clips, I think because I was watching all the Marvel movies during the pandemic and then didn’t really use it again since then
Be diligent about not spending too much time watching something if it's not what you want your algo to be, sometimes I can get in loops where I watch something because I'm confused by it and then just get a lot of confusing content.
I think that's why, just saying
That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.
As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour
The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least 100:1.
For shorts it is abysmal, I only get horrible recommendations there - no idea why it is so different.
I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.
Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all hearsay.
This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.
Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.
Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime, on the other hand, is something people already pay for (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind of backwards in some ways.
Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.
YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.
Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.
Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to push at the user.
I tried reels when it first released, and gave up after an hour of constantly being shown videos of scantily clad women.
reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to get it to stop showing you some combination of “funny prank videos” and onlyfans funnel content.
There are so many UI elements on top of video that end up blocking what you're trying to see. There is no way to hide them.
YouTube also destroyed its search.
1. the algorithm sucks 2. it will consistently fail to load content quickly enough when scrolling unwanted content
YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].
IMHO good riddance. Anything bad for the mindless addictive chum industry is good for humanity. Now do Instagram, Facebook, Xhitter, etc.
I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.
The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x
...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.
It might be eventually.
(GenZ) People are migrating to RedNote now to lift a middle finger. It's more of a meme.
EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between sessions.
Most of the content there, it's, well, "shorts", cuts from full videos of podcasts, etc. It lacks real users. It's basically the current youtube creators doing content for Youtube Shorts.
Let alone how the algo it's worse, and you can't download videos :)
I suspect if they're mirroring content to YouTube, it's more to try to attract audience to TikTok than monetize through YouTube.
I think both Alphabet and Meta suck at seductive material.
I've never personally used TikTok, so it's possible my perception is flawed, but to me it almost seems like a dare to the government to prove how serious their rationale is. If the government truly thinks that having data collected by Chinese apps is so dangerous, are they willing to flat out ban _all_ Chinese apps? If so, is that more extreme step still something the courts consider constitutional? If not, was TikTok just a convenient political target rather than something actually dangerous?
Reels needs to be more disconnected from Facebook for it do anything similar.
Why do you say the Shorts UI is better? It seems exactly the same to me.