Is the TikTok ban a chance to rethink the whole internet?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Life is full of these chances, but we seldom take them. Whatever happens with TikTok, it'll be business as usual in no time.
For the worse ? It was the perfect event to push surveillance and military spendings.
This stands in stark contrast with US-based social media companies, where both its users and content creators often speak like they're at war with the algorithm, yet to the tech elite these sites algorithms are tuned to perfection.
the blatant algorithm manipulation around elections and politics is just the icing on the cake. sure, china is probably doing this too, but they're either being more subtle or playing a longer game. meta et al may have come out ahead for a few quarters but what's that worth if user count is declining long term?
From time to time it will show you content adjacent to what you watch. After three or so viewings your feed will add the content you watched/engaged with regularly.
Press "not interested" twice (or sometimes once), and content will disappear.
American social media effectively ignores any input from users.
Are we sure? My experience with Instagram is the opposite, whenever you linger a bit on a reel you'll start to get more of that content
It's a pain because you have to constantly press "not interested" to curate your feed, I'd pretty much prefer to have content feeds, so that I can watch anything without having it go in my (im)permanent record
I couldn't speak for Tiktok's aims, but they seem different enough that its algorithm doesn't chafe in the ways that we've come to expect.
Who is they?
Anyway, you're wrong. TikTok pushes videos you want to see, while US app algos push content you are most likely to engage with. These are not the same thing. In fact, content one most engages with is content that generates outrage. Try not to get angry when you open Twitter. It's not easy.
Whoever runs the platform. That's the value they see in their platforms: the ability to control what you see, when you see it, and how you see it. You might only want to see what your friends and family have been up to, and in chronological order, but they are going to make sure you have to constantly scroll past shit you couldn't care less about to get to it, especially when that shit is advertising.
Not only do they do this for marketers, they actually think that making their users regularly disappointed and frustrated is a good thing. They think that forcing you to hunt for what you want makes finding it more rewarding and while you're scrolling past garbage/ads or searching for something you just saw, and cursing the obnoxious algorithm for hiding what you actually want they call it "engagement".
TikTok is also guilty of influencing what you see but they stay out of your way as much as possible. They bombard you with what you came for every minute you spend there. TikTok is massively popular and addictive because of that. US platforms could do that too, but their customers are advertisers - people who want nothing except to take your attention away from what you want to see.
You can go to twitter and get offended by bots, or you can go on TikTok and get bathed in dopamine. There's room enough on the internet for both experiences, but don't be surprised when people feel frustrated and annoyed by one of them and not the other.
No. US apps push creators, TikTok pushes content.
On TikTok, its the content that goes viral. Some nobody with 700 followers can have a video explode. That is exceedingly rare on YouTube. Its usually the channels with 1 million subscribers.
Advertisers love that, and so do platform owners. Its much easier to control and squeeze a few creators rather than a big diffuse group.
There’s most likely some middle ground for this. Too diffuse and it makes direct sponsorship difficult meaning the platform has more control over advertisements as they need to be algorithmically placed. Too centralized and you’re back in the land of cable where your advertising is less effective because of the broad cross section of the audience watching.
As far as “squeezing” creators goes… no, more centralized means higher demand which means higher pay and more control in creators hands.
Not at all. You forget that platform owners can suspend or ban someone without much recourse. "That's a nice channel you got there.. be a shame if something happened to it" and all that.
The point of no return was precisely the introduction of the smartphone because it lowered the amount of energy necessary for someone who doesn't care about technology to interact meaningfully with it. To this day most people don't own a personal computer unless they need it for work. But almost everyone has a phone.
Also, 1 hour without an interesting video is something I've never experienced on YouTube, even on new accounts (I create an account for new TVs). I think I'm simply not their target audience.
I couldn't even understand the point of 10-20% of the videos, like "What is this video trying to show here? A random person saying the word banana in a loop"
Just this past week I met a friend who uses TikTok and he said the same: Really good algorithm. He said when he watches "intelligent" stuff in it, the recommendations tend to be as "intelligent" or even more so. Whereas his experience with Instagram was that it quickly starts suggesting brain dead content.
I also do think there is a little bit of passive censorship about controversial topics. For example, if you lookup "free tibet" or "free hong kong", the posts there have at most 2-5k likes, and it seems like these posts never really "hit" the algorithm's sweet spot and get famous. Sure, this is entirely anecdotal, but I do find it a bit odd how the algorithm chooses what to show and what to hide.
Once again as someone who uses it, I think tiktok and its algorithm are definitely crippling the youth of America. At the same time, it doesn't sound right to ban it.
I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.
They tried that with Vine and it was a tremendous flop. Launched 2013, finally killed off around 2017.
In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.
In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.
You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)
I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.
In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated. Anyone who has subscribed to hundreds of feeds can probably tell you how great the signal to noise ratio is. It’s not. And that’s just for subscribing to blogs that tend to be on topic, throw in microblogs (Twitter and clones) and you quickly get all kinds of nonsense you don’t care about, e.g. baseball and politics if you follow John Gruber for Apple news. Realistically there are a small handful of really high quality feeds you don’t want to miss, and for the rest you want to follow topics, not people. TikTok lets you effortlessly do that; traditional RSS subscription model doesn’t, and no one has built that “your own service for discovery”. Ironically Reddit may be the closest thing for the following topics part, if you ignore all its problems.
There was an article on HN a couple years ago that goes into more details: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...
Hugely off-topic, but that strikes me as a very strange thing to be taught. Personally, I believe that, if humans have free will, other animals do too, but that's all it is: a belief.
Fortunately we don’t have to indulge them as the project founder’s page is here: https://www.mccourt.com/project-liberty/ and the project website is here: https://www.projectliberty.io/
New tech isn’t the solution to what ails the web though. The web is built on great tech, and there’s a constant forward motion to iterate and improve on the technical stack of the web. Reigning in specific anti-consumer practices characteristic of surveillance-oriented businesses is because even if you manage to make a decentralized protocol popular for a short period of time, if there is ever enough people for it to be commercially lucrative, exactly the same cycle of centralization will repeat itself.
Capitalism is just a gentler version of feudalism, which was a gentler version of slavery.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...
I have been wondering quite a while how engineers working explicitly on "lowest common denominator" tech feel about themselves and their work?
EDIT: I kind of forgot that yt serves ads in unbearable quantities for quite a while. Thinking that yt might care for viewers seems indeed a bit naive.
The IP protocol has been proven for decades, but the "newyorker" is probably thinking about the entire Internet of Facebook, Google, Instagram and X?
No. Next question.
I deleted my account about a year ago. Although I loved a lot of content and was awed by the work of many creators, I got this weird anxiety when I had been scrolling for, say, an hour. It was like my brain was giving me a warning sign, though my consciousness did not perceive it. I came to a personal decision, unscientifically, and without any jingoism or conspiracies, that short-form scrolling is bad for my health.
A couple of weeks ago I signed up for Loops (the fediverse version of TT) and I scrolled a few videos. I had such a strong negative feeling that I closed it and uninstalled. I am so happy YouTube Shorts is so shit, because I watch one or two that catch my eye, then go back to the longer videos.
> McCourt, who says that he has no interest in becoming TikTok’s C.E.O., is unique among the group of potential buyers. For starters, he has been steadfastly public, voicing his desire to purchase the app in print and televised interviews, including on “Fox & Friends,” reportedly Trump’s favorite show. He is also the only potential buyer so far promising to serve the public’s interest—to address not only geopolitical concerns about the app but also the deleterious effects it has been shown to have on young users.
It seems to be little more than a thinly veiled ad for billionaire Frank McCourt to push his bid to buy TikTok, which he promises will not just be another social media platform but so much better under his ownership, and fix all the problems. Surely wouldn't be used to push his and his friends' agenda. Not to mention that ByteDance seems to have repeatably said they don't want to sell, but everyone seems to have their price, maybe they just haven't got the right offer yet.
Do I wish otherwise? Of course. Will anything of the sort happen? Nope.
Oligarchs won't stop until all media (social and legacy) are turned into ideological echo chambers in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and a return to the Gilded Age.
All done in the name of free speech and freedom, of course.
Companies get shut down or penalized whenever they break laws or behave in obviously abusive ways. Tiktok was given several recourses, and they refused.
That's all there is to it.
It's a tried and true method to find witches.