Good attempt but TikTok also makes people rich. Amassing a huge following and being popular brings brand deals etc.
I hope this takes off though.
I hope this takes off though.
Once people get feedback and good experiences things are evened out much better. Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
It doesn’t bill itself as a social network though. Neither does TikTok seem to.
When I get the "intended" experience opening on the phone it's so awful. It's mostly ads and pages I don't care about, and occasionally some local bands or venue writing what's happening, which is why I use facebook.
> Once people get feedback and good experiences things are evened out much better. Look at Tumblr or even Reddit, that despite being popular, never had influencer culture.
Couldn’t agree more. But Pandora’s box has been opened and people being people and companies being profit maximizing machines … I doubt we will ever get there.
What’s really nice is small niche communities that exist in places like mastodon where often the “normals” don’t know about or don’t patronize making the experience really nice.
That's absolutely not what Tiktok is. Most people who make money are a majority or random amateur users with massive social interactions, and i see no "doomscroll-fueled advertisements" whatsoever. Ads are very badly targeted, like on every other platform.
I can't talk about Tumblr, but while Reddit doesn't have an open influencer culture in the same way that TikTok or Instagram do, it does have massive amounts of content marketing. It is very much not the anti-advertising community heaven it appears to be, at least outside of very small subreddits. Taking it as an example of pure socializing is quite optimistic.
The trick is to get high enough numbers of users to use the platform though.
So for example I own an instance and I will provide free video hosting. In exchange I will serve you ads and collect some data to target those. If you don't like that you could go to an instance that charges a monthly fee. Or you can run your own.
If I can monetize my instance I can also pay people on my server to provide content.
To put my money where my mouth is, the Mastodon instance I'm using charges people $20/year and I'm happy to pay it.
Each producer has to hustle up their own ads. So they tend to coalesce onto huge servers that provide an ad service to do that work. Still, you often get some content sponsored by the local Mexican restaurant in some town you've never heard of.