Instagram deals reveal Meta is offering TikTok creators as much as $300k to post
businessinsider.com
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But I disagree with your comment about YouTube. I think YouTube recommendations work extremely well, and I only see videos that are related to the 5-6 topics I am exploring on YouTube in the previous few weeks. And when I explore a new topic I start seeing those recommendations instead.
I have never seen a Mr Beast video (or any other video by similar hucksters) on my feed.
You do need to be logged in though. But I use Premium, so that's a given.
I do think that will change though, probably in the near term. YouTube seems determined to push their own shorts. More concerning though, it seems there's now a very strong emphasize on very new content. Several channels have mentioned that videos have to succeed almost immediately and will get little traffic over longer time frames. LTT mentioned this and I've seen it on my own (tiny) channel. I expect this will incentivize publishers to churn out more content more quickly to increase potential success rates, to the determent of quality.
Also, I'm increasingly seeing longer, clearly AI generated listicle-style content showing up in my feeds. I made the mistake of starting one of these a few weeks ago, and now half my feed is similar junk content.
If you accidentally click on something that turns out to be junk, it's vital you go into the "History" section in the sidebar and remove it from there. This removes it from the stuff considered by the algorithm.
I'd always bet on the platforms that have a natural draw and appeal even with worse payment, and TikTok is one such case. It seems kind of painful honestly how hard Meta or Youtube with shorts have tried to emulate it while it's pretty obvious they're out of touch in some way.
Facebook and even Zuckerberg himself personally with his cringy rebranding has increasingly that "How do you do fellow kids" energy to him
With that in mind, I would not be surprised if the top TikTok users will not take the free money. I mean its free money. If it actually works is another story though. Meta has been trying to force growth in new social media apps several times now, and its not really working, social media apps are basically generational.
I feel bad for them I grew up on the internet, in my day it was MySpace and a few other sites, I can only imagine the outrage I would have felt if they knocked off one of my social communities I frequented as a teen.
It is important for influencers to diversify across platforms so I don't think this is a good deal.
If your livelihood depends on a single company, you exist at their pleasure.
So often many will invariably end up letting the place where they predominant publish to dictate what and how they produce whatever it is they output. (I was fighting hard not to say the word "content"...)
Which I despise but also understand: you do what anyone with a job does to keep the money flowing until someone in the relationship decides to end the arrangement.
(Now that I think about it, self-publishing is hardly immune to that. It just means perhaps the creator's motives could be more varied and fluid?)
This is a double negative. It means you would be surprised if they take the free money.
Judging by the following text I think you mean you _would_ be surprised.
Not necessarily--one can be unsurprised at both the decision to take or not to take money, the two aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not surprised if it's not cloudy outside on a given day, but that doesn't mean I am surprised if it is. I'm just not surprised by general day-to-day changes in weather.
The default surprising behavior here is to refuse $300k just to post on a different social media site; given the context of /r/TikTok, the parent comment not surprised that they don't take the money.
Many modern users start their journey as a business though the content may appear innocent or authentic.
They're not, and never have been. Nor are they innocent - they're corrupting and destroying the platforms they're on. And, for all the talk on authenticity, they're the direct opposite of it.
I remain bewildered by the continued social acceptance of this work. We're talking about people who openly accept and refer to themselves using the term "influencer" - a word that's directly synonymous to "manipulator". How much more in-your-face do they have to be about telegraphing malicious intent?
I suppose "I should spend less time on my smartphone", "I spend way too much time watching Instagram reels", etc. are now part of this group, too.
I keep comparing[0] advertising[1] to a cancer on society, and that analogy applies to influencing in particular too. Thing is, a lot of those influencers, aka. "content creators", actually do create good content on a regular basis[2]. Yes, this is kind of what makes this advertising vector effective in the first place, but it gets harder to make people think about how they're being manipulated when they can rightfully say they watch it out of genuine interest and get real value out of it.
Which is why I bring up the cancer analogy. Many cancers induce the body to route more blood towards them, which also benefits the healthy cells in the vicinity. From the point of view of such cells, the tumor is great - it blesses them with plenty. But of course we know, that benefit is short-term and localized - eventually, it leads to premature death.
I see the work of influencers to be like this. They pull in money and use it to produce exciting content, making the platforms thrive - or at least it seems so, for a while. In reality, they're slowly but surely burning the platform out (and over longer timescales, also public consciousness).
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[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
[1] - Well, particular subset of sales, marketing and advertising. AFAIK there's no good term that describes it; the closest one I found over the years is "marketing communications".
[2] - Especially if we consider entertaining content as good, too. Which, honestly, I think we should - humans need and value entertainment.
"I don't like people in government dictating what I see online. My stand against it will be to create an account for an online service run by a company based in the People's Republic of China."
EDIT:
Downvote all you want, that's what they're doing.
This is already the case; the law doesn’t just target TT, it is applicable to other platforms too.
“It would ban social networking services within 270 days if they are determined by the president of the United States and relevant provisions to be a "foreign adversary controlled application"”[1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fo...
Yes, it does.
https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/PLAW/118/public/PLAW-118pub...
> (i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
> (ii) TikTok;
> (iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
> (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
It can be applied to others, but there's a process.
> (B) a covered company that (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of a public notice proposing such determination; and (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
Which people on TikTok early on called the most fair algorithm. However, I suspect Youtube initially had the same or a very similar one.
And in both cases I suspect once the app becomes very popular the algorithm is updated to be more profitable, whatever that requires.
In other words, enshittification affects everything.
The presence of this comment in every HN thread is a meta-example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick_(service)#Streaming_deals
And they seem to be trying to lure more people away by offering more favorable revenue splits than YT/Twitch.
Of course this is all funded by online casino revenue, I don't know if it would "work" without being able to light money on fire. There are credible people out there insisting that Kick is losing money and only exists to funnel new customers to Stake's online gambling services.
This is trivial to determine without even needing to defer to credible people: Its entire business model outside of funneling people into gambling addiction is taking a 5% split of subscription revenue. This while it is paying Amazon for the actual (expensive) streaming tech[1], in a market that's notoriously hard to be profitable in for companies taking both a larger cut and running ads.
Google pays Apple tens of billions to be the default iPhone search engine - this seems quite similar.
GP would need to talk to an antitrust expert to learn more useful information concerning the distinction between being a monopoly, and illegally leveraging monopoly power. I am not such a person, so I’m not going to say more here.
Also, it’s a big leap to prove that exclusive agreements to post on a specific platform is attempting to bury a competitor, TikTok (and every other company) is free to offer exclusivity contracts as well.
Everyone at Meta needs to take a "communicating with care" course every year which exactly trains you to hide your true intentions and not leave a paper trail of anti-competitive statements.
Also, with Threads at the top of the iPhone app store constantly yet I dont know anyone who uses it .. makes me wonder is there a way to gain the top positions in the app store? Either paying for it and or gaming the system via massive army of bots?
For the rest of the world, the risk and dangers of American interference in their elections appears to be more present and explicit than the dangers of Chinese interference.
After all, look at China's thriving, diverse political environment.
American imprisons 10 times as many of its citizens than PRC. Most of these people are imprisoned for ideological crimes ("Protestant norms say that you should not intoxicate yourself") or political crimes ("our system holds that no one is entitled to the necessities of human life").
Did I say that the US has a healthy and democratic political life?
Of course the US has its problems. Just look at the government now.
It's just not a constitutionally-defined single-party totalitarian state.
Why is this specific thing worse than a similar way of describing the US system?
Could that change? Sure. Especially with so many people apathetic to what happens in China.
I mean, if that is indeed their rationale, then our civics education really does suck.
Giving a totalitarian regime access to the device that more-or-less holds your entire life and acts as a perfect surveillance portal to your every move decidedly falls more on the unconcerned side of the scale.
Unless, of course, they didn't make a particularly "reasoned" determination like you said.
> learn to read yourself before lecturing people about education
Let's keep the ad hominem to a bare minimum.
poof China has all my data - what do they do with it? Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
Some of us have a definition of "authoritarian" that is different from that of reality. I've lost count of the number of political dissent posts I've seen towards both sides of the political spectrum in the United States on American-based social media platforms.
And if authoritarianism is really a problem, why double down on the governments you give your data to?
> And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
Compared to the influence that the Chinese government has over the Chinese people, it's minor. That also goes for the governments of most places China has strong ties with. Strengthening their sphere of influence in the US is not the act of those who have concerns over authoritarian regimes influencing their lives.
> poof China has all my data - what do they do with it?
They're a rather imaginative bunch when it comes to cyber offensives, so let's imagine one ourselves.
They could scour your contacts and content for dissidents abroad, using that information to inform those operating one of their extralegal international "police stations" as to their whereabouts. [0]
Now, let's stop imagining. Let's see what they have been confirmed as actually doing with it.
They could collect geospatial data and combine that information with other personal details to compromise the security of people who work in sensitive places. This has actually led a number of nations, including Norway, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to ban TikTok from being installed on devices with access to government networks [1]
It's worth remembering that the US only banned the TikTok app - they could have continued operating in the US through a mobile webpage, but decided not to and threw a fit until Trump rearranged (perhaps extralegally) the law banning the app. Why? Because apps give far more access to devices than webpages, which have sandboxed processes and other checks on what code can access. If keeping American eyes on TikTok was the one and only goal, that app would have been a sacrifice that they were willing to make. The fact that they had to have the app tells me that they may have wanted the extra access that native apps afford.
> Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
I'm not saying the American intelligence apparatus has clean hands. If that's the concern, then again, cut back on social media and apps that collect unknown quantities and qualities of data, instead of opening up more accounts to totalitarian governments that have a long history of using censorship and surveillance in a very straightforward way to achieve their political aims.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic... [1]https://www.context.news/big-tech/us-tiktok-ban-which-other-...
But you'll never convince me that the main reason for the ban wasn't to replace Chinese propaganda with American / Billionaire propaganda and tbh that one's less charming.
And if your imaginative worst case scenario is that they use my data to root out and extrajudiciously kill ex-Chinese dissidents in America then idk why that would be a problem for me since I don't know any of those. I do know some American activists, though.
I can easily invent way more damning fantasies of what the US Govt could do to me, a US citizen, if they had an admin willing to subvert constitutional norms and more visibly use the PRISM surveillance tools.
> Imagine you are a small girl or boy of, let's say, eight years. It's Sunday afternoon and your father wants you to visit your old grandmother. You, of course, detest it - she's old, senile, whatever. But then, if you have an old authoritarian father, he will tell you something like - and this would be, as Alenka put it, a good thing to do - he will tell you: "Listen, I don't care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to your grandmother and behave there properly." That's perfect, I claim, because you will retain your, let's call it, inner freedom. You will be furious at your father, but that's good for your long-term freedom.
> Now, what would a monster called post-modern permissive father do? He would not give you an order, but he would have told you something like this: "You only go to visit your grandmother if you really want to. Just remember how much your grandmother loves you." Now, a child is not an idiot, and he or she will know perfectly what this order means. Beneath the appearance of a free choice, it gives you a much harsher order. The order is not only "you must go and visit your grandmother," but "you must do it freely." You must really wish to visit your grandmother.
> So you see, this nice example of how - and this is basically what also Alenka described as that situation - "do whatever you want," etc., where the apparent freedom of choice masks a much harsher choice.
I wouldn't call it "bratty," but that is certainly part of it. My impression of the situation is that yes, folks flocked to a Chinese app because they were a) angry at the US government and wanted to undermine the purpose of the TikTok ban; b) equally angry at US social media services that are seen as being to willing to acquiesce to the demands of the US government in general and the current administration in particular, and c) ultimately unconcerned about who has their data.
I have a hypothesis about my point c, which is that TikTok's user population skews younger, and so we have a population of social media users who grew up with the understanding that their data and attention are packaged, sold, and analyzed by anyone and everyone; they're not concerned about the implications of giving data to China, and it strikes them as hypocritical for the US government to spend decades on data collection and only express concern when users decide to take that data outside the the US sphere of influence.
"The only thing China has ever done to me is sell me cheap stuff, which is great because the main way people get money who aren't rich are through jobs, and companies don't really want to A) have employees and B) pay them anything. Companies are controlling everything so everyone I know is poor and just going to get poorer. I don't know how China is supposed to be harming me through Tiktok. I don't know how China is going to use my data to hurt me. Honestly I don't know why people want data so badly when everyone's broke-why don't you already know that. The only chinese stuff I see on Tiktok are people cooking and burning incense. I would understand if I like worked for the government but I work at a fast food place so ... what are they gonna do? Get me fired from Mcdonalds? Lol you could have multiple felonies and still work at Mcdonalds. Now they're gonna take Tiktok away like they take everything else and it's stupid. The other stuff sucks-Facebook is for old people and dumb minion memes, I keep seeing dumb alpha male crap on YouTube, and Instagram doesn't show me anything new after scrolling on it for ten minutes. Why do like 3 companies have to control everything?"
Lots of fallacies and issues with those statements. We had lots of conversation after that. But I think that shows the general mood among those who are sticking with Tiktok. A lot of the value is that it's simply not Meta.
The reason that TikTok is winning is because it is a superior app in pretty much every way to its competitors (reels or shorts). The UI is clean and simple for producers and consumers, the interactions are all well done, and most of all, the content is all there, with some cross-posted to the others but mostly for larger channels that can afford to invest in boosting their reach.
You can bemoan its addictiveness or whatever, but don't pretend that it's a bad app that people use because they are desperate for Chinese propaganda. It's so much better that the US government is actively trying to kill it so that the domestic alternatives have a chance.