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Comment by startupsfail | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, is there some meaningful way for geriatric millennials to use Tik Tok?

Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...

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My general view on TikTok is: why would I even remotely want to use something that's specifically designed to exploit me and manipulate me? The tiny shred of value I might experience (in the form of an occasional interesting video) is a side-effect of the service, and if they could get their value out of me and give me literally nothing at all, they would. This same perspective applies to all the centralized "social media" services out there today. None of them exist to make society better or improve the lives of anyone in any meaningful way (outside of enriching the executives and investors running them).

Yeah, in fact I'm trying to wend myself away from the internet generally. (Sure don't need more of that shit.)

To be frank, the TikTok algorithm is the best of all the algorithmic doomscroll machines you can use.

Instagram is trash, Youtube Shorts is complete AI puke trash.

TikTok actually seems to "know" what I like seeing and clearly learns faster than the others.

A quick test just now:

  - Video about Amiga 500 in the 90s in Finland
  - A running gag about people having a Favourite Spoon
  - A recipe for Bao Buns
  - A skit about Japanese Shisa Kanko pointing and calling method
  - Book reviews of someone's favourite books of 2025
  - Someone tried to do floor work and found a massive shaft leading down under their house

Zero ads. All were from "real" people, not content farm accounts.

Instagram reels:

  - A "family account" skit, yech
  - Ad
  - A verified account reposting other's videos
  - Another one of those
  - Ad
  - A meme account
  - A meme account
  - Ad

Not even touching Youtube Shorts, they're even worse.

That's cool, but yeah I won't use it regardless (just like I won't use any of the services you mentioned). It's all for-profit centralized extractive/exploitative stuff.

To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.

I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.

Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.

The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.

Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.

I've tried multiple times with a TikTok account to get me useful videos and its always kids playing some weird games. FB/YT are much better and instantly switching content when I skip past a video.

TikTok is unusable for me.

I get a lot of stuff I care about (some scientific papers overviews, blender/davinci editing tips and tricks, bits of high-quality podcasts) on tiktok, even if I just go for 5 minutes to entertain myself with some audio-visual crap. Mention of its algorithm being responsive matches my observations here.

Why? Just leave it be, and your life will be just as rich if not richer.

I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.

You can search TikTok memes on YouTube. People upload them.

You using TikTok earnestly would result in a feed vastly different from your kids anyway.

Would you even see the same videos they do, given how customized feeds are?

As a former child, I'm not sure I would have wanted the adults mimicking my behavior. Back then I loved the occasions where the adults and us kids got together, such as festivities, and I got to hear their stories. They were all interesting and serious people though, with interesting lives and jobs (I was born in the 1970s and many of the adults had experienced WWII, or, the parents, the hard years following it - I am [East] German). No strange opinions about science or politics.

I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.

Agree. Your role as a parent is probably to serve as an example to them—even of old-fashioned, crufty ways. (Surprised/not-surprised to find my kids are curious about film cameras, vinyl, audio cassettes, MUDs, BBS'es…)

It's not a question of mimicking, it is interesting what is current within the teenage/student community. Adult population runs out of steam at some point.

I hear a lot of people be incredibly critical of TikTok, while being active consumers of Facebook/Instagram/X/etc. I've found the content on TikTok to be much better curated to what I actually like, with just enough (i.e., very little!) other content sprinkled in occasionally.

I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.

We don't have TikTok here (India), but I find YouTube shorts pretty useful. My feed is a mix of Action Labs shorts, Omar Agamy news, ZTT PC stuff, psychology, videos about animals (pet, domestic, wild), etc. I don't know what your standard for meaningful is, but the shorts are at least as useful as long form videos to me, if not more.

An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.

Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.

I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.

There is no meaningful way to use it.

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