The best part of TikTok is being able to see who is talking to you. Reddit has become less and less useful to me as I have aged as I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not talking to a person at all or if I am it’s a 13 year old edge lord pretending to be whatever.
So much information gains or loses value based on who is saying it. It also came out around the same time that every YouTube creator started stretching their content to 10 minutes minimum for ad revenue. I rarely want to spend 10 minutes on a single throw away topic which killed a lot of interest in browsing YouTube casually for me.
I know there are a lot of naysayers for good and bad reasons but if you are on the fence you should give it a try and it will likely become one of your favorite online spaces to spend time.
I feel exactly the opposite. What I like about Reddit (and HN, for that matter) is that it’s topic driven, not personality driven. I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade and don’t know anyone there… and that’s the way I prefer it!
Also, there are Reddit user analysis tools (such as: https://reddit-user-analyser.netlify.app). If ever I’m speaking to someone and get the sense they might not be arguing in good faith, I just look them up and if they have a history of trolling, I end the conversation.
I tried it. I was thoroughly entertained for a few hours, then I quit. It’s like junk food for your brain. Extremely high reward never ending content.
These days I preference 20+ minute content on YouTube that I mostly watch on my tv. Which makes me sit and carefully select something high quality rather than veging out to short videos.
Genuinely surprised to see a +1 for an app that is so riddled with security and geopolitical nastiness. Not to mention how awful this app is for young people's mental health.
>I know there are a lot of naysayers for good and bad reasons but if you are on the fence you should give it a try and it will likely become one of your favorite online spaces to spend time.
I don’t think anyone has the guts to mention in these articles that musical.ly looked to a non-user as teenage erotica for teenagers.
Back to the topic: I think Vine already showed us that there was a market for a video-based social media application that was tied to your @-handle. YouTube has over the years become way too proper and high-effort for creatives that want to do it for fun. Instagram was too picture-based. A good video editor and fame (or notoriety) and the unofficial Vine-descendant is born.
I wonder what the people at Vine thought after they saw TikTok do what they did with a few tweaks.
> I wonder what the people at Vine thought after they saw TikTok do what they did with a few tweaks.
Well, the founders made ~$10MM each with 5 months of work. So they were probably happy at the time. But Vine was too early, so I think video storage and movement was still pretty expensive for non-FANG companies. So they limited uploads to 6 seconds. I think that limitation was too low to do what TikTok does.
But the real reason they were too early is recommendation systems like TikTok uses seem to have been based on work done since Vine was shuttered.
I'm sceptical of that. ByteDance developed the recommendation tech a while back, at one point they had the most successful news recommendation service in India without any engineers speaking the language.
99fang in 2009, ByteDance in 2012, Vine in 2012.. I don't know your definition of "a while back" but if you have some background on this I would be excited to hear it!
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1328744086849925120 : "Back when Vine was a thing, all the top Vine creators, a significant amount of them young and black, went to Twitter asking for a larger percentage of ad revenue since they were working so hard to generate content.
[citation needed], this sounds like outrage porn for a certain kind of person.
Those creators could choose to stop creating content and Vine would still have lots of other creators. It's not like the site would've stopped functioning without the few unionists.
Well, Dick Costolo, a previous CEO, was actually a clown: "Upon graduation, he decided not to accept offers from technology companies and instead moved to Chicago to work in improvisational comedy" [1]
There is even a 2012 New York Times article: "A Master of Improv, Writing Twitter’s Script" [2]
I always wonder how media portraits an alternate reality where people and organization behaves as if they were living within The Truman Show [3]
That is not a clown. Clowns don make up and there is a significant effort and education that should be done to be a real clown.
Improv is a fantastic tool that I recommend to everyone. The basic concept of Yes, and… makes a huge difference from an emotional intelligence perspective.
I do not know but one thing I do is that it felt like they never had ads. Twitter in general was way worse with monetization. Perhaps it was not sustainable and a bigger loss leader than Twitter.
Before TikTok, there was another app from ByteDance, now forgotten: TopBuzz. I think it’s there the algorithm appeared.
At first, it started showing you some unfunny mess of weird gifs, memes and short news briefs. But after an hour or two of scrolling, it learned. It observed your scrolling speed changes, your tap patterns, everything. And the feed magically changed to something more interesting — to you, personally.
Interestingly, later on this app was accused in facilitating pushing the Chinese political agenda, and then withdrawn from app stores in 2020. But TikTok moved on.
>TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content
Why have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels failed to implement this? It is the main reason the TikTok algorithm learns so fast and is so much better that their algorithms. The other important reason is that the "Not interested" action is seamless and TikTok actually learns from it.
The problem that Youtube has is that they already were what TikTok is today. Early ~2005 Youtube was extremely similar to what modern TikTok is, lots of amateurs talking into their webcam and not a whole lot of professional content.
Youtube however spend a lot of effort to drive that early content away and focus on professional content that they could monetize easier. Finding a random video from somebody who isn't a professional full-time Youtuber is getting pretty rare these days.
Youtube Shorts thus has the problem that all the random slice-of-life content that strives on TikTok, is deliberately suppressed on their own platform. Difficult to see how they can fix that, as it just goes against everything they have been doing for the last decade.
The algorithm is important of course, but it needs content to search through and I just don't really think there is enough left on Youtube to compete with what TikTok is doing. All the videos I saw on Youtube Shorts was just professional Youtube's cutting some bits out of their larger videos into a shorter video, it just felt useless, annoying and uninteresting.
> Youtube however spend a lot of effort to drive that early content away and focus on professional content that they could monetize easier.
Could you elaborate a bit on that? What did youtube to do drive that early content away? Why is it easier to monetize professional content?
I have an alternative theory: Some people within every social media company try to turn the company into a mass media company—they want to promote content according to their taste, hang out with celebrities ... See "youtube originals". Social media companies win if they can withstand that pressure, if they manage to stay neutral, to show things to people that they're interested in.
> Why is it easier to monetize professional content?
For the same reason that Twitter is currently under fire: brand safety.
Brands don't want their ads to appear next to people spreading flat earth conspiracy theories, drunken ramblings, hate speech or dangerous "challenges" - just think back to the Tide Pod "challenge", if you were an advertising buyer for Tide, would you want an ad for Tide as a pre-roll for a video where a bunch of morons eats them like candy? That crap alone led to almost 7700 hospital incidents and at least fourteen deaths [1]. Additionally, you have people without a fucking clue what they are doing who upload videos like high voltage arc burning in wood, showing no concern to safety - and at least 30 people died because they were blindly following these videos [2]. Other stuff I've seen are "DIY" YouTubers doing electrical work and even I as someone who's not formally certified but have way over a decade worth of experience in construction and maintenance immediately see just in which amount of danger these people go.
And hell even actual professional YouTubers like HeavyDSparks routinely show a shocking lack of caring about workplace safety. Not wearing proper PPE (helmets, shoes), standing barely a foot away from a winch cable with thousands of pounds of load on it... it's bad enough that people don't care about OSHA guidelines on their own, but showing that on YouTube... I respect the guy and his team for the good work they do to help out people and nature, but they could definitely do way better in promoting safe workplace standards!
Platforms that allow large scale unmoderated publication of user-generated content will always end up facilitating grave injury and death.
> The other important reason is that the "Not interested" action is seamless and TikTok actually learns from it.
Have you ever used it? Because is doing a "decent" job but not a "great" job. I've been suggested videos that I constantly flag as "not interested" all the time (and since it has no "block" functionality you gotta suck it up if it comes back again)
The algorithm is great but is more about where are you located than anything else. You don't get to see a lot of the content created in the first place just because you're not in the right region (eg. I never saw a Charlie video for example)
Overall I think it might apply a weighted approach on what to show and based on your engagement double down on what you are likely to watch more. Then you've trends, top creators etc that get featured more often.
The only thing I love about TikTok is the non-existing advertising. There's some, but is rather seamless and non blocking that sometimes you are even going to watch it.
Nothing to do with YouTube where you're basically in a worst situation than the classic TV (ads every now and then)
My very loose understanding is that the effectiveness of the "Not interested" button is somehow inversely proportional to the strength of the correlation that TikTok uses for that particular suggestion.
As the obvious example, if you are a male, you might only need to click "not interested" once or twice to stop seeing e.g. skateboarding or woodworking content, but many, many times to stop seeing content from attractive females.
I suspect it 'knows better than you'. Self-curation leads to a boring niche whereas ignoring what you want in favour of what you linger on - even if you're lingering out of rage - leads to more engagement.
I'm not convinced the Not Interested button does anything at all. I have blocked and "not interested" 103 (one hundred and three) reddit accounts on tiktok so far and it still shows me them.
The actual interesting information is one meta level above.
User attention deformability.
How succeptable is the user to suggested content, that allows for faster "steering" into addiction lanes.
So, what it basically is, a search over addiction topology to the first hook and then a try over sorted by addictiveness topics for similar classfied user groups.
TikTok has paid human curators iirc, I don't think the others do. This lets them be more aggressive with recommendations since the videos it recommend are more accurately labelled.
Humans doing curation is not that expensive, that is the main innovation TikTok came with.
Exactly this; TikTok has careful moderation and curation within specific styles and a (relative simple) algorithm to quickly figure what the user is interested in. Plus a lot less advertisement.
That is their "innovation"; and is also something that is hard for YouTube and Instagram to copy as it would mean they would have to spend more and monetize less.
A popular theory I’ve heard is that it’s quite common for social media platforms to “turn up distribution” in the early years to attract content creators, but that they’ll inevitably turn it down later once they think creators are significantly reliant on the platform. I guess the idea is that this short of rapid distribution of content across the network and learning what consumers like is potentially at odds with maximizing revenue?
> >TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content
I thought this is the naive view expressed to non-technical people, but it incorporates a lot more user input. It's just, to the user, it feels like that's the only thing it's communicating.
Sure, but getting this "lingering" metric from 100% of its users already puts them leaps ahead of other social networks. Every user provides clear interaction metrics for every content he sees.
On the "classic" consumption UI's of other social networks you couldn't create that metric with such high accuracy, because you don't know which content is in focus and the content itself might be static.
That's probably also why Instagram's algorithms now put much higher weight on Reels than their classic feed when measuring engagement of a user...
Perhaps it's not as universally worthwhile as it seems. It requires length of attention and preference to coincide, and though anecdotally, I know it doesn't for some people - like myself.
I tried TikTok in my usual manner and attitude towards social media; I would doom scroll as fast as I could, allotting longer time for patterns I don't recognize, shorter for what I already understood, tangential to preference and couple seconds at most. The feed or whatever it's called became monotonous, lacking in diversity, devoid of content, even those that I would be presented with in other platforms as trending on TikTok. And I deleted the app.
YouTube isn't as terrible, though not ideal(perhaps my overuse of ad blocking is playing a role with it).
I watch about 10-15 hours of TikTok a week and agree that the algorithm is incredible.
But personally, I haven’t found TikTok’s “not interested” button to be useful at all. It’s like it puts content/creators in some limited time out and then brings them back with a vengeance.
On TikTok I’ve found the best thing to do is block creators who I’m not interested in. It’s the only surefire way to keep them out of my feed and is very effective.
> The fact that ByteDance spent aggressively on user acquisition to grow TikTok has been common knowledge for years: at one point, the company spent an estimated $3MM per day on acquisition marketing in the United States alone, and the company is purported to have spent roughly $1BN on advertising over the course of 2018
Stratospheric rise, yes. But I question how market driven this actual rise was, who exactly provided the funds to spend $2bn over a few years to make TikTok a large brand.
Is it a "cultural phenomenon" and "geopolitical flashpoint" when an app with that much firepower takes off?
ByteDance has been making loads of money from Chinese domestic market, through TouDiao and DouYin. It knows in order to compete with big names such as Facebook, YouTube, it needs the North American market, which is known for all international brands. Basically winning the US market is winning the world, the same concept as being a Hollywood star is a international star.
I think people failed to understand TikTok. People keep talking about social network. TikTok is not a social network, it does not use your friends and your connections to predict what you will enjoy, and that's the beauty of it. For me TikTok is a TV. It is MTV, constantly showing you exciting videos, regardless where it come from. YouTube is like Cable TV. The closest to it is Instagram, but Instagram pays too much attention to who you follow. TikTok does not replace Facebook, but it will eat your TV time, it competes with Netflix.
DouYin, which is TikTok China, has totally transformed the Chinese e-commerce market. You know what it does, something very much similar to QVC, with Internet's low cost, it is eating up Alibaba's market share. Last year NEW ORIENTAL ED & TECHNOLOGY went bust after Chinese government forbids after-school education, the company set up accounts on DouYin, English teachers start to sell products on DouYin while they casually teaching online, it became a hit, they sold hundreds of millions GMV every month, you would be surprised to know hundreds of thousands people would log on DouYin every day to listen to what these guys talk about, and buy everything at the same time. It saved the whole company.
Just imagine how Facebook can invest 36b on metaverse. It is not hard for company to invest for future returns, that's how it works. ByteDance is not lack of money, it has investors pushing its doors to hand over money to them, and they are very profit organization already.
Spending $1b on ad is not exactly what they did, they invest $1b for contents (influencers), not pure ad.
Look man, what do you want anyone to say? ByteDance are private so we can't know for sure. Given the ARPU for Chinese users I've seen in various industries I find it entirely plausible that they paid for this out of profits.
I am skeptical of TikTok because it works too well and is too enjoyable - while conditioning users’ brains to go into a very short attention mode. Someone else here talked about the advantage of finding something interesting and 20 minutes long on YouTube- much healthier.
One thing that TikTok did for me that was awesome: I searched for restaurants in the small tourist town I live in, and the search results were very good. I had read that young people (I am 71) use TikTok as a search engine so I tried it.
I tend to have TikTok installed about 25% of the time, and uninstall it when I am wasting too much time. Someone here suggested blocking content creators I don’t like; next time I have it installed I will try that.
I'm with you. I've never downloaded it. I don't think I've seen any praise for TikTok in YouTube or Reddit (which I frequent).
To my surprise, there's at least some form of praise for TikTok here in hackernews. It is surprising because as far as I'm aware, there's a negative sentiment here in general for social media (facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.), for the mental health risks it poses.
I have nothing against it either, I guess I'm just getting old and have less inclination to try new things.
> To my surprise, there's at least some form of praise for TikTok here in hackernews. It is surprising because as far as I'm aware, there's a negative sentiment here in general for social media (facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.), for the mental health risks it poses.
Plus the security issues. TikTok has been proven to be full of backdoors.
The linked article says TikTok has been downloaded over 200 million times in the US. So assuming you’re in the US there are something like ~130 million other people in your shoes.
But is it really worth anything to have young kids post videos about how good they look or what they eat? Compare this to some really high quality content on youtube.
Go get addicted to TikTok for a month and find out how high quality the stuff can get. There are farmers, professors, chefs, mathematicians, dancers, artists and so much more doing amazing things on the platform.
Privacy concerns aside, it really is a wonderful nexus of humans.
Never heard anyone say that about TikTok, ever. Even if true, the amound of bullshit and disgust you have to endure to find one good video isn't worth it.
This simply is not true. One of the reasons TikTok is so addictive is because of the high signal to noise ratio in favor of signal. People talk about the quality of their algorithm all the time. The first day or two is naturally not as good as you are just getting a bunch of highly random content because it literally knows nothing about your tastes. But it’s literally the flick of a finger to move onto the next video and a tap of a heart to let it know you found something you like.
I can now get pretty much 80% videos from creators I enjoy and the variety of that content is amazing. Funny rap, followed by serious rap, followed by a professional chef critiquing the creation of a dish, followed by a SNL skit, followed by a Ryan Reynolds skit and on and on.
It's addictive, because you're chasing the good videos like wins on a one-armed bandit. Loss loss loss WIN loss loss WIN loss loss loss loss. Tha'ts why I would never use it for a longer period on a daily basis, because I think it fucks up your brain chemistry more than any other social media app (additionally to the appalling content I had to witness).
Wow, did not know I could find all of that on that platform. Still, the quality of those videos is rather mediocre, to say the least. - But maybe I'm not the audience of this platform. But at least I now see there is a target group for them.
You could say the same about youtube, all you mention and much more. Yes I know there are differences.
What irks me with these sort of uncritical apologists is how they see it as second coming of Jesus, when all I ever seen praised about tiktok keeps me hard in 'meh' category. I am sure its addictive as I see it clearly in other's people kids, but so is heroin and I feel 0 urge to get hooked on it nor make it available for my small children.
Life, and its ultimate quality and beauty is something completely, utterly different thing. It never came, comes or ever will come off the screen.
> You could say the same about youtube, all you mention and much more
YouTube's discoverability is abysmal, so it's really not comparable. I use YouTube every day and have not had it recommend to me a new channel I'm interested in... a year? When I refresh my homepage, nearly one half of the videos stay the same. I've already seen 5 of them.
> I am sure its addictive as I see it clearly in other's people kids, but so is heroin
Well, I'm not praising its addictiveness, right? I'm praising the people that post on it.
TikTok is essentially Chinese spyware, and the quality of its algorithm is terrifying. But that's really it – it's just a good content platform, and its scale means its attracted great content. Ascribing all these silly qualities to it, like being in opposition to life, and similar to heroin, is hyperbole to the extreme.
I think tiktok's "slice of life" short glimpses into how people live is dramatically more interesting than the bloated content youtube pushes at me, which is usually weirdos with fake sounding voices doing overly dramatized "explainers" or "reactions" about something the algorithm has identified I'm mildly interested in.
What you see in tiktok feels more "real" (even when contrived) than the overly produced content of youtube.
