I am 14 and haven't interacted with TikTok once. The whole thing disgusts me and I find it funny that a company that's all cozy with the CCP is controlling the algorithm feeding kids around the world shit entertainment and lies.
I read its different for Chinese kids on TikTok as the the platform does not allow the "destructive" content and garbage like it does in other countries. From what I can tell Facebook exploits everybody equally. Both are wrong but if true I feel criticism is merited.
They are both ultimately controlled by the CCP, however, the Chinese version is very restrictive. Having colored hair or tattoos will get you auto-banned. All the same evangelical-type restrictions apply of course.
The only thing keeping the western version from turning into a complete sewer are the advertisers. The TikTok Algo prevents people who are fat, wrinkly, too old, or unsemmterical (unattractive) from bubbling up. This is know from leaked internal documents supposedly.
> Having colored hair or tattoos will get you auto-banned.
I just opened the Douyin app and seven of the first ten human videos have people with colored hair. Tattoos tend to be subtle and obviously won’t be seen in most videos, but you see them all the time if you pay attention. Dying hair is so normal in China especially for women (usually to shades of brown, but some will use more lively colors), you can hardly film a crowd without capturing a ton of colored hair. There’s of course also a whole world of cosplay for every popular game and anime on Douyin. I don’t know where people are getting these ridiculous clips of misinformation and confidently spreading them around without thinking twice.
Edit: As an example, I just looked at the Genshin Impact cosplay tag. Tons of videos with hundreds of thousands to more than a million likes. Every single one of them has colored hair — purple, red, pink, green, blue, white, you name it. Conspicuous tattoos in maybe 10% of them. Go figure.
i've literally used the chinese version briefly and have friends from there. it's facts. all good positive influences there, no dancing thots and dph challenges.
> all good positive influences there, no dancing thots and dph challenges.
This is 100% bullshit. I’ve used Douyin and it’s just the same as TikTok, and even if I haven’t, anyone with surface familiarity with human nature would know there won’t be a social media network without dancing and “bad influences”. Now, Douyin literally means trembling/dancing musical notes, guess where it got started?
Douyin does have a “youth mode” where supposed bad influences are more limited. It’s opt-in however, and through talking to actual Chinese teenagers I gathered that nobody uses it, because guess what, teenagers like the “fun” content. Enabling this youth mode is actually a prank they pull on friends.
Also, search for posts from Chinese parents trying to block Douyin on their router, you’ll find a ton. Guess why?
Normally I would chalk things up to differing perspectives, but your claim here about “all good positive influences” is so absurd I have to conclude you’re straight up lying.
no. lemme flip the burden of proof: the CCP is a known hostile actor against our nation. i want proof that they're not doing something shady before we let them play with the minds of kids.
They ignore U.S. laws. I even believe their transfer of user data to Oracle is an inside company joke. It's always "pending" and the project never finishes.
In the meantime they pilfer our personal data and use it to their advantage.
I have a better idea: how about we ban them from the Western world!
They're obviously up to no good and they ignore our laws. We're always two steps behind as they keep promising compliance yet they never do. Once we find them out they come up with excuses and promise they'll behave next time.
Like I said, I believe they're silently making fun of us. Having us run a rat race while they just keep on pilfering our personal info.
I don’t like _anyone_ doing mass surveillance but, as a European who also likes EU far from perfect attempts to curtail it, I do sigh when people think there isn’t a vast difference between US corporations and the CCP. At a bare minimum Facebook etc exist within a relatively free society with laws and elections and freedom of speech. It’s a question of degree and the degree is huge.
Yeah, I agree that the big stink and fear is way overblown. So's the censorship! That's why I'm seeing so much engagement with my Winnie the Pooh themed channel /s
The situation is a lot different. The U.S. and China are not similar politically and socially, at least not yet. As a case in point, note that U.S. companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google Search, and Youtube are blocked in China, whereas people in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are free to access services like WeChat and Baidu.
What's more, Europeans are free to develop their own social media platforms, and in fact I wonder why they haven't been more successful to date; there's plenty of software talent and cultural depth in Europe. It would be great to see more competition.
Your comment frustrates me a lot, especially the second part.
Not because you're wrong, but because any competition that comes up in Europe gets bought by the giants to the west, usually before they're globally known though sometimes not; I'm sure it's not entirely unknown that Skype was purchased by Microsoft at least, that was a pretty big player at the time.
In terms of general tech companies there's loads, including Shazam, iZettle, Momondo, Gamesparks, spider.io, Mojang, Apiary, Sparrow etc;etc; 52 by Apple/MS/Google in the years 2011-2016.
I'm honestly surprised Spotify remains.
A European social network has a really high barrier to entry compared to the US ones, sure, but all that meets them if they're successful is an acquisition- or at least that does seem to be the case with most European tech startups.
To your first point: I think the closeness with the CCP and closedness of the country would be fine points, my general feeling is that the US is a lot more clandestine with their methods (Snowden wiretapping of google revelations notwithstanding: most orders in the US come with stipulations that you're not allowed to speak of them).
Regarding the "openness", I feel like the US is battling it with Sinophobia, I mean, based on the former Presidents words at least; rather than an outright ban as the Chinese are doing.
I'm American. I'm a heavy libertarian and you are absolutely right, the US government is probably doing the same thing with local social media corporations.
This does not mean I believe we should give the US the same treatment as the CCP. The CCP openly enslaves people of other races and does not respect basic human rights.
Every country spies on every other country. The difference is that the US does have some amount of democratic oversight, rule of law which applies to everyone, reasonably functioning courts, separation of powers, basic commitment to humanistic values, etc.
None of this is perfect and you can aim a lot of criticism at various aspects, but I do think the differences are pretty fundamental and do matter.
This would carry more weight if nearly every consumer good in the US wasn't made in China. It's very difficult to avoid giving money to the Chinese economy for ethical reasons at this point.
Fitting, my wife showed me Instagram yesterday, and I was like "So this is TikTok?", "No, it's instagram", "Ah I though Instagram was about pictures from people, this is just short, "funny" movie swiping, I thought that was TikTok's thing", "IDK, I never used TikTok".
Yep. This is the same strategy Instagram used a few years ago in copying Snapchat's Stories format, and likely has the same goal. The idea is not that Instagram can take back TikTok's audience — those users are well and truly lost — but rather that it can deny existing Insta users any reason to even try TikTok in the first place. (Because they can get the same form factor without downloading a new app.)
From what I've heard, the Stories copying strategy did successfully contain (but did not roll back) the Snapchat threat to Insta. So there's some reason to believe they can hold the line against TikTok with this approach too, even absent the possibility of a government ban.
I expect this sort of convergence will continue in the future. Whatever one might think of fast-following as a strategy, scale plus rapid copying of features does seem to work.
Stories definitely stopped Snap's potential in it's tracks. I'd consider that a completely successful bootleg. Well successful if we only consider the goal to be stopping Snap, unfortunately in the process there was one casualty, we lost Instagram.
How so? The only thing Instagram sacrificed to add Stories was some real estate at the top of the screen for the Stories bar. I would say adding Reels has been more invasive because those show up in your feed.
Not only does it keep users, but it allows producers to put the same stuff on Instagram, thus Insta users don't have the need to go to TikTok to see the hyped content. (While people say TikTok has the better suggestion algorithm, I never used either)
Perhaps. Or they have A/B tested the new alternative and found it superior (e.g. Instagram users exposed to that new experience come to the app more often, stay for longer).
I usually stop scrolling after I see the check-mark which indicates I'm up to date. Below that there are TikTok-type short reels with all sorts of stupid things.
lol insta reels suck. it's almost exactly a month behind tiktok on trends etc. i'm not a big user of either and even i known this, facebook has to be aware and just not care. everyone kinda just laughs at reels so i can only assume it's targeted at old millennials?
The YouTube shorts really piss me off, because, afaik there’s no way to seek (and some of them are a bit long for a “short”), at least from what I’ve seen in the mobile UI. It may be behind a gesture or something though.
That's the copycat behavior. It's forced engagement analytics. You either care (and it's boosted for some people) or you don't (and it's devalued for some people).
"Youtube Shorts" is just an alternative frontend, you can replace any url from youtube.com/shorts/XYZ to youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ to watch them with the original UI.
It's a lot more than UI, it is a completely new distribution medium. Creators are also now incentivized to make such type of "shorts" as their distribution/algorithm is completely separate from the normal videos.
Sometimes you can drag along the bottom to seek, but it only seems to work on some shorts. You can sometimes tell if it will work because it’ll show a progress bar at the bottom. I’m not sure what distinguishes those though, since I’ve seen long shorts (hah) with and without them.
I wonder how much noise this adds to their algorithm.
The other day my wife wanted to show me some "short" from a content creator she likes, and had to rapidly scroll through ~30 of other "shorts" in her feed until said creator popped up again and she could click on her profile pic. Whatever way YouTube rated those other 30 vids for my wife is completely wrong, unless they happen to have a classification category called "rapidly scrolling down because of your stupid ass UI that doesn't allow backtracking or searching previously seen content".
At this rate, in a few years, even non-tech-savvy people will get fed up with increasingly nonsensical and confusing UIs of social media products.
Everyone’s just trying to survive. In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features. I believe the instagram book had a similar claim about Sidstorm (sp?).
I guess when network effects are life you can’t afford to not be the network. Google was smart to nab YouTube. And android. Meta was smart to grab instagram and WhatsApp (and that same logic, after missing out on making a phone, I bet is why they’re rushing to own VR). Innovate, copy, or die, basically.
I feel there's a difference between copy-catting an upstart vs. a competitor that already outclassed you. The latter is kind of admitting defeat :).
But regardless, what's really annoying here is that this new mode of interaction is pushed so hard that it hides away and starves out the "traditional" one. It's like these companies don't understand we're no longer in an era of a single social networking platform. I don't come to YouTube or Facebook to get more TikTok - I'm fine with getting TikTok on TikTok, I come to YouTube for actual longer-form videos, to Facebook for posts and groups, etc. Seeing YT, FB and IG pushing "shorts"/"reels" in my face only makes me visit them less.
From what I understand they would other drop other projects or literally not leave the office until the new feature was built. Again, from a book, you might want to fact check this.
I installed TikTok last year when the company I worked for switched all of their ad spend from FB to TikTok. I found it addictive in the sense that it was a time waster, yet fun…
I have now installed TikTok 3 times. Each time for a week I find it fun, then after about another week I uninstall it because I value my time to create my own stuff (writing and open source).
I find YouTube Short to be different. Somewhat fun, but not enough to pull me away from the YT material I watch, like philosophy ‘think’ content, Playing For Change music videos, and minimal political stuff.
Using https://Freedom.to tools to monitor and limit viewing times is almost always a good idea. Latest macOS/iPadOS/iOS also has very good support for limiting app and specific web site use. These are great tools, at least for my digital life.
A lot of what's "viral/popular" on instagram is just reposts from tiktok/twitter. If you don't curate a following of actual people, that's much of what the algorithm feeds you.
This is the reason I deleted Instagram. It was better than Facebook for keeping up to date with friends, but after an update they added the "Suggested posts" that automatically show as you scroll, after you finished the new posts from friends. They offered no way to disable suggested posts (and simply have, as before, the static feed of your friends post in reverse chronological order).
My wife does this too and I've noticed that a large percentage of the Instagram videos she shows me have the TikTok logo on them. People are just copying them and reposting from one platform to the other.
As the other "social" giants converge on ultra-short, rapidly-swiped video clips as the current state of the art in user attention draining, my question is - what is the next step?
As a now non-owner of even a smartphone, I overtly ogle other people using Tiktok. It's equally amusing and baffling for me, and I feel pity for that person.
From the Max Headroom episode 1 synopsis: Investigative TV news reporter Edison Carter uncovers the disturbing secret of a new TV advert technology in use by his own employers, Network 23, called "Blipverts", high-intensity high-speed commercials with the ability to overload people's nervous systems, causing them to short circuit or explode.
What could it possibly be? There's just text, images, audio, and video. All these social media companies are just riffing on those same formats with their own spin (filters, formatting, expiration time, content length, etc.) Same as with like/dislike, follow/subscribe, share, etc. actions. Same as with instrumentation/telemetry to harvest data and sell to advertisers. What else is there? Main difference nowadays is the recommendation algorithms for keeping users engaged.
The tech is getting a bunch of hate right now for some reason (possibly the open disgust the Meta thing seems to provoke, inherited directly from the already loud anti-Facebook voices), but it seems shortsighted to me. I wish Facebook had just stayed Facebook and kept Oculus going as a separate brand-- in some ways they've almost harmed the market with their choices.
VR can be great fun for anyone who can tolerate it, and even many of those with motion sickness issues can overcome it (I did). It also gets you moving around, something that doesn't get enough credit.
That said, I think AR will absolutely dwarf all else in a nearer time frame. People are going to come up with all kinds of wild body sensory interfaces with friends and/or internet audiences, and I'm not even talking about sex stuff.
Accessories which light up specific colors or patterns based on anything from biometrics to video views to investments, cascading emoticon displays sewn into clothing fed by live feed responses, sunglasses showing secret geocache stashes (or human contacts) related to alternate reality games... the kids are gonna come up with all kinds of ways to be cooler than their parents, as they always have.
I am only looking for answer so I can get ahead of the game ;-). But yes, logically, M. Zuckerburg is right (if there is a future here, that is, which I am personally not convinced about).
Curious what you're using these days? I've got an old iPhone that I haven't updated past iOS 14 and have been wanting to just drop smartphones completely when this thing dies. I'm just wondering what I'll do for MFA mainly, and here in NYC it's nice to have maps when you're out (even though I remember the time I got myself around the city just fine without them 15-ish years ago).
I'm not the one you replied to, but I'd say: Get any random dumbphone for a small amount of money, live with it for 2 weeks. See if you like it. If not, no time wasted deciding on the "best" replacement product.
For me, the 2 weeks turned into 5 years (so far).
Oh and I've migrated to a different country in that time, and I'm still alive, despite not having a navigation app thingy. No excuses! :)
Unfortunately you can't just use an old flip-phone because the 2G networks are all shutdown. Although there are a couple companies today making "dumb" phones.
A good middle ground I found is the Light Phone. You can send and receive texts, load music and podcasts onto it, and it has GPS navigation. But, it has no web browser, no appstore and a monochrome e-ink display.
>here in NYC it's nice to have maps when you're out
I'm very grateful I live in a country where going smartphone-free, a bit like going car-free, is still a viable choice while maintaining a relatively mainstream lifestyle. Good luck!
Saying that, colleagues and friends have had a laugh out of some of the escapades I've got myself in to, with no smartphone for navigation. I still maintain that my choice is better for me overall, in terms of time and energy usage.
I've considered just using a smart watch, since it'd let me keep in contact with my wife or coordinate when out meeting up with friends. But I guess no, I haven't considered just getting rid of a phone/communication device altogether. I haven't lived with a TV for 20 years, so maybe I just go back some decades altogether and give up the phone for a while to see how it feels.
Found myself accidentally scrolling YouTube TikTok last night, wasn't a good feeling.
The SV giants have built a culture where creativity/innovation goes to die and only copying is rewarded. Ironic when thats what they used to say when they looked down at Chinese made software.
It's crazy when you see FB did try to make new social apps for a period with their "New Product Experimentation" team, but they would never give any of those new ideas the UI billing they'd give a Snap clone or TikTok clone. Always a bad sign when an org respects the ideas of the competitor more than their own team.
This article is too brief and answers the question in a less interesting way than it could have. I thought the article would be exploring the consequences of short-form viral vertical video becoming the dominant medium of our culture (evoking McLuhan, Neil Postman) but instead it's about data security and new AI training possibilities from every increasing volumes of training data.
Hopefully that day comes soon. It will make it easier to quit social media and focus on the things that matter. The greatest advantage one can have in the modern world is being able to avoid these distractions while everyone else is turned into an impulse zombie.
I remember thinking that Reddit was the best of a bad lot when it came to social networks. Anything good happening on Twitter would get screenshotted on Reddit, same with videos from IG/FB. In some ways it improved the signal-to-noise ratio, as I guess my entertainment tastes were more compatible with the Reddit crowd.
Now, every network is becoming indistinguishable. Most Youtube Shorts I see are ripped straight from Tiktok. It has all the irritating telltale signs; wooden AI voiceover, stupid sound effects overlaid on top on the original audio, and of course a 5-second looping clip of some monstrously bad music.
It's draining. I now think of it as a reprise of the GIPHY era when lazy people would post GIF replies from [popular TV show] in response to posts.
> Now, every network is becoming indistinguishable. Most Youtube Shorts I see are ripped straight from Tiktok. It has all the irritating telltale signs; wooden AI voiceover, stupid sound effects overlaid on top on the original audio, and of course a 5-second looping clip of some monstrously bad music.
You forgot the fourth element: Some mid teen/woman preening in front of a mirror (because in 2022 people still can't figure out how to use the front-facing camera).
It’s interesting to me because the only thing the sites have of any differentiator of value is the userbase. Without that they are really a fairly homogenous set of features, and most of the work has gone into advertising.
Tiktok also dispenses of the notion that you’re there to interact with friends - it’s entertainment for your interests.
I don't know, but I bit the bullet and joined TikTok a year or so ago in spite of all of my privacy-protecting practices I do for most things (uMatrix in Firefox, my always-on VPN, etc) just to see what had people so absorbed and/or alarmed about it.
And I have to say that I'm terrified of it. I hate how alarmist and dramatic that is, but the utter falsehoods and vitriol that seems to go viral on there is just evil. I hate that a bunch of middle school children might be exposed to so much propaganda. From political messages to anti-vax fake science to "did you know?"-style rewriting of history, it's just awful. And so much of it is spread/re-shared by young, hip, people that kids will identify with as cool and/or trustworthy.
And there's no real way to actually engage with any idea. Not only are the videos extremely short--way too short to actually make any legitimate points or arguments about a complex topic--but even the text replies are Twitter-style and only allow some handful of characters, so again, it's basically impossible to even refute any of these ridiculous falsehoods. The only possible discourse is to insult each other or share vacuous slogans, memes, and truisms.
I know conspiracy theories and lies have always existed, and of course I realize that we were all taught history with some bias, etc. But the speed with which this stuff spreads is incredible. My partner has an 11 year old who was on TikTok and I was CONSTANTLY needing to correct him (gently, of course) when he would share a "fact" he "learned". A recent one was that the T-Rex skeleton's arms as we know them are actually backwards, and that "we" now know that they were more like little chicken wings. This was, of course, a fairly benign example, but I've had to correct him (with evidence) on other topics that make me much more concerned. Luckily, he's not on TikTok anymore.
I understand the concern, but is it that different from early 90s internet spread of drugs made of bananas or even before that urban legends? I know that it is easier to ban stuff than teach critical thinking skills, but I genuinely think the latter is preferable long term.
In my defense, my kid is still too young to engage in this stuff so that might be the reason I am less alarmed. I hate to say it, but my parents did a fair amount of watching with us and they tried to put things in context ( I still remember my dad scolding me after I repeated blatant propaganda line I heard on the news ).
The time you spend correcting your kid is not wasted.
> I understand the concern, but is it that different from early 90s internet spread of drugs made of bananas or even before that urban legends?
Well, yes. In the 90s, the speed at which I could acquire stupid ideas from the internet was still VASTLY slower than today. First, I had to actually get home from school and sit in front of a computer because I didn't have an internet-connected device in my pocket at all times. This meant that I couldn't be absorbing nonsense during car rides or dinner time, either. Then, I had to make sure that my family members weren't using the telephone. And while there were lots of questionable forum-style websites, there wasn't like a single-digit number of hubs online where everyone got the same nonsense info at the same time, or where someone who produces said nonsense would know to go to maximize their reach.
I would say that information moves much faster today than it has even when Facebook unseated MySpace (which was well after the 90s).
> I know that it is easier to ban stuff than teach critical thinking skills, but I genuinely think the latter is preferable long term.
Sure, and I didn't suggest otherwise. Education is the most important and resilient way to combat all kinds of terrible ideas. However, the concern I expressed in my comment was specifically about children. Children can't be educated almost by definition- it takes time to become educated and well-versed in basic logic and reasoning. I'm fortunate that my step-son found this information "interesting" enough to share with us so that I had the opportunity to explain to him that the vast majority of content being shared with him is from non-experts or people who are actively trying to manipulate people into agreeing with them on something. Did he take that to heart? Not really; because it happened multiple times and I had roughly the same conversation with him multiple times. He's not there yet in his education.
And then there's the other issue of the adults that are consuming and spreading nonsense at record speed. And a lot of that nonsense is currently aiming to turn people AGAINST science and education. "Those damn academics are lying to us!", "Don't trust your kids around teachers- they're 'groomers'!", etc.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't feel good about the future for our kids.
<<because I didn't have an internet-connected device in my pocket at all times.
The worst part is that I almost completely agree with you, because I am almost certain I will be facing similar hurdles. That said, if the issue is the internet connected device, isn't an instant 'fix' to replace said device with one with no access and then take school to task to enforce similar ban ( the most common objections I heard was:'i need to be able to reach my kid in case of emergency'; dumb phones still exist so that could work?
Urban legends were spread by word of mouth, like Marilyn Manson removing two ribs so he could self-fellate.
We'd hear it from 'that guy' at school, laugh and get on with our day. TikTok is that guy today, and unlike the '90s, he lives in your pocket and can deliver other such interesting tidbits on a variety of topics, 24 hours a day.
So urban legends are more accessible now. It only adds more of a responsibility on parents to either spend time with their kids and put TikTok vids in context or just let them be exposed to all the garbage out there.
It is not that different from the TV panic. There are differences, but similarities are striking.
This may be where ( and why ) we differ. I do not consider FCC to be, well, useful. It was not useful during Carlin's words you can't say on TV. It is certainly even less useful now.
I am confused. Are you arguing for social media government oversight?
And while yes, there were plenty of bullshit urban legends and propaganda pieces (generally from ones own government) out there, 'plenty' was still a rather limited number.
I'm not sure how old your kid is, but once they reach the age of infinite recursion 'why' loops you'll quickly learn that you don't have the time and energy to fend off the firehose of falsehood and will succumb to the bullshit asymmetry principle and realize that the internet can feed your kid crap much faster than you can even reply to if you don't moderate their access.
I honestly have no good answer here. Mind is a terrible thing to waste and I do not want those to fall through the cracks just because parents are idiots. Natural response is to put limits on what parents can do. Here is the problem though. Some people would likely disagree with what I would want to instill in my child. Since that is the case, I accept that parent's freedom will sometimes yield results that are suboptimal ( wasted child's potential ).
Beyond that.. what can we do? I would not mind effectively forcing 230 to make all platforms define themselves as publishers or not. Clearly, some sort of re-alignment is needed. Maybe we could force everyone to think twice before posting anything on the net?
As you can see, I do not know what the answer is. All I can do is what is best for my family.
If people continually discover that the history and science "facts" they learn from Tik-Tok are false, they will eventually develop the healthy skepticism which humans have needed for survival ever since the first lie was invented in the mists of prehistory.
I don't think that's true. It's more that society makes it really hard to do anything else. Unless you're doing something to start a business, become an influencer, or because it's your life goal people look down on you for it. So people don't. They doomscroll instead, because you won't be challenged for that.
I don't think people want to. People want to be successful, want to have good relationships, want to have fun, want to be entertained. I don't think people want to endlessly scroll for content, its not what people will say they set out to do. Some social media companies (and video game companies) figured out the dopamine feedback loop (probably via hiring psychologists) and have engineered that into their systems to keep suggesting content that feeds your emotions and keeps you on their platform looking at advertisements.
Video games use it to keep you in a ever grinding loop to stay in their game like a hamster in a wheel and hope you don't realize you can leave at any time.
People don't wake up and say "I want to waste 4 hours of my day watching stuff".
Now imagine heroin had just been discovered ~10 years ago... and corporations were peddling it to average folks who didn't know any better... And it was ruining people's lives... Oh yeah, that happened! Bayer knew on some level it was highly addictive, but it was legal and the money was good.
“A century ago, scientists at a German pharmaceutical firm investigated a chemical modification to morphine that made it more palatable as a cough suppressant. The Bayer Co., predecessor to today’s pharmaceutical giant, marketed its popular new remedy as “Heroin.”
No it doesn't. Pinterest is actually good because it doesn't shove politics and talking heads opinions at you. I use it as an image board, and it works great. I know it killed Google image search, but at this point, I don't care.
> The shape of our politics, our ideology, and even our fundamental grasp of how the world works is, in some substantial way, up to the algorithms. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, a quarter of people under 30 in the U.S. regularly get their news from TikTok clips. That number is growing. People are even turning to social-media video as a replacement for Google search.
> Whether the results of such swipes and searches lead us to enlightenment or drag our worldviews further down toward their least reconciliatory, most conspiratorial depths depends in part on AI.
Honestly, what is the solution?, in the eyes of Capitalism, these Companies are the ultimate winners.
They are creating more revenue, more activity, crushing the competition other than themselves.
Who's going to stop this? especially that no matter how many users complain, the numbers are always going higher, and every monetary incentive is pushing companies towards this AI time blackhole with infinite mass surveillance.
You might say regulation, but why would the U.S. ever handicap its companies when they are basically the new U.S. worldwide influence tool?
No matter what the people vote, these companies have an infinite lobbying budget.
You and me might not use Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, but let's be honest, we are increasingly the minority.
> If such a system could, say, rank videos by how happy they are, it might help elevate more positive content and subdue the darker stuff: less vitriol, more virtue.
Isn't this even more dystopian?
Imagine there is crisis in Afghanistan, or a nuclear Activity in the east.
The algorithm would just simply filter all of that out, and leave you living in that mindless unrealistic view of the world.
Yes I agree, the algorithms and news coverage are way too negative these days, but removing negativity is not the solution at all, it's basically blinding people from the truth.
Instead of promoting miss-info, you are now hiding the news completely.
It depends on how much of a shock to the status quo you believe TikTok[1] is.
Take the invention of the printing press, for example. It was instrumental in the development of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Both undermined the legitimacy of the the Catholic Orthodoxy and the Ancien Régime, respectively. The printing press was used by adherents of Lutheranism, Jan Hus, Zwingli, Calvin, and Gustav V to propagate texts outside the previous monestary-scribe-book economy which, as you can imagine, also served as an orthodoxy-preserving filter. Likewise, Jean-Paul Marat's L’Ami du peuple[2], Le Pere Duchesne(Hébert), and countless others[3] were able to publish revolutionary texts faster than the monarchy could stamp them out. Both are case where technology outpaced social capacity.
The question is, "has TikTok and it's like outpaced our social capacity?" What I mean specifically: is throughput and velocity of idea propagation at odds with our current social superstructure? In hindsight, this was clearly the case in the Reformation ad Revolution. Attempts at stamping out the ideas failed and the social order changed to accommodate the technology. Talking today about outlawing the printing press is considered an absurd.
I'll argue the same is true for calling a ban or regulation on TikTok. Bans are a technological solution to the social organizational lag problem. Instead, we should be developing and employing social mechanisms that bridge the gap. After developing and deploying these social mechanisms, it will seem just as absurd to advocate for a TikTok ban.
We should be looking at the development of social mechanisms post printing press that acted as a counterbalance and learn from them when developing new social mechanisms that work to temper algorithmic feeds today.
1. Or more broadly dopamine-optimized and AI-generated content feeds.
The worst part of TikTok is everyone copying this idea of putting their videos into an endless loop. I don't want to see your stupid video over and over again.
I'm not sure saying all the other paltforms are copying TikTok is correct.
It's more that TikTok is the natural evolution of of technology that all media platforms are heading towards.
- Lower the cost of media production and publishing until its basically free
- Lower the cost of distribution by using an algorithm
- Lower the cost of moderation by using crowd-sourcing and algorithms (if even that)
The results are pretty scary.
Political discourse is in free fall. My hypothesis is that a big part of the US political dysfunction is due to the populace consuming the "news" on Twitter and Facebook as a series of low-quality or downright fake posts. It's all hot takes, no meaningful discourse.
Entertainment is in a tidal shift. Netflix is trying the high volume, cheap production, let the algorithm sort it out, but will still eventually lose to YouTube. On a positive note, independents are making better cooking "shows" on YouTube than Food Network or Netflix ever produced.
Old newspapers and Hollywood had a lot of problems of their own. But there were also big advantages of the professionalism, editorialization and quality control they offered.
The question is if we'll find a healthy balance by some combination of the platforms and their users trying to do the right thing.
About my only somewhat real discussions are with co-workers, who happen to have very different political positions. Frankly, I am doing it against my better judgment ( discussing political matters can get divisive fast ), but the conversations are generally interesting as the other participants are from non-traditional backgrounds so they can offer interesting perspectives.
I think this is the part that is missing, but last time I started talking honestly on the train about what I think is happening out of the corner of my eye I saw a kid raise his cell seemingly in an attempt to record the conversation. I wasn't saying anything too radical ( "people are idiots" was the gist of it ), but nothing I would want floating around the net..and so I stopped.
I am not sure what the answer is. Best I can hope for is that I will be able to keep my kid away from it long enough.
I want to believe that those that pay their attention to and engage with their local community will have a higher quality of life.
Debating politics on the Internet is generally a waste of time. Debating with a real, intelligent person can sharpen your viewpoint and improve your relationship with that person.
As a millinial i don't use tiktok. i have never used it once and don't care to use it. personally i think it's a detriment to society having been around zoomers and seeing the effect it's having on them. so if "everything" where to become tiktok, i guess i just wont be using the internet anymore.
I can’t believe the younger generation is doing something a member of the older generation doesn’t care for and is making sweeping proclamations about what will happen if things change.
As a millennial, I was telling college friends in 2005 not to specify their hometown, school or religious affiliation on the then-new Facebook, because
a)it wasn't mandatory
b)ask yourself why you would need to put that in when the majority of your connections are with people who are right there on campus
Some people listened, but most did not. FB was college-only at the time, with no ads. People just wanted to e-stalk others. Not too much has changed, except that people now e-stalk influencers they have parasocial relationships with. And you click a button to throw a couple of bucks at them.