One of best features of TikTok is how easy it is to create your own content. You don't even have to think about it: just duplicate what another video is doing with exactly the same moves and exactly the same music. In that sense, it's definitely social media, since almost everyone on that platform is also a creator.
Instagram can be used without seeing any influencers, it allows you to stick to the content your interested in.
In my case, I'm able to just see Evangelion memes from accounts I follow and the occasional ad.
I think the main similarity between TikTok and traditional social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" aspect. Once you've bought in, you see how amazing these peoples' lives are and you want your life to be that great too.
IMO it's all an illusion, but it's not much different from seeing a friend, family member, co-worker. or a prominent business-person/celebrity being more successful than you. The interesting (scary?) thing about TikTok is that it hyper-compresses that environment into a few seconds, then constantly bombards you with it via a neverending flow of videos. It's like keeping up with the Joneses on amphetamines.
Weird part about it, it really depends. The last time I checked, my TikTok feed was just full of funny small videos filmed by random people doing stupid trends outside. Nothing about their lives exactly attracts me. However, the fact that a lot of people see these videos, and I reshare it with my friends and laugh at it together is what can make it remarkable.
Obviously, it heavily depends. I’ve looked at my friends’ feeds and it’s exactly what you’ve described.
This is the actual great thing about TikTok. My experience of TikTok seems very different to the majority of the commenters here, it’s like we’re on different platforms.
Obviously we all like different things, and there is enough content to fill everyone’s feeds with it.
Yeah, the one thing people familiar with TikTok seen to agree on and be impressed by is its ability to cater the content it serves to your desires.
That's actually what got me to try it out. There were multiple cases where I heard that, so downloaded it and spent some time on it. After you've used it a few hours, you start really getting mostly the stuff you like.
You just have to be very careful not to engage with stuff you don't want to see. Scroll away as soon as you've determined it's not for you, as they'll notice if you watch things to the end. I made a conscious decision that I didn't want to engage in content where people were complaining about the behavior of other people and scrolled past as soon as I identified things as such, and I stopped getting them within a few days. My TikTok is all fun/funny stuff.
I've took on a shitty job recently (which I've since quit) and there were a lot of 40-50-60 y.o men working the said crap job. Some 75% of them are watching Tiktoks during breaks, which I've never seen with Youtube/Insta. You can think of "keeping up with the Joneseses" as a disease or something negative (which I do personally), but it's what a looot of people want to do and live like.
I'm not entirely sure I believe this argument that Tiktok is a different level of addictiveness than "traditional" social media (which IMO is a fake distinction with no fundamental difference to "$NEW" social media, but that's a separate discussion). I'd like to see if any data or studies actually suggests the endless scroll of twitter, facebook, instagram and reddit, or the autoplay of youtube, is less addictive than tiktok.
I've certainly seen friends and family compulsively scroll and obsessively check instagram and snapchat in a manner no different than what people are criticizing about tiktok. It seems like people witness their "their generation" using instagram/snapchat for hours on end; then they see the younger generation using tiktok for (the same number of) hours on end, and get the idea it's far more damaging.
I can't seem to find a single site (which would presumably mean a consistent methodology) that lists recent data for average|median use per day for both of them, but I've seen numbers saying people spend 33-50 min per day on Facebook, vs 90+ min per day on TikTok.*
I suspect the curated short video format is what really holds people's attention in a way that is different from "traditional social media".
*disclaimer: as reported by different sites, with different methodologies, and different reporting dates.
TikTok does in some ways seem like the anti-Instagram or Facebook, or at least my feed does. It's all people using their hardships or quirks as humor and a way to connect, or couples examining the annoyances of marriage and relationships in good humor.
The amount of things I want to and do share with my wife and kids in there makes me thing of the items as small emotional payloads I can send which are themselves a message, sort of like sending an emoji or string of them.
Tik Tok is youtube for people with ADD. I listened to some Mr Beast videos and checked out some of his videos on youtube. OMG its like freakin cuts every 10 seconds, feels like my mind going to explode. I finally figured they cut it like a Tik Tok video for the ADD.
YouTubers have been doing gratuitous jump cuts since like 2011, go look at some Fred videos. It's nothing to do with TikTok nor ADD, they use the jump cuts to mask recording mistakes or to cut out pauses.
> they use the jump cuts to mask recording mistakes or to cut out pauses.
Over time, it becomes a culture signifier of sorts. MrBeast is bigger than Pewdiepie (embarrassed that I know these names), he obviously does not need to paper over mistakes with those cuts.
Same way he doesn't need to make exaggerated open-mouth face for the Youtube thumbnail, but they do anyway.
There have been a few people that examined the topic of YouTube thumbnails, even with a/b testing and statistical analysis (since YouTube allows you to change it and gives good stats). It really does matter to getting views.
Yes, and the scary part is even for people without ADHD, it's completely killing their attention spans, which is then triggering them to go and get themselves diagnosed. Producing ADHD meds is going to be a lucrative business
One of the greatest marketing moves of all time is coming up with the name "Adderall". It's just amphetamine! Well, a slightly different stereoisomer mix, but just amphetamine nonetheless. Sounds a million times better though, especially if your kid is about to take it.
Isn't Youtube for people with ADD? I don't really use Youtube much, but when I do end up on the site its full of cheap videos with people "reacting" to things with yelling/shocked faces and a bunch of chaotic nonsense.
The only good things on youtube are music videos, DIY repair, and lectures / talks that gets uploaded.
This is a matter of degree, short video sets the bar lower and encourages the behavior. After all, the reacting videos are only small part of Youtube the whole platform, but short videos are always like that kind of nonsense.
People are seeing the young YouTube in TikTok. For monetization reasons, YouTube shifted to longer and better produced videos, and the quirky and raw content the OP is praising TikTok for has become less prominent, although it is definitely still there.
There is an interesting argument here against the idea that YouTube, Facebook, etc are monopolies despite their impressive market share. The moment they try to extract value from their users, they have to shrink their own mote - a competitor can copy the older version of the platform that extracted less money.
They don't actually have much choice in how they run their products.
So if a dictator's hold on power is weak, is it not a dictatorship? Imagine there have been 2 coups over 15 years, yet both produced a winner-takes-nearly-all outcome.
Not sure it matters much if you're at the bottom and have to bow to one for a while then the other.
Put it this way; your comment could be a veiled description of US politics. The typical democracy simulates a coup every 2-5 years in a winner-takes-all contest. If if you're at the bottom and have to bow to one party for a while then the other. Indeed, the description is so apt that everyone ritualistically accuses their political opponents of actually fomenting a coup (powered by Russia/China/Israel/Bill Gates/mobilising dead people/gerrymandering/the electoral college being illegitimate/whatever).
So yes, I do actually believe that. If the hold on power is weak enough it doesn't count as a dictatorship.
The difference is an effective balance of power between branches of a government. Dictators have unchecked power (at least in practice) until they're deposed.
Similarly many of today's tech giants are difficult to escape, especially as network effects drive toward centralization of power.
I think it is TV, you turn it on, after a few second, you have your entertainment. YouTube still needs searching and subscribing, TikTok doesn't need any of those. I compare TikTok to MTV.
There was a pretty interesting article about this recently, called "The end of social media". Social Media is becoming more and more like TikTok, where you don't see your friends content so much but rather upvoted content.
As someone who's rapidly moving over to Activity Pub platforms, this was still an interesting read. Over there, it's just like social networking used to be: a strictly chronological feed of posts from people you choose to follow and nothing else. Sure, it's not always the most engaging content (my Facebook feed is still more "sticky"), but engagement is decidedly not the point over there.
Those older platforms were about your social networks (friends and friends of friends) - or at least they were before they started to ape TikTik.
For me, the much closer comparison to TikTok is YouTube, and I feel that TikTok is really just a mobile-optimized YouTube.