Note that this is "average time on app", which draws two potential pitfalls:
• Youtube is consumed A LOT on the website, including some people using the mobile website (not the app) to keep it playing in the background (duh). This only compares average time on app.
• It could also be totally skewed, if let's say 100M people spend 2h/day on average on Youtube, and 1k (a tiny amount) spend 2.5h/day on average on Tiktok, that'd be already good enough to say "average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok".
I haven't read the report, but wanted to point out these two warnings. As we say in Spanish, the easiest way to lie is with statistics. And of course any half-decent PR person will take any numbers and blow it up into a headline, so tread with caution.
(Absolutely not wanting to discount on Tiktok, which has been growing at an incredible rate, just wanted to say that the wording on how exactly they are "winning" sounded a bit contrieved).
The article also says "Data from app monitoring firm App Annie indicates that average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok, indicating high levels of engagement."
Now, I don't know for sure, but I cant imagine that YouTube is integrating App Annie metrics into their YouTube App, right?
It's not like Google dont have their own metrics platform...
And is TikTok really using App Annie?
So where are they getting the data from?
Are they including media streaming devices like ATV, Chromecast, Roku, and so on?
Overall it's a misleading report that misrepresents the attention graph of platform consumption!
You can find out which app is currently opened in Android. Do this repeatedly and you get an impression for how long which app gets used. All App Annie needs to do is pay popular app vendors to ship their data collection SDK. They might not get perfect data like Google does, but large enough samples to make statements like this.
They use VPN, Ad blocker and every other apps which people indiscriminately give permissions to, They buyout such apps with significant number of users from the play/App stores and extrapolate the data collected through those apps.
I wouldn't be surprised if publishers directly pay App Annie under the table to boost their stats.
As far as YouTube screen-time is concerned Web, Game Consoles, Media centers & smart TVs would account significant screen-time and it's unlikely App Annie's data hoarding apps are installed in them(Unless say shoddy media center bought from Ali express).
That said, TikTok might well indeed take over YouTube sometime in the future as they are doing what YouTube did in the beginning - Home videos sans shitty cameras, Now YouTube is all about top 1% creators with Michael Bay movie budget for each video.
P.S. Not an endorsement for TikTok, Never used it, Will never use it for their moderation practice against the disabled.
That's what they would say, but they told moderators to suppress posts by "Ugly", "Poor", "Disabled" because it's not glamorous enough to attract new users.
I refuse to use the YouTube app. The ads have gotten so bad. The website I can use an ad blocker and it’s fine to watch. I try using the app iOS or TVOS and it’s 3 ads to start and an ad every 5 minutes.
I recommend buying YouTube Premium. I’ve been a happy customer for a couple years now. It’s better for the creators compared to blocking ads too and they get paid based on your watch time. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
I do pay for YouTube premium. But the amount of ads in the video itself is just too much. Everybody has a sponsor to talk about multiple times in theirs video. And then there is the various interaction reminders. And YouTube stills shows me ads for movies and whatnot.
I am now combining YouTube Premium with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlok to get a decent experience.
I also have YT Premium. Those in video promos are so easy to skip. Most creators put them in the same spot every video, some even at the end.
These are mostly regular people trying to earn a living making high quality content. I’m not seeing how you can begrudge them the few seconds of skippable ad copy.
Everyone thought it was cool how episodes of The Walking Dead kept getting longer. But then someone ran the numbers and it turned out the episodes were still the standard ~40 minutes, and every single new minute past that was ads. And not just ads, but lots of super short ads, so they're even more annoying.
As a full-time YouTuber person, I wholeheartedly endorse this statement. I say that as someone who pays the bills from YouTube and as someone who pays for Premium every month.
It's been a while, but last I checked Premium views were worth more on a per-view basis than ad-watching views. We're talking tiny fractions of a cent, but they obviously add up. Moreover, so-called "demonetized" videos remain eligible for Premium revenue, despite the reality that they will earn little to nothing from ads.
I have YouTube premium and love it. I mostly watch it for music videos and technical talks, and love not having ads. Watch some kids shows too with the 5yo.
I nearly always use the web site, even though I have the app on my phone. Full screen browser tab on the desktop just feels more “TV-like” and engaging than staring at the phone screen.
why not use ublock origin, rather than buy youtube premium? UO will remove every single ad in browser. It's obviously 100% fine to buy premium; I am just curious about the reasons, if any.
As someone who lives very comfortably on a software engineer’s salary at a big software company, I generally avoid trying to “work around” their business models. If I’m going to use the software/service, I’m happy to pay those engineer’s salaries too. (And if it makes the product unusable, then I don’t use it).
I like the simplicity of paying for it and knowing it’ll work everywhere without having to deal with work arounds. (I watch on at least 5 different platforms)
I don’t mind the price - I love the straightforward model.
I watch a ton of YouTube and want to support the business as well as creators (they get a cut of the subscription).
If I'm not missing anything it seems to have about the same features as NewPipe, which additionally supports downloading video/audio for later consumption. Any particular reason to switch?
The nice thing about tiktok is I haven't seen an ad I can't immediately skip. And since I don't follow influencer accounts I also don't see "product placement" or promotional videos.
Truly, I can't remember watching a single advertisement on tiktok because it's so easy to skip them. The moment they force ad watching ala youtube I'm out.
Yea, the Youtube algorithm is the "pick me girl" of algorithms.
I watched one video by a creator I already follow about their solar panel installation and water-catcher garden irrigation.
What do I get in my recommendations? Dozens and dozens of videos from completely random channels about solar panel installation and gardening.
I very rarely find new creators on YouTube, who produce consistent high quality content. I follow a handful of channels and even from them I lookat 20-40% of their videos.
TikTok on the other hand I swore I'd never use. Then came Covid19 and lockdowns. I reached the end of HN, Reddit and Youtube, so I installed it.
The Algorthm is fucking amazing. Dunno how they do it, but 80-90% of stuff it shows me I end up watching (it is 10secs to 3 mins so the investment isn't that huge =) ).
I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.
I'd never actually go search anything like that on purpose, but I actually kinda found out I enjoy looking at. It's a good way to space out for 30 minutes and relax. Most TikTok videos get to the point before a stereotypical YouTuber has gone through their intro and sponsor segments :)
> I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.
I bet some of the uptick in quality of content on tiktok vs youtube is based on the length of videos. If they only have three minutes, all the interesting things will be shoehorned into the available time. Whereas youtube creators are incentivized by the payment structure to lengthen their content to increase their adshare pay so they extend their content to 10 minutes + leading to a lot of filler and "heyyyyy guys let me tell you about my day blah blah blah before we jump into the meat and potatoes" etc.
It's exactly where the issue is. It's no mistake, product management at Google isn't dumb.. here is how it works.
YouTube, for years even post acquisition made no money, kept bleeding to aquire users. At one point a revenue stream is implemented, which must keep growing to recoup the large investments. Not to mention, pure greed.
The algorithm isn't designed to promote quality content to enhance the user experience and love for the product. It's designed to keep users engaged, while allowing for as much ads time possible. So, the 10 or or 16 mins length was identified as sweet spots to allow for at least one ad placement without loosing engagement. Click bait videos aren't demoted, they work. They keep users engaged as they get promoted to watch yet another video, until brain saturation. They maximised profit, they didn't strike the right balance, perhaps too naive to imagine competition could steal from their market share.
Here we have tiktok, knowing very well they would need to be order of magnitude better to gain traction, at least where the market was already taken up by YouTube. They created an app making it easier and faster to push well cut content, with better tech, better suited UI and overall UX proven to be attracting younger audiences who tend to make trends with their creativity.
Take a good look at the YouTube app, despite the few visual improvements it feels like a decade old library system with auto play, ported to mobile phones. Look at tiktok, it's mobile first, it's fluid and design for touch interaction, the social features are right there, not outside the video in the form of two thumbs button and a thread of text blobs.
Google clearly don't understand or refuses to understand trends. They build minimalist systems , boring to look at but that perform very well, and it is now capitalist greed that set the direction of the company, the bottom line is to squeeze more and more money before the competitions finishes them. They got a few years to go on like that.
Of course. You are probably in that age range yourself so that's your circle, and barely content creator
I would assume. Youngsters innovate, the previous generations tend to follow.
Please. I don’t want social features in my video library app. I unsubscribed from YouTube since I can’t remove “shorts” from the interface. I’m not going to pay for them to lobotomize me…
The social aspect is on YouTube as much as it is on tiktok, one got it work better in term of UX. As for shorts, the same critic can be made of Twitter, which I despite but the content is forced concise for the reason mentioned in another comment. Shorts on YouTube and Facebook are some poorly implemented afterthought, in playing catch up, I also find it sad we can't hide them altogether.
I like watching makeup videos and product reveals and I've just started straight away immediately skipping to the ~3:30min mark because that is when they actually start showing the damn palette.
i’ve watched a lot of youtube this year. every day, and i rarely consume any other media at all. Its overtuned to locking you in and i generally agree with OP. I was watching a lot of guitar stuff and at one point that’s literally all it would show me, despite having other interests. i think i appreciated it was a bit lacking when i realized i was regularly clicking into my subscriptions and searching (manually) for new stuff they or related channels may have uploaded — and finding many interesting videos after wards.
Its a hard problem and perhaps im an exception, but if you are searching for new stuff, and finding amd watching it, that’s a miss by the algorithm. Especially if that becomes the main thing you do.
I saw so much promotion of the tiktok algorithm on HN so I decided to check it out. For the first hour I was laughing at almost every video. The app very quickly optimized to show me funny videos from people like me. And then after a few times using the app, I quickly became bored. I don't want to see endless funny videos, I want to watch some longer informative videos and I couldn't see how to make the app do that.
When I go on youtube it shows me 10-20 minute science and engineering videos which I can put on and sit on the couch watching. This provides lasting value for me because I never get bored of these like I do with 20 second comedy videos.
YouTube creators create a new channel for one or two videos or avoid content entirely because they're terrified the algorithm will ruin the good thing they have going if they branch out into a new topic. They do it once and see the hit and never do it again.
This is a hit for US cultural dominance and influence.
Americans and Brits, at least in average watch time, are now consuming media ultimately controlled by the Chinese government.
And the previous election was influenced by a foreign government using American social media networks to influence, not to mention influencing the president-elect directly.
Either America's own social networks are used against them or social networks controlled by other countries are gaining dominance.
It seems nothing other than a decline in American influence in the world. And it comes from other countries outperforming the Americans.
Whether America reacts to this or ignores it through the arrogance of the current greatest will define American power in the world for generations.
You have no idea how much money they spent. What we do know from sworn testimony is that they reached 126 million users through Facebook alone [1] We also know they funneled millions into NRA to influence our elections with dark money.[2] They also had an army of social media influencers working at the IRA with a $1.25 million monthly budget. [3] And, what is the value of the influence from their state sponsored hackers that stole data and leaked through WikiLeaks? [4] No megachurch can do that.
Both happened. The spearfishing John Podestra gmail hack was separate.
The Hilary personal email server used for government business that contained classified information that was illegal was hacked by Russian agents the fbi alledged.
Hillary's IT Admin was asking on reddit how to wipe a server of a VIP. With such incompetent admin there is a high probability that the server was hacked.
> The Mueller report detailed that the IRA spent $100,000 for over 3,500 Facebook advertisements, which included anti-Clinton and pro-Trump advertisements.
That an outrageous 0.0015% of the estimated 6.8 billion price tag of the 2016 election. Damn Ruskies and their election interference [shakes fist at the sky].
Fun fact, 100k is 0.4% of the price of the Mueller report itself, at 25M.
That is Facebook ad spend, not the total cost of the attack.
It doesn't include other things described in the paragraph that the IRA did, like organizing Trump rallies and running troll farms where they posed as Americans on social media.
It also doesn't cover things like paying for the operation to infiltrate the NRA etc.
And then of course there could be stuff we don't know about
And we all know that that's not what happens now on any major non Chinese media platforms. The reality is that most of these platforms demonize China good contents and their creators, applying double standards https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-01-22/YouTubers-under-fire-f...
Spotify and Pandora dominated music streaming for years, while based in Europe. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t say they were indicative of a decline in American influence.
Other countries’ companies can succeed whiteout diminishing America. Even China’s.
Tangentially related, I wish Pandora was still a thing, I used to love it. Currently pandora.com redirects to a 404 page when viewed from outside the US [1]
> Americans and Brits, at least in average watch time, are now consuming media ultimately controlled by the Chinese government.
That's a good thing, they will learn quickly why mass media monopoly is bad, when they now have the fear that drive them to actually look at the giant monsters...
The unfortunate thing is that monopoly often comes with control.
In the face of an overwhelming US monopoly of popular entertainment --- cinema, television, music, comics, and books --- the rest of the world ... had relatively little power. Yes, there are localised (and often government-supported / encouraged / incentivised) instances of each. But it was US pop culture that defined the direction and movement from the 1950s onward.
(For the pedants, 1) I love you, you're my third favourite people, except on the second Thursday of the month, and 2) "defined" != "there were no other influences.)
A couple of years ago, I noticed the youtube recommendations that would get were a lot less interesting, though still relevant to me somehow. At some point I started seeing a lot more "mainstream" content, especially after media companies figured out that they needed to have a youtube presence in order to stay relevant.
So I wonder if the algorithm the switched to had something to do with them potentially losing attention from users.
I can't speak to tik tok, never used it, never will.
I wish someone at YouTube could explain, but the recommendation algo is nothing like what it used to be. Every refresh would bring a gem, now it's mostly the same videos, often from the same channel if I happened to watch a few in a row... Very odd.
I also feel this way. In the past I was completely satisfied with the recommended content.
I now find it over-calibrates to recommend based on recently watched videos, whether the same channel or the same style.
For example, I watched a video the other day, something like "Boris Johnson pronouncing the word _____". Next thing I know, my recommendations are flooded with similar videos that I don't really want to spend my time on.
This deters me from watching videos that come up that I'm mildly curious in watching, but don't really want to watch more of.
This is exactly my experience, the absolute worst is when it clearly recommends videos that I have already watched, as if it thinks I've forgotten and somehow won't notice since apparently I'm the guy from Momento.
It feels like I keep seeing same videos recommended over and over again. And it is not like Youtube does not know that I have watched majority of the length...
yes, Youtube's recommendation algorithm got very bad. The front page always shows more or less the same videos - many of which I have already watched...
That's the worst. I already watched these videos while logged in the app. Why am I being suggested these again? Also, thousands of interesting hours of video are uploaded daily, why am I seeing the same 5+ years old videos over and over again?
Every TikTok user I know tells me that the primary reason they use it is the algorithm. Apparently it’s way ahead of YouTube. Anecdotally I am in the same boat as you—ended up removing the YouTube suggestion sidebar with an adblocker due to its increasingly poor quality.
One anecdote that I heard about the TikTok algo is that it favors new creators with <5k subscribers and actively pushes that content to new users. This is opposed to how Youtube does it, where more established creators are pushed over news ones.
I feel like this is what really helps TikTok always have fresh content. If you want to become a YouTuber, the path to having a good following can be years of grind. With TikTok, there is a good shot your first video might just propel you to stardom. Thus more people are inclined to create content for TikTok. It creates a feedback loop
Or, as famously yelled by Ballmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!, where the developers are content creators.
You can make really great content on YT and reach an audience. Creators like Tom Scott prove it's possible. But you have to hit a minimum production quality or the algorithm is going to discard you. Mostly this means that you still need a team of people to make it on YT. On TT, it's still totally fine to make bad production quality that has great informational content. So yes, YT has niche content, when considered against TV, but TT has one more factor of magnitude more niche content.
For a bit of anecdotes of the people that I am following: About 30% come from YouTube/Other Internet Media and produce TikTok style content, about 20% are TT Stars, and 50% are these small creators that YT wouldn't even consider. This group, checking their followers, averages about 10k. On YT I don't subscribe to a single person below 100k followers.
I have Category Theory TT accounts followed, but no Category Theory YT channels subscribed. Do CT have YT accounts? Possibly. But not once has YT shown me that content. This might be a problem with me, but TT resolves it through their natural flow, and as I am significantly more advanced than the average user, a problem with me is a problem for the platform.
At this point the path is going to be to start on TT and only move to YT once you have established a following that can make it over the YT recommendation escape velocity.
I don't think channel going back 15 years is good example for new creators. I would expect them to keep somewhat relevant as they have been trough enough cycles to keep some audience always.
YT content is more longform and making that good and engaging takes tons of practice according to my observation. Look at early content of some big names like MKBHD for example. You can see the potential in them but they are nowhere as good as their new content.
Anecdotally this seems correct to me. A friend of mine has had several viral TikTok videos hit millions of views, and he's only been on TikTok for a little while. He did no outside promotion. I think the only way a new YouTube video would do that is if it was absolutely earth shattering in some regard.
This is interesting. I think this approach goes hand in hand with a much lower quality bar on TikTok. We have an expectation that YouTube videos have a certain production quality, so pushing new creators would often result in unmet expectations. On TikTok new creators can record a 15 second dance and be instantly indistinguishable quality-wise from more experienced creators.
I feel like some AI has decided that this video is "good for you". I have some videos on my feed for weeks on end. Now some videos I have already seen are reappearing without the red bar to signify that I have already watched them.
Something definitely stinks with the algo on YT currently. At least for me
Exact same here, frustrates me to no end. They conveniently forget I've already watched some videos and they are shown as unwatched when I clearly remember watching them. Then others which DO show the red bar on the bottom indicating I've watched it, yet they still recommend it to me?!? Sometimes I have DOZENS of these recommendations in my feed. Lately it's been bad enough for me to really consider ditching YT for good.
Veritasium did a video on this recently [1] where he talks about how YouTube saw falling engagement when only showing users their subscribed channels, so they started recommending more non-subscribed content a couple years ago (he talks about this around the 2-3 minute mark in the video).
I feel like the subscription system takes too much manual upkeep that the average user is not willing to do. If I look at my subscriptions list there is stuff I haven't paid attention to for 5+ years because its too much effort to bulk unsubscribe. But the youtube front page picks up on this and just never shows me any of it.
The algorithm does a decent job of showing the stuff I have been interested in recently over just a simple mix of my subscriptions.
I wish someone could make a YouTube 2011 clone. Maybe call it YouTube classic — of course this would be a trademark infringement, so it would have to be named something else. But seriously, if I can get YouTube 2011 back with its human curated categories and recommended videos sidebar that is based on the video that is currently being watched, then I would be so happy!
Can someone explain to me what happened to Vine? I feel like it beat TikTok to the punch by ~8 years before it was bought and then unceremoniously killed by Twitter. Was that the first example of US innovation being suffocated by the big tech oligopoly?
Vine's an example of the beginning of great idea that wasn't taken to its full potential. There are significant key differences between vine and tiktok. There are three that come to mind.
Tiktok expanded allowed uploaded video duration up to 3 minutes.
The For You Page algorithm (which drives the content you see in the feed) is scarily impressive in how it can match the viewer with content they would most want to see.
Lastly, and probably most importantly (in my opinion) Tiktok fosters a home for a vast number of entertaining and informative content creators that give them an edge. Vine mostly went for entertainment in quick six second bursts.
> Tiktok fosters a home for a vast number of entertaining and informative content creators that give them an edge
Vine did this too which is a big part of why it's so surprising to me: Vine didn't just have the tech but they had the community. You can still find Vine compilations on YouTube with millions of views that capture the vibrant set of content creators that Vine once had.
Honestly the only real difference between Vine and TikTok in my mind is that Vine was more focused on comedy while TikTok is more focused on music. Otherwise the two services were pretty much identical.
TikTok had a much better creator reimbursement platform and partnerships built in from the start, and benefited a lot from the early work Twitch and YouTube did setting the tone here, as well as the growth of "influencer culture" leading to further brand and advertising involvement in the space.
The amount of content, the type of it, and the number of people out there willing to make goofy content - I mean young and old alike ... is amazing.
The number of people with cellphones and decent cameras recording 'everything' means we now have all sorts of vidoes of 'guy fishing and whale breaches' or literal lighting strikes etc..
And the normalization of content creation, of likes, of views, the possibility of making money from it etc..
Basically the tools, cultural norms, media and social systems - all reached a critical mass some time after Vine.
If Vine were to have held on, evolved along the lines you indicated, they might have beak TikTok to it.
Oh - and one last point: TikTok started with cute dancing girls among teens. That content category is a great place to start, break through, and get a critical mass going before breaking into parrots swearing, cute babies, and funny challenges.
TikTok (or at least my experience with it) is largely focused on 15-second clips, so I'm not sure duration differences are the significant ones. It seems the algorithm's ability to surface engaging content on a per-user basis is more important than anything else.
I'm guessing content owners may have realized the value in letting people use tiny sections of their songs. Meme songs on tiktok likely generate huge profits when streams of that song jump.
Vine was funny (really funny) but Tiktok shows you what you want to see, and that’s more powerful. It’s very effective and scarily addictive in a way Vine wasn’t.
Combination of easy to use editing tools and effects to emphasise creativity together with the sound tracks. It’s often missed but the soundtracks were (still) are a big reason for it’s traction. It’s become the new mtv
Tiktok is much better as it allows people to infinitely remix existing content. Like a video with a funny sound? With one tap you can make your own and get that "SEO" juice from using that popular sound.
I think the biggest difference is that the number of mobile-app users worldwide is double that from 2016, when Twitter announced they were shutting vine down.
When Vine started in 2012 there were only ~1B smartphone users.
Twitter is allergic to making good business decisions. Even later on, they never attempted to resurrect Vine after TikTok showed the way and FB followed suit with Instagram Reels.
There's ads. Upon opening the app, I get one to apply to work at Chick-fil-A. After scrolling a number of videos, I got an for Givingli. No idea how much/little that pays the bandwidth bills, but the ads themselves are largely disguised as content - ads look just like any other content in the app. It does say sponsored while showing an ad, but it's subtle.
Yes TikTok has ads AND the ad rates are pretty high (I worked in marketing tech for a while and saw the rate card and the huge amount companies spend there)
I don't get why people keep saying vine should have been popular. Myspace beat facebook and look which survived. Myspace was never going to be like facebook. Why should vine have been as big as tiktok just because it was first? Theres plenty of examples of being first not being the winner.
Vine was shut down prior to TikTok's launch. Vine had struck gold and was discarded, then foreign copycats (TikTok and Musical.ly) filled the void. It's one thing for TikTok to beat Vine, another for Vine/Twitter to not even try.
At the very least it's an interesting parable of how short-sighted "innovative" big tech companies can be.
CCP propaganda won’t be a red flying with people chanting “China is great!” It will be something like “masks aren’t effective” to increase the impact of COVID on America.
All the videos I see on TikTok regarding COVID are all pro-mask/pro-vax/pro-science. I can see how others will be led down a different path though. Not sure it's intentional so much as showing people what they want to see, and I don't see how it's any different than, say, YouTube where one can also go down a rabbit hole and get stuck there.
And yet if you walk across the aisle, you will hear people saying the opposite: CCP propaganda is something like "vaccines are effective" to increase the microchip coverage, or whatever.
Something as massive as YouTube can be beaten. This feels like the circle of life, considering every empire that rises eventually falls too.
Though I am not saying TikTok is the doom for YouTube since geo politics will play a significant role its future. And there are other metrics by which TikTok hasn’t probably caught up with YouTube yet like the size of the user base, revenue etc.
What seems odd is how TikTok is managing this. YouTube is popular among all demographics, the diversity of content is mind bogglingly high whereas (I presume) TikTok is popular among the crowd who are either going to highschool or in college. Its primary purpose is entertainment, so how did it beat YouTube exactly?
I think they're very different platforms serving completely different content. I see tiktok as instagram/twitter/snapchat's competition rather than youtube's. If you go back several years on youtube(like 10 years back) you'll find a lot more casual low-res videos of people being goofy/interesting without any agenda to build a following. Nowadays youtubers are all "Hey guys thanks for clicking on my clickbait title don't forget to smash that like button and subscribe I know you're here because of the title but I'm going to do a long intro about something else because I really need this to be 10 minutes long." To be fair many of these are great documentary/educational/infotainment/explainer series on Youtube that I won't find anywhere else. Wendover or Real Engineering are more well-known examples but there's a long-tail of niche history and economics accounts I like to follow that formats like tiktok won't serve anytime soon.
The lowered barrier to entry with TikTok and its algorithm means that someone with a PhD in an extremely esoteric field can do a quick presentation without having to make TikTok their new career. Real Engineering is great, but they didn't randomly fire off one YouTube video and get where they are today.
TikTok is also absolutely filled with pseudo informative content which looks exactly like this but the statements and numbers are complete garbage. Because the platform does not put much weight behind users and names, this stuff is just as prominent as the real content.
Don't they serve very different demographics and/or interests?
I've been assuming TikTok is the equivalent of "what is trending today", where "what" is something related to dance moves, or other stuff I don't find very interesting. (Or, it's not that I find dance moves uninteresting, it's just that it's not something I'd want to spend time consuming). Are my assumptions wrong, and there is genuinely interesting, and more in depth content on TikTok?
Also, the whole thought of a video platform devoted to teenagers filming themselves dance ... is... well, to be honest, a bit creepy. But I suppose this is a concern for just a part of the content if my assumptions are wrong.
Ps: Just to clear, I'm not saying there isn't creative things or something to learn or expand some kind of understanding through TikTok. Just that, surely, there isn't much overlap between YouTube and a platform limited to 15 second video clips? Especially one, that for someone who has never used it, seems mostly limited to teenagers filming themselves dance?
> dance moves, or other stuff I don't find very interesting
There are lots of different corners of TikTok, and for good or bad it's generally pretty good at forming some fairly niche communities. I have a couple of primarily dance-oriented creators I follow—none of them teenagers, fwiw—but the most interesting are the ones who use their platform to educate, whether it be about science-y stuff or music or history or whatever; I've learned a lot from following a substantial group of Black creators who've taken the time to talk about their lived experiences. These communities with somewhat deeper content really took off when the platform opened up 60 second videos (I gather that was late in 2020?) and they've mostly gotten even better now that creators (at least some of us?) can make 3-minute videos.
It's all based on what you like and follow, though. Very early on, it's worthwhile to go out-of-band to track down names of a few creators that you can seed your for-you-page with, otherwise you'll get the lowest common denominator stuff. Sometimes someone will "duet" or "stitch" another video and then you're introduced to another creator and can follow them directly; other times the FYP itself will serve up someone you've never seen or heard of but that has content (and presumably like-and-follow patterns) similar to the ones you do follow. And then you can like and/or follow the new person.
I mean, there's thirst traps too. If those were the only videos you liked, then that's what it would show you.
Based on the suggestions here, I went ahead and looked for myself, and I'm impressed by how fast and accurate TikTok figured out what I liked. After about two minutes, all it showed me was a combination tools, nature, animals, and woodworking.
I have a more niche hobbies like 3d printing and electronics which I'm sure it'll pick up within enough time, but, not a single video of what I assumed almost all videos were.
I'm happy to be wrong, and I get why TikTok is so popular.
While dance content is the most popular, the system that recommends videos allows a factor of magnitude more niches than other platforms. In no way is TT limited to dance. Within the first day I stopped seeing dance content. If you want to post stuff that would do well here, it would do well on TikTok.
Is the barrier to entry (installing yet another app on your phone) onerous in some way that I don't see? Otherwise it seems straightforwards enough to install the app for yourself and see what's on there.
There's a ton of content that isn't thirst traps (aka teenagers dancing), but while that's an interesting question to dig in to, if enough people switch mediums (from newspapers to radio to TV to YouTube to Tiktok), there doesn't have to be an overlap for one to largely supplant the next. How's the New York Times doing these days?
To be fair, Youtube VS TikTok is mostly the wrong comparison.
Tiktok is mostly competing with the Insta/Facebook I need distraction so I'll let myself be numbed with external impulses as fast as I can get. Most similar was the story feature in Instagram, often also videos, although nobody every compared viewing them with Youtube.
Although Youtube also has it's scroll/impulsive it's not a direct competition. Although you could argue any form of time consumption (online) is competition.
I would not go as far as saying the comparison is wrong. From what I have read about the platform, it is a video sharing platform where teenagers can also insert currently trending music and share the content. There is also a home feed that works automatically by finding the best video suggested by an algorithm. So based on that description, it is fair to compare it to YouTube.
I agree YouTube /Instagram/Snapchat stories feature is closer to the experience of TikTok.
Though I making a guess since I have only read about it and seen some screenshots.
Tiktok videos are on average a few seconds to a maximum of 3 minutes (which is rare to see anything over a minute). A youtube video is 5-10
minutes on average. Comparing apples and oranges only works if are talking about a fruit salad.
YT has some knock-off of Stories but I have never used it. But unfortunately a lot of creators I watch (even some guys who explain very involved technical stuff) make videos for it now and label it #shorts which is annoying since I usually watch YouTube on my laptop or iPad.
It would be nice but unless some massive VC backs it to market it and help it scale, or content creators become aware about it and jump ship, it won’t make a big dent.
TikTok seems emblematic of China's overall approach compared to the West - shows up late to the party, but studies all those hard-won lessons to copy and later surpass the most successful Western products. The free market is great at finding the superior product, but it's also messy and wasteful with all those failed attempts - why not just sit it out until a winner starts to emerge, then copy them? China seems to have perfected the art of the fast follower.
Tiktok is very much a product of the 'free market' segment in China. The government does have a minority ownership stake in it now, but that's very recent and they played no role in it's founding by Zhang Yiming, a programmer and serial app and online service founder.
Yeah, my understanding is that the recommendation engine was already developed for a news app popular in India, and that they grafted this onto Musical.ly (the acquisition which has now become TikTok).
Also, they spent many, many millions on ads to get the app everywhere.
many, many millions can be approximately equal to 1bn. I am aware that they advertised a lot, but didn't have (and wouldn't trust) any figures provided on this, as I've seen how wrong they can be.
no different than SV itself. How many Clubhouse clones did we have exactly, not to mention just about every established giant suddenly coming up with 'spaces' and 'stage channels'?
That's always been the game, inside and outside of countries.
Seems many here are not TikTok users (and some never will) but besides algo TikTok video editing with music and app UX has made people so easy to jump on uploading and recording video from a smartphone, and making this toxic culture of attention from the young audience on making TikTok videos (just look for the cringe reactions of people recording TikTok users making videos).
I feel like I'm going crazy. Hasn't TikTok been proven malicious in it's excessive user tracking and data theft? Why does everyone I know still use it? Outside of privacy concerns, doesn't the blackbox algorithm make anyone worry? We're building automated echochambers for an entire population. We're giving a Chinese company the ability to control the content consumption, and therefore beliefs and knowledge, of entire countries. The ever growing popularity of tiktok is, to me, extremely concerning.
- algo is a black box, and uncalibrated youtube makes my eyes bleed;
- own by the biggest spy on the planet, google, known for manipulating information, monopolistic behavior, participation in the worst gov programs (e.g: PRISM);
- impose American censorship rules to the entire world, and makes creators do inane cuts to fit some terrible metrics
Besides, the typical Tik Tok customer doesn't give a damn about those things. They didn't on facebook, insta, whatsapp, or whatever. They don't even know it's an issue, "have nothing to hide", don't care about privacy, power centralization, citizen spying and so on.
I see where you're coming from, but Youtube isn't nearly as opaque as Tiktok. You can actually search for videos on youtube, typically content is longer and has a higher production quality which reduces probability of doom-scrolling. As someone else mentioned, TikTok is intentionally designed to be addictive and gamified, much more so that youtube or facebook.
And, objectively speaking, the US government is far preferable to the CCP. The US has it's issues and has made mistakes in the past, the CCP is still putting Muslims in concentration camps and exercises regular authoritarian controll over it's citizens. Militarily, the US is allied with most EU powers (including France) and generally has good intentions for it's allies. China, on the other hand, finds itself on the outside of most alliances, and considering that even their own people are treated poorly, I can only imagine that their intentions for others are not positive.
American tech companies take your data and sell it to advertisers, I don't like it, but they do. The US government only accesses it if they have a reason to do so and subpoena the specific information needed. The Chinese government? I have no doubt that they're collecting data for much more nefarious purposes. Intelligence indicates that they've been improving their military forces massively in the last several decades. It wouldn't be hard for them to subtly start slipping in propaganda into the tiktok feeds of countries they intend to invade, and then they'll have local-national support.
I think it's easy to look at this and say objectively that it's worse. If Youtube or Facebook were owned by France or Germany I would hold the same belief that tiktok is worse. It's not fear of some mysterious "other", but fear of a proven enemy to freedom and human rights, China.
> The US government only accesses it if they have a reason to do so and subpoena the specific information needed
As Snowden revelations have shown, this is not the case.
> It wouldn't be hard for them to subtly start slipping in propaganda into the tiktok feeds of countries they intend to invade
Last time I checked, the USA were the number one warmonger in the world, sometimes by lying about WMD and going against the vote of the UN.
I'm not defending China, I do think Tiktok is a dictatorship honeypot, but the USA is only good to the USA. A cancer is worst than diabetes, but I still don't think diabetes is a good thing.
And google is only good to google.
I'm in the good graces of neither, being in Europe, and consider both as services that will try to get as much of me as possible when I use them. And the minute our interest are not aligned with theirs, they will bite us.
Fun fact, if you are not a US citizen, you have no 4th amendment rights against seizure of your data. No judge or legal process necessary beyond a blanket executive order.
> Militarily, the US is allied with most EU powers (including France)
Wouldn’t this be an argument for preferring TikTok over YouTube?
There is literally nothing China can do to me as long as I stay firmly in the West. On the other hand, I could very well be sold out by Google to the US government, which could easily have me extradited from the EU.
I mean if you want to foster anti-america content all you really need to do is leave TikTok alone. It’s my generation’s version of Tumblr only on a bigger scale. You don’t really need manipulation when the user-base skews young, activist, and unironically anti-capitalist.
Which I think is awesome personally but I get how some people will see all of that as huge red flags.
I mean the trope of colleges turning people into leftist hippie communists is older than my parents.
But K-12 in the US tries to hammer so much “so misleading it might as well be false” pro-America propaganda during exactly the age that kids are generally rebelling against anything authority tells them that’s it’s not all that surprising that during a major economic downturn that’s only benefiting those with capital that people would start to have a distaste for the system that produced this mess.
There’s something wild about being so liberal that people assume you’re conservative. I’m very much vaccinated and also upset that our government left the out most vulnerable people with $1400 and a thumbs up, fucked over out healthcare workers, pushed people back to work rather than give any meaningful assistance and put everyone at risk, did basically nothing to control housing costs all while the stock market posted record returns for already wealthy capital holders.
I just think it’s weird to attribute the things you are complaining about to ‘capitalism’, and that if you are going to make such broad statements, then it’s weird to claim there are no benefits to those ‘without capital’ when there plainly are.
I happen to also be critical of most of the things you are criticizing. Blaming ‘capitalism’ doesn’t seem to offer anything. The word has become interchangeable with ‘the bogeyman’.
In a lot of ways I don’t think that’s a totally unfair assessment. But “fuck capitalism” has become somewhat of a rallying phrase for people who are upset at a number of economic problems and their non-solutions that are largely underpinned by the mostly individualistic but fundamentally capitalist way of thinking that is both wildly held in the US in general but specifically held among those in power who are personally unaffected by the systems they create.
> underpinned by the mostly individualistic but fundamentally capitalist way of thinking that is both wildly held in the US in general but specifically held among those in power who are personally unaffected by the systems they create
I largely disagree with the first half of this, and agree with the second half. I think ‘individualism’ is a chimera and not a cause.
I do agree that Americans are generally more suspicious of the state than people in most other countries, but that’s to be expected given both the founding and history of the country, and the experiences of minorities.
On the other hand, the disconnectedness of those in power and the lack of solutions is definitely evident.
My dislike of ‘anti-capitalism’ is that is just a complaint, but without any solutions.
> There is literally nothing China can do to me as long as I stay firmly in the West.
There are numerous Uyghurs in the West who would disagree with your assessment given the harassments they have had to endure. This will only become worse as China continues to become more powerful.
Explaining these to the average person makes you seem like a conspiracy nut case.
No of some of the same people will go on about the illuminati controlling everything. But you talk specific companies or policies and you get an eye roll.
Just a single point, but as a non american, I can say that I do not feel "the same way" exactly. Its close, in that I think, the discussion in the EU on Huaweis network equipment in telco nets, is a little bit overheated and I'd like to see the same requirements to be enacted on, for example, CISCO, whos security track record is ... not that good?
But I still think that 'chinese company owning a majority of internet video traffic' is WAY more scary than 'US company owning a majority of internet traffic'. Maybe thats just bias, maybe not.
But yes, I think there should be more relevant non-US big IT players to add more variety. But for a lot of reasons, the EU, and especially germany, just does not cut it in regard of IT expertise anymore. I am not saying this from a perspective of "disappointed patriotism" or something like that. Its more about having more choice would make thinks more interessting.
But on the other hand: more choice makes thinks like movie streaming less attractive. I do not want to have to sign with Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO, Apple TV AND Maxdome.
I guess we still cannot have the cake, and eat it, too.
I agree with you, China is a nation run by a single dictator that is imprisoning and torturing millions of people without trials or even letting anyone else know.
The USA has its problems, but they are all extremely publicized compared to the secret nightmare going on in China.
I have noticed that there are armies of Chinese and Russian shill accounts on HN now that brigade with "whataboutisms" whenever criticism of Putin or Jinping's dictatorships arise.
As a non american I don't feel the same way. Amazon, Google, etc just want to make money. TikTok is (like all companies in China) an extension of the Chinese state, a state that is currently engaging in genocide.
Amazon and Google are extensions of the USG when dealing with foreign nationals. You can assume that 100% of the relevant data is accessible to US agencies.
How is that different than Facebook? We have known for Facebook shady data policies for 10 years, and that has never prevented people from using it, why do you think suddenly people would care more when it comes to TikTok?
Facebook wants your data to sell higher priced targeted ads.
Tiktok gives your data to China. I don't know what they are doing with it but they are not using it for better targetted ads. I guess when they request permission for my phone contacts, clipboard content, private photos at least I know they aren't using it for ads.
People in many parts of the world will have the exact opposite impression. So far, Chinese domination looks like new roads, while US domination looks like coups and war. Of course, this reflects the current relative advantages of both and I have no illusions about the risks of being dominated by any imperialistic power.
Which just blows my mind. At a total US development aid of $34 billion in 2019, China is the only country that even comes close. The US's giving in the last fifty years (including massive sums to China) has been unparalleled in recorded history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
> US blows away all other countries in humanitarian aid too
The problem is that they often do blow stuff away, quite literally. People aren't going to sing your praise for the new well you've dug after you've bombed their wedding and killed all their friends and family.
Such a cynical position. I predict there will be domestic calls in the near future to significantly curtail the US's extraordinary benevolence -- nobody seems to appreciate it anyway. And that will benefit nobody other than maybe China, which has its own history with killing innocents.
If you reduced the development aid but also stopped bombing people, regime changes and all that good stuff that brings instability to a region, I'm sure everyone would be fine with that.
If you want to do some good, take some refugees. Like, a significant number, not a homeopathic amount.
> I think the majority of countries have dropped or shot bombs at somepoint in the last 100 years.
195 countries in the world... Only have to find ~100 countries that have bombed another country in the last century. Only thing I can see that is going to save that assumption is going to be ww2.
> The US was killing more central asians than China every year of the last 20 years straight. Hopefully no longer true going forward.
That's absolutely a fallacious comparison.
1. We don't have accurate data from China on the number imprisoned and killed by them, so no one can make absolutely comparisons like you did.
2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.
I dont agree with a lot of what happened in the middle east, but you can't in good fairh stretch that as a comparison to fit your own narrative.
There's those qualifications and spin I was asking for.
China is bringing economic development, secular institutions and women's rights, in a heavy handed way, whether the residents want it or not, with minimal regard for costs to those residents. It's the exact same thing as we've been doing, minus a fig leaf of democracy.
In neither case is the word genocide or ethnic cleansing appropriate, body counts don't support it. But it's especially rich to level the accusation 5 seconds after our 20 year war ended.
Note the word "war". They killed us as well. Again, this is not comprable to the situation in China with the Uighur Muslims. Unless you're one of those running these camps, you don't have an accurate body count, so you don't know what word is or is not appropriate. Based on the perceived scale of the operation, genocide seems very much correct, but I have no more information than you.
I don't understand how you can sit here and compare a war in the middle east to literal concentration camps. Stop performing mental gymnastics to fit your own narrative.
Because dead is dead. If you can't read, who cares what the declaration of war said.
It's counterinsurgency in both cases, attempting to modernize a tribal Muslim society in hopes of improving security from terror attacks.
You are aware there were terror attacks in Urumqi?
There are differences between their style and ours, the re-education camps vs the drone bombs. Maybe there's an argument about freedoms vs deaths. But Americans clearly do not actually give a shit about Muslim lives, it's just a political talking point. 300k dead in Yemen with our weapons doesn't even make the news, Afghanistan barely cracked the news for a decade, etc etc.
How many Americans were baying at the moon to invade Iraq and now they're the world's greatest humanitarians about Xinjiang?
>2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.
This kind of whitewashing is what allows us as Americans to ignore the mass scale death we inflict while pointing fingers at other kettles. You don't even have the cause of events correct - we invaded afghanistan first, America were the aggressors. Do you think we invaded Afghanistan to preserve women's rights? Do you know that American soldiers were told to turn a blind eye to the afghan national army raping little boys? You mention that we don't have accurate numbers about china's tyranny, but under Trump, we repealed the rule that the USG had to report drone strike casualties. I'm not surprised other countries don't see a functional difference between the US and China, after all only one of those countries has a solid track record of overturning democratically conducted elections because they didn't like the outcome.
As a European: this is extremely funny. America has been doing this for years. Apparently only when it's not America doing these things it becomes a problem?
America being an ally only really makes them more dangerous to me as an individual. If I were in trouble with the US government there is a high likelihood my own government would extradite me. There's very little chance of that with the Chinese government, and the chances are they wouldn't be interested in the first place*
* Not that the US would be interested in me personally either. But they do take an interest in citizens from other countries.
Well, you could certainly see why the situation changes when the service is controlled by an adversarial government. At least the US services are only clandestinely influenced by the US government. TikTok is practically a Trojan horse
Kinda. Many Americans run around with a notion of some kind of noble entrepreneur who provides the bounty of endless choice in consumer goods, even if it's a corporation. The fact that many different brands come from the same factory tends to be overlooked. Americans are also unique in their tolerance for constant advertising where other cultures would consider it gauche and intrusive.
TikTok is imo goddamn scary. It is explicitly set up to hook people with gamification techniques, showering likes on new users so they come back for more. Only the subject matter is often politics, activism and intertribal warfare.
The US want to take all my money and put me in jail. I like my freedom.
China want to blackmail me to do their bidding. I dont actually have much shame, so probably wont work so good.
There are days where I think the lesser of two evils when it comes to invading my privacy might be the regime whos jurisdiction I am not, and likely never will be present in.
The US government is monitoring traffic at all major points including undersea cables. The US reasons are complex ranging from terrorism to cyberwar faire to unknown reasons.
One reason China does it to monitor and control their own people. Speaking out against China in the west will often put family in China at risk and any business interests. Monitoring journalist, tracking western movement, cyberwar faire, are all reasons.
Being a US company specifically doesn't make it better, but being a Chinese company absolutely makes it worse.
I wouldn't be nearly as worried if Tiktok were owned by Italy or Germany or France. But China, with it'a ongoing genocide of Muslims and totalitarian oppression, yeah that is worse than Netflix selling your data to advertisers.
TikTok algorithm is like a tamgotchi with short memory. The echo chamber is actual much less than on other systems, or at least this is my actual understanding.
I've been working on AI and ML for 20+y now, I'm always interested is testing the systems out there from the user side.
Overall, I've been surprised by TikTok, as I did find it very enjoyable actually, and easily 'trainable'.
Why does YouTube not change their algorithim. It is clearly sub tier to tik tok, they have the data and skill set to provide new and entertaining videos but the recommended feed has been so stale and stagnant for a few years, constantly pushing videos you’ve seen or ones you clearly don’t want to watch. How much of tik tok’s success do you think is their algorithim for recommending content. I heard from numerous people how addicting it is and how every video is different. Do you think the short videos give more instant gratification which has a
Large effect? I use YouTube shorts and for the most part it is really entertaining
Yea, It may be as simple as the length. There's a vastly higher frequency of samples when every video is twenty seconds long.
It's also clearly designed around a different experience, a constant consume-or-scroll feed as popularized by Instagram. YouTube shorts also has this, but regular YouTube clearly doesn't, given that there's just enough latency between video skips that it feels like the algorithm is "making mistakes" at a much lower number of skips.
Exactly right. More data beats better algorithms every time. Because YouTube is (foolishly IMO) trying to turn itself into television, they've pursued 10+ minute videos even when there's only ~30 seconds of content. Tiktok's success is well deserved.
YouTube's algorithm used to be better, they neutered it at some point after all the articles about "YouTube Radicalization" dropped. Feels like it's heavily moderated or throttled on what can bubble up now, which probably results in less novel content and novel content is where TikTok excels.
I wonder about the 'other' viewers on youtube, the matching to 'you might also like' content is terrible. At best I get a lot of the same channel, or videos containing the same title, or worse still the celebrity garbage that is popular in the country at the time.
The algo also doesnt seem to get the hint - it suggests a video over and over again, an no matter how many times I dont ever watch a video on X channel or on Y subject, it keeps on trying.
While I am complaining, Netflix algo is getting worse too. Stop reccomending the movie I watched earlier in the week, I watched it. I clicked thumbs down on it. I dont want to waste another 90 minutes on it.
The depressing reality is that your average person on the street couldn't care less. I've tried bringing it up to friends and family in the least evangelical way I can, and the most common response is that they simply don't care about their privacy; to them the content on the platform is worth dealing with an app that's accused of malicious practices and "so what if some company in China gets my data, I'm not planning on going to China". Talking about things that are well known in the tech industry to people without that background has a nasty habit of making you look like a conspiracy theorist to Johnny Random.
The obvious answer is that most people just want to watch funny and entertaining videos, and don't care about some externalities which don't even seem real to them.
I think the reason people use it is the reason why people still use dating apps. Choice is infinite. Every time you swipe, is a new person, a new video, a new hit of dopamine. An insatiable appetite for something new. It is also power. With the dating apps it’s the power to dismiss someone with a swipe, no need to waste time looking at their profile. In TikTok there are no YouTube ads, and you can swipe quickly past videos that don’t spike interest (dopamine).
It would be an issue if Youtube's doing it for their own benefit, but they are just honoring Nintendo's request to not show that content to minors, so Youtube isn't at fault here.
As a person who is hopelessly addicted to refreshing feeds I can say that TikTok is the first app in 10 years that replaced reddit - my previous digital drug of choice. Their algo is just to good. People without rich and fulfilling lives don't stand a chance.
Nope, you're not going crazy. But the thing is every other social media company does the same thing. So railing against tiktok was ineffective because everyone already accepts this. And I was one of the people early on (even before the merger) talking about it.
Even the "china controls it" part isn't persuasive because, I mean, what isn't china influencing these days? And TBH I don't give a shit if it's Chinese or American powers collecting my information, I don't want either of them doing it. And consider that these American corporations influence other nations in the same way China may influence America and they accept it -- of course Americans would accept it too.
My word to people who hate TikTok's privacy invading tech and practices is to lobby to pass a sweeping privacy law or shut up, basically. But that would mean wrecking a huge part of the parasitic tech industry so it's not going to happen.
Domestic companies like Facebook and Google are already doing all the censorship, manipulation, and tracking I'd expect from the Chinese. Why should I care at this point?
What do you call a nation that spends 800B on the military while their infrastructure rots, routinely sponsors coups all over their hemisphere and maintains an aggressive forward military posture all over the planet?
A democracy is a form of government where citizens pick who is in charge.
You can have pacifist government against war. You can have the opposite.
Norway is a democracy but doesn't have an aggressive miliary posture. The US has the largest army and probably spends 800b on their military.
Authoritarian government manage by suppressing their own people. This requires an aggressive military presence locally. All of the conditions above could be true as well for these types of governments.
There's polling numbers on all this. You can check popular approval of imperial wars in the US (it is low), or you can check Chinese approval of their government (it is high).
Ah yes, the extremely reputable self-reporting from Chinese citizens, who absolutely have no fear for their safety should they say the wrong thing. Of course the Chinese love the CCP, they all say so!
Go talk to some Chinese people, then, do your own research.
Just don't call them brainwashed while uncritically swallowing a story about how we're all free and they're all oppressed, no matter what they say about it.
Hmm maybe once China decides to get rid of it's Muslim concentration camps I'll take a visit and ask around. Until then, it's pretty clear to me which government is objectively worse.
Approval of their government compared to what? What is the alternative? Chaos?
In a democracy you have many parties and points of view which would naturally lead to lower popularity as it spreads over many ideas. Each takes turns and this system renews ideas.
Sorry, I thought you were trying to understand why Chinese people might be happy with their government after you add it all up. If it's just cold war arguments and demonization, I can't help you with that.
Consider, even if you're that hardcore about it, 'know your enemy' has some value. They understand us but we don't understand them, and sometimes it's willful on our part. We'd rather tell ourselves a story.
What do you think the word democracy means? None of that is incompatible with being a democracy.
That's not a defense of those actions, but there's an incredibly bizarre trend these days to act as if words don't have any actual meaning beyond their mood affiliation. Just pick a word from a vaguely-related grab bag ("living wage", "misinformation", "democratic", white supremacy ") and hurl it blindly at the conversation and you get all the retweets you want.
If you admit that, the issue becomes actual reality, not authoritarianism per se, and the comparison between the US and China becomes very uncomfortable when democracy is no longer a crutch.
"Good" is such a subjective term. Even the worst totalitarian governments are good for some percentage of the population. Even the best democratic ones have people who are struggling against the system and would regard it as evil.
I live in New Zealand and there are people driving around thinking we are a communist country and feeling oppressed by government. They express as much through the signs and stickers all over their vehicles.
I wish that good and evil existed in a measurable way but I fear that we live in a world of grey and everyone sees the shades differently from their different perspectives.
We'll see how you feel when China takes over the world and your kids are only allowed to play video games 8pm-9pm on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday... unless you're Muslim in which case all of you can work in a labor camp with no rights or technology.
I stepped back from a group chat because the fellows in it swore by “Mental Health TikTok,” where therapists give mental health advice. This is concerning to me.
Beyond that, the data collection and the way it mixes young-but-of-age mildly sexual content with underage guys imitating them makes me stay far away. I enjoyed the handsome men in various states of undress but couldn’t find a way to make the app not veer into underage content, no matter how many times I told it what I liked. Disturbing.
> I stepped back from a group chat because the fellows in it swore by “Mental Health TikTok,” where therapists give mental health advice. This is concerning to me
What's concerning about this? I don't mean this rhetorically: I'm genuinely curious, as I've heard people say similar things recently.
It seems to me that, like metabolic health, there's a pretty large body of basic mental health advice that's safe and salutary, and that doesn't displace heavy-duty mental Healthcare for those who need it (in the same way that healthy recipe tips don't displace insulin shots).
It was apparent in the group chat I was in that these guys were replacing heavy-duty mental healthcare with tips provided by unverified sources on TikTok. A chat where we went to vent about our frustrations turned into peer-to-peer mental health diagnosis informed by these TikTok doctors, telephoned through these regular, non-doctor participants.
It struck me as the kind of thing that leads people to, for example, ingeste chloroquine phosphate [0] on the advice of a celebrity.
> It was apparent in the group chat I was in that these guys were replacing heavy-duty mental healthcare with tips provided by unverified sources on TikTok
You've mixed together two-way (discussion) and one-way (advice) mental health communication. Your point only applies to discussion, and the tiktok example only involves advice.
Concretely, what privacy concern do you see in watching a video with mental health tips? Do you think this privacy concern similarly extends to reading a Wikipedia article on (eg) CBT techniques?
Or am I misunderstanding, and "Mental health tiktok" involves users describing their mental health issues in videos that they post, and a back-and-forth with those who are claiming to "treat" them?
I'd trust Wikimedia's privacy policy a hell of a lot more than I'd trust TikTok's.
Also, the English Wikipedia article on cognitive behavioural therapy cites Cochrane reviews, psych textbooks and a whole volley of journal articles from prestigious journals like the Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association etc. describing clinical trial results, plus guidance from the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence.
Presumably, the TikTok version makes up for this by having a better dance routine.
> I'd trust Wikimedia's privacy policy a hell of a lot more than I'd trust TikTok's
Yes, of course. I wasn't clear, but I was referring to going through a search engine, not going directly to Wikipedia.
> Presumably, the TikTok version makes up for this by having a better dance routine.
I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood what this subthread is about. The _quality_ of medical information and the privacy concerns involved in finding it (whether through Google or via tiktok's algorithm) are completely different topics. To be honest, I can't imagine how anyone could read these comments and come away thinking any comparison was being made (let alone equivalence being drawn) between quality vs privacy concerns.
I was being snarky about the quality of the information, but the privacy issue is the important one.
If the key variable is the search engine, then, yes, you probably don't want to be feeding details of your possible mental health problems into Google. Maybe DuckDuckGo would be preferable. Once you've put your symptoms or diagnosis into a search engine, where you end up is going to likely not be the main issue. If you type, say, "autism spectrum disorder" into Google, Google will make certain assumptions about you regardless of whether you end up clicking on a Wikipedia link, an NHS.uk link, some academic paper on bioRxiv, or a TikTok video with someone describing their autism diagnosis.
That's an extremely expansive definition of "two-way", to the point of meaninglessness. If you were to bite this bullet, you'd also preclude the type of extremely basic work to get informed that any patient should be doing when engaging with the healthcare system (including for physical health). Basic research about your health problems doesn't even preclude putting full faith in your doctor and his recommendations; they're helpful in the general case for even understanding conversations with him. And this type of web search provides infinitely more "two-way" loss of privacy than signal from tiktok recommendations.
This is worth elaborating on, since I know HN tends to have a bizarre fantasy conception of the medical system where patients arent supposed to understand anything that's happening. I have to wonder if the HNers contributing to this conception have ever engaged with the medical system, or if they have, I have to pity those that they're responsible for.
There are plenty of doctors in my family, and I've been responsible for managing both chronic and severe acute health issues for family members. Every single one of the doctors I've been in contact with would be shocked by the notion that patients shouldn't be informing thenselves at a basic level. This goes quadruply for basic preventive measures like nutrition, exercise, or basic mental health practices: there's a reason that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
I don’t think you want mental health information going where it could be used against you.
Eg,
> Cheng believes the website that doxed him by publishing his personal information online was started by pro-Beijing supporters in Hong Kong.
> “I feel fear,” he admitted. His family, too, was scared and told him not to walk home alone anymore. But part of Cheng remains defiant as he considers the doxing website a component of a larger campaign to incite fear in protesters as mass demonstrations continue into their third month.
The parent comment clarified in response to my original question that they were referring to "heavy duty" mental health advice, of serious issues.
The premise of my pushing back against privacy concerns was mental health advice of the basic, fundamental kind: mindfulness, productive thought patterns, healthy work habits, sleep hygiene, etc etc etc.
Even taking for granted that tiktok's access to this information is scarier than eg Google's, the signal they can glean from this type of usage is little more than "I get anxious sometimes", not things like "I have bipolar disorder". I don't think it's controversial at all to say that getting advice for serious mental disorders via social network isn't a good idea for multiple reasons (again, this is why I clarified with the OP of the story what sort of mental health advice they were seeking).
To make it clear by analogy: one maintains their physical health through a million 24/7 day-to-day decisions, and nobody would blink twice at getting information about eg yoga or healthy recipes from YouTube or other non-medical sources. OTOH, trying to treat your pneumonia or MS via YouTube or tiktok would be an obvious disaster. Similarly, there are a million and one day-to-day actions one takes to maintain their mental health, eg mindfulness or other basic CBT techniques. Researching these independently is not just harmless, it's what people _should_ be doing, regardless of whether they're also seeking treatment (and the privacy concerns are similarly minimal). Again in stark contrast, serious mental health issues shouldn't be treated via casual research.
Pretty clear from several comments in this thread that Non-US citizens have a hard time distinguishing the risk-levels of a US-centric vs a China-centric world. Particularly insulting to see the French comments. Ever wondered what Europe would be looking like today if it was China and USSR that ended up defeating the Nazis?
I believe it. Nowadays, I watch perhaps 1-2 videos a day on Youtube. The addictive endless scrolling of content on Tiktok means I'm spending on average an hour a day.
Sounds like it is time to add TikTok to you blocklist and get back an hour a day. Add the following to whatever filter/blocklist you use and rejoice in all that regained freedom:
TikTok has two advantages - first, an order more user data to refine it's feed algorithm and second a format that lowers the bar for content creation which allows for super niche content to be viable. The combination enables a feed that resonates.
Their recommendation algorithm is reportedly the envy of many other platforms. I heard that was pretty much what was being bid for at the time offers started floating around.
TikTok always gets a zero or 1 on each video, whereas FB only get interactions for a minority of units. This makes it a lot easier to train better models.
I can't wait for Google to make their own knock-off, do it in 4 different ways, kill them all off, do it another 3 times at the same time, and then kill those off too.
In the meanwhile they'll have permanently degraded some part of their core service offerings chasing this, maybe putting 10 second videos in place of every street view shot in google maps, or making search favor short video content or some nonsense.
It's not a great metric by itself. There are two ways that "average watch time" can increase: users becoming more engaged, and less-engaged users dropping out of the app. It's a concern if it means that TikTok is becoming a youth-only app, for example.
TikTok feels so incredibly fake. I know that a lot of that same fake content is available on YouTube, but on YouTube, I can subscribe to creators that do real things or offer substantial and interesting critiques. TikTok and Facebook video feel like broadcast TV - highly over-dramatized and over-hyped. Again, I know the same is available on YT, but I can also use it my way.
It really isn't. I get only normal people on my tiktok, but I also only follow normal people and tend to "not interested" all checkmarked accounts when they show up.
TikTok "ForYou" algorithm is very very impressive in its recommendations. 2 people might have very different experiences with TikTok.
So if you start using with some regularity, even if you don't press like in anything it will figure out what you like and what you don't. I am very curious about how it measures content engagement.
View length. If I watch a whole video then that's positive signal between me and that video (no matter if I actually like the content or not). Netflix gets that as well. I can say I like history documentaries, but Netflix knows I really use their service to watch trashy reality TV shows in the middle of the night - and then they use that information to choose what sort of shows to produce.
I gave it a shot, and once I got the algorithm to recognize me... it was addictive, but fake as fuck. Nothing really felt like it had love in it. And as much as I tried to push the algorithm towards educational content that actually taught me something new, it could only really show me silly "life hacks" that were clever, but I'll probably never use.
Fake, refined, optimized, or over-produced.. it's all the same thing really.
With television, there are[were] a limited number of channels. Airtime was a scarce resource, and making a TV show cost money so the companies funding it wanted to make sure they got the best bang for their buck. So they had lots of experts tweaking every show to make sure it was juuust right. Little if anything was truly off-the-cusp. Seemingly impromptu conversations on talk shows are scripted and rehearsed. Too much money on the line for anything more casual. When less money is on the line, fewer people are involved and everything can be a lot more casual. Public access television is cruder but feels more authentic. Low budget art films can experiment more than big budget movies. The production of MST3K was casual and crude when it was on public access, but became serious business when they moved to Comedy Central.
A similar dynamic is in play on youtube. When a channel is just some rando uploading videos with little investment and little expectation of financial return, the content is generally cruder and quirkier. When a channel is run by a major corporation with lots of money on the line, lots of people involved in it, and high expectations for the reception, then everything is taken more seriously. Professional cameras, professional lighting, professional editing. It feels more like television because it is more like television.
This same overproduced aesthetic doesn't only come from corporations though; I think the dynamic is in play whenever the content producer has high expectations or aspirations. An individual creator working alone who has aspirations of becoming an "influencer" will put more effort into their content than somebody who has no expectations or aspirations for their content. Their content will become overproduced as a consequence of their lofty aspirations. Maybe tiktok inspires or nurtures these lofty aspirations more than youtube did in the early years.
This is why Im actually disappointed by the headline. Affirms people would rather watch a mostly degenerate freak show and blatant materialism than maybe learn something or view something reasonable. And its mostly kids ingesting this. Can you tweak your account to view normal content on tiktok...sure maybe? But thats not what its known for or why its popular. Its to feed you the most extreme content possible and keep your eyes there.
youtube is my main streaming platform, but i have come to understand the appeal of tiktok. most of the things that are inherent to the tiktok platform, i have to manually do while using youtube.
a couple of examples are manually ignoring click-baits, overly long videos and explanations, multiple parts videos (some are genuine, but most are bad-intentioned), creators and channels i don't care about, etc.
This is a valid critique, and why I originally dropped tiktok after a few brief attempts last year. The trick is that you have to do a little work up front to find videos you like (perhaps they've been crossposted to your Facebook feed or something). Early this year I watched and liked videos from about four completely different tiktok creators that I specifically sought out (because I'd seen one of their videos crossposted to FB), and from then on my FYP has been scary-good at serving up stuff that would appeal to me.
ETA: I basically never see teenagers dancing badly. Those videos exist in a different wing of TikTok from the ones I frequent.
that is probably the main point of all of it - generation change. The tiktok is GenZ. The "teenagers badly dancing" is probably a very meaningful content for them.
Yeah, probably because I never watch YT on the app, usually casting via Chromecast to a projector.
YT now has their "shorts" as well that they're desperately trying to push to fill the gap that TikTok (well actually Vine) has created. But their big mistake was only allowing people to watch shorts on mobile...
There are three categories, with slightly different capabilities and interfaces for each, capped at 15s, 60s, and 3m. The short ones were originally the only ones, 60s became available about a year ago (?), and 3m only just over the summer (and I'm not sure they're even available to all creators yet; they had a slow rollout).
in the article:
"average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok...
However, YouTube retains the top spot for overall time spent - not per user - as it has many more users overall."
The average TikTok user spents more time, which is still interesting. Maybe kids just have more time on their hands.
Seems to be misunderstanding of TikTok and their algorithms. WSJ did an interesting experiment where they programmed a bot to do take interest in certain videos. the tldr is that it spirals till you get more concentrated, extreme in the type of content. i.e they searched for depressing videos and they get more and more depressing.
Where Facebook has a weakpoint is that the content they server you is rather limited. It's a newsfeed of your friends, your friends friends (maybe) and the groups you've joined. Maybe they'll recommend something for you. But most of the time, it's stuff you've more or less opted into.
TikTok on the other hand - has at its disposal videos made by anyone, at anytime in the history of its app. That's a lot of content. I can be on Facebook and be done scrolling in 15 minutes. Same with Instagram, Twitter. TikTok, because it has essentially an infinite amount of assets it can serve...you're there forever, watching short snippets of videos to get a dopamine hit.
Not comparable to other social media, IMHO...more dangerous, regardless of which country owns it.
TikTok will surpass both Youtube/Instagram in terms of videos watched, tiktok will also change the way we consume content and how we interact with it.
They also came further in solving comments to videos unlike Youtube where comments section is a toxic wasteland.
Heads up that your link, vm.tiktok.com is tracked to your user. If I go to that video and share a link, I'll get a different URL. Previous iterations of their web frontend revealed user account info (eg the name used to register the foxhop user, assuming you snagged that username), but it looks like the current frontend no longer shows that.
I can't watch TikTok. It's the most obnoxious media I've ever seen. Where is the pause or stop button!? The UX feels like a ride on a rail car without brakes that is run by a coked out conductor.
Overton window friendly mainstream content shaped by PRC censorship is popular because no one likes running across divisive / distressing content that seems to be endgame of western attention merchant approach. Incidentally western platforms follow suit and starts cracking down on undesirables. Going to be interesting once TikTok rolls out massively profitable store fronts / shopping layer comparable to DouYin. Maybe tiktok philosphy will prove that serenity sells more than drama. Censored, curated speech is more marketable to unrestricted free speech.
YouTube is going to blow it with the extremely hamfisted and enraging TikTok clone built into the YouTube app. Being unable to exit a video the same way one would exit a normal YT video is a nightmare, esp since you often won’t know it’s a “short” until it’s too late. There are other dealbreaker bugs in the shorts player. Hope they figure out another way and change course.
with all that data, they can map public areas and find the best to settle in, that media is influencing public opinion, they can prune messages they disagree with even more so than youtube has ever done.
Ultimately tiktok is enjoyable and I feel happy after closing it. Western apps by comparison are filled with the culture wars and I open them less and less often. Hn included.
I thought about starting my own TikTok page dedicated to programming so I recorded one about why I still prefer C++ over Rust. While I got decent views for the subject matter, I got roasted by 12-year-olds in the comments section. The top one implied the real reason I preferred C++ was because I’m a boomer, and it was apparently written by someone who likes to upload Roblox music videos. My page has since been made private.
I can take toxic Reddit, HN, and even Twitter comments, and while I found the whole situation hilarious there’s something frightening about opening my whole identity for hordes of anonymous people to judge. There’s a power imbalance that doesn’t seem to bother a subset of Gen Z or the general population who continue uploading content there.
This is intensely offensive. US tech companies are banned, robbed, and defrauded by China. We have no chance to compete with them in China, yet they can come here and freely. Tiktok should be banned.
Exactly what malware do people install to get on "App Annie" panel? Is it the "Phone Guardian VPN: Safe Wifi" garbage I see in the Play Store? People really will install anything. Perhaps the conclusion should be changed to "Clueless dupes who install spyware also more likely to prefer TikTok".
• Youtube is consumed A LOT on the website, including some people using the mobile website (not the app) to keep it playing in the background (duh). This only compares average time on app.
• It could also be totally skewed, if let's say 100M people spend 2h/day on average on Youtube, and 1k (a tiny amount) spend 2.5h/day on average on Tiktok, that'd be already good enough to say "average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok".
I haven't read the report, but wanted to point out these two warnings. As we say in Spanish, the easiest way to lie is with statistics. And of course any half-decent PR person will take any numbers and blow it up into a headline, so tread with caution.
(Absolutely not wanting to discount on Tiktok, which has been growing at an incredible rate, just wanted to say that the wording on how exactly they are "winning" sounded a bit contrieved).