Well that’s just capitalism. Just like the rise of sugary drinks and booze cigs etc. We’re not optimizing for the well-being of people. It’s all about that dough. China is the same, but instead it’s just one big extra shitty company.
Fair, though to my mind that’s all social media, so I can’t get worked up about one particular one. The reason I’m glad I was pushed off reddit is because I’d end up in a doomscroll trance there too
There’s degrees to be sure though - ticktock is the absolute worst, because it has a lot of content and a good algorithm… Plus, short form video is the easiest to get lost in
I think it’s an individual thing, and probably also dependent on said individuals state of mind. I dropped off TikTok ages ago because of its tendency to get me lost, with reddit I didn’t entirely know how bad it was until the blackout happened and I noticed how often I would just compulsively reach for my phone to open reddit when I wasn’t doing anything else
I just ignore them because the videos are a mess of graphics and popups outside the app. It has literally made some videos unwatchable for me as they kept getting interrupted and breaking.
It’s the worst mobile website I’ve ever seen, which is impressive considering Facebook and Reddit have been intentionally breaking their mobile websites for years now.
I was fine with memes over the past few years … sure they are a quick dopamine hit that make you laugh or think
But now when my friends send me tiktok videos … especially when someone has been watching these video streams for hours or days … they start sending out the most random, inane, mindless content … it’s the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
it’s the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
I think that’s kind of the point. There was an article a while back that said the CCP/Bytedance intentionally serve up braindead content to everywhere outside China, while promoting educational and uplifting content at home.
That’s such a gross misunderstanding of the separation between TikTok and China that it’s very possible purposeful misinformation.
China has no control whatsoever over TikTok, and in fact, there are US intelligence officers on the board for the American company. If anyone is “intentionally serving up braindead content…” it’s the US company, who is under strict control and observation by US intelligence agencies.
Xenophobia and jingoism have so thoroughly riddled most American brains that you require no evidence of anything, and just exist in a “vibes based reality” where you accept entirely false information as truth because it fits your preconceptions. The US government has spent years at this point trying to prove what you’ve said about TikTok, and they’ve been entirely unable to do so, because it’s literally not true. And as I said, their US board is filled with US intelligence spooks, not Chinese ones.
Next you’ll tell me China is pushing pro-Palestinian content on TikTok, instead of the youth just being rabidly pro-Palestine.
Nice. I’ll be honest, I never bothered with tiktok, only Instagram. And even that got to a point where I just gave up and tossed it. Even Reddit was weird like that.
that sounds way too bizarre to believe without seeing a source. and i know there’s gonna be people replying saying it’s not that bizarre, because China, but really…?
Grep for “Companies like TikTok” to find the relevant portion.
The guy talking isn’t exactly a scientist and this ain’t a rigourous peer-reviewed study, but it does seem like he knows at least a little about what he’s talking about. Take it with a grain of salt.
I have one 50 year old friend with very little tech know how and his kids set him up with a good smartphone. I saw his family about a year ago and his kids noted that their dad often sits up until about 2 or 3 in the morning at the kitchen table just scrolling through tiktok videos. He sent them to me about once a day until I had to block him and tell him directly to stop sending me this stuff. He’s since become ‘aware’ of his addiction and stops sending out videos as often as he did before. He still scrolls through thousands and thousands of videos a day.
It would all be funny if it wasn’t so frightening at the same time.
50 is still too young. Endless scrolling should only be for old people who literally can’t do anything. Kids need to do physically stimulating things like playing outside, adults need to do mentally stimulating things like playing video games. Old people don’t need to do anything, they can veg out to short form.
Legitimately, when I was quitting nicotine, I would scroll on my phone when I was getting withdrawal pangs, and it helped.
Nowadays I have to watch myself, or else I’ll potentially lose hours. I know exactly what addiction feels like: going without and satisfying what feels like a need - it feels right. And these apps are definitely addictive. I didn’t really notice until I tried to stop.
No, I don’t want to see that brainwashing garbage. It’s curated to wreck the brains and society of Western democracies.
Everyone should have heard about this by now, but China’s version of TikTok is vastly different than ours. It is limited to mostly educational content and has built-in screen time limits. They know what is bad about our version of it, and it’s on purpose.
You can go ahead and point out where I mentioned Lemmy in my prior comment. But I will address that now, and of course TikTok is not better than Lemmy.
But what my prior comment was about is that the content from TikTok is unhealthy for the mind. Therefore Lemmy should not host it at all.
I already downvote the porn posts that are just dancing hoes from TikTok. Or anything with that watermark on it. Everyone who cares about mental health and reducing propaganda and misinformation should join me in doing so.
There are a few reasons I can think of that Lemmy is a better platform than ticktock.
ticktock uses an algorithm to drive engagement and keep users on the platform for as long as possible, recommending posts that it thinks the user will like or hate. Lemmy doesn’t do this.
I’ve never actually used ticktock so I’m not sure if it’s possible to block content in the same way but the ability to block users, communities, and entire instances is I think one of Lemmy’s best features.
there are no ads on lemmy.
Now for the content in question, my understanding is that it’s entirely user generated. Just like Lemmy, reddit, YouTube, Etc. It’s not like the Chinese government is making American women film themselves dancing and then forcing them to post it on ticktock. That’s just what that person wanted to make and post and ticktocks algorithm is recommending it.
With that being said, there are potentially useful, funny, or important content that might be uploaded to ticktock by a user, the same way that girl dancing video was. If that happened, wouldn’t make sense to move that content to a platform without many of the down sides of the ticktock platform?
I think you don’t really grasp the concept of a hivemind, where users of a platform tend to have collective set of views deemed acceptable and unacceptable by the community. It doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, it just means that it is a view or opinion that runs contrary to that of the community. Reddit was a shit show for that (and I know you came from there due to your use of karma), and Lemmy has it too. The entire purpose of the up vote/downvote system is to increase/decrease comment ranking based on users perception of comment quality, though people tend to use it to show disapproval (as you did with my previous comment). There is no "normal’ when it comes to this, as it is entirely dependent on the instance and subcommunity’s collective views.
Furthermore, let me introduce you to the actual definition of gaslighting, per Merriam Webster:
1 : psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator
2 : the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage
Yeah but they’re just distracting from the domestic surveillance that is oppressively bad. I’ve never seen a compelling argument TikTok is somehow more dangerous to use than Facebook. At least for a US Citizen with no family in China. But you go out explaining how you’ll assassinate Xi on any platform they could send somebody to take you out. Anyone who trusts any company or government with their data is naive.
I think it’s more in that each platform has their differences as far as consumption, and possible behavior setting/modification, in which they’re both detrimental. It’s not secret that algorithms are used to keep the user engaged, and that so-called ragebait is a huge engagement driver. Facebook is somewhat of a link aggregator meets microblogging (ie status updates), while tiktok just feeds an endless loop of short videos. I would imagine (though I don’t have stats or sources) that videos keep people glued to their screens more effectively (easier than reading), and could be more troubling.
I’m not in TikTok or anything but isn’t that something China would of course do? Like they are trying to push their app to a country that loves FREEDOM. Why would they limit content based on their controls in place in their country?
Mine’s been doing it too even though she knows how much I absolutely despise tiktok… There’s a reason I don’t have that app… Lol
And the fucking fake voices… Ugh… Such shit.
Like, usually I use my phone with the volume completely off and I don’t even want to turn it on for most of the videos I see on here or wherever but it seems like for all this tiktok garbage you need sound to even determine why the hell someone shared it with you.
This is why I wrote a Telegram bot that uses yt-dlp to convert videos and send them directly to people. My friend group all use different socials, Facebook, tiktok, Twitter, Lemmy, etc., and the bot will take the link, download the video, then send it back to the person, and then they can forward it to whatever chats they want.
It’s been pretty fucking handy. That is, if your friends use Telegram.
I thought I was getting okay at the basics, but actually visiting Japan taught me that I definitely was not. But I’m starting classes later this year, hope to become fluent eventually.
PSA: If it’s links on Discord, you can prefix the link with vx to make it natively embed so you don’t have to click through (e.g. vxtiktok.com). This also works with twitter links (vxtwitter.com). People out there hosting these domains doing the lord’s work
I’ve certainly been trying to get people into the fediverse and off the corporate side of things but yeah, I’m currently sitting at 0 conversions. It’s made for some fun conversations though.
We’ve got the culture and to put it simply a place to go to. The barrier for new entry is just that we are all, put simply, nerds with our communities focused around that. The fediverse’s main problem overall is honestly just that the majority of the population are corporatists whether they know it or not.
Tiktok sucks so hard, but then occasionally I find a minor nugget of wisdom or a piece of information so helpful that it makes me keep the app. Just the other day, some said he applies antiperspirant to his feet in order to keep them warm, because then they’ll sweat less, and will get less cold in the socks. I didn’t even really know that was a problem I was really having, but now, I will never have cold feet again. There’s also always eelfeel, so I’m alright with it as a whole.
More broadly I do hate how kind of walled off the app is. I try to share videos on snapchat, oof, snapchat cuts it off so it’s only the first five seconds of a video. Best to send the link, but then, if you don’t have tiktok downloaded, it takes you either to the app store, or it hits you with the shitty web browser. Maybe fine for seeing a single tiktok, on mobile, but it’s pretty bad on desktop since it’s not formatted for it, and overall it, just is kind of ass to deal with, especially on repeat. Hate the modern internet.
Edit: Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn’t understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Putting antiperspirant on your feet sounds deeply unnatural, chaotic and satanic. It’s the kind of thing that will result in a sock-related early death.
Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn’t understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Did something about Lemmy make you think we avoid the truth here?
This shit is Vine. We had this same social media platform in 2013, basically. Everyone’s just freaking out about it now because it’s owned by china, and everyone’s been made to worry about threats to national security, even though we can all kind of agree that the american government also sucks and is heinous. It’s giving me some “Only I can bully my little brother!” kinds of vibes. It’s like the same shit as when europeans get brought up, at any point, anywhere, and then americans start making fun of british people having bad teeth and knife crime and stuff, even though they have basically all of that but worse. Nobody’s a nationalist until another country gets brought up, and then suddenly everyone’s the most patriotic proud to be an american motherfucker. It’s cringe. It reminds me of when we started calling them “freedom fries”.
Yeah I think that would be cool. I think we should all be spied on. I think we should all submit everything we’ve ever done to every authority. Every time I’m taking a shit, I record a small video and save it to my publically active telegram channel that’s full of dead al-qaeda members and federal agents posing as them. So dictates the holy doctrine.
I dunno, it’s moreso the fact that people don’t bring up how every other web service is spyware whenever they get brought up. You get a fair number of those complaints, and more on lemmy, where everyone is a linux focused privacy psycho, sure, but I think the disproportionate level of shit flung at tiktok isn’t really organic, and people aren’t judging the app on the actual merit of the thing. If you wanted to, you could pretty easily fling shit at tiktok on the basis that you can’t really control what it is you’re watching at all, and so it can very easily take advantage of people who have no self control. You could judge it on the basis that they implement policies to curate their content pretty heavily to be more attractive (eliminate the uglies). You could judge it on the basis that the platform basically has no active moderation to police speech and will allow very obviously white supremacist and conspiratorial content to flourish. All of those are pretty true criticisms.
But instead, people don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, and they just want to fearmonger about chinese invasion some more. What I’m saying is that the claims spiral into shit like all the kids being brainwashed, on the basis that china has it’s own tiktok, doyun or whatever, you know, when that doesn’t make any fucking sense and those two ideas aren’t really logically connected. China has it’s own everything, for the most part, they exist behind a curtain. Obviously, if they have their own tiktok, which no duh they will, it’s gonna be controlled by the chinese government, and then the chinese government is gonna spin that so their censorship is for the good of the people and for the good of the kids. But then instead, people will accept that claim at face value, and use it to turn around and say that the chinese are brainwashing our kids, when ironically they’ve just bought chinese propaganda. That’s the type of shit I’m talking about. There’s no like, measurement, or self-awareness, of what actually there is to hate about china, people just end up kind of talking shit based on the points that they’ve been fed by propagandists who benefit from their ignorance. People would just as easily hate tiktok if it was censored by the chinese on the basis that “this content isn’t beneficial to society, this content is” type shit, and people actually do already criticize tiktok for that because they’re full of shit and can’t make up their mind and believe the app to basically just be controlled by some foreign red menace government.
Do you see where I’m coming from? People that aren’t willing to actually understand the shit they’re talking about, they just hear a surface level narrative and then decide to parrot that unflinchingly, and then, duh, of course that narrative is gonna be a tool to, in this instance, try to take a bite out of a foreign company in order to get them more tapped into US intelligence, and allow US intelligence more access to their data, while at the same time providing US business interests with a neat and shiny new toy.
It’s so silly. Lol like Google can hand over everything to the feds and they can harass you, arrest you for dumb shit, fuck with your family, jobs etc. China can’t do much to me over here. Plus if they wanna spy on me they can just see what’s already public. I’ve never seen evidence TikTok actually gathers or sends anything off that Meta/Facebook or Google does. I mean, can’t these people run a packet capture program? Jeez. Smartphones are corporate controlled spy devices already, so if you’re using one you’re already pretty blown. The problem isn’t TikTok, or the CCP spying on Americans. It’s the spying itself no matter who’s doing it. Plus fucking Blackrock owns 40% of Bytedance. We got our hands in everything. Anyone who thinks the US government can be trusted more than China, and lives in the US is insane. Unless you’re Chinese and have family over there. Then it’s a real problem.
Anyway. Who’s more likely to give the feds everything? China or Google. I don’t think China will give them shit. It’s a moot point anyway because most of US TikTok is handled by servers in the US by a legal US corporation (owned by Bytedance of course). When Blackrock owns 40% though why are we even talking about this stupid shit. It’s a distraction from all the companies and gov here in merica’ fucking us. The CCP sucks ass, they’re horrible, I don’t really trust Bytedance with my data, but I don’t trust Google either.
I don’t get it. Just seems like a bunch of grumpy old millennials. I’d hoped we would be different.
I refuse to install their app(Facebook) phone on my phone. They have basically broken the mobile site once again, so I’ve just stopped using it. Much easier.
That’s what literally all social media sites do. It is far more profitable for people to be using your app than your mobile website. Apps make it much easier to harvest data and corral the user into the exact experience you want them to have (ads, suggestions, etc).
I know not many people here are going back to Reddit but just for a second, open your mobile browser, disable the add-ons if it’s firefox, and go look at Reddit currently. Within the last few weeks they have absolutely massacred it. Like, truly, it is astoundingly bad now. The original mobile redesign of the site was already terrible, but this new-new-mobile reddit is so painfully bad that the only conceivable reason for its existence is to get people to give up and use the app.
Could I see some pictures of how bad it’s truly gotten?
I’ve occasionally browsed Reddit with Firefox private browsing plus uBlock origin, and while the website is quite crappy (Much nagging to use the app and to sign in), it hasn’t gotten any worse in the last few weeks.
This post actually made me look for a solution and I found one! Solution to opening tiktoks without using tiktok app or site, not how to stop ur friends sending u garbage.
It made me think… mpv player can play basically any link you throw at it (thanks to yt-dlp), and we also have mpv on Android, so why can’t we do it there as well. And sure enough, I found this github.com/mpv-android/mpv-android/pull/58, someone baked yt-dlp in mpv for Android, making it possible to open link in mpv (share >> play in mpv)
While this is useful, it could be even better! If the AndroidManifest.xml also contained support for Facebook, TikTok and Instagram links it could be set to directly open them instead needing to share it to mpv.
As always I like promoting open source frontends for these pages. For tiktok I use proxytok. For changing any tiktok link to one of these instances use the libredirect extension for firefox, it also works in mobile
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