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.

I’ve had no trouble curating my feed to mostly professionals, psychologists and pet behaviorists. Occasional cute animal videos

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…?

I want to see a sampling of this “educational and uplifting” content.

Just don’t forget Blackrock owns a very sizable portion of Bytedance. Just saying.

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.

Gotta download the APK from the link

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.

That’s why I use desktop mode on most websites

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.

She sent this as a reply:

It’s too late for me. Save yourselves!

The problem isn’t largely the manipulation of information you perceive through the app, although they do try their hardest.

The problem is the app. People are putting that shit on smartphones and walking around with it. It’s so bloated with spyware that the spyware outweighs the install data needed to run the app itself. I don’t care if they’ve got a headquarters in the USA or wherever else, at the end of the day I truly believe that the information being stolen is ending up in their Chinese HQ which is a fucking military operation of a hostile dictatorship.

It reads and transmits your message history, your GPS location, your photo library, depending on your model it’s probably recording sounds most of the time. They have your name, your address, the layout of your home, where you work, where you like to eat, which bank you use, every personal conversation you’ve had for months: you’re fucked if a global conflict ever starts. The other world powers will be completely crippled by a bunch of complacent fucking nitwits who chose Vines over their soul. Great job, assholes!

it’s addictive, and hard to pack helpful good information into a video that short, and so it just ends up being an infinite stream of completely pointless content. it cannot be good for young children to be swiping through endless shortform content all day, either.

honestly, i’ve mostly stopped using reddit, and it was kinda shocking switching to lemmy, where i can consume all of the content i am interested in that was posted today, and theres just, no more. it is certainly a healthier way of using social media though.

It’s not about vertical video. It’s not even about China.

It’s about the obscene amount of tracking that TikTok does. It makes Instrgram’s privacy violations look tame. It collects data on basically anything you can think of, and then uses it to show you exactly what you want, making it more addictive than most drugs while simultaneously having all of your data sold off.

The fact that it’s vertical video is bad enough on its own.

The fact that it’s short means you can’t actually do anything meaningful with it. Can’t meaningfully set up a scenario to tell a good joke. Can’t explain the context behind the educational fact you’re sharing. Can’t develop characters in a story. It can never be anything more than basic spectacle.

But the worst bit is the fact that it’s pure algorithm. YouTube at least shows you a screen of 10+ videos for you to choose from. Or you can go to your subscriptions page and see videos from people you’ve specifically said you want to watch. Or use search and find videos on a specific topic (though recently YouTube has made changes that make this significantly worse than it used to be). TikTok is “watch the video we want you to watch, or skip to the next video we want you to watch” on repeat. It’s incredibly patronising, and far less valuable as a user.

Just use YT Shorts if you love the videos format, don’t install an app from a military op in the world’s largest dictatorship.

You’re going to sit there and say “Don’t china me on it” when that’s literally the problem. You’re willfully ignorant of the actual problem with it. Fuck you!

I’m operating under the assumption that the Chinese Dictatorship by their very nature are acting against their own interests, that they could be happier in a functioning democracy with more equality.

Definitely a traitor to everyone else on earth, though. It would be akin to being a proponent of Stalin, Putin, Mao Zedong, the generals or the emperor of the Dai Nippon Empire, etc. History will be on my side with this one.

Platform purist ty

I’ve told them repeatedly though? If they’re not aware at this point it’s on them.

Facebook is just American spyware. The Chinese gov can’t exactly send the feds to my house. You better bet the US gov can though!

And that’s different than American spyware in several important ways, such as…

Such as…

Well shit.

What sort of spyware do they employ?

Eh, I used to think this too, but TikTok isn’t closely associated with chinese companies, any more than TakeTwo or anything made in Shenzhen.

I still abhor it for what it is though, alongside YTShorts.

Indeed.

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.