I have several young cousins (gen z) who use TikTok as their Google. Recipes, travel ideas, news, fashion, shopping, how-to videos. While of course a lot of their usage is passive scrolling that trains their algorithm, they're very adept at using search to find the same things I find in my browser.

It's bonkers to me, but I guess my patterns of information lookup have just calcified with age.

I’m in my late 50s, and I’ve been using TikTok for over six years. Before that, the only social media I used was Facebook—not Instagram, not anything else—but TikTok pulled me in from the very beginning.

At first, it was all about the novelty: lip-syncing and dance videos. Over time, though, my interests evolved. I started following creators for travel vlogs, occasional financial advice, health tips, yoga and exercise—and last but not least, singing, which I only began at age 55.

I don’t have many viewers, and that’s perfectly fine. My account isn’t about chasing likes or comments. It’s simply a way for people to see who I am rather than engage with a random, unknown profile—if they’re curious enough to look. It also helps avoid mixed signals: when you know who I am (even though you never truly know someone), you can usually tell whether something is meant as a dad joke… or a Daddy joke

As a result, my consumption of TV, Netflix, and HBO has dropped significantly. I find it far more engaging to follow real people and see what they’re doing with their lives. And here’s the irony: aside from the first two or three seasons of Survivor, I’ve never been into reality TV—yet somehow, I’m completely hooked on this one.

[ Wordsmithed by AI ]

I have been trying so hard to get YouTube to stop recommending shorts to me. I am pretty sure that the "Show Fewer Shorts" thing you can choose in the app doesn't actually do anything.

My wife loves TikTok to a point that she will take it personally when I complain about it, but I absolutely hate the "vertical short form video" crap that's gotten popular. I'm probably just showing my age, even with my admittedly-quite-flakey attention span, I feel like TikTok and YouTube shorts are just kind of irritating. So much stuff on there is either low-effort crap with lip syncing to some clip from a movie, or shit yelling at me with burned in giant subtitles, both of which are almost certainly part of my own personal hell.

Your categorical error is that you think people are watching them to cover details in topics.

They are a replacement for TV. You know, the thing that people used to watch for hours upon hours a day?

My wife loves TikTok.

It introduces her to new fashion, new restaurants, new places to visit. Local, hyper local and hidden, and her favorite travel destinations.

It's full of bite size tutorials. Tips and tricks. Genuinely useful stuff. Blogs and websites you'd find this stuff on are not as visual, not as well edited, and are hard to find or full of SEO spam.

It's introduced her to all kinds of hobbies. Gen Z is all about finding old consumer digital cameras from 2000 or even older Kodak one-use disposables and transplanting the lenses. TikTok nucleates these interests and trends.

The news breaks almost immediately on TikTok, and there's immediately insightful community commentary - why would you ever need CNN talking heads?

Every day there's a new "fad". It changes fast, on a day to day basis. Just a few days ago, there was this "an owl but from [x]" meme that was really cute/funny.

TikTok is genuinely everything. It's amazing. Much of the old internet it replaces doesn't hold a candle to it.

I had this discussion once before, I don't remember where, with I taking your position. The other guy seemed to think that entertainment was fungible, and so the entertainment of short form video was objectively better than long form, since it could theoretically be turned off at any point unlike a movie, and since it had infinite variety. Which I guess makes sense if you believe the fungibility, but I can't imagine associating in real life with such a person.

> What is the point of junk food?

The answer to this is the same as the answer to your first question.

I used TikTok a few times and then uninstalled it because it’s very addictive. It’s a lot of nonsense like dances, and bits of cooking episodes, travel and destination clips, punchlines from TV shows and cartoons, memes etc. It’s a really sad thing to use honestly, makes you feel dirty for wasting all that time.

It has 200M users in the US (I'm not one of them), which is about half of all citizens. Do you really think it's possible they have no point?

For most people, it's a distracting little jolt of dopamine and a way to get quick news or commentary.

It's definitely not good for our brains for that to be the main kind of content we consume, but it's not useless.

I think you're being optimistic.

”Instead of” or "in addition to" ?

Would not put it past them to influence what content people see on TikTok either.

Do you feel there's no difference between being surveilled by Oracle and being surveilled by the CCP? They're both terrible, but do you really think they're equivalent?

There's also the issue of the algorithm being used for propaganda, which (again) is also terrible in the hands of either party, but with potentially very different outcomes.

What's the first amendment angle here? Foreign actors aren't covered under 1A, and people in the US are just as able to publish to and consume TikTok as they were before.

What is 1A and PAFCA?

It seems like what this will basically entail is a US algorithm and moderation system, while the core app remains with ByteDance.

> The Joint Venture will secure U.S. apps through software assurance protocols, and review and validate source code on an ongoing basis, assisted by its Trusted Security Partner, Oracle.

So the new team will be in charge of content moderation, training, and "review and validat[ion]" of source code. Not actually a new app.

I am European and live in Japan.

China is currently providing weapons for Russia to wage large-scale war in Europe, while supporting a dictatorship in North Korea that regularly launches nuclear-capable misiles in my general direction.

The EU would have to put the US on a list of "foreign adversaries", with whatever political fallout comes from that. Not saying they shouldn't, but there will be downsides.

Since controlling these platforms is probably the best ROI for swinging public opinion, I'm sure it's a matter of time before they get seized (one way or another) and redistributed to reliable political allies.

Old: CCP censorship, CCP surveillance, CCP narratives

New: US censorship, US surveillance, US narratives (patriot approved)

I feel like this outcome is so much worse than just banning the platform.

I think it was more about control. The narrative was that the Chinese government was intentionally affecting the algorithm for US users to dumb them down and affect elections.

Wrong.

The definitive factor here is whether the Chinese company wants to put themselves deep in the American political water. To any company, living under a crosshair alone is difficult enough, it becomes even more so when the company is foreign-owned.

The sell was a strategically correct decision by ByteDance, they made money out of it and they secured some future income, at least for a short while. But no app or service lives forever anyways, so it's still a good trade.

Whether or not the sell could benefit actual American users was never mattered.

Correct. We've fixed TikTok by blowing off a law enacted by Congress to ban it and now Oracle has a live tracking of every user by GPS.

Yes, this is terrible. Before now it was fine, just Chinese intelligence agencies and data brokers mining it and Chinese interests pumping it full of human and bot sockpuppets to manufacture the consent of users to be more aligned with ideas that work best for the CCP's interests, but now it's just ruined.