The best part of TikTok is being able to see who is talking to you. Reddit has become less and less useful to me as I have aged as I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not talking to a person at all or if I am it’s a 13 year old edge lord pretending to be whatever.<p>So much information gains or loses value based on who is saying it. It also came out around the same time that every YouTube creator started stretching their content to 10 minutes minimum for ad revenue. I rarely want to spend 10 minutes on a single throw away topic which killed a lot of interest in browsing YouTube casually for me.<p>I know there are a lot of naysayers for good and bad reasons but if you are on the fence you should give it a try and it will likely become one of your favorite online spaces to spend time.
I don’t think anyone has the guts to mention in these articles that musical.ly looked to a non-user as teenage erotica for teenagers.<p>Back to the topic: I think Vine already showed us that there was a market for a video-based social media application that was tied to your @-handle. YouTube has over the years become way too proper and high-effort for creatives that want to do it for fun. Instagram was too picture-based. A good video editor and fame (or notoriety) and the unofficial Vine-descendant is born.<p>I wonder what the people at Vine thought after they saw TikTok do what they did with a few tweaks.
Before TikTok, there was another app from ByteDance, now forgotten: TopBuzz. I think it’s there the algorithm appeared.<p>At first, it started showing you some unfunny mess of weird gifs, memes and short news briefs. But after an hour or two of scrolling, it learned. It observed your scrolling speed changes, your tap patterns, everything. And the feed magically changed to something more interesting — to you, personally.<p>Interestingly, later on this app was accused in facilitating pushing the Chinese political agenda, and then withdrawn from app stores in 2020. But TikTok moved on.
>TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content<p>Why have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels failed to implement this? It is the main reason the TikTok algorithm learns so fast and is so much better that their algorithms. The other important reason is that the "Not interested" action is seamless and TikTok actually learns from it.
> The fact that ByteDance spent aggressively on user acquisition to grow TikTok has been common knowledge for years: at one point, the company spent an estimated $3MM per day on acquisition marketing in the United States alone, and the company is purported to have spent roughly $1BN on advertising over the course of 2018<p><a href="https://mobiledevmemo.com/tiktoks-billion-dollar-secret-that-wasnt/" rel="nofollow">https://mobiledevmemo.com/tiktoks-billion-dollar-secret-that...</a><p>Stratospheric rise, yes. But I question how market driven this actual rise was, who exactly provided the funds to spend $2bn over a few years to make TikTok a large brand.<p>Is it a "cultural phenomenon" and "geopolitical flashpoint" when an app with that much firepower takes off?
I am skeptical of TikTok because it works too well and is too enjoyable - while conditioning users’ brains to go into a very short attention mode. Someone else here talked about the advantage of finding something interesting and 20 minutes long on YouTube- much healthier.<p>One thing that TikTok did for me that was awesome: I searched for restaurants in the small tourist town I live in, and the search results were very good. I had read that young people (I am 71) use TikTok as a search engine so I tried it.<p>I tend to have TikTok installed about 25% of the time, and uninstall it when I am wasting too much time. Someone here suggested blocking content creators I don’t like; next time I have it installed I will try that.
But is it really worth anything to have young kids post videos about how good they look or what they eat? Compare this to some really high quality content on youtube.