[azatris]

I absolutely love using TikTok, but would give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement.

It has absolutely brought more positivity into my life. I am specifically feeding the algorithm with this intent and I get what I asked for. It is a psychological tool.

[baron_harkonnen]

> give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement.

It's important to recognized that it's not a coincidence that TikTok exists and is run by a Chinese company.

In the West that replacement would have been immediately purchased by FB or Twitter and then summarily destroyed. This is literally what happened to the closest Western equivalent: Vine.

The Chinese government has many faults, but unlike the US government, the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.

Facebook did try to buy Musical.ly, the company that became TikTok, and would have likely destroyed it just like Twitter did Vine.

If the US government was remotely functional it would put a little effort into challenging the ability of near monopolies to simply destroy any competitor through acquisition. I agree that it's not ideal that the Chinese government is tightly connected with TikTok/ByteDance, but the reason there is no Western TikTok is because our governments (particularly the US) are so deeply aligned with the interests of larger corporations that a viable competitor to these cannot exist.

[netcan]

I agree with you.

Besides "FB would have bought it," social media doesn't generally do "replacement." Nuanced differences in product lead to different products, because the "social" aspect is made of culture.

Any replacement for tiktok wouldn't be a replacement. It'd be a different product in the social media space. One way or another, a tiktok ban benefits FB, whether they build a competitor, buy it, or their existing products pick up tiktok's market share.

We are totally ill equipped to deal with modern monopolies. We weren't great at dealing with the old, monopolies. Now though, the laws, norms and political MOs are nearly irrelevant.

One trite example is prices. The default way to "prove" the effect of monopolies historically has been price. Prices don't exist in social media.

A deeper difference is the microeconomics. When Bell was being broken up, one big problem was creating viable component companies. If the courts screwed up and created failing child companies then telecommunications would be broken. This is a hard problem for a court, well outside their comfort zone. With social media the microeconomics is totally different. Even if FB disappeared, consumers would not lack for social media. The market is capable of replacing FB easily, all that's needed is for facebook to move aside. Commercial/profitability considerations are barely an issue.

[_2d30]

Why assume FB would kill an acquisition? They didn’t kill WA, IG or Beluga. They made them into massive billion+ DAU services.

[brownbat]

It may be harder to monetize short video content than short text or longer videos (maybe that drives YouTube revenue nudges for longer content?).

But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you.

But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.

[bigpumpkin]

Chinese companies like Tencent/Alibaba would try to crush any competitor that's not part of its ecosystem/ doesn't have a stake in.

Any Bytedance related links were prohibited in WeChat, for example.

[toohotatopic]

How can Twitter destroy the idea of Vine? Twitter can destroy Vine.co, but why is there no competitor with the same idea?

The moment they had shut down vine.co, a new site with the same idea could have gone life and absorbed all the users.

Why does this not happen? There are Facebook user groups, reddits and other social networks, even Twitter itself. A replacement for something that popular should be known instantly and take over without friction. Why does 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' not work here?

[nemothekid]

>* a new site with the same idea could have gone life and absorbed all the users.*

But that did happen - it was called Musical.ly, which is now known as TikTok (US). I don't think people realize that the US version of TikTok was preceded by an app called Musical.ly, which was also Chinese owned, but failed in China but had massive success in the US.

[jorblumesea]

> the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.

In most cases, Chinese companies are basically owned and controlled by the state. This has nothing to do with monopoly or trust issues. Acquiring lines of credit in China after you get to a certain size basically means you're owned or partially owned by the CCP.

[Waterfall]

Vine wasn't destroyed, it was bought by Twitter long before it released.

[teekert]

All I see is girls putting their phone somewhere, dancing in front of it, then getting back into being absorbed by their phones. Can you describe more specifically what is so positive about it? My kids are about to enter the age at which they get a smartphone and these things make me a bit afraid (like, who's watching? Why do they stare at that app for so long? etc). I don't understand the alure, but I want to keep an open mind and not be that old parent that doesn't understand...

[bkruse]

Having used tiktok for a total of 10 hours now, I get programmer humor, car videos and funny animal videos - exactly what I want

That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate

[kpennell]

Once I started marking 'not interested' on the super basic teenager dance videos, I eventually stopped seeing them. Same with a lot of the memey songs that get tiring to hear after a while. I'll try to make a list of people who keep popping up.

[bstar77]

You don't need to understand the allure. Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways? What wrong with people smiling, laughing and dancing? I'm an old parent trying to be open minded as well.

[saityi]

>Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways?

Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times.

Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.

[chucksmash]

I'm a fan of the "Digital Wellbeing" features that ship with newer phones.

I have a social media account which I check approximately biweekly and definitely considered myself someone who wasn't falling into the attention trap in my pocket. I only read HN, a few news sites, send texts, and play chess on my phone.

I was amazed to see just how much time I spent doing these things. Even if in some way how I'm using the phone is more virtuous or less problematic ("this hour-long article about the architecture of the classic XBox gratifies my curiosity, is informative and gives me more context with which to understand my field!"), that time and attention sink still comes at the cost of everything else in life.

[StevePerkins]

The parent commenter asked if anyone could describe what is positive about the app. Since they apparently have no first-hand experience with it, and do not understand the allure from what they've heard or seen so far.

You're responding to him or her with "You don't need to understand the allure". And somehow seem offended that he or she doesn't understand what people are laughing about.

Come on.

[newswasboring]

> What wrong with people smiling, laughing and dancing?

There is nothing wrong in it, but there isn't much alluring there too. Its available from so many other platforms.

[monadic2]

Really? Almost the entirety of where I see this is people recording and re-uploading content from tik tok onto Twitter. It’s certainly a distinct communication culture. I mean “Instagram dance” was never a thing the way “Tik tok dance” is a thing.

[newswasboring]

I guess what I'm saying is just because it's distinct doesn't mean it's alluring. It might be a different form of expression but what is being expressed is that entertaining or different from Instagram. It's just a bit less objectifying than Instagram but still feels lacking.

[newen]

I think the dances came from musical.ly, which part of Tiktok used to be. Then, it's just people doing what other people are doing, one upping each other, trying to get popular, etc. Same social media stuff and Tiktok's recommendation algorithm is really good, so people get into it really quickly.

[RspecMAuthortah]

Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways?

> I would argue it is one thing to be absorbed by reading in your phone HN or other productive sources. Laughing and dancing on the other hand, after a certain period of time not so much useful.

[bstar77]

This is one of the most depressing comments I've read in a long time.

[Waterfall]

This comment chain is one of the funniest I've seen in a while. Literally laughing so hard at your comment thank you.

[teekert]

Yeah, actually I wish HN would make me laugh and dance, this comment makes tiktok sound pretty good!

[chosenbreed37]

> Yeah, actually I wish HN would make me laugh and dance, this comment makes tiktok sound pretty good!

LOL. I find HN highly entertaining. Well...not to the point of breaking into a dance...but entertaining. Quite often I just jump straight to the comments.

[082349872349872]

https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1281092706677243904

"${RELIGIOUS GROUP}: A man who has an uncomfortable feeling that somebody, somewhere is enjoying themselves."

for a different ${RELIGIOUS GROUP}'s opinions on dancing, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591306

[nxc18]

I get mostly cooking, gardening, life hacks, and occasionally political humor. I'm also on gay TikTok so there's some 'fun' content there.

I've learned lots of cool stuff on TikTok - my favorite tip recently has been a trick for partially juicing lemons while leaving them intact; last week I broke my soda habit as a result of easily accessible homemade la croix.

[teekert]

OK sounds good, maybe I should just try it, always good to know what you are talking about, right?!

[azatris]

Since the content is curated strongly by your likes and dislikes, I am afraid your children might actually get some nasty stuff there. There's psychotic horror and soft porn. I don't think I'd trust my child with it unless they're older than 14 or so.

The dancing stuff is pretty mild and I'd say even constructive for children.

The allure, is hard to describe. The content I see is very human, people describing their experiences, doing harmless jokes on each other, or teaching something. How it differs from YouTube is that it is much more strongly tailored to your likes, and due to time constraints, skips the chuff and gets to the meat of things quicker.

[cwkoss]

It seems to create affinity scores based on which videos you complete watching, like or share. Then they also maintain similar affinity scores for every tag on those videos and the creators of those videos. So as you watch stuff, you feed becomes tuned to your preferences without needing an explicit 'follow' step.

Users have little control of what videos they see explicitly, but if you like 5 videos with the same tag, it will present more videos with that tag.

[bstar77]

I was a bit critical of my wife using TikTok until I realized that she replaced the negativity of Facebook with something that, in its current form, is pretty harmless. It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity.

[ralfd]

This.

Take any social media app and there is something toxic, mean, snarky about it. Twitter is optimized for snark and shit storms. Facebook has your crazy uncle sharing fake news. Instagram posts are fake and pretentiousness. Reddit has their subreddit drama.

TikTok is just fun. Even wholesome fun.

I tried if I could find one mean tiktok video, but there was not one bullying video. Even if the girl making a dance video was ugly/fat the comments on that were encouraging and positive.

[chillacy]

I was wondering awhile ago to what extent the famous saying "the medium is the message" applies here. It's famously easy to misread the intent of text, to see hostility when there is none (and so smiley faces and emojis came into being), it's probably harder to be mean over photos than text (especially a photo of yourself...), and even harder over video.

[rvz]

Not sure if you're aware of the fact of what was going on in Hong Kong and the loss of its autonomous status due to the national security law. Facebook and TikTok are no different to privacy, but TikTok can give all of that data and the CCP can access it. But of course it doesn't matter to you because 'its pretty harmless'.

For Hong Kong citizens, it's much worse. They are being identified and arrested in the hundreds as the Chinese government has access to this data to find anyone insulting or ridiculing them. That's very totalitarian to me.

[stronglikedan]

> But of course it doesn't matter to you because 'its pretty harmless'.

That doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation of OP's comment.

If a very small fraction of global users may come to harm as a result of (not by) using an app, then that's pretty much the textbook definition of "pretty harmless".

[mschuster91]

> It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity.

... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.

[msbarnett]

Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.

[xapata]

Do you agree with the censorship and propaganda policies of mainland China? If not, Sinophobia is not paranoia.

[msbarnett]

No, but then again I’m equally opposed to much of contemporary US politics and the long history of US meddling in foreign countries affairs to obtain anti-democratic results that happen to favour US goals (broadly, Latin American 20th century history), so again, this “TikTok’s data gathering is an existential threat to freedom but please pay Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google et al no mind” framing is... unconvincing to say the least.

[addison-lee]

No doubt spyware is bad from either country, but TikTok was caught trying to suppress content from "ugly, poor, or disabled" users. Do you still support the app knowing that?

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

[msbarnett]

I didn’t say I supported it at all.

I merely said I don’t see how it’s worse than the major US social networks. Like say Facebook, which has been caught multiple times allowing employers and housing advertisers to illegally exclude groups like Black people, from seeing job postings and apartment listings.

Again, I don’t know that what TikTok has been shown to be doing is any worse.

[addison-lee]

Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

[foepys]

Look at Hong Kong where China just yesterday told the political parties that holding any pre-election for Hong Kong's parliament is an aggressive act against China.

Or look at the Uyghur internment camps. Or the one child policy that effectively turned some communitys 80% male.

There is no opposition in China that can speak up against this.

[ardy42]

> Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country.

I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is:

From the OP:

> To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:

> ...

> This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.

[msbarnett]

> I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US.

I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.

[ardy42]

> I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.

Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?

IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.

If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.

[scottLobster]

Don't need to be enthused to acknowledge one is better than the other. At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP. The only difference is I live in the US, so the CCP doesn't really care and can't really reach me without committing a potential act of war anyway. If I moved to China and maintained my same social media habits I'd be disappeared rather quickly, and possibly organ harvested.

Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.

[alextheparrot]

Can you explain the threat model you're using here to assess Facebook vs TikTok? This sounds like just emotional language as I could call most of the modern web spyware and not be too far off the mark

[xapata]

It's less about threat model than willingness to use it.

If the US government were using Facebook to censor and disseminate propaganda, we'd likely eventually hear about it.

In contrast, the Chinese government is certainly using TikTok to censor and quite likely to disseminate propaganda. Critics of that policy will be imprisoned.

[Altimos]

This article calls into question how closely you feel a sitting executive's campaign is to its government, but we have heard about it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-202...

[ideals]

Ya only Uncle Sam is allowed to spy on our kids.

This line of reasoning is getting old. All social media apps are data collection driven platforms

[bstar77]

Since the copy/paste exploit was addressed (in ios) I'm not sure what useful information "chinese spyware" can gather from this app. As long as it's being used for goofy dance and lip sync videos, I don't see the harm.

[cj]

I see the risk being less about spyware, and more about giving CCP the ability to push its agenda at the flick of an algorithm tweak.

A lot of people in comments are talking about how great the feed algorithm is out weeding out teenage dance videos and showing interesting content.

You can easily imagine a scenario where CCP tweaks its algorithms to favor content relating to one party or candidate vs. the other.

The scary part is that I think it wouldn't be obvious to know whether China is exploiting TikTok's American audience via algorithms driving a certain agenda since it can be done very subtly in non-obvious ways.

[zzzcpan]

It's a private company, it's very unlikely for them to outright push government propaganda. They'll probably just censor "political activism" on the platform altogether and someday if government establishes tighter control of the platform they might be forced not to censor some of it, like things that undermine the US government.

[giantrobot]

Large "private" companies in China are not private as you would think of them in the West. The Chinese government or the CCP will own outright or through holding companies shares in a company. So even at the most benign the government or CCP will have influence in a company's governance. Executives and upper management will always be outwardly enthusiastic about all Chinese government/CCP talking points and decisions.

Due to China's "security" laws security and intelligence agencies have essentially full access to large companies' data. There's no real due process so a "private" company's data is essentially government data. There's also the overt and covert censorship and propaganda imposed by the government.

Company executives serve at the pleasure of the government. Anyone not towing the party line or acting with too much independence will get caught up in "anti-corruption" investigations or just be arrested for crimes they may or may not have actually committed.

Realistically it's better to just assume a priori that a Chinese social media company is pushing propaganda and building dossiers of users. It's certainly safer to assume that.

[monkpit]

Couldn’t you say the same thing about any social media algorithm? That’s the “scary part”. Not the fact that it is Chinese.

[godtoldmetodoit]

My personal feeling is that Tiktok is better then most other social media for the end users emotional state, at least based on my wife's usage.

From a spying perspective, I tend to agree with you as well.

That said - China doesn't let FB or Twitter in their country, why the hell should the US let them in ours? To me it is akin to letting them buy the NY Times or CNN. They may be benign now, but if tensions were to continue mounting, they could greatly influence the content a significant portion of people in the US are receiving. I see 0 reason to trust them with that power.

[jfengel]

Is there any reason to think that positivity will continue to hold? Or is TikTok just getting its grace period before griefers, trolls, and paranoiacs move in?

If the Chinese government is going to aggressively moderate TikTok to keep that out... uh, cool, I guess. I'd be happy to see some popular entertainment that doesn't devolve into a screaming match. But it's a lot of work, and reduces audience (i.e. revenue).

[throw57654]

TikTok is also banned in China.

Bytedance has an isolated version called Douyin.

I believe if FB or Twitter created specific versions that comply with China’s laws, they would be allowed.

[jsterSC]

I highly recommend anyone that has this initial reaction to what these companies are benefiting from their surveillance models check out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

Which does an excellent job helping to stimulate thought of just what the power and purpose of these types of apps as well other structures (alphabet) are able to do...

[kpennell]

RIP Vine