[izgzhen]

The content on/recommended by TikTok has two main interesting characteristics as I observed:

- Being very "personally relevant": It doesn't only recommend generally popular stuff. It can be very quick at picking up some niche interests of yours.

- Feel very authentic. TikTok makes it easier for "ordinary people" to get millions of views "accidentally". And as a result, many popular video feels very authentic, which might be preferred compared to curated content like in Netflix or even YouTube.

[codetrotter]

I uninstalled TikTok a week ago because it was showing me too much of the same stuff, but I may eventually return after I’ve had a break from using it for a while. Not yet but maybe later. Anyway, I agree a lot especially about getting a lot of views. Though in my case not in the millions and not even in the hundreds of thousands. But one of the first videos I posted to TikTok was seen 50k+ times. And it wasn’t even a good video, just a little bit of nonsense fun. Other videos I’ve posted since then, on a different account, have only gotten a few hundred views each but to me that is a lot still compared for example to YouTube where my experience has been that the videos I’ve posted to YouTube get a handful of views.

And the most interesting part is that the videos I’ve posted to TikTok don’t get a lot of likes. And to me this says that if I am able to make better content (not an easy thing to do btw), then TikTok is very much ripe for getting a lot of views.

And this is encouraging to me, because I’ve always liked the Reddit and HN way of using upvotes and downvotes, and I feel like TikTok does the same for video that Reddit and HN do for text and links, except that with the video format they have they can also use number of loops a video is watched by each person seeing it, in addition to hearts and comments. And the most encouraging thing is seeing the videos getting those hundreds of views because it shows that TikTok really is using this mechanism and that they are showing your video to people to determine if it’s worth watching.

This is interesting both from a software development point of view, and also from a video creator point of view.

Even before TikTok I was thinking about how Reddit/HN style ranking of content could be applied to video. TikTok has the additional strength you mentioned of discovering your preferences. I think the preference discovery is difficult to replicate without a bigger team of people and probably some knowledge about Machine Learning. But I think there might be room for more video services that use the HN/Reddit ranking method like TikTok also does, while being targeted at a specific audience, like individual subreddits are and like HN is. I worked a while on this with some other people, but limited budget made it very difficult to get anywhere and I have had to pursue other paths instead for a while. But we may continue down that line again at a later point.

[dannyw]

TikTok actually gives people what they want. For people in my generation (20+-5), no one reads, cares about, or trusts mainstream media. We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok.

Yet, search YouTube for anything newsworthy and you only see mainstream media these days. I don't want establishment bs, give me something different.

[keewee7]

I'm a Danish guy from the same generation and I hope you at least try to get news from something more reliable than reddit.

>We get our news from reddit

Things I learned from reddit:

>Rapes only happen in India

Does reddit filter news about rape in other countries? Because there is plenty to take from just by looking in the crime section in local Danish news. This might be one of the more bizarre biases of reddit.

>The US will soon collapse and Europe needs to prepare

I have been hearing this one since 2011. I am still waiting for American boat refugees.

>Chinese tourists are the worst thing since the killing of Harambe

It seems like reddit can only avoid being racist against a small handful of groups that they care about right now like Black Americans and Muslims. Anyone else is free game. Especially Chinese and Indian people.

[scotty79]

Reddit and such places expose stupidity of creation of human culture. Harambe is not any dumber than Billy the Kid.

[snakeboy]

For my, the most successful strategy I've found is to have a handful of academics and journalists that you trust and who cover a sufficient breadth of topics, and reading their articles/blogs/twitter feed. Then adding a few contrarians who I strongly disagree with just to challenge me a bit.

If you're not careful, you can fall into the same traps with social media as with mainstream media: 1. getting reporting from people who lack context on the issues, or 2. getting a distorted view of which issues are important.

[JohnJamesRambo]

I haven’t read an HN comment this upsetting in a while.

[RandomLensman]

I suspect also that most in your cohort could not afford to pay for some of the pricier information sources (and that actually goes for a lot more people). So sidestepping cheap "establishment bs" might actually be the rational strategy.

[jka]

If you can get 70% of the calories for free, then despite the (usually known, or at least suspected, and generally down-played by the vendor) side-effects can be more attractive than paying full-price. The vendor has a strategy though.

[go_elmo]

actually quality public-media is startig gaining traction on yt too, e.g. Deutsche Welle is releasing loads of interesting short background docs / reports regularly. Its entertaining and very informative, can highly recommend.

[brnt]

Yet when you look at the size of the audience, and the ease of spreading misinfo, nothing is more mainstream than social media.

[spoonjim]

I understand why you hate “establishment BS”... the requirement of being, at least to a first approximation, accurate, is a huge constraint on entertainment value.

“JFK clone weds two-headed space alien” is better TV than “Fed announces 1.2% jobs growth in September,” but I hope that in time you start seeking out facts over entertainment.

[thiht]

Listen, every single time I find a piece of information regarding tech in general (often security, cloud or IPOs), whether it’s TV, papers or the internet, they’re wrong on something because the journalist didn’t care about being thorough. This is just about tech because it’s my area of expertise. Now why would I believe that it’s not the case for every single field besides tech? Why would I believe journalists are thorough regarding politics, economics, health, energy? I don’t. That’s why instead of reading journalists pieces, I follow experts I trust on the fields I care about, whether it’s on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube or whatever. And why do I trust them? Because if they know what they’re talking about, they have rock solid sources which is what I expect and that I don’t find in mainstream media. They believe they are the source because they say so, but it’s not how it works.

[jasonladuke0311]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

[scotty79]

You are kidding yourself if you think mass media is even close to accurate. If not by anything else you should be convinced about this by how easily mass media copied completely false "news" they found on the internet.

You could call them on their BS then only because you have internet too. When it comes to other sources mass media do no better job. You just can't see that easily how crappy they are in approximating the truth.

[spoonjim]

Mass media isn’t “close” to accurate (something is accurate or not), it’s just more close, on average, than entertainment-oriented news (which includes Daily Kos and Breitbart alike).

[jdgoesmarching]

Cable news is also entertainment-oriented. All media revolves around engagement, which now typically plays out through appeals to identity or maintaining heightened states of anxiety. Yes that includes your ABCs, CNNs, and MSNBCs.

I’ve noticed people who only watch “real news” tend to have very homogenous anxieties and information about the state of the world that is rarely the most pressing or complete view.

[spoonjim]

Yes, that is true. For example, if you just read mainstream media, you will not see how the meatpacking jobs have all gone to illegal immigrants in the last 20 years.

[Memotio]

You mean that?

I deleted TikTok after a week because anticorona was so popular.

A guy only posted stuff which was fitting his narrative and ignored basic logic for his videos.

He also didn't care at all when I pointed out the issues of his 'reseqrch'.

He posted a study saying that they had issues correlating corona measurements to corona numbers. Eve the researchers and the study itself concluded that it doesn't say Corona measurements are not working they only stated that they were not able to determine the right reasons but postulated why like that talking about measurements can have an effect etc.

He used the study to conclude that Corona measurements are useless!

This is super dangerous and crazy that other people like his videos and get their broken narrative supported.

He is literally part of the probl of missinformation.

He also posted a video from a ex vice president for allergies from Pfizer who worked there 10 years ago and knows nothing about Corona who talks about how crazy and wrong it is.

This guy trusts some dude who is not an expert more than real experts.

I have never could have imagined that it would ever be a problem to allow any person uneducated or not to just freely communicate stuff to someone else.

But this is so ridiculously braindead.

I don't even want to accept anymore that it's okay for someone to not get vaccinated because of their opinion. They are probably not able to properly determine if it makes sense.

Start listing to normal and known media again pls! Listen to experts in their fields first!

Always be critical but do not believe anyone else just because you like more what they say.

[leo_bloom]

> We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok.

We are doomed.

[ulfw]

"For people in my generation (20+-5), no one reads, cares about, or trusts mainstream media. We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok."

And this in a nutshell is why I don't have hope for your and future generations. Instead of researched and published stuff you prefer "news" from unknown sources (including nefarious state actors)

[xondono]

That’s quite a dramatic statement.

Let’s be honest, most of the “research and published stuff” is also crap. The majority is built out of reposting things from those “untrustworthy” places, or from “interviewing experts”, that 9 out of 10 times are tangentially linked to the issue.

News has always been more about entertainment than getting information.

[upgrejd]

>Instead of researched and published stuff you prefer "news" from unknown sources (including nefarious state actors)

And this is why our world is so messed up now, too many older people believing something just because it was it was in the papers or on TV.

[scotty79]

Actually I encountered on tiktok few bits of interesting scientific information I haven't seen anywhere else that when I googled them turned out to be pretty well researched.

For example young Hoatzin birds have wing claws like archeopteryx and use them for climbing branches in unbirdlike manner.

[bsder]

> It can be very quick at picking up some niche interests of yours.

Except that none of my interests can put anything useful in a 60 second video.

What's an example of a "niche interest" that TikTok picks up and does well on?

TikTok seems to be well adapted to create the ADHD dopamine hit to waste time, but is it of any use beyond that?

[thiht]

TikToks can be up to 3 minutes long and can be multipart. There’s tons of things that you can learn in 3 minutes or less: stuff about plants, music, mechanics, History, fashion, animals, lifestyle… And TikTok has a community vibe, some songs transcend the niches, that’s why everyone has heard the Wellerman song for instance.

Note that TikTok’s success is a response to The artificially 10-15 minutes long videos on YouTube. Strip the ads, the sponsorships and the algorithms which requires 10 minutes and you have TikTok.