[okasaki]

I always have a laugh when people say TikTok has x-type content. The truth is it has that type of content _for you_. Because it's what you engaged with. TikTok has lots of great content, but some people really don't like what they see in the mirror.

[kareemsabri]

Then you're either being willfully naive or don't understand how media works. Marshall McLuhan described this phenomenon 60 years ago, the medium is the message.

Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Note that I don't much care about Tik Tok fear mongering, but pretending the platform doesn't shape the type of content on it is absurd. Why is Instagram different than Tik Tok different than Twitter different than HN?

[patmcc]

>>Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Unironically, yes, I'd bet dollars to donuts there's some niche creator doing exactly this. As an example, one of the people I follow (@maklelan) is a PhD in theology & religion, and has ~1000 videos on biblical scholarship, the history of various religious texts, different translations/interpretations of scripture, etc.

It's interesting and very niche content. There are probably 1000x more views being had by attractive young women dancing, but TikTok is big enough that it has everything.

[kareemsabri]

Fair enough. I thought I'd test it. I opened Tik Tok for pretty much the first time. I've installed it but not yet used it. It showed me a bunch of girls dancing, as expected. I thought I could swipe up / down to tell them what I like, but I can only swipe up, so I'm not sure how I train it.

I searched "Israel Palestine". I got an Irish guy named Freddy Quinne telling me it's like "coming home from work one day, only to find that someone else is now in your house". It appears to be mostly just guys talking / ranting. This hasn't really changed my mind that the medium shapes the content.

[patmcc]

Oh, it's absolutely not easy finding that niche content. You're going to need to swipe past a lot of cleavage to find anything else. To get more of whatever you're currently on, re-watching, liking, commenting all probably work. To get less, either swipe past quickly or long press (I think?) and you can choose "not interested" or something. I think there are other ways to block particular creators and sounds (and maybe filters?) if you don't want to see that specific thing.

The search does leave something to be desired - the app is very much designed for just endless scrolling.

[kareemsabri]

It just sounds like a lot of work trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Point taken that the content (maybe) exists on the platform, but if I can't find it what good is it? As essentially a worldwide daily competition for virality, it seems like it'll trend to what is mass entertainment.

[patmcc]

Yah, if you're looking for particular content or something it's not a great app. It's really meant to be a maximally configurable timewaster. The app doesn't care if you waste an hour on dancing videos or slime videos or politics videos, as long as you spend it on the app.

I don't think things go viral on it quite the way they do on other platforms - like on youtube, to a certain degree, anything viral enough is going to show up in the recommendations for everyone. Less so on TikTok, I think.

[skulk]

It's hard to believe anything of real value can be communicated in such a constrained format, but would you care to share any tiktoks that are actually worth risking a hugely time-wasting addiction for?

[dopeboy]

Yes, absolutely. In fact I was just emailing some childhood friends these videos earlier today.

What TikTok does _really_ well is surface hyper specific content to you. I grew up the children of indian immigrants and there's a, let's say shared trauma, to growing up like that. It's a ton of little things that I just swallowed as a kid and now I realize: that's kinda messed up. Things like aunties always asking me what school I got into, am I dating, am I getting married, etc. They seem like innocent questions right now but as the eldest teen in the group, I wanted appreciation and felt like I was getting orders from these questions.

Yes it's a constrained format (though I think you can up to 90 seconds now) but you have to realize, it is near impossible to find this kind of content elsewhere. There's a whole generation of people who find communicating through short video clips more natural than how you and I are talking right now. And they're not afraid to challenge social norms that I had to accept; I can only salute that.

Does this represent all the type of content I engage with? No - the slot machine effect is very real here. For every impactful video I watch, there's maybe 10 dopamine hit videos I consume. I choose to make that trade off (with guard rails - I install TikTok every friday and delete it every Sunday).

Sample impactful video: https://www.tiktok.com/@anncytwinklee/video/7130719838778953...

[GekkePrutser]

> It's hard to believe anything of real value can be communicated in such a constrained format

This is exactly what I've always hated about Twitter. Its length-limited posts actively stimulate stupid crap like people posting what they had for dinner and make real insightful content very hard to read because people have to split it up in 20 different parts which all become their own threads with distracting replies.

Even the sane people I followed posted so much nonsense I had to wade through to find the one pearl that it was just not worth it. If something good comes up it'll make it to HN anyway so I just left Twitter.

I really don't get why Twitter is so popular either but I guess like with TikTok most people like shallow content. See what's popular on TV too, it's the "reality"/celeb crap.

[theplumber]

If you use tiktok then you already know what tiktoks are worth your time.