[echelon]

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.

[kelnos]

> The news breaks almost immediately on TikTok

Not arguing against the rest of your comment, but I find the concept of "breaking news" to be generally terrible for society. News outlets should wait until they have enough information to present an event as accurately as possible, but the rush to be the one that gets there first means this is often not the case.

And I expect this goes double for randos publishing on TikTok.

[NoteyComplexity]

That’s true. I think the bigger problem is that many people seems to misuse the term, making any news a “breaking news” but oftentimes, it doesn’t.

The only valid use for “breaking news” imo, are disasters.

[techjamie]

My girlfriend used to be hooked on TikTok for political stuff until I started pointing out how much of it is comprised of half-truths if not straight up lies.

For example, one day she came over and showed me a short where this lady was warning women the Rs were starting their discrimination campaigns up, because Kentucky was looking to pass an amendment making women get certified doctor letters on if/the status of their pregnancy.

I called out how ridiculous that was pretty quickly and she told me this is 100% real and the lady in the video wasn't lying. I looked it up, and it was a real proposal[1]... Made several years earlier by a Democrat as a satire bill that was never under true consideration.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/kentucky-democrat...

[soulofmischief]

Veracity is cornerstone to a healthy internet, and it can be very impossible for someone to fact check things on tiktok if their one-stop shop for consuming things and finding information is also tiktok. Corroboration, validation etc. are something I can do (to best efforts) on my computer with applications and websites that help me do this.

Don't get me wrong, I like instagram for the political commentary; but the vibe is different, Instagram is a supplementary source and not a primary one. It's still not a perfect system either, for example Instagram doesn't allow clickable links which can really hamoer organization and spreading important information.

[NoteyComplexity]

Thank you for your thoughtful story!

This is the reason why I have raised this question, as I don’t really understand why people are so into this platform since I don’t enjoy short form contents.

Perhaps just because it is short, with properly use, TikTok can discover many niche topics that we probably don’t know.

Does it change my decision of using this platform? Probably not because I prefer longer and slower paced contents, but I could at least know that TikTok is not just about brainrots or random people dancing like many people as claimed, at least now I know there are people finding their passion in this platform or discovering new place to explore.

[sgc]

So better, richer content twitter? I never used that site except for a brief period at the beginning of the current Ukrainian war, but it sounds like it appeals to the same type of person.