In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour.
Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are phenomenal and people are using them so creatively.
IMHO, the traditional social media giants optimized for profit only, destroyed any potential competitors and up until TikTok we have been left to terrible state of the social media.
If you recall, FB and others were involved in political manipulations and accused of spreading extremism.
It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists and the tech giants were blamed for spreading that in the name of engagement. At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.
> It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists
I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online. I'd bet at least 40% of Americans have views that if stated online would get them a white supremacist label and I bet the figure for conspiracy theorist is over 70%.
> At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.
Note: It wasn't that it became horrible according to some nigh-universally accepted standard, it just became horrible by the standards of those who (now) control discourse.
> I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online.
My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.
New fancy soapboxes have distorted our understanding of each other, deeply. They amplify, magnify, and otherwise inflate the sense that fringe ideas are more widely represented.
Agreed. It was hard seeing a professor whom I admired slowly transform over the course of the last ten years into a conspiracy theorist and alt-right content propagandist. He used to reliably offer the on-the-other-hand perspective, but knew what he was doing and generally kept a level head. Once his “devil’s advocacy” started getting him attention and likes on social media, it started to be more and more his focus until the persona became the person.
Very sad to see. He has fewer friends among his students and colleagues but a cadre of online followers gathered from who-knows-where.
> My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.
Duration/number of datapoints is less important than sampling. What is your sampling?
My own sampling is from talking to people next to me on trains around south east England. This is obviously not a completely random distribution, but it's much more representative than my friends, family, colleagues and online acquaintances.
My sampling is diverse and big, in my bad opinion.
I'm in the US, born in New England, and have lived in five states throughout the Northeast, Texas, and the Northwest. I've spent a collective three years living in Germany, Switzerland, France (wife is from France). I have slept at least one night in every state in the continental US. I once hitchhiked across the US and back again, gabbing with every person I could find along the way. I lived in cities for about a collective decade, and in very, very rural settings (log cabin even) for a collective decade and a half. Lots of other stuff in between and on the sides. I communicate with diverse groups, in person and online, from right to left, nix to ms, fantasy to sci-fi, young to old. I'm a 'perspectivist', and am fascinated with the perspectives of others, especially those outside of my frame of comfort and reference. I try to push beyond 'convictions', to uncover 'opinions'; convictions are usually firmly rooted, while opinions often change. A person's background and influences are usually baked into their convictions, while opinions generally reflect where a person is in life, like the kind of music 'you're into right now'.
I was a line cook and an artist, working horrible minimum wage jobs for a decade, was homeless for a year (under a bridge homeless), started at community college, transferred to Harvard, graduated at the top, got prestigious fellowships, and now work in software development and live in a rural area that is within an hour of a big city. I still talk to everyone like they are my partner in life, I don't care what they look like or with which demographic they 'identify', or how long I have known them. I'm gabby - I talk to everyone - I make friends with everyone I meet, from the guy on the street to the gal at the grocery store, to the company leader.
Confession: I'm a thinker and writer in my free time. But I have tried to cast as wide a net in life, and have tried to engage people as people, for what I think is a long time.
My conclusion: we're being gamed. The people underneath are intact. Amazingly, when the game is lifted, the people emerge, largely unscathed, as testament to the endurance capability of our ancestral rodentia.
My sample and data have led me to hold this opinion rather strongly, for what it is worth, which is nothing.
I have to disagree with that, snapchat was just as innovative if not more so in the early days of tiktok and musically in the space around camera filters and editing.
There are two big things that make tiktok unique. The for you page, and shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly. No other platform has been able to circulate viral videos as quickly as tiktok has proven to be able to, and the for you page, rather than encouraging people to actually follow individual accounts, means that people are actually seeing the videos that keep them on the app the longest (and in turn off other apps), rather than having to curate their own feeds.
> shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly
Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.
While FB always focused on their vaunted friends graph, there was an entirely separate graph waiting to be discovered which had nothing to do with friendship:
i.e. A graph of people worldwide who have lipsynced (or danced) to the same tune. It's a clever way to inject novelty (and dopamine) into the system!
I like Snapchat, though I never properly used to because I don't know anyone who uses it. I have been entertaining that app only because of its originality and I do appreciate their innovative spirit. I believe FB has copied their features and Snap continues to be an underdog.
Also, FB apparently was running VPN apps in disguise to monitor the traffic of the younger audience[0] to identify upcoming competition and crush it.
IMHO, this behaviour of the established players destroyed the innovation in America, lost it to China. I remember, at one point it became unfashionable to create new social networks or invest in them but it turns out, FB is not the end of history.
Facebook was never a peoples directory at the start. It was similar to how instagram is now because you could only find your friends and other people your age in your area. Instagram keeps this by not being a peoples directory and thats how the original facebook users want to keep things.
From the perspective of Europe and Asia at least, the rise of the far-right and far-left was already in motion by 2006 and was catapulted by a combination of increasing tensions with Muslim minority groups and the Great Recession. It is almost a steady rise rather than something fueled by social media. The social media in these regions is probably too left-wing for the mainstream.
No disrespect, but....Chinese spying company? It's free and you are definitely not the product, but your information and contacts and photos and videos sure look tasty to the CCP.
I'm not American, most of the people aren't and from our perspective FB and TikTok are exactly the same.
In fact, Europeans and British can positively say that FB had a substantial life changing impact due to personal data misuse and political manipulation.
It's one of the core reasons most Europeans would like to see their data protected and Tech giants held accountable. Be it American or Chinese or another one.
You might argue about EU/US alliance and say that CCP are the devil but the fact is, US is documented to spy on scale, have spying partnerships with US tech giant(Google for Snowden and WikiLeaks), rich history of organising coups and political movements and most importantly the political situation in US is also not stable and it's quite possible for Americans to elect EU-hostile president with questionable ties to Russian oligarchs like the last time.
The situation with TikTok might be a new phenomenon for the Americans but it's how the rest of the world has been living in the last 30 years.
Are you really trying to compare a dictatorship state to America? And I say this as as foreigner....you are creating quite the false equivalency here. But muh both sides....People need to stop looking at things in black and white.
> People need to stop looking at things in black and white.
How saying that USA is the absolute angel and China is the absolute devil is not a black and white but saying that USA and China pose similar risks is black&white?
Besides, a large number of Americans[0] are disputing the integrity of American elections, claim that America is ruled by a secret elite, claim that elections change nothing, claim that USA is about to be a dictatorship the moment gun control laws are introduced. Of course I don't believe in any of this BS but the movement of people who believe in this stuff is frightening and very weird things happen on the 6th of January in 2021 and things might change dramatically in near future. So yes, I do compare the USA and China in sense of a risk for Europe.
Comparing things that are equivalent is pretty pointless, because the outcome would always be the same: "they are the same".
We compare things that may be similar but actually different.
Comparing things highlights differences and commonalities.
Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are phenomenal and people are using them so creatively.
IMHO, the traditional social media giants optimized for profit only, destroyed any potential competitors and up until TikTok we have been left to terrible state of the social media.
If you recall, FB and others were involved in political manipulations and accused of spreading extremism.
It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists and the tech giants were blamed for spreading that in the name of engagement. At some point the place has become so horrible that they started blocking prominent accounts, including the American President.