I mean, TikTok was already bad to begin with but what did they do to deserve a spot next to Twitter? Did I miss something? Surely they can’t do worse than trying to make their paid only, right?
Why do you think it’s more spyware than any other big tech mobile app or social media?
And based on my experience getting hooked so fast into while I didn’t want to touch it, it seems it has the best algorithm. I’m off it now, like all other social media expect for fediverse, but I can testify on this
My fyp is full of bipoc LGBTQ+ people? Twitter on the other hand tries to feed me right wing news sources and disinformation all the time. There’s a spectrum here and TikTok is far on the other side.
Also to be frank the algorithm is by far the best out of any company with a “for you” algorithm. It blows pretty much anything else out of the water entirely.
Go watch a few truck or bbq tik toks and watch it backslide. Anything that is vaguely a “manly hobby.” You’ll be surprised how quickly Ben Shapiro winds up in front of you.
I watch more tiktok than I’m proud of, and YouTube is actually way worse for this. Youtube I’ve actually started using some private browsing for things that I think might turn to Joe Rogan or whatever because on that platform you’re like 7 videos from “i’d like to check out some camping videos” to “here’s how to protect yourself from the woke mob in the apocalypse which will happen next Tuesday courtesy of Ben Shapiro.”
The thing that worries me about tiktok is they’re too good at this. It would honestly be extremely easy for them to tip the scales.
People rightfully call out TikTok as a spyware because of their ties with CCP, but how exactly are other social media giants and big tech any different as they too have ties with the CIA, FBI etc
Basically, most social media reads out everything that is openly accessible, like cookies, address books and contacts, etc.
TikTok goes deeper, it has been watched going into protected files, trying to break encryptions (sometimes being successful).
how is it speculative that big tech steals your data. Google, Amazon, microsoft, every single big internet conglomerate sell your data. Its a fact, and is widely reported.
Don’t we have a different tiktok than the Chinese one? There are specifically US folks in charge of the non China Tiktok. Wasn’t one of the security heads a former US state security agent?
follow someone long enough and eventually they complain that their videos are being taken down with zero reason, and being banned outright. an example is sanrioangel I think her name is, she’s had so many tiktok accounts banned for no reason other than being trans
Idk, I find it’s algorithm very easy to control compared to every other social media, its much easy to manipulate. My fyp is full of gay people so idk what you mean by the second statement.
Reddit users often hate Reddit but feel stuck in it without alternatives that they can accept.
Twitter (it’s not X, fuck that silly aging “peaked in the XTREME 90s” divorce dad nonsense, I hope he cries more about it billionaire-tears ) has lost a lot of users and the ones that are left are devoted cultists that pay money for relevance symbols on their accounts. blue-checkfarquaad-point
TikTok has people that are hooked on the algorithm to the point that they may not bother even participating in any such survey because it isn’t on TikTok.
No matter what this 40 year old boomer ass Lemmy user base says, TikTok is amazing and some people are doing some really incredible things on it. You should give it a shot.
I don’t use tiktok or any other shit social media like that. I had reddit for the communities and now this place for the same reason…which it’s mainly memes at best. Using tiktok makes you a fucking idiot…
Ya, because most of Lemmy userbase is from Reddit, the “American” website that bullied a kid into killing themselves, because they were “helping” find the boston bomber.
yeah, let me just have all my data leaked one day, address, name, photos, card details, passwords, my own and foreign governments can have that data too just for the extra cherry on top. let them also profile me across the internet so I can be stalked even easier, what a great idea.
some people don’t want to be tracked, have their data trained on ai, have their data leaked and sold on the dark web, have their accounts compromised. they might even require it for work or in general to not literally fucking die or lose their job as well
I’d worry more about the US which directly controls the state I live in over the guys chilling 3000 miles away. Its really a false equivalence to compare the two.
it is if one is far away and the US has active control over all western countries (I assume you live in a US bloc country), I’m going to be way more concerned with the one who can send a CIA agent to rule my death a suicide with two shots in my head.
Politically to. I live in a US state. How are the Chinese going to use my transfem tiktoks against me. Are they going to sell me more estrogen? Hell yes if so lol.
Russia did little interference in the election. A study:
Trump also lost the popular vote anyway, it was the bullshit electoral system that allowed him to slither in. Although I’m not too surprised someone interfered with our elections, we do it to everyone else. Its common knowledge we interfered in the 1991 russian elections and directly manipulated and gave a fake result for their elections in 1993. We were able to directly change and influence their major political powers with their foreign interference, Russia has only managed to make bots annoying people on twitter.
and honestly why would china interfere in our elections, they can literally sit back and watch us fall apart. It is a pure fact that they are economically doing very well, and that we are in decline. Both our parties are anti-china, so who would they fudge in favor of? Stage a CPUSA coup?
Honestly I get how I might be coming off that way, but Im trying to be as neutral as possible. I have not said anything supporting russia or china in these posts, im just trying to introduce the point that the US social media spy apparatus is far more worrying than the Chinese one. I get it for like higher up people, but they have protections the common person does not. Monitoring us losers does nothing for them, just a lot of useless effort they don’t have to do. We are already buying everything from them, they don’t need to do anything for us to keep doing that.
I guess Im coming off as defending china, but I haven’t even done that in this post. I’ve just said they are far less influential than my own government. The US is still the global hegemon, they didn’t get there by being nice to people, they’re not staying there because they’re nice to people, and they will continue to stay there because they are willing to do whatever it takes to stay on top. The global hegemon, especially the USA’s, is far more directly powerful in my own life than the other guys ever will.
If you’re watching nothing but 15 second TikTok’s, your algorithm is saying you’re a fucking idiot. And I’d have to probably agree based off what you’re saying here.
So you literally have no idea what it is and what it’s about, but here you are running your little mouth. Weren’t you raised better than believing what you hear when you easily have the ability to see what it’s about yourself? You don’t sound too bright.
I know what TikTok is and what it is about. That’s why I choose not to use it. You are bright enough to realize that clips from TikTok are posted in other places on the web, right? I’ve never used crack cocaine either, but I know what it is and what it is about.
TikTok is literally designed to psychologically manipulate teenagers and you fell for it. You sound mad about it, too. Hope it doesn’t rot your brain too much before you figure it out, but that doesn’t sound likely from your replies.
This. I use tiktok more than I like, and it’s extremely easy to watch an hour or two. Thing is, when you get done, try to remember even like 3% of what you watched.
Does this reflect how the platform is actually doing or do we just like the circlejerk of wishing they would fail? Because everything I’ve seen says Reddit has been completely unaffected by the changes made and they’re still getting more user signups, engagements and interaction/posts than ever.
Tik Tok also seems to be growing strong.
Twitter is a genuine laughing stalk and is pulling major shit…but everyone still seems to be using it regularly.
if you have been back to reddit, they might have growing numbers (probably due to shitty practices forcing you to use their app instead of mobile browser) etc. but the quality of discussions and the amount of bots just reposting the same comments skyrocketed.
I mean it’s a huge site, it won’t die, but if you look at it that way, Facebook is still alive, do you have a desire to spend time on that site though?
Pleased to say I haven’t been back to Reddit (except to scrub my entire history there to nuke my account). Reddit quality going completely down the toilet is something seen long before these changes were made. It’s really sad to see that companies aren’t forced to make better products because people will put time and money into these shit platforms regardless.
yeah I already noticed the downhill trend before the API changes but after it really went into a nosedive, expectedly the power users posting good shit just left, so rage bait reposts are the trending things.
I have been back to reddit to check things out from time to time. The quality has definitely degraded, and their changes to not seeing NSFW stuff without logging in or using their app has me visiting less and less.
The comment section is still nice, but I just don’t see the quality it once had.
The burden of proof lies in the eyes of the Christian god! And as a fellow Muslim, I can say nothing about it, but He might speak through me and say that Reddit became a place without much new content.
I don’t save sources in case of future need for references. I haven’t written a thesis on the matter. It came up in a few articles in my tech news RSS feeds. You’re welcome to not believe me and I would readily consider contrary information anyone else offers it.
Only a good 0.1% of reddit actually “creates content” with the rest having only engagement via comments. A good 99% of those also don’t do anything but lurk.
The people that make the content are also the ones more likely to switch to alternatives.
It’s an engagement loop so while the amount of signups and accounts is unchanged, there is simply less content to keep people around and to monetize.
We can take a look at the comment count on major subreddits over time. Using the top 5 most commented listed on Subreddit Stats, and then using Social Rise to see comments per day (go down to “Graph of” and click “comments”).
All except Starfield show comments cratering at the beginning of July, and they’re not coming back. Obviously, Starfield is a special case given the release of the game. AITAH was also just starting to pick up and then had its jugular cut out. Across the board, there looks to be a 3 or 4 times reduction in comment rates.
Now, perhaps the site is still OK among the more niche subreddits. That’d take a lot longer to analyze. But it’s clear the big traffic drivers are not pulling people in anymore.
While I overall agree this seems to be the case at first glance, I do notice that august there’s a huge drop that correlates with school starting up again. Probably need to compare to previous summers.
Edit: looks like it's still pretty huge even accounting for that
Good to know, i was having trouble on mobile with it. Thanks!
I'm glad I left that site. They just view us all as little addicts and have lost any semblance of caring about what made reddit work in the first place.
I just have a hard time believing this when the_donald started on reddit. The site has been an incubator for right wing actors for years. Even the infamous Stormfront recognized the opportunities for recruitment there years ago.
Reddit is driven by search traffic and the results got a lot worse since a lot of good posters quit. They lost the content but not the users yet, I think it’s just going to take a long time before they truly see the damage in their traffic statistics!
Since I am side loading Apollo still, Reddit overall is still good. I currently don’t see much change because of this. However, when my RedditAPI key is revoked and I’m unable to generate a new API key, there is no way I can keep using it. I’ve got 5 different Reddit apps on my phone, including Apollo, and they all suck.
Dude just ditch Reddit. They’re getting users to pay people to shitpost and are taking a cut, they also removed the ability to opt out of tracking for ads. All in like 3 days!
Well, Tiktok demotes china critical accounts and promotes china friendly ones, people who tried it came to the conclusion that’s it’s roughly by the factor 10 so they aren’t even hiding it!
But the alternatives aren’t as developed. Godot still isn’t great for 3D projects and Unreal is Epic and also has royalty fees like Unity tried to add.
Unreal only has a 5% fee on games that made over 1 million USD
Unity wanted to add a 0.20 USD tax for every download after you made 200K USD 200K users(which changes depending on how many downloads your game has and which plan you are using)
Units pricing method could have been easily exploited, game developers would have to pay for people pirating their games, if a free to play game reached those requirments, it could cost them more than the game made, giveaways would cost game developers money and all unity games would have to collect data
No, I’m well aware that Unity’s model is fucked up.
I’m just saying that I don’t consider Unreal a valid alternative, especially as it’s owned by Epic who have shown themselves to be far worse than anything Unity has done already, and there are no other 3D engines as good as Unity. I called out Unreal also just because people are saying that Unity shouldn’t charge any fees as they think fees are unfair, but then happily recommend Unreal.
Not saying necessarily to keep using it, I’m just saying it’s not as simple of a solution as just switching for a lot of devs.
OP, social media usage is down across the board. These platforms won’t truly die until the next cycle of growth. Autumn? Winter? Usually gaming goes up when the cold weather comes around. Perhaps we will see growth then. We ought to be making sure we make communities for each new game that comes out, if an instance creators goal is to attract a lot of people. If they prefer quality, well, keep on this course. Lemmy is amazing.
Usually gaming goes up when the cold weather comes around. Perhaps we will see growth then. We ought to be making sure we make communities for each new game that comes out, if an instance creators goal is to attract a lot of people.
Speaking of, wouldn’t that be a good time for a general games/gaming instance to spin up then to play host to those communities?
I’m on the fence on this one because on one hand, more content is always a good thing. On the other, more people will bring the attention of corporate capitalists
Its a heavy mixup, but either lemmy dies or its going to get better. Federation has seen a dramatic increase in usership, so I’m thinking its getting bigger. Its inevitable that capitalists are going to see us anyway. We just have to tell them to fuck off. I don’t really know what to do besides that lol.
I think as a format memes are very fun on TikTok cause they’re expected to always have a sound component so it engages more senses than just vision, just make a good algorithm
memes are fun on tiktok, that is true. Although as with all social media these days, the alg is too good, I hate going down rabbit holes for hours when I could be jogging or playing dnd with my brother.
It’s a Dictatorship’s Military Operation. The app’s software is more data theft than it is actually used to run the app. They take everything stored on your device, from photos to text history. All of it. If I were to rate all apps on the basis of harm, Tiktok is miles above anything else.
you’re a fool to believe they just gave up the power to control the country. I bet you think the USA is a democra- oh shit yeah you do think that too. Its a plutocracy babe. You dont live in democracy.
Also are you insinuating China doesn’t have a democracy, not is capable of self correction? You think westerners have some godgiven ability to be the bestest peoples in da world?
LMAO Bro the CCP is literally a one party system with a “president for life.”
Heres a fun thought, you acknowledge that the App does have that data collection software as it has been proven by many independent software reviews, so is it worth it for a person, no matter what other country they come from, to betray their own nation’s people and create security risks in order to view and post vines with music?
How does having one party rob the country of having a democracy. Democracies dont have to be your shitty splintered capitalist infighting mess you call governments. Not president for life, he can still be democratically removed from office, he just has no term limits. I think no term limits is more democratic anyway.
Heres a fun thought, you acknowledge that the App does have that data collection software as it has been proven by many independent software reviews, so is it worth it for a person, no matter what other country they come from, to betray their own nation’s people and create security risks in order to view and post vines with music?
So what, anything that would damage the US is good, I don’t care lol. Also the software may be in part owned by china, but the heads of the western tiktok division are made up of US national security “retirees” lol.
Having an actual dictator who can only be removed by his close peers makes China a lot more of an Oligopoly than a Communism, my dude. I think by strict definitions the USA is probably more socialist than the CCP.
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