I'm baffled by the glowing endorsements of TikTok on Hacker News of all places. TikTok content comes across as completely vapid. It's like the worst possible mashup of bad television and social media. As a company TikTok seems to have zero goals beyond increasing engagement.
> I'm baffled by the glowing endorsements of TikTok on Hacker News of all places.
Could it be addicts trying to justify their addiction to the world (and themselves)? It sounds like TikTok is even more successful at being addictive than previous social media drugs, maybe it's strong enough to hook people who weren't hooked by its predecessors.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and (to a lesser extent) YouTube are weapons of psychological warfare that have been optimised to spread political misinformation and outrage.
TikTok, on the other hand, is just hot chicks dancing, stupid memes and Shrugging Black Italian Man. It reminds me a lot of old YouTube in that regard.
I'm deep into exploring farming practices, a funny opthamologist and queer culture. All of which I am not exposed to in my regular life and are not shallow.
It's as deep as you want to make it. As vapid as you want to make it.
I get the temptation to write it off (I don't personally use TikTok daily), but to me this take feels similar to people who used to assume Twitter is just for people reporting what they ate for lunch. That might have been the case at the start but TikTok has _plenty_ of niche content, some vapid, some productive, which frankly depends on the media you engage with.
Indeed, every time I see a post on HN/reddit assuming TikTok is just people doing dances and other vapid content, it's almost from people who have never actually used TikTok.
As a non-user, I am genuinely curious about what are some concrete examples of productive contents?
From my understanding, the only format of communication on TikTok is videos with a short time limit. I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
> I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
This is actually one of the most refreshing things about TikTok. Content density. What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds.
The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
I went through some TikTok accounts that aim to be informational. Even for the basic type of people talking to the camera, the content density is indeed higher than some YouTube counterparts.
The problem I see is that there's an upper limit to the quantity of information even with this higher density. And that's a hard limit on the range of topics that this format can cover.
Furthermore, I don't think this can be solved by simply increase the time limit as well, since people can't maintain the same level of attention for a long period of time. Say the content needs 60s with max density. It usually needs to spread out to 120s with lower density for it to be understood better.
For the informational content I consume on YouTube, in a 10min video, the parts that can be removed are usually 30s of opening and 30s of closing. For the rest, though it has lower density than TikTok, I don't think it's possible to compress that much and the low density is in some sense necessary.
Of course, this is specific to how people use YouTube and TikTok. And though I am unlikely to use TikTok from this experience, I still appreciate your input.
>>>What YouTubers take 10 minutes to do, a competent TikToker gets across in 30 seconds. The platform itself encourages a maximization of information density.
I'm struggling to comprehend how German artillery tactics in WW2 can be competently covered in 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/3VY10gfnrTQ
> I'd imagine it is hard to convey much to be considered productive.
I have found some great TikTok tutorials on iPhone photo techniques. For example, hold the phone upside down and on the ground, pour water in front of it, and you get an amazing PoV / reflection shot. The clips that demo'd this were all less than 30 seconds long. There are other tutorials on tool use and knots, by way of example, from which I have learned useful things.
These short-form tutorials are a breath of fresh air compared with bloated YouTube equivalents and their tedious intros. And you can save them to your camera roll.
There are a lot of tech-related accounts. There is also a lot of marketing, ux-design. Some examples :
- @therubberduckiee
- @loewhaley
- @tony.aube
- @cassidoo
- @systems_analyst
There is also urban design tiktok with @mrbarricade.
Let's also be clear that the goal of the app is to entertain and I think it does this really well and cheaply. Then sometimes you learn something that you might use in your work or personal life.
I'm not who you replied to, but I find it hard to believe that you went to an account with the username "systems_analyst", who posts videos on networking and cybersecurity in an informative manner, and decided it was "aspirational meme garbage".
On HN, I give people who I disagree with the benefit of the doubt and assume they're always intelligent. But that doesn't extend itself to believing they're always arguing in good faith. I find it unfathomable that a critically thinking person truly believes a social network with close to a billion users is devoid of any useful content. I "feel" like you're trying to be contrarian and edgy for the sake of being so.
I think my earlier Twitter analogy is apt here. Of course you can't expect TikTok to be on par with Coursera. Similarly, you don't go to Twitter for dissertations. These social networks are entertainment first, and their algorithms and restricted formats lend themselves to a certain type of content. But the natural evolution of social networks at scale is that people easily discover new content that is legitimately useful to them, or find a community based on their professional or side interests.
I went to the #softwareengineering hashtag on TikTok and very quickly found a few helpful accounts. You can do this with any hashtag. Frankly, software dev TikTok feels more friendly than HN at a cursory glance.
TikTok's audience age skews younger. I'm not saying these profiles will be helpful to you personally, but if I were in high school with a passing interest in development and got exposed to TikTok-style entertainment/info content, I probably would've started coding a lot earlier.
Yeah, it isn't really comparable to Facebook or Reddit or Youtube. They really do different things. TikTok seems most optimized for the passive receiver of vapid content use case. You can actually do exactly that with reddit if you browse without logging in and never click a comment thread. The top 1% (and bottom 1%) of interesting TikToks end up on Reddit anyway. Facebook/Insta are explicitly about your life and the lives of your acquaintances. TikTok seems more like competition for Netflix really.
TikTok is the latest social media on its ascent. Perhaps they are impressed by its ability to keep the pigs eating. Or maybe they really like short videos. Hard to say.
Uh... yes? I'm sorry, but if you go to tiktok for deep content you're in the wrong place. If you want deep content, you read a book. Or use a carefully curated blog list. Or read scientific papers.
I go to tik tok purely for enjoyment, and for that it works.
Yeah, some of the content looks like it's "teaching" you. But it's doing it in the same way Discovery Channel is (was) teaching you. We find learning certain stuff to be entertaining. If I really wanted to learn about history or biology of physics I'd find other, much better ways. But I still like it when I see a video on how black holes bend light and make it orbit a couple of times before letting it go. It's cool. But it's still entertainment, and that's 100% ok.
LE: And I make sure to like 90% of videos with pretty girls, just because I like tik tok to be entertaining and I never want to curate it to blandness. (It's very gender equalitarian btw, I've seen feeds of my women friends and they're full of sexy men).
You have to use it a bit and interact with it to find the content you like. My guess is that people who like it have done this and people that don't haven't yet found their niche.
I think this might be it. I remember my first interactions with Tik Tok to be full of teens lip-syncing songs while preening on camera. I'm still not a regular user, but now whenever I open the app I actually see people from all walks of life.
Sure it's vapid and I'm glad I've aged out of feeling I need to participate in any of these things.
But it's great to see competition with SV, competition FAANG, competition with the US even. It's not a solution, but it's a breath of fleetingly fresh error for everyone sick of endless monopoly, acquisitions, and "tech nationalism for me, free trade and dependency for thee".
I just downloaded it and tried the first 100 TikToks after expressing my interests explicitly and putting 'personalised' ads and app sharing on... I know it takes a while to get an algorithm going but, I was thoroughly bored with all of the content.
I also saw a lot of content I'd already seen before. A lot of people mentioned they see TikTok content on YT, reddit, FB. I also see it the other way around, including plenty of classic meme content from years ago before TikTok even existed.
Can the people who're so glowing about tiktok please post their top 3 interesting accounts? At this point I'm not sure whether I'm looking at other stuff, or that my judgement of the same stuff is just different.
I started using TikTok for a couple of weeks now and started to find it fascinating, the communities that are built around the bubbles the algorithm creates are quite interesting and have discussion between themselves. It's easy to reach out to actual subject mater experts for non-technical stuff, people you wouldn't typically see on HN or Reddit.
Now does it bring __value__ to my life? No
Will I keep participating and creating content just to engage in these niche communities? Yes
You find it fascinating and interesting, you're discovering niche communities and engaging with them. You (presumably) enjoy creating content. That's value. Fun, entertainment and communication all have value.
I'm with you here. I was under the impression that there is a general consensus (backed by scientific studies?) in hackernews that social media consumption is detrimental to mental health.
Also I always read negative comments about TikTok on YouTube and Reddit. I've only read praise for TikTok on hackernews.
Reddit and YouTube are very hive-mindy. HN users tend to actually try things themselves instead of just consuming the trendy mass opinion (though they do this too to some degree), which is why we might be seeing this distinction.
TikTok content is precisely what you want it to be. Turns out when people are tired and looking for quick entertainment they aren't looking for deep philosophical questions, though you'll have no trouble finding plenty of that on TikTok if that's your thing.
Honestly, I don't use it but my gf uses it and it's far and away better than any other social media I've seen. At least half the content I see when we scroll through together is good.
