This might be a good example of feature creep for no reason. They already added a weird “multi video” post thing where you can scroll right on top of scrolling left and I feel this is another step into overloading the UI. The big tiktok of 2019/2020 was magically simplistic where you could basically only swipe full content in a tinder-like fashion, I fear this is another step away from that.
Aside from live video showing in my For You feed, all the changes I can think of have been good. Longer video lengths have resulted in some content that previously would've only been on YouTube. Horizontal slideshows have become a mini-medium all to themselves. If this text feature is available on the web (as all of the other features seem to be?), this puts TikTok ahead of Instagram's Threads.
I am guessing this is a feature aimed to be a more casual way of "tweeting", given that Twitter is under the rubble right now, and competitors want to take their best chances and see what works
Seems like an effort to pull more from the Twitter space. I'm not sure how well it will work in the end.
I've found that lately, I'm less likely to even engage on social media at all. At least half of the account posts I see (at least in comments to more popular origin posts) are from sock puppet accounts. Facebook groups that I participate in are generally higher quality overall, even though they're a bit ham-fisted when it comes to content moderation. Reddit is/was all over the map, from great communities to absolutely no point in trying to participate if you don't match the cult of the given group.
Mostly search+discover... You can generally search on a topic of interest, and find a group that covers it (or several), the up/down side is some groups only allow visibility to members, so you can't get a feel for that group without joining first. While I appreciate the usefulness, I'm less inclined to want to stay within Facebook's walls, so to speak.
I don't use TikTok myself, but I'm curious how text posts will be prioritized in people's feeds compared to standard video posts.
My understanding is that (at least on paper) there's a minor feedback loop where getting a lot of views on a video = video is recommended to more people = more engagement = more recommendations. And conversely, if too many people scroll past a video without watching it, that video gets de-recommended in the same fashion.
So now we throw text posts into the mix. Even if a lot of these text posts have music attached, I'd imagine people on TikTok are way more likely to stop scrolling and watch a video than stop scrolling and read a 1000-character post; unless TikTok's content recommendations specifically account for this discrepancy, I could see text posts getting drowned out pretty fast.
There are a lot of text posts already on TikTok, but they're just done as videos or slideshows. And some are very popular. Text memes or jokes or "witty observations" often are in this realm.
And it also turns out that these are shared quite often -- which is another metric that TikTok's algorithm uses.
Videos with lots of text hijack the algorithm a bit - it counts what proportion of the video is watched when evaluating its effectiveness, and if you put a giant wall of text on a 7-sec sound clip, you can get an artificially high watch-through rate with not-particularly-good content.
Text without images in the background seems objectively less attention grabbing, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just keep using captions over video.
Which platforms are TikTok better than? Because I can't think of any. It's junk food for the brain, and I've heard even teenagers tell me that themselves. I think in the future TikTok will be looked back at not unlike the tobacco industry in the 20th century.
You should actually try tiktok instead of regurgitating the opinions of sinophobic nationalists. The algorithm reflects yourself better than any other app, so whether you get junk is entirely up to what you choose to watch.
The video algorithm is a lot more precise. If you spend ~3 seconds on 2 girl scout videos before swiping on, and less than 1 second on body building, you suddenly get a surge of girl scout videos like the whole app is sponsored by them. Someone else never noticed a single video in the subject. It feels magical that the app happens to have thousands of videos for your specific likes and none for content you don't like. I wouldn't be surprised if it went down to measuring your attention to a hundredth of a second
Saying all that, if you read 1000 characters, according to the TikTok way of sorting, you're already hooked. There will be plenty of posts where you swipe on after ~10 characters (in terms of swiping on within X hundreds of a second)
People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text
> People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text
I predict a lot of high-quality, well-researched text posts doing great on tiktok
Given how a significant, significant majority of content on TikTok is propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation, I see text posts doing as great as a wet fart in a hot tub.
This one surprises me. TikTok is so... different of a platform. I find it utterly jarring and revolting, my wife and kid find it fun and engaging, all for the same reasons. It seems like you're either going to get engaged in a video rabbit hole, or turn away.
In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory.
Threads at least made some sense, as Instagram is still a more slow paced, time to reflect type platform. TikTok less so.
A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments.
I think there's probably a way that text can be built into the app that works alongside what's there and makes it a more interesting experience than just looking at screenshots.
This is very untrue. It's just your personalized feed that is filled with that, because you happened to watch just enough of them to let the algorithm know you're interested. Other people see one of these videos and just swipe down immediately and never see one again. Please don't try to guesstimate the amount of content on tiktok in any given category just by your personal experience, because it's heavily biased because of just how the platform works.
You can scroll through the "Discover" tab which has depersonalized trends across the whole app. I just took a quick scroll through and it seems like at least ~5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen. There's been at least a few recent trends over the past few weeks that have been almost entirely text (beige flags, all the greenscreen text trends, #groupchat, etc).
Anecdotally, I also see clusters of text-only posts every few weeks, even though I always either pause to read or scroll immediately through.
I would argue that "5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen" is a huge moving of the goal post from the original claim in this sub-thread: "just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments".
I definitely used to get videos with walls of text that are obviously trying to game the algorithm by getting you to read an essay to increase watch time. Once I habitually scrolled away from them I stopped getting them. That isn't even related to the claim of voices reading screenshots of tweets or reddit comments.
I absolutely believe that videos exist where there are text-to-speech readings of tweets or reddit comments and that the commenter referencing them sees a decent amount of them in their own feed. But I do not believe they represent a "decent amount" of the majority of TikTok users feeds.
I guess it depends on what you consider a "decent amount". Within the overall context of whether text posts would be popular or not on TikTok, 5-10% of globally-trending posts being text-heavy seemed like a decent amount to me but YMMV.
But, you are right that I was talking about text posts in general rather than directly responding to the videos about reading text from reddit/twitter that this subthread was discussing though. I see those often but I don't see them currently trending.
There has to be something about TikTok algorithm that it won’t work with quick readers/addicts/those in “the spectrum”. It wasn’t TTS but last I tried I too got series of uninteresting content. The system just didn’t register my fulfillment.
> A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments.
Not for me, I get exactly zero videos like that. I always chuckle when I read someone say "Most videos on TikTok ..." since they seem totally oblivious to the fact that there isn't a single TikTok experience. You get what you get and I get what I get.
It reminds me of an older guy I know who stated in front of a bunch of young men "All of the videos on TikTok are scantily clad 13 year old girls doing dirty dances". It was second-hand cringe embarrassing.
I think baby boomers, gen-x and a decent portion of millennials still think of social media as being broadly targeted like TV stations used to be. Even YouTube doesn't come close to the insane customization of TikTok.
Ever heard of first impressions? Not everybody is going to spend time tweaking some invisible algorithm. If it doesn't show them what they're looking for, why should they stick around? It's not like people sign up to Tiktok to keep in touch with friends.
Somebody new to YouTube is going to think there's nothing on it besides Mr Beast, iPhone reviews and culture war nonsense, because that's what the front page shows to a signed out user. I imagine Tiktok is similar.
> Not everybody is going to spend time tweaking some invisible algorithm
Well, there are exactly two options with TikTok. Either you use the app or you don't. If you don't use the app then you probably shouldn't be making definitive statements about what content is on the platform.
If you do use the app then it will quickly (I mean within less than 1 hour of use) customize itself to your preferences. There is no "tweaking". Just by interacting with the app (swiping up on videos, viewing comments, allowing videos to replay, etc.)
So if you have been on TikTok for roughly 1 hour or more then you are getting a significantly customized experience that almost no one else on the platform is going to get. That isn't true on YouTube or really any other kind of media experience that existed prior to it. That is why older internet users can't really reason about it effectively and tend to make statements that sound out-of-touch to younger users.
I find basically all social media sites too confusing to use, starting with when I first attempted to use Facebook around 2010 and couldn't figure out where the hell anything I posted "went" or where anything I saw was "coming from" and couldn't figure out the distinctions between various pages or types of posts. I'm told by a longer-time user buddy that the UI made a lot more sense in the early, .edu days.
I spent years not realizing Instagram posts could have more than one image. Now they have videos, too—are mostly videos, even—which just seems wrong to me.
Twitter confuses the hell out of me. Tiktok is constant frustration, if I try to use it.
I swear, I'm not even that old and was definitely not old when I first encountered a lot of these sites. IDK how they're so successful when I find their UIs totally unusable. Must be a me-problem, I guess. I manage to figure out shit like Paradox Games UIs without too much trouble, and they're regarded as exceptionally dense and hard to learn, so it's not a general problem of mine with all UIs.
I recently came to the realisation that I've been trying to rediscover h2g2 ever since I left it. It's the only social media site which has ever made good sense to me. I'm currently on Mastodon, and disliking it intensely.
>In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory.
It will most certainly live in a different tab than the main video feed.
Right now, the tabs are: Video | Shopping | IM | Account
It'll just become: Video | Text | Shopping | IM | Account
Threads was also aiming to fill a vacuum left by Twitter. A vacuum that I suspect doesn't exist for TikTok users in the same way.
There's a category of user that wants short form video, who started on Vine, did not move to Twitter after Vine was killed, and then ended up on TikTok. TikTok's success seems to be in part specifically because those users did not want (at least originally) a text focused social network, even one that had reasonable UX around short form video.
As someone who used to use TikTok, I do laugh when people describe it as a place where there are "people shuffle dancing". Yes it might have been what initially made the platform successful, but it far far beyond that now.
It shows really short videos which means if I like it it's over anyways. The search is basically broken and trying to find specific videos on topics is impossible. The videos I want more of never come.
It's like a typical early internet video: a 15 seconds video labelled wink where someone does a closeup of an eye and winks. Cool when that was a technical achievement kind of lame now.
Oh, not the content of the videos, more the noise and autoplay nature of it. I was searching for a better word, but landed there.
FWIW, I feel the same way about Shorts. Apparently, if the last thing you watched was a Short, the next time you open the YouTube app, it just starts playing some random video. I loathe this feature.
So basically all the social media platforms are converging feature-wise. Twitter/X is leaning into video, TikTok is adding text posts, Meta now has a Twitter clone.
I think its less a race/ethnicity thing, but more of two other things:
1. Age. It's just really jarring to many older people.
2. How cultured you fancy yourself to be. If you're someone who values reading 100 pages of a novel to just get into the story, then you will find TikTok to be vacuous. And honestly, that's probably a fair assessment. When I watch TikTok videos I give them about 5 -- maybe 10 seconds. I don't apply this same bar to other media, but I can imagine this is really off=putting for some.
I think the creation and exploration of TikTok is great, I also think that it needs to be explicitly decoupled from Bytedance. Even with the creators on the platform, I think its a net-negative for the world due to its addictive nature.
IME most of the content I get from white creators is political in nature, for now. I somehow drifted away from BookTok into witch-don't-kale-my-vibe-tok. I'm too lazy to be intentional with the search function so I'm hoping I will eventually get back to the part of TikTok that's talking about something besides politics.
EDIT: I want to throw out there that Belatown is the greatest soap opera of all time. Its a TikTok exclusive.
I've found the algorithm adjusts quickly -- I'd argue too quickly sometimes. I watched one video analyzing the USWNT game against Vietnam and I felt like I was bombarded with women's soccer videos. And I like women's soccer -- but not that much.
> Edit: Would love to get some feedback along with the flurry of downvotes.
Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote.
That's like me saying Jews don't like steak based on my experience.. of a sample size of one Jew who is a vegetarian.
I personally know several folks who are Indian, Mexican and various South American nationalities who also deeply detest tiktok. A few Koreans too.
The best advice I can make is to maybe get a bigger friend group if you're going to try and make large generalized statements from it. 500 people is a good minimum size.
> Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote.
It's very unfortunate that you (and presumably others) read it like that. I am not making an argument or a generalized statement in my post.
If in doubt, you can also check my post history to see that I do not have a history of making any such posts.
I am expressing curiosity about how the recommendation algorithm might be tailoring content not just based on interests but on the inferred ethnic backgrounds of people (because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other).
I'm open to feedback on how this could have been phrased differently.
As a basic rule, you can't use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. That my particular Korean friends like the cheesesteak place up the street says nothing about Koreans, cheesesteaks or that restaurant.
This is because at a basic level my friend group just doesn't look like any kind of general population. If nothing else it's geographically restricted, a tiny subset of classes and interests - and likely indirectly education levels and income.
> because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other
They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income.
And yes, if you target anime, you'll select the Japanese and if you target Webtoons you'll select mostly Korean and Chinese.
Your flaw here is not your language but the direction of your reasoning. You can't reason from the specific anecdata up to population level - "my Black friends like tiktok therefore tiktok must target Black people". That's a "the parking lot is wet, it must be raining" sort of statement.
You CAN reason down. "Tiktok really does a good job showing content from Black influencers, they probably have a large Black audience".
> As a basic rule, you can't use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends.
I think you missed the point again, because my post was not trying to use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. It was an expression of curiosity and a desire to see data, which at least in my mind is quite opposed to drawing assumptions (or making an argument, or a generalized statement as you had previously written).
Nevertheless, this is an interesting post with some good information and I appreciate the time you took to write it out.
> They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income.
This part in particular was very informative; I'll be doing some more reading on this thanks to your explanation.
>The only people I know personally (ie. that I have an inter-personal relationship with) who complain about TikTok are white. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of people from ethnic groups originating in MENA/SWANA that I know personally are extremely positive about TikTok and the content it enables them to both create and be exposed to.
>I wonder how much the algorithm tailoring content to different ethnic groups has to do with these impressions.
A simpler explanation is that white people are generally more anti-China, and not something to do with the algorithm.
Problem with tiktok is there’s a lot of misinformation, and I don’t mean the political ones, no just pure technical stuff, so many times I see some videos of kids claiming technical stuff and spreading a lot of false claims that I am seriously thinking to make an account just to refute such false claims, and because of the userbase is a little uneducated with short attention spans, it spreads quickly with the mindset if “tiktok said it then it’s true”!
How many more platforms do we need where users can post all sorts of media and follow other’s content? Every social media site copies features from another, and they are all basically the same item wrapped in a different package. When will people wake up and return to RSS?
RSS was by techies, and only ever used by techies. Uncontrolled news feeds lacking data collection doesn't sell enough for the giants.
Also RSS only thrives if sites put in the effort to support it. Even still, the majority of online users are on social media platforms, not "surfing the www" like the gold ol' days.
