Comment by thorum 4 days ago
Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
I think a lot of people fall for the feels authentic and confuse it with authentic. Also a lot of people cant tell the difference.
> A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss real authenticity because they don't have the tools to recognize it.
Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you actually have them?
You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own personal model to maximize the volume of content you swallow.
Because the internet is filled by slop shit by people trying to make a buck from it.
It's like saying I don't know how to recognize non-spam when I end up blocking 99.99% of all mail showing up at the server.
I do recognize non-spam, it's just that I know most of it is crap.
I don’t know that it’s people trying to make a buck - and that seems a bit silly of a thing to say to begin with. I presume you try to make your buck doing whatever it is you do.
What I will say is that it’s definitely a different form of expression from what we’ve had beyond recent history and - at the same time - artists, photographers, painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have been trying to live off their form of expression for a while now too.
My TikTok For You Page is almost entirely made up of Veritasium videos, sci-fi authors, some standup, lock picking lawyer and "how is it made" style videos. I don't get any of that brain-rot slop. If I did, I wouldn't use it. Which would be a slight improvement to my life. Although I'm not negatively impacted by the current level of my TikTok use, I can definitely see it takes an extra level of willpower to stop (i.e. close the app, put down the phone) than almost any other of my extra curriculars. From enjoyable hobbies to other fun time wasting activities such as gaming. Barring Factorio which is the biggest time warp I've ever encountered, with an almost perfect dopamine extracting game loop.
The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
These videos are often not that short. They're often broken into several parts and can be 30 minutes or longer.
The true danger of TikTok is the "wonder what will be next?" which is an infinitely rewarding question.
>The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop onto your brain?
The funny thing is I think you're misunderstanding the scale. You wife likes videos that are not-so-obviously staged. Somone else would get purely staged videos. Someone else would get actual real videos. If you like real pilots landing planes on runways where the wheels make sudden noises, it will give you that.
There are tens of billions of pieces of content there. TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things that the most people like, but it's not the only content there, that's just common sense and good business (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid
Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though
YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff
so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(
> the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.
I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."
Connecting people to other people, to life changing art, places and things that they end up loving and wouldn’t know about otherwise? That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
I think you and others here are focusing on the stereotypical “influencer” faking authenticity for views but there are literally millions of human beings posting on TikTok about all kinds of things. A lot of them are pretty cool. Just click “not interested” on influencers and click like on the stuff you want to see instead.
I think it's fair to say after a decade or so social media does not "connect people to other people", what you are describing are parasocial relationships. People are lonelier than ever, not just in America but worldwide.
Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and knowledge, after that the space of available content quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of resources and experience. If you're still relying on an algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to dive further.
Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
> Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place, another medium, a different author, actor, photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you, and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things they learned decades prior.
“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
> Connecting people to other people, to life changing art, places and things that they end up loving and wouldn’t know about otherwise?
Does your opinion change if you understand that none of that is remotely real or actually exists?
You have an app that is designed to feed you Potemkin villages, and here you are praising their real estate value.
> That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
That's like praising psychosis for being one of the best mental illnesses, and concluding that you'd like to see more of it.
> Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.
There's a spectrum between Vaudeville and sharing family recipes. YouTube's MrBeast is on one end of that spectrum.
This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
This is what was meant.
> This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
still confused. Is this supposed to be an example of “bad” or “good” content?
Because I can’t (perhaps due to lack of empathy.. idk) imagine why anyone would want to waste their time watching stuff like that.
It's pretty creative and funny stuff, imo. If you consider that to be "good" or "bad" that's up to you I guess.
The way people choose to spend their lives is largely up to them, I'm not sure it's good to be labeling things as a "waste of time" when they're deriving something from it that you simply do not understand. Particularly when they do it in a way that is pretty harmless.
I don't know if you have pets, but if you spend time observing them you'll see most of what they do is simply letting time pass and for them, that's enough. Believe it or not, for many people the same is the case. Finding meaning in the acts we do is a personal endeavour so I think rather than telling people they're wasting their time instead try to understand what they're seeing in such things that you don't see.
I think a lot of people find creative acts very rewarding, there's an element of surprise that comes from it. The unexpected can be enjoyable. I think one of the reasons why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful is that it really succeeds in giving people the feeling of constant surprise.
Personally, I've found really inspiring art on Tiktok, as well as new music and also a lot of simple but engaging content in german (which I'm trying to learn).
> This is what was meant.
I think you inadvertently made an entirely different point: it's all fake, but you just swallow some content acritically believing it's something personal that speaks to you.
In the end, you're just complaining that some sirens are fake but others really do love you.
'authenticity' in the sense of content made by normal people without any strong goals other than 'some other people might like that' (and for some, maybe eventually getting some income from monetization) rather than highly produced content with the goal of reaching the largest possible audience and extracting the largest possible amount of money from that, which is what reels feels like. if you want to see that type of 'more authentic' content, tiktok's approach to populating your feed will be much more responsive to that than instagram's. there also seem to be a lot more people creating content on tiktok aimed at that level.
I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.
The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.