Comment by elzbardico

Switzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.

It depends what you interact with. I tried it fresh today and it quickly decided I'm a Berliner muslim who likes Nigerian food because I lingered for a minute on something. That interest graph is very fast and volatile.

Uhh... that's kind of how these algorithms work. I presume you interact (i.e. don't scroll past) with a lot of the English posts. It's going to index on that and show you more English content. When I'm abroad, I might see a few posts in their native language but the algorithm will revert to showing English posts about the city/country once it realizes I'm not really jiving with Portuguese posts, for example.

i mean, we all have the algorithm tailored to what we want to see, so the parent comment here is kind of a moot point, right?

I've never used tiktok... Do you mean 12AM (midnight)? Or are people commonly in the habit of mid-afternoon naps?

12PM is Noon. Did you mean Midnight?

I would believe if someone said it was completely organic. It's just how Internet is and how social graphs build up. The typical American notion that the Internet is nearly 100% dominated by American English socio-cultural platform and English is the foundational language of the world's all cognitive processing is just an annoying megalomaniac hallucination.

English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.

Considering the algorithm did not crawl out of the primordial ooze unbidden by man I am going to guess the former.

The algo learned "by itself", but humans set a objetive to optimize and then implemented it to do so as well as it they could.

So essentially both I guess?

Why is that the question? If it learned to do it by itself it still is being allowed to do it by humans.

You don't deserve the downvotes from the immature peeps around here. Your question is 100% valid.

I would lean for the latter, the simple explanation may be that people just prefer local content.

Might not be available in Canada that much longer https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tiktok-ban-canada-operation...

The vidoes that I see are pretty much spread across the world, not a huge US influence, doubting any shock will happen.

in Morocco most of the adults speak French and Arabic, so when they need to speak to an Englisher they get some kids over to help because they all speak English from TikTok

I think it really depends on the size of the population speaking a language.

For instance my partner sees almost only spanish content, and a huge majority is from latin america.

We are living in Europe.

The algo bends to your interests. But it's trivial to test the default reach if you ever post a video. They show stats for viewer location.

You can even find guides by people trying to make their phone seem american so they can reach us audiences.

Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?

Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic

You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.

See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

Your link doesn't appear to work

I actually had to check if TikTok was subject to the French protection laws on localized media quotas. I see it applies to Netflix et al, but not directly to TikTok.

Xiaohongshu is generally known as RedNote outside of China.

Xiaohingshu is widely used outside China... by Chinese.

My experience in the UK is that the whole Chinese community is on it for anything (discussions, classifieds...) instead of Facebook, Insta, etc.

Yeah, if "widely used" means that multiple nations and cultures use the service, then they are not widely used.

Yeah, me neither. Some analysis said the absolute number is large but the percentage is still small. And the migration is more about protesting. Xiaohongshu will need to come up with better monetization schemes too.

I think it will be a temporary phenomenon. Tiktok people arrived on RedNote last week and were jaw-droppingly amazed at videos of flashy modern Chinese cities, natural wonders (Guilin mountains), beautifully dressed young men and women, tasty food, Luigi fandom, and cute cats.

For many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China. They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.

However I think that the US-based population of Tiktok refugees will subside once the novelty effect has worn off. Probably shrink by half in a month. Hopefully there will remain a positive lingering effect.

The very first versions, IIRC. Now they have diverged completely.

I became so interested in ancient Chinese mythology after playing black myth wukong. Also my cousin is watching cDramas all the time and she intends to marry Chinese guy… So I think the soft power is there already, whether we like it or not. but I think it’s good to have competing content instead of being fed whatever powers that be think is good fur us

Government can't create culture and art anymore than a tech company can. They can only allow it to grow and spread, or block it.

Taiwanese shows are better if you want to learn Chinese. They speak clearly and don’t speak fast like China shows.

Three Body is a science fiction television series and I think sci-fi often involves complex vocabulary and abstract concepts, making it a tough choice for language learners

Friends is great, but still pretty advanced as English learning goes, with fast speech, and lots of slang and US/90s specific references.

I think this is one of the main reason Japan gets overwhelmed by tourists every year, their culture has so many fans.

> most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.

since we're here, what are some of the least bad modern Sci-fi/Horror movies/TV shows from China?

There are many good Chinese language films, not all of them Cantonese. You're forgetting about Taiwanese directors (Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and mainland sixth generation directors (Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye). There are also works by less known authors such as Bi Gan, Hu Bo, Xinyuan Zheng Lu - very unique and impressive.

One should not throw around ignorant blanket statements. There's a wealth of amazing Chinese language movie made outside of Hong-Kong, and yes, good artists can exist under authoritarian regimes, a prominent example of which would be Soviet cinema and literature.

I'm not sure what subsidized EVs have to do with cultural influence.

> What do you mean by "global pop culture" here?

Encountering a Chinese song playing a cafe in Latin America. A popular movie with global appeal. Or even people being aware of cultural trends. I feel like culturally, China is a bit of a black box.

China's pop culture having moderate success on directly boarding countries is not really proof that I am wrong. Given it's size, i'd say that's an example of how it fails.

I only know of Wukong, are there other ones worth checking out?

The fact that the IP for that amazing book was bogged down in political and mafia-connected controversy, delaying it's global spread for almost a decade, that all kind of proves my point.

Chinese nation state hacking groups also literally break into American Fortune 500 companies and US aerospace/defense companies to steal R&D and tech to then use themselves + give to private Chinese industries. That sure does help them a ton when they dont have to do any research and can just steal and copy instead.

I don't know well Beijing Enlight Pictures makes for a Chinese Disney, but I will say that Big Fish & Begonia was a good show.

"Soul Land" got animated? Which series? I hope the first, the second (or third?) series with that million-year-old white caterpillar was awful.

In any case: that manhua is one of the least bad stories, but the singular focus on "advancing to the next level" (incredibly popular in Chinese stories, for some reason) gets quite dull after a while. It's just that "Soul Land" manages to somewhat mask it; reading much of anything else Chinese is like going up an endless staircase (get trashed; level-up; reclaim face by trashing the baddies; loop).

This definitely wins by numbers - my local anime site features chinese 3d shows too and there’s a lot of them. But the viewership isn’t that good still, judging by the comments and voting.

Those two share a border, how does that show global reach? I would be surprised if a country didn’t influence its neighbors in some ways.

They are yes but I'd say that the Korean ones are even more popular.

I don't buy this narrative, even as a Chinese American.

There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about people travelling the most beautiful parts of China. Free for everyone to consume.

Chinese movies/shows just kind of suck, especially compared to the quality of Kdramas and anime.

Do you have any concrete examples of Chinese culture elements as popular as anime that is "supressed" in the US?

Suppression can only go so far against really impressive works. Consider how even the Iron Curtain had trouble keeping them out, and today's USA has no such walls, but instead, an impressive cultural industry of its own. (Or was that your point ?)

I think they meant that because content is siloed already by language barriers, the only ecosystem that would be affected by the removal of US users is the English-speaking subsystem.

That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.

2/3 of the global population doesn’t speak English.

Douyin is TikTok. Before all the drama started, it was the same software powered by most of the same backend servers.

> videos appear genuine and wholesome

That doesn’t mean they aren’t hyper-optimized for monetization, though

Sometimes dreams are all they have - especially if they're young.

I think we have to understand the reality that the economy today is not what it once was, not even close. I think a lot of people are looking to the influence trade since they see the corporate / political / economic future as failing them and they want to carve out something on their own while the getting is good and while they still can. Sure some just want to be famous but others appear to have a very realistic view of their prospects both as an influencer and elsewhere.

This was covered in a recent podcast. Apparently TikTok classifies videos on many more factors than e.g. Youtube and other US companies. China can do this because they have a cheap pool of many users who can perform this activity.

The podcaster felt that with AI capabilities getting better day by day (maybe - that's another discussion) that this multi factor classification could be automated. It seems not to have been done yet AFAIK.

You'd think with all the H1Bs the US is importing some of those could bring in some recommendation engine expertise.

The truth is that the recommendation engine is power and people drawn to power in the US were too quick to abuse it driving out the old hands - and once institutional knowledge is lost it's hard to get back.

I'm really at loss at how bad Google is at algorithms considering how pioneering they have been in selecting engineers based on their algorithmic skills and their immense contributions to the whole ML sector.

I can let Spotify play on its own for hours and it will be just right...Even with songs I know nothing about, it's just very good.

I tried Tik Tok once and I could see how easily it could pick content.

But Youtube and Youtube Music are a disaster. Youtube Music is a decent service, but it's hard to get suggested anything really.

Youtube Shorts are a disaster. Sure I like the Sopranos, I find some Joe Rogan's interview interesting and sure I like the NBA, but that's virtually all it feeds me, even if I start scrolling away to other topics.

I wonder if it's more of a deactivation pending XYZ, with a readiness to flip the on-switch back on if there's a policy change in the U.S. (which it seems like there might be).

True enough but I don't think that will be fast either. The main reason to update would be features and they can keep the old version of any APIs up to support US customers. Other than that the only reason they would have to update is any breaking changes in Android/iOS which are a lot rarer these days afaik since they're both so mature as OSs.