Comment by elzbardico

This hasn't been my experience, using TikTok from Switzerland, I almost exclusively see English language, with a focus on my interests

My experience is that it serves you the content that you spent time watching and engaging with.

And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to

I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.

Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"

The majority of the content feels regional, though.

I don't think it does, I don't see any single content from my country's language. Tiktok is very good at adapting the content to you.

Canada and potentially the UK are gonna be having the biggest shock I guess. Potentially Australia too?

The question is, was this a conscious human design decision or did the algorithm learn to do that by itself?

As an American in the US, I get quite a bit of foreign and foreign language content under For You.

This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.

If its like Reels (I dont use tiktok) as soon as you are in France its only French content. Same for youtube.

Source?

My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.

TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.

Are Weibo and Xiaohongshu used widely outside of China? Given the names alone I'd imagine their adoption is fairly limited to China.

> creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization

Seems people are already mass migrating to Rednote. I’m not sure how that plays out though.

Re. copycats -- VK was also a blatant copycat of Facebook, down to copy-pasted CSS styles.

> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture

The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.

Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.

Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.

There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.

As someone who wants to learn Chinese, I think about it all the time. Watching Chinese shows just isn't as fun for whatever reason. I was telling my wife the other day I have met so many people who credit Friends for why they can speak English.

That's soft power right there.

I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol

For better or worse, I think CCP has long been on the backfoot in international propaganda just because what passes for persuasive narratives in authoritarian contexts falls flat to global audiences fluent in western entertainment and media culture.

Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.

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

I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.

It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.

Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.

The only good Chinese language films were all filmed in Hong Kong, directed by people like Wong Kar-Wai. In the Mood for Love is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.

Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.

I'd say that in the last two years China has advanced quite a big step with video-games.

As a Chinese American, this is the real reason people don't know about China.

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

Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.

The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.

The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.

“Chinese movies” are popular in Vietnam for example, so not fair to say they have no global reach.

True that. My wife watched a few Chinese dramas, but they're quite boring compared to k-dramas or japanese shows. I find them annoying and full of propaganda. Only the historical ones are borderline interesting. Also the CCP crackdown on celebrities didn't help.

By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.

I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.

One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.

I think you are a bit too premature: China has at least one(usually dozens) competitor for literally everything America has. You just don't hear about everything in the US.

Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.

Tesla -> BYD

Google -> Baidu

Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee

IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX

Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures

They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_(2019_film)

Some great info here [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2J0pRJSToU

Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?

Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?

Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.

I'm resentful for not having BYD here to offer affordable vehicles. The vast numbers of people who are now boxed out of the middle class could desperately use the help of a vehicle that doesn't cost them $700 a month.

[dead]

Or perhaps you haven't encountered Chinese content because of soft suppression of the content from within the US bubble

> For who? UK users?

Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.

> TikTok users who use the Chinese version

The what now? There are no Chinese nationals using TikTok. It's banned there. Like it's now banned in the US.

its fantastic for canada

Ah yes, USA, UK and China. The 3 countries that exist.

If so, good riddance. The good point of TikTok is that the videos appear genuine and wholesome. Not the hyper-optimized for monetization crap YouTube Shorts show you. I much prefer the videos with kids goofing around on icy streets over the American narrator telling me some bs about some great baseball player.

> it'll kill their dreams.

They can dream new dreams. I didn't become an astronaut—and realized I didn't actually want to become one, either.

Hopefully the US tech industry is not so schlerotic that they're unable to clone it and offer a competitive alternative. Given TikTok has demonstrated there's a huge amount of money to be made in that space. Although given how awful Google Shorts and Reels' recommendation algorithms are in comparison, maybe there really will be no replacement.

The data must be hosted in the US. Oracle will have to shutdown their servers.

Although TikTok has said they are gearing up to shut the service down.

It probably prevents them from distributing updates though.

>The gold in TR has always been its algorithm.

Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.

YouTube Shorts is terrible. YouTube clearly wanted to have some answer to short-form video but without putting much effort into it.

Instagram Reels is a bit better but it feels very "sanitized" and fake.

And China!

I’d worry that such a platform would be used to reverse social trends unfavorable to the owner, instead of social trends unfavorable to society in general.

It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.

yes on both

More like Trump can use it as a bargaining chip with China.

> Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok

Trump can blame Biden and move on.

> If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?

Bytedance makes most of its money from Douyin.

A worrying angle is that Elon is essentially subservient to the CCP because of Tesla’s presence in China. Remember when Tesla signed a pledge to uphold socialism at the behest of the CCP a couple years back? It’s also why Elon - who claims to uphold free speech, capitalism, democratic values, etc - will NEVER say anything negative about China. If Trump is close to Elon, and Elon is easily influenced/controlled by the CCP, it really undermines the independence of US leadership. I am concerned this next administration will be soft on China in all the wrong ways, including not enforcing a ban that has been legally instituted and upheld unanimously by SCOTUS.

At least in Germany, for Gen Z, Facebook is quite dead and Instagram co-exists with TikTok, both with >70% of the cohort [1] using them. There is no clear winner. Anecdata, but for freshmen, TikTok is way more popular.

TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).

[1] https://www.absatzwirtschaft.de/tiktok-vs-instagram-ein-verg... - sorry, I only found a German source