I was fine with memes over the past few years … sure they are a quick dopamine hit that make you laugh or think
But now when my friends send me tiktok videos … especially when someone has been watching these video streams for hours or days … they start sending out the most random, inane, mindless content … it’s the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
it’s the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
I think that’s kind of the point. There was an article a while back that said the CCP/Bytedance intentionally serve up braindead content to everywhere outside China, while promoting educational and uplifting content at home.
I have one 50 year old friend with very little tech know how and his kids set him up with a good smartphone. I saw his family about a year ago and his kids noted that their dad often sits up until about 2 or 3 in the morning at the kitchen table just scrolling through tiktok videos. He sent them to me about once a day until I had to block him and tell him directly to stop sending me this stuff. He’s since become ‘aware’ of his addiction and stops sending out videos as often as he did before. He still scrolls through thousands and thousands of videos a day.
It would all be funny if it wasn’t so frightening at the same time.
No kidding. I just find it ironic that the generation that kept saying “TV will rot your brain” is now completely consumed by social media.
that sounds way too bizarre to believe without seeing a source. and i know there’s gonna be people replying saying it’s not that bizarre, because China, but really…?
Absolutely reasonable thing to ask.
Grep for “Companies like TikTok” to find the relevant portion.
The guy talking isn’t exactly a scientist and this ain’t a rigourous peer-reviewed study, but it does seem like he knows at least a little about what he’s talking about. Take it with a grain of salt.
I want to see a sampling of this “educational and uplifting” content.
That’s such a gross misunderstanding of the separation between TikTok and China that it’s very possible purposeful misinformation.
China has no control whatsoever over TikTok, and in fact, there are US intelligence officers on the board for the American company. If anyone is “intentionally serving up braindead content…” it’s the US company, who is under strict control and observation by US intelligence agencies.
Why are you lying? Every Chinese company is under the CCP’s boot, as made evident by the one time Tencent tried to fight it
I felt this way with instagram. My phone can barely handle the web app and you can’t even replay the video without an account. Truly garbage UX
Im pretty sure that meta purposefully makes the mobile websites for all their products as shit as possible to get people to use the real apps instead
That’s what literally all social media sites do. It is far more profitable for people to be using your app than your mobile website. Apps make it much easier to harvest data and corral the user into the exact experience you want them to have (ads, suggestions, etc).
I know not many people here are going back to Reddit but just for a second, open your mobile browser, disable the add-ons if it’s firefox, and go look at Reddit currently. Within the last few weeks they have absolutely massacred it. Like, truly, it is astoundingly bad now. The original mobile redesign of the site was already terrible, but this new-new-mobile reddit is so painfully bad that the only conceivable reason for its existence is to get people to give up and use the app.
Man i really miss old reddit, what a shame. I hope lemmy continues to grow, none of my hobbies have active communities yet like they do on redddit
As always I like promoting open source frontends for these pages. For tiktok I use proxytok. For changing any tiktok link to one of these instances use the libredirect extension for firefox, it also works in mobile
Suddenly glad all of my friends are old people like me.
old people like me
The person who sends me far more TikTok videos than anyone else is my boomer dad.
i shall retaliate with fediverse links
Have you heard about our lords and saviors the alternative frontends?
This but it’s instagram
My wife created an Instagram account in my phone so she can send me videos.
It’s both. So annoying when the first bit is muted and you can’t replay.
Share -> Save Video
Oh shit!
This post actually made me look for a solution and I found one!
Solution to opening tiktoks without using tiktok app or site, not how to stop ur friends sending u garbage.It made me think… mpv player can play basically any link you throw at it (thanks to yt-dlp), and we also have mpv on Android, so why can’t we do it there as well. And sure enough, I found this https://github.com/mpv-android/mpv-android/pull/58, someone baked yt-dlp in mpv for Android, making it possible to open link in mpv (share >> play in mpv)
It works for instagram and all other shit.
So do we need to download something from your link to make that work? Or is it already part of MPV?
I just shared this with my wife, since she has started sharing TikTok lately.
Sorry to hear your marriage is on the rocks mate. Hopefully it’s just a phase.
I fucking abhor TikTok. Anybody who installs that app is a danger to themselves and a traitor to mankind. Disgusting fucking thing, it pisses me off.
The thing about it that irks me the most is that it’s not even for any valuable means. It’s just a slightly different FaceBook or YouTube Shorts platform! You’re selling us all out for fucking video clips?!
What is it about short vertical video that makes people froth insanely at the mouth? Don’t “china” me on it, people whine over youtube shorts, instagram reels, they poopoo on snapchat, loathed twitter stories, and thought vine was a stupid idea. It feels like an ancient redditor thing, but I was in the 11 year club too and it’s just a different type of format for media, media which can be used in many different ways, as always. Like how internet video generally is different to TV.
it’s addictive, and hard to pack helpful good information into a video that short, and so it just ends up being an infinite stream of completely pointless content. it cannot be good for young children to be swiping through endless shortform content all day, either.
honestly, i’ve mostly stopped using reddit, and it was kinda shocking switching to lemmy, where i can consume all of the content i am interested in that was posted today, and theres just, no more. it is certainly a healthier way of using social media though.
The fact that it’s vertical video is bad enough on its own.
The fact that it’s short means you can’t actually do anything meaningful with it. Can’t meaningfully set up a scenario to tell a good joke. Can’t explain the context behind the educational fact you’re sharing. Can’t develop characters in a story. It can never be anything more than basic spectacle.
But the worst bit is the fact that it’s pure algorithm. YouTube at least shows you a screen of 10+ videos for you to choose from. Or you can go to your subscriptions page and see videos from people you’ve specifically said you want to watch. Or use search and find videos on a specific topic (though recently YouTube has made changes that make this significantly worse than it used to be). TikTok is “watch the video we want you to watch, or skip to the next video we want you to watch” on repeat. It’s incredibly patronising, and far less valuable as a user.
I dunno man, my TikTok algorithm is about the wokest, most informative news feed amongst them all.
Sometimes they try something new, and I have to train the algorithm a little again, but nothing too annoying.The problem isn’t largely the manipulation of information you perceive through the app, although they do try their hardest.
The problem is the app. People are putting that shit on smartphones and walking around with it. It’s so bloated with spyware that the spyware outweighs the install data needed to run the app itself. I don’t care if they’ve got a headquarters in the USA or wherever else, at the end of the day I truly believe that the information being stolen is ending up in their Chinese HQ which is a fucking military operation of a hostile dictatorship.
It reads and transmits your message history, your GPS location, your photo library, depending on your model it’s probably recording sounds most of the time. They have your name, your address, the layout of your home, where you work, where you like to eat, which bank you use, every personal conversation you’ve had for months: you’re fucked if a global conflict ever starts. The other world powers will be completely crippled by a bunch of complacent fucking nitwits who chose Vines over their soul. Great job, assholes!
I just checked and the tiktok app has no access to anything on my phone lmao. It literally cannot access any of this data, unless you’re uploading videos then it will use your pictures.
Plus, even IF youre right and the app is somehow circumventing all of the rules the app stores require to even be on it, AND somehow Google and Apple are incapable of figuring out that the app is malicious AND they also for some reason don’t remove it for breaking those rules, I’m just some dude looking at stupid memes. China isn’t getting anything I care about.
What if there were a service to convert ticktock videos into Lemmy posts? Would that be a good thing?
No, I don’t want to see that brainwashing garbage. It’s curated to wreck the brains and society of Western democracies.
Everyone should have heard about this by now, but China’s version of TikTok is vastly different than ours. It is limited to mostly educational content and has built-in screen time limits. They know what is bad about our version of it, and it’s on purpose.
I’m not asking if any platform is better than Lemmy.
I’m asking if it would be good to facilitate the ability to post the user generated content from a terrible platform to Lemmy.
No. That’d be like having your family owned restaurant cook Mr Beast burgers.
You are well beyond reefer madness levels of fear and paranoia.
This was verified by a number of independent researchers. 60 Minutes even did a full segment on it.
This user is a troll, so you can safely ignore them
From what I can see, it seems like their opinions go against the grain of the Lemmy userbase. They don’t seem to be intentionally antagonizing people.
Right, normal people have negative thousands of karma. Thanks for the gaslighting brah
You’re better off pointing out where they said inaccurate things than just saying “troll!”
Look at their comment history
I don’t see any overly trolly comments. What’d they say?
Why don’t they just actually send the video file?
Those apps purposely don’t make it trivial to download the files do they? You probably could but someone who swipes Tiktok all day can not.
Lots of tiktoks can be downloaded easily, but still, they can be large, why send those around when you can just send a link
For better user experience for the person receiving it.
Do memes stop being memes when they’re on tiktok?
Once they hit TikTok, they’re purely Chinese spyware.
Facebook is just American spyware. The Chinese gov can’t exactly send the feds to my house. You better bet the US gov can though!
Forget countries, if Facebook is like having a prying eye spy on you, TikTok is like having 100 prying eyes spying on you.
Eh, I used to think this too, but TikTok isn’t closely associated with chinese companies, any more than TakeTwo or anything made in Shenzhen.
I still abhor it for what it is though, alongside YTShorts.
And that’s different than American spyware in several important ways, such as…
Such as…
Well shit.
Tiktok sucks so hard, but then occasionally I find a minor nugget of wisdom or a piece of information so helpful that it makes me keep the app. Just the other day, some said he applies antiperspirant to his feet in order to keep them warm, because then they’ll sweat less, and will get less cold in the socks. I didn’t even really know that was a problem I was really having, but now, I will never have cold feet again. There’s also always eelfeel, so I’m alright with it as a whole.
More broadly I do hate how kind of walled off the app is. I try to share videos on snapchat, oof, snapchat cuts it off so it’s only the first five seconds of a video. Best to send the link, but then, if you don’t have tiktok downloaded, it takes you either to the app store, or it hits you with the shitty web browser. Maybe fine for seeing a single tiktok, on mobile, but it’s pretty bad on desktop since it’s not formatted for it, and overall it, just is kind of ass to deal with, especially on repeat. Hate the modern internet.
Edit: Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn’t understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Putting antiperspirant on your feet sounds deeply unnatural, chaotic and satanic. It’s the kind of thing that will result in a sock-related early death.
Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn’t understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Did something about Lemmy make you think we avoid the truth here?
This shit is Vine. We had this same social media platform in 2013, basically. Everyone’s just freaking out about it now because it’s owned by china, and everyone’s been made to worry about threats to national security, even though we can all kind of agree that the american government also sucks and is heinous. It’s giving me some “Only I can bully my little brother!” kinds of vibes. It’s like the same shit as when europeans get brought up, at any point, anywhere, and then americans start making fun of british people having bad teeth and knife crime and stuff, even though they have basically all of that but worse. Nobody’s a nationalist until another country gets brought up, and then suddenly everyone’s the most patriotic proud to be an american motherfucker. It’s cringe. It reminds me of when we started calling them “freedom fries”.
Yeah I’ve heard all this before. Basically you’re advocating for people to opt into spying because their own government does it. No thanks
