5 votes

How do you describe TikTok? The automatic culture of the world's favorite new social network

2 comments

  1. [2]
    tesseractcat
    (edited )
    Link
    I think TikTok is the progression of a social network run by AI with the goal of increasing engagement. I see two schools of thought regarding this kind of social media. The first is trying to...

    I think TikTok is the progression of a social network run by AI with the goal of increasing engagement. I see two schools of thought regarding this kind of social media. The first is trying to keep you engaged by giving you a list of short form, semi-interesting content. This is something that I feel reddit has shifted more and more into, and where TikTok sits.

    The second is increasing engagement by adding more 'controversiality'. This doesn't have to be big arguments, just showing users posts that have more discussion will typically end up showing the more controversial posts, because people are more likely to interact with things they disagree with. I think this is where some of the 'older' social media like Twitter and Facebook has shifted. I think somewhat unintuitively, showing posts that elicit negative emotions (like anger, sadness, or FOMO) increases engagement.

    Typically though, social networks try to hide the fact that they're doing one of these two things behind other systems, like following individual people, forum like behaviour, emphasis on family, etc. However in the case of TikTok, they've embraced it instead, especially since the idea of algorithmically delivered content has become more normalized recently.

    I don't think the TikTok style of social media is necessarily bad (and I certainly think it's better than the second school of thought), but I find that whenever I use social media in the first school of thought, I find myself becoming more unhappy and I very rarely end up actually getting anything useful out of the time spent. In contrast, while long forum content, (i.e. finding a youtube creator you like, or television), requires a similar time investment, I find it has a much more positive impact on my mental health, and is more enjoyable in the long run.

    I think in the end it comes down to delayed gratification, whether you're willing to invest more effort into finding long form content that you might not like, or just want to watch a stream of short form content that can maintain a rather static level of interest.

    I think Youtube is unique in the fact that it wants to be in the first school of thought, but can't quite manage it due to the fact that the whole premise of the platform is (for the most part) long form content.

    4 votes
    1. Adys
      Link Parent
      Facebook is a paperclip maximizer for engagement. AI will eat the world, indeed.

      The second is increasing engagement by adding more 'controversiality'.

      Facebook is a paperclip maximizer for engagement.

      AI will eat the world, indeed.

      3 votes