Unless you’ve been aggressively avoiding politics you’re likely aware of the rumbling to ban TikTok because it’s a Chinese owned company which a) allows China to track user data and all that entails and b) has code in it which would allow China to censor content if they felt the need to.
So assuming TikTok does get shut down in the states, what’s next for folks that have to have their short-form videos and challenge fixes?
Some newcomer booting up their own clone? (I’ve got money that says several folks already have it coded up just waiting for an excuse to launch)
Some sort of agreement with the existing TikTok to continue if all US user data stays hosted in the states?
if i remember correctly wasnt Walmart going to buy it until trump lost the election and everyone thought it was safe … and if they ban it the internet might as well self destruct the protest and such will be unimaginable
YouTube is already going after that market with YouTube Shorts. Before TikTok, there was Vine, which was indistinguishable from my perspective (my perspective being, someone who never used either – maybe someone can fill me in). Instagram already has videos and influencers.
I guess I don’t really understand what made TikTok better than those other options, but there are other options for influencers to cash in.
150 million users. If this isn’t a classic case of prohibition doesn’t work, I don’t know what is.
GenZ is pissed. They’re already deleting their Meta apps in droves. So much so Insta has changed the procedure for how to delete your account. Making it more difficult to do so. Presumably to slow the bleeding.
A noted upthread, YouTube is already getting into short-form videos. I know about that because I’m on YouTube a lot, but not on much else in social media. I presume other platforms would also get into short-form videos if they haven’t done so already.
TikTok apparently has a really effective algorithm which makes it effective at capturing peoples’ attentions. But it’s never been the only game out there.
Youtube Shorts…kinda does? But nowhere near as good as TikTok does.
As for Instagram: they tried to copy TikTok, but ended up adding so many “features” they ended up turning the platform into a bit of a mess. Plus they also de-prioritised photographers, focusing on video, which lead to many photographers leaving the platform as well.
So, that’s why Vine went away? It seemed like exactly the same thing – short videos.
I think it’s interesting that it’s all about the recommendations. I do everything I can to avoid getting recommendations from social media sites – I’ve turned them all off in Twitter, I never use the auto-generated playlists in Spotify, etc. I’m just weird, I guess.
Anyway, my guess would be YouTube to take over the spot if TikTok is actually banned. If it looks like TikTok may actually get banned, I imagine the owners will hand over the site to a US domiciled entity instead. Too much value there.
…vines were a very specific type of short video: they were only six-seconds long.
TikToks can be up to ten minutes long (last time I checked.) Which means you get a significantly bigger variety of content. Vines were pretty much short-form jokes. TikToks can be everything from cooking videos to short documentaries, social commentary, breaking news, dancing, conspiracy theories, you name it, there is something on there that will cater to you.
And once you start watching something, the algorithm quickly figures out plenty of other things that you are also likely to enjoy. And it serves up a variety of stuff, if you like “true crime” stuff it won’t just give you true crime stuff, but all sorts of things that you are likely to enjoy.
Of course, one of the reasons why the “algorithm” is so good is because they were sometimes cheating.
ETA: And the other thing about Vine was that it wasn’t making any money.
[note: the link is to a “clickbait” site, not proper journalism, but it gives the gist.]
Recommendations in the first couple of generations of streaming services were pretty bad, so I haven’t dipped into the new ones yet. The “you’ve shown interest in a similar community” from Reddit are generally pretty good for me, except that, like much social media, it doesn’t have a long attention span so it tends to just show me a lot of stuff similar to what I’ve just looked at and forgets the rest.
(Except, one time, it combined the fact that I read a lot of UK subreddits due to being an Anglophile, and read subs about transit, and logically but incorrectly thought I would be interested in London bicycling. Most posts from there were completely uninteresting but it was not a total loss because one started “why is bicycling so crap in London? Broken glass everywhere” and I read the thread just to see how long it took before someone made a reference to The Message. It didn’t take very long.)
I don’t use TikTok, just YT Shorts, but I asked my brother, a Xennial, about the difference as he uses both, and his answer was pretty much instant: the algorithm. I know Shorts throws way too much crap at me: stuff with zero comments and one or two likes, very badly produced. I understand they need to feed me new videos, but it’s far too frequent, and I can’t remember it ever being something I wanted to see. I
…and the other thing is, if TikTok is banned, that doesn’t mean I’m going to go to another platform. I spend a bit of downtime browsing both YT Shorts and TikTok. And I always end up spending much more time on the latter than the former.
So if TikTok gets banned (and it isn’t going to be banned where I live) I’m not “jumping to another platform.” Because I’m already using the other platforms. I don’t use them as much, because TikTok simply works better. But if TikTok goes away, I’m not going to replace the time I spent on TikTok anywhere else.
I have trouble imagining exactly how Congress would go about banning TikTok. They’d have to say in the text of the law what is bad about what it is the TikTok app is doing. Presumably they’d have to generalize this badness so that other apps that did the same thing would automatically come under the same kind of scrutiny. Right away, problems of interpretation emerge. Also, if too many apps come under scrutiny, enforcement would be bogged down to the point of being ineffective. And, anyway, I hate it that my employer can dictate what apps I can use on my work-provided Android phone. Would Congress, intoxicated by power-mad schemes of public mind control, in their wildest dreams of world-wide dominion intrude on citizens’ day-to-day technology selections? Would the Google Play Store be tasked with informing the FBI about “unauthorized apps” that happen to be installed on YOUR PHONE?
I would expect TikTok to either move or at least set up an independent arm outside of China, with no data going back to China. Sorta like when Kaspersky moved its data operations to Switzerland to avoid issues with being headquartered in Moscow.
People get paid to do it. Some people have developed a huge number of followers on TikTok that they don’t have elsewhere and are making a living off of it.
Others have tailored their likes and dislikes over the years and are happy with the inane videos that are being served to them.