TikTok Is Destroying Itself From the Inside Out
TikTok Is Destroying Itself From the Inside Out
TikTok is fumbling critical business partnerships and cluttering its app with unpopular features. It could be the beginning of the end.
Some irony there. Tik Tok wants to be more like Youtube with its long form content. Youtube wants to be more like Tik Tok with its shorts content.
Neither seems to be winning the opposing battle.
Fucking YouTube shorts.
Every content creator has to partake in the stupidity because it's that or becoming an algorithm outcast, so they awkwardly cut bits of their videos just to post a couple of those.
And then YouTube forces them in everyone's throat, with absolutely no regard for the medium and no option to filter them out.
No, YouTube, I won't watch your stupidly formatted 10-second bits of nothing on my TV.
We need a TikTube apparently.
I had to buy one of those for my dog
YouTok
Well youtube has both.
And I hope the long form videos take some sort video cues and don't have 3 minute long rambling intros anymore. The one nice things about shorts is they get to the point.
Unfortunately, if twitter has shown us anything, it's social networks are ridiculously hard to destroy, even when actively self-sabotaging
Instagram is absolute garbage compared to how it used to be. It's still massive. Once people are hooked, it's hard to wean them off. People were livid at reddit, but only a fraction of those who spoke up are here
What's changed about Instagram? I'm not familiar enough to know, but I don't feel like I've heard anything all that controversial about it outside of Meta's general "pay to remove ads" thing. I certainly haven't heard anything about systemic enshittification like I have with Twitter, Reddit and TikTok; have I missed anything?
They're hard to destroy until something (people view as) better shows up. My buddy Tom from MySpace got out while the getting was good.
More than anything, it's that people resist change. They'll stick to what they are doing until sometime after it becomes very clear that they shouldn't any longer.
It's hard because once you got a place where all your friends are, it will be extremely hard to leave because it's not like they'll follow you and move to something like mastadon, pixelfed, or lemmy.
My friends are on Instagram, if I wanted to find my classmates, they would all be on there. My parents are on facebook, there's no chance for those old guys to move to something else.
TikTok is no more a social media platform than YouTube is. I'm puzzled why some people call it that and my only guess is that they've never used it.
"Social media" just means a public place where the plebs can upload content and interact with other plebs via the internet without knowing a lick of html, Internet culture, or anything technical really. If they are so lucky, some might even be graced by the attention of a minor internet celebrity, the modern day patricians.
Oh no!
Anyways
It's so funny one wanting to become the other, yt went to shit after shorts and tiktok is doing the same.
Why can't they put shorts somewhere else? I do watch them but I don't always want them, they clog up results and recommendations so bad
I hate that on the YouTube mobile app the shorts take up the entirety of your screen when you first open it. Like they really want you to watch shorts over their regular video content. And YouTube shorts still to this day don’t even work. If you open YouTube and watch 50 shorts a day, once a day for a week, after the first day you’ll see like one new short a day. There’s no algorithm, it just shows you the same exact shorts in almost the same exact order over and over again.
Because everyone thinks they have to offer everything to get more users and increase the bottom line.
They'd rather be a jack of all trades than a specialized expert in a field.
I keep getting shorts (not anymore i fixed that) when i searched for something and they often feature stuff not related to my search. Like me searching for tubeless bike tire instruction video and the shorts in between are a alien looking dark purple baby and a short where some muslim looking guys are waving a scimitar at a goats neck...like what in the actual fuck does that even do on youtube?
Shorts need to be ended imo, so i blocked them.
@Squizzy @yamanii This extension does exactly that (at least on desktop) and stops doom scrolling without removing them entirely: https://github.com/doma-itachi/Youtube-shorts-block
the same but opposite. YT pushes shorts to compete with Tiktok. Tiktok pushes longform content to compete with YT
Sounds a bit more like the format is getting very exhausting to people, and more people are recognizing the unhealthy effects.
So now they need to go the opposite direction to try and fix it
Nah, it's just enshittification. Every other video is an ad now and some videos that aren't labeled as ads are just viral marketing ads in disguise. The "for you" page gets exhausting with all these ads, and it's really the only way to discover new content.
Then there is tiktok live that they heavily push. Tiktok live can be sorta cool, but once the NPCing trend hit, 6 out of 10 live feeds are people unabashedly whoring themselves out for money, another 2 out of the ten are weird live "games" that are just p2p with the in currency gift system, another 10% are live open shops like Pokémon cards or freshwater clams for pearls or shit (which is kinda cool, but there are so many of them) then the last 1 are legitimately interesting live feeds.
Then it got even worse... they added competitions, which would require a certain amount of high value gifts to be sent by their viewers to obtain cash prizes for hitting certain gifting metrics. This turned almost all of the live feeds into just endless begging.
Then somehow it got worse... they added "battles" which pit two live feeds against each other. Nowadays it's a lot of Israel v Palestine or Trump V Biden streams. There timed and whoever collects more gifts wins the match. It's really nauseating to be honest...
It's not people slowly realizing that tiktok is bad, it's just tiktok actively becoming worse. The most frustrating thing is all your favorite videos are lurking somewhere on the site, but you have little control over what comes next and it often takes wading through mountains of shit to find something good.
But that is exactly how TikTok is supposed to work no? They condition the user to swipe until they see what they want. In the beginning you get great content and are conditioned to like the swipe. But after a while more random shit gets introduced and you end up "searching" for the content you want with many little distractions here and there. At least that's how I was told it to be from friends.
More good news! Please!
Don’t be fooled. TikTok is going strong and will continue to go strong. How long has Twitter or Facebook been “on the decline?” Sure, maybe they’ve both lost a lot of users, but these kind of cultural touchstone apps don’t ever seem to go away. TikTok will be around for a long time to come.
The enshittification continues, until
moraleprofit improves.That implies that the enshittification will stop when profits increase, but we all know that it will never stop.
Now I am imagining a world where profit doesn't stop.
Like all the money gets centralised more and more until everything is owned by a single tiny group or even one person. They literally have all the money in the world.
And everyone else just ... stops using this money, since there is no point. Then they start using a different form of currency like pearls because that is the only way now to trade between non-owning people. Making all this money completely useless.
Stop, I can only get so erect!
We found a way to squeeze 0.00023% more profit per user.
I don’t really agree with this post, at least in title (and not in the way many commenters seem to be “agreeing with it” despite maybe not reading the article).
Tiktok is getting worse… for users. Not for “itself”. It’s the same as Facebook or even other tech based services like Uber. They start off good and very user friendly to draw people in, often operating at a loss for years… and then they clutter themselves with ads and other monetizing features.
I don’t know Tiktoks profit loss margins but I’m guessing that it’s financially near or at its absolute peak performance so far, just as Facebook has continued to raise profits year after year despite often being detested more and more as time goes on.
I will say it was incredibly fast how quickly it transitioned to a giant money making machine compared to older platforms. It's much more rapidly viewable, and seems to have more conversation around that then it being legitimately a worse social platform.
The COVID boom to tech is the most probable answer as it was steroids to isolation accessable social interaction. But man they aren't even trying to ride the wave anymore but capture as much of the leftover ripples as possible.
Tiktok is getting worse… for users. Not for “itself”.
The article also makes some very large assumptions about longer length tiktoks being inherently worse for its audience.
I for one would love longer length tiktoks, and as for those who don't the algorithm is extremely efficient and will filter out that style of content for those who don't.
This is similar to the shop discussion, tiktoks gives full control over filtering this out via the #shop hashtag and disabling the shop tab.
The article really creates artificial problems with the app to justify its own existence when really these aren't major issues that would lead to the downfall of a company or reduction in users.
Personally I'll be the first to stop using a platform when they spam me with ads (Instagram). But tiktok is generally very manageable, much more than most other forms of social media.
Very much agree on all fronts. I think articles like this in part often spring up just because… a great deal of people enjoy clamoring around some “haha evil tiktok is finally ending!!, but it’s just… not really the case and tiktok being more “evil” than any other major app is really not substantiated in my view.
There definitely have been some changes. I absolutely get more “non ad-ads” in my feed (as in, content that is clearly being paid for but not marked as an advertisement and played off as organic content), though I’m not even sure if this is really the apps “fault” as much as it is creators.
When I left tiktok, I feel like I was getting an ad every 4 or so minutes, almost all of it scammy fastbfashion brands. I think I left tik too fully at the same time as the reddit protests.
Is that a bad thing?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company is pushing its eCommerce so hard you hear about it more than any other topic on the app, both in ads and organic videos from creators hoping for a share of the profits.
In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format.
Outrage is brewing among a growing contingent of users who post videos arguing TikTok is ruined now, and analysts say the company is jeopardizing its success.
But TikTok spearheaded the short-video revolution, and it risks straying from its core use case of fun, entertaining clips and losing its edge.”
The problem was bad enough that The Atlantic ran a story with the headline declaring “Instagram Is Over.” As time wore on it seems Meta has stuck the landing, but only through abandoning or at least retooling the projects that were alienating users.
Instagram honed its Reels product, ditched its shop, and embarked on a PR campaign promising that the app was hearing and responding to complaints.
The original article contains 975 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"horizontal content"
I mean... C'mon. WHAT RATIO?!
Maybe TikTok does understand me.
Good. Hurry up.
We should start our own video platform, with no rules other than hate speech prohibition and dark web-esque content removal. Never sell to Google. Never sell to Tencent. Never IPO. Just maintain the servers and hire enough technicians to maintain a content scanning algorithm. Keep it small and provide a cleaner experience by not fucking around with adblock users. Just have a platform that utilizes ads, don't punish adblockers, and with those metrics in hand, approach advertisers and charge less than youtube charges.
In theory, you can do something like that with Peertube, it's a federated alternative to YT.
In practice, serving video content requires fuckloads of bandwidth, which has huge costs. The first thing you'll want/need is to limit filesizes and/or video resolution. Depending on what you start with, how much initial money you have, even allowing people to watch everything in 720p might be a strain.
For paying the costs with ads, unless you can guarantee hundreds of thousands of daily views, the platforms won't be willing to pay much, "low exposition" or whatever. Though, if the only thing that won't be there is hate speech and dark web, you're letting normal porn in, which can drive significant traffic, but now you'll have to deal with puritanical companies not wanting to associate with your site, plus companies afraid of the possible backlash.
Ideally, you'd have to create your own ad server, so you'd have to reach out to companies directly and ask them if they'd like to advertise on your platform with no middlemen.
Yeah "just maintain the servers bro" isn't going to work. The bandwidth alone is insane. There's a reason why there are fewer and fewer Lemmy servers since June 2023, even as total users are growing.
Are you going to allow copyrighted content? You’ll get downranked in searches, and probably wrecked by the DMCA.
Advertising also isn’t as lucrative as it seems. YouTube was a money pit for years - that’s probably tied to the decision to push Premium so heavily. Videos are big.
Funny.
I don't care what happens to tiktok itself, but I still enjoy watching videos on tiktok, and a lot of creative people will post a lot of interesting videos, which I also download using tiktok downloader.
Is this marketing? On Lemmy?!
