the solution to this is very obvious, but I know some folks won't cease using the product.
It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.
> the solution to this is very obvious, but I know some folks won't cease using the product
"Everyone should simultaneously quit doing the harmful thing" is a "solution" to our present surveillance advertising problem in the way that advice to save money is a solution to poverty or "have you tried farming?" is a solution to world hunger.
I.e. not a solution for humans, but a description of a beeline to the desired state as performed by a hive mind.
What is the solution? You imply that it is just to quit using it, but then you mention how super-addictive social media and especially TikTok is. Which it is, by design, by very smart people who very intentionally exploit every aspect of human psychology they can, for profit. I don't blame the victims of social media, I blame the architects of it. To me it's clear that social media does more harm than good, and is only useful to generate ad revenue, which to me is also clearly more harm than good, and should all be nuked from orbit.
People use social media to consume news and entertainment and to curate and communicate with people and accounts using an interface that allows them to read and share multiple media types.
My mother used it to communicate with her COPD support group and chat with in-laws in Australia. I use it to follow up on work groups and authors and developers I'm interested in. Most people's usage of social media is banal and mundane, little different than watching television in the 1990s. They use social media because it provides value for them, not because they're addicted to dopamine.
The solution is simple, go interact with actual humans and make an actual bond. Hanging out with good friends feels way better than any social media I've ever used and I've been online shitposting since 1995.
CBS news is effectively state media after the Ellison acquisition and Weiss hire. TikTok's US operation won't be any different and rolling HBO/Time Warner/CNN et al into this will be even worse.
First instinct is USDS stands for usds.gov and it literally turned into nationalized social media. Upon further research USDS is apparently short for U.S. Data Security. WTF is with this naming. Imagine TikTok DHS (Digital High School) JV.
All Americans are probably better off using Chinese apps that the Chinese government uses to snoop on them and Chinese are better off using American apps that the American govt uses to snoop on them than the opposite.
The impact the Chinese government can have on an individual American is minor compared to the US govt and the same goes for the American and Chinese govts on the average Chinese person.
...Highly disagree. China can (and has) manipulate the hearts and minds of the American public—skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor. They've been doing this for at least a decade now, and have played a silent hand in reshaping American politics. If (when) a conflict arises, trust that they will use this tool to manipulate the electorate in a way that benefits them in a zero sum way.
>China can (and has) manipulate the hearts and minds of the American public—skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor
Nothing a tin-foil hat can't prevent
As if the public needed any manipulation. You can just read what actual public figures, journalists, and such have been openly saying for the last 15-20 years...
When a long-time political player, wife of a President, and presidential candidate calls a big chunk of the population "deplorables", when opposing candidates call for the jailing or even shooting of their opponent, or when the current President is saying what he says and doing what he does, you need more to get "chaos" and "distrust of the neighbor"?
Damn, imagine if an Australian or a South African billionaire did that with big media companies, oh well, that's just a weird thought, nothing to take from that.
> skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor.
I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
IMO influence over real concrete choices is much more alarming. Someone with household-level information has an insane amount of advantage in an election. You can target politcal messaging street by street to play up the worst aspects of your opposed candidate and the least repulsive aspects of your own candidate.
But if you're in china, the most you can do is try to push towards whatever of the two candidates is least bad for you. And spoiler, zero american politicians are pro-china.
HN (and Reddit) are not social media, they are forums. Social media are platforms where the main purpose is to socialise. Forums are platforms where the main purpose is to discuss the topic of any given thread. Just because you can talk to someone, doesn't make it social media. I will die on this hill.
Fully agree. Forums predate social media and are some of the oldest parts of the internet. And it's not quite socializing... it's more like, are you broadcasting and consuming content? Or discussing it?
I played with TikTok for a week or so. Every time I opened it, it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name. It felt like a very concerted effort to dumb down the American population. You wouldn’t listen to these people for 10 seconds out in public. The fetal alcohol syndrome phenotype was widespread. The entire experience was disturbing, to be honest.
I'm not a fan either (and don't bother with it) but TikTok and co try to prey on your ... sorry try to show you stuff that they think you want to see, indexed on advert spend and a few other factors that will maximise advert spend return. That is their entire raison d'etre.
So, why on earth are they displaying stuff that you say is disturbing? There is no profit in that and TikTok is all about profit, ideally from abroad, ie market share.
I'm sure that the American population is incapable of being dumbed down any further.
Maybe it's just you. To me it shows totally different stuff, equally stupid, by default (e.g. if I go with a new account), but easily changeable with very little targeted watching (it picks your interests quite fast)
Because TikTok in the US is run by an American company now, right?
It was only a problem when TikTok was owned by a Chinese company, right?
Then, it was little more than a propaganda and surveillance platform for a hostile foreign government but now it's a propaganda and surveillance platform for a government that can actually harm you. But getting black-bagged by ICE or whatever other band of Christofascist moral police the next decade brings is a price worth paying to avoid the risk of indoctrinating the youth into Communism, right?
If anyone criticizing it was one of the people in histrionics over ChInEse MInD cOnTRoL then those are the people I'm mocking.
Because even if it was true that TikTok was a "CCP weapon of war" - which I have yet to see actual evidence of - that's still less of a threat than the USG and existing Western social media platforms, all of which are definitely full of foreign and domestic psychological operations.
And when that same lot (it's mostly the same people) gets Section 230 repealed and has the US internet regulated by the FCC and all online speech within the Western world gets censored and monitored for wrongthink UK style, I'll mock them again from behind my nine illegal proxies.
Remember when part of the argument to force a TikTok sale was protecting American's private data? Honestly, if I had to hand my personal data over to someone, I much rather give it to the nebulous "China" that people always fearmonger about than an American billionaire aligned with the current administration because the latter is much more likely to have avenues to use that data against me.
I don’t know if you’re joking, but that’s pretty clearly exactly what they’re going to do. Take a look at the new terms of service. They released this morning, this whole app has just been weaponized against political and dissidents.
the solution to this is very obvious, but I know some folks won't cease using the product.
It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.
> the solution to this is very obvious, but I know some folks won't cease using the product
"Everyone should simultaneously quit doing the harmful thing" is a "solution" to our present surveillance advertising problem in the way that advice to save money is a solution to poverty or "have you tried farming?" is a solution to world hunger.
I.e. not a solution for humans, but a description of a beeline to the desired state as performed by a hive mind.
What is the solution? You imply that it is just to quit using it, but then you mention how super-addictive social media and especially TikTok is. Which it is, by design, by very smart people who very intentionally exploit every aspect of human psychology they can, for profit. I don't blame the victims of social media, I blame the architects of it. To me it's clear that social media does more harm than good, and is only useful to generate ad revenue, which to me is also clearly more harm than good, and should all be nuked from orbit.
Just use another platform if you can't quit cold-turkey.
But yeah, the solution is to not let them collect data about you.
Social media is addictive, but Hacker News overplays how addictive it is.
Most of what keeps people on it isn't heroin-like dependence but convenience and habit.
Convenience of what? What goal is achieved most efficiently by using social media?
People use social media to consume news and entertainment and to curate and communicate with people and accounts using an interface that allows them to read and share multiple media types.
My mother used it to communicate with her COPD support group and chat with in-laws in Australia. I use it to follow up on work groups and authors and developers I'm interested in. Most people's usage of social media is banal and mundane, little different than watching television in the 1990s. They use social media because it provides value for them, not because they're addicted to dopamine.
The solution is simple, go interact with actual humans and make an actual bond. Hanging out with good friends feels way better than any social media I've ever used and I've been online shitposting since 1995.
CBS news is effectively state media after the Ellison acquisition and Weiss hire. TikTok's US operation won't be any different and rolling HBO/Time Warner/CNN et al into this will be even worse.
Not even state media foreign state media.
> TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC
First instinct is USDS stands for usds.gov and it literally turned into nationalized social media. Upon further research USDS is apparently short for U.S. Data Security. WTF is with this naming. Imagine TikTok DHS (Digital High School) JV.
Tiktok became a bigger national security risk after being sold than it was before.
All Americans are probably better off using Chinese apps that the Chinese government uses to snoop on them and Chinese are better off using American apps that the American govt uses to snoop on them than the opposite.
The impact the Chinese government can have on an individual American is minor compared to the US govt and the same goes for the American and Chinese govts on the average Chinese person.
Yep, and they won't work with each other, and thus provides a modicum of data safety due to opposing governments.
The real challenge to this is that most Chinese apps aren't in English.
...Highly disagree. China can (and has) manipulate the hearts and minds of the American public—skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor. They've been doing this for at least a decade now, and have played a silent hand in reshaping American politics. If (when) a conflict arises, trust that they will use this tool to manipulate the electorate in a way that benefits them in a zero sum way.
>China can (and has) manipulate the hearts and minds of the American public—skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor
Nothing a tin-foil hat can't prevent
As if the public needed any manipulation. You can just read what actual public figures, journalists, and such have been openly saying for the last 15-20 years...
When a long-time political player, wife of a President, and presidential candidate calls a big chunk of the population "deplorables", when opposing candidates call for the jailing or even shooting of their opponent, or when the current President is saying what he says and doing what he does, you need more to get "chaos" and "distrust of the neighbor"?
A Tin Dome which might actually work.
Damn, imagine if an Australian or a South African billionaire did that with big media companies, oh well, that's just a weird thought, nothing to take from that.
LOL!
> skewing their biases in a way that creates internal chaos and dissent, disrupting institutional order, and sewing distrust of thy neighbor.
I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
IMO influence over real concrete choices is much more alarming. Someone with household-level information has an insane amount of advantage in an election. You can target politcal messaging street by street to play up the worst aspects of your opposed candidate and the least repulsive aspects of your own candidate.
But if you're in china, the most you can do is try to push towards whatever of the two candidates is least bad for you. And spoiler, zero american politicians are pro-china.
Depends if you see more of a threat coming from China or Israel.
All these big socials are horrible brain rotting addiction machines no matter who owns them.
Social Media is evil. Don't participate.
Hacker News is Social Media
Barely.
It's like saying "don't do drugs" (thinking of heroin, meth, coke and that sort) and someone else says "caffeine is a drug too".
HN (and Reddit) are not social media, they are forums. Social media are platforms where the main purpose is to socialise. Forums are platforms where the main purpose is to discuss the topic of any given thread. Just because you can talk to someone, doesn't make it social media. I will die on this hill.
Fully agree. Forums predate social media and are some of the oldest parts of the internet. And it's not quite socializing... it's more like, are you broadcasting and consuming content? Or discussing it?
For anyone confused, this only affects US users who's data is now handled by the new US entity.
Is there any way to use the international version of TikTok in the US?
VPN?
https://archive.is/fs4Nl
I played with TikTok for a week or so. Every time I opened it, it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name. It felt like a very concerted effort to dumb down the American population. You wouldn’t listen to these people for 10 seconds out in public. The fetal alcohol syndrome phenotype was widespread. The entire experience was disturbing, to be honest.
I'm not a fan either (and don't bother with it) but TikTok and co try to prey on your ... sorry try to show you stuff that they think you want to see, indexed on advert spend and a few other factors that will maximise advert spend return. That is their entire raison d'etre.
So, why on earth are they displaying stuff that you say is disturbing? There is no profit in that and TikTok is all about profit, ideally from abroad, ie market share.
I'm sure that the American population is incapable of being dumbed down any further.
Log a bug.
Maybe it's just you. To me it shows totally different stuff, equally stupid, by default (e.g. if I go with a new account), but easily changeable with very little targeted watching (it picks your interests quite fast)
How much more data is even left to collect lol
Everything that would assist a Kavanaugh Stop
Well, precise location data for one.
we’ve had this for decade+
But that's fine, right?
Because TikTok in the US is run by an American company now, right?
It was only a problem when TikTok was owned by a Chinese company, right?
Then, it was little more than a propaganda and surveillance platform for a hostile foreign government but now it's a propaganda and surveillance platform for a government that can actually harm you. But getting black-bagged by ICE or whatever other band of Christofascist moral police the next decade brings is a price worth paying to avoid the risk of indoctrinating the youth into Communism, right?
Right?
People are clearly criticizing it.
The theoretical difference is that the people can push their govt to restrict what data the American version of TikTok collects and what it does.
Unfortunately it’s looking likely this difference will remain theoretical.
If anyone criticizing it was one of the people in histrionics over ChInEse MInD cOnTRoL then those are the people I'm mocking.
Because even if it was true that TikTok was a "CCP weapon of war" - which I have yet to see actual evidence of - that's still less of a threat than the USG and existing Western social media platforms, all of which are definitely full of foreign and domestic psychological operations.
And when that same lot (it's mostly the same people) gets Section 230 repealed and has the US internet regulated by the FCC and all online speech within the Western world gets censored and monitored for wrongthink UK style, I'll mock them again from behind my nine illegal proxies.
Remember when part of the argument to force a TikTok sale was protecting American's private data? Honestly, if I had to hand my personal data over to someone, I much rather give it to the nebulous "China" that people always fearmonger about than an American billionaire aligned with the current administration because the latter is much more likely to have avenues to use that data against me.
„Hey, while we have the data - why not pipe it directly to ICE? Palantir might use it as well.“
All for the sake of "security & safety", I‘d assume.
I don’t know if you’re joking, but that’s pretty clearly exactly what they’re going to do. Take a look at the new terms of service. They released this morning, this whole app has just been weaponized against political and dissidents.