What is the point of using short form content platforms as a consumer really?
Just put the political stuff aside, they are often too short for any details over any topics if not straightly brainrot, ending up making people get distracted and lost patience easily. I never a fan of YouTube shorts and instagram reels either because of the same reason.
Perhaps they are good for promotion, but as a user perspective, can anyone really point out one good reason to use these platforms?
I’m in my late 50s, and I’ve been using TikTok for over six years. Before that, the only social media I used was Facebook—not Instagram, not anything else—but TikTok pulled me in from the very beginning.
At first, it was all about the novelty: lip-syncing and dance videos. Over time, though, my interests evolved. I started following creators for travel vlogs, occasional financial advice, health tips, yoga and exercise—and last but not least, singing, which I only began at age 55.
I don’t have many viewers, and that’s perfectly fine. My account isn’t about chasing likes or comments. It’s simply a way for people to see who I am rather than engage with a random, unknown profile—if they’re curious enough to look. It also helps avoid mixed signals: when you know who I am (even though you never truly know someone), you can usually tell whether something is meant as a dad joke… or a Daddy joke
As a result, my consumption of TV, Netflix, and HBO has dropped significantly. I find it far more engaging to follow real people and see what they’re doing with their lives. And here’s the irony: aside from the first two or three seasons of Survivor, I’ve never been into reality TV—yet somehow, I’m completely hooked on this one.
I have several young cousins (gen z) who use TikTok as their Google. Recipes, travel ideas, news, fashion, shopping, how-to videos. While of course a lot of their usage is passive scrolling that trains their algorithm, they're very adept at using search to find the same things I find in my browser.
It's bonkers to me, but I guess my patterns of information lookup have just calcified with age.
I have been trying so hard to get YouTube to stop recommending shorts to me. I am pretty sure that the "Show Fewer Shorts" thing you can choose in the app doesn't actually do anything.
My wife loves TikTok to a point that she will take it personally when I complain about it, but I absolutely hate the "vertical short form video" crap that's gotten popular. I'm probably just showing my age, even with my admittedly-quite-flakey attention span, I feel like TikTok and YouTube shorts are just kind of irritating. So much stuff on there is either low-effort crap with lip syncing to some clip from a movie, or shit yelling at me with burned in giant subtitles, both of which are almost certainly part of my own personal hell.
It introduces her to new fashion, new restaurants, new places to visit. Local, hyper local and hidden, and her favorite travel destinations.
It's full of bite size tutorials. Tips and tricks. Genuinely useful stuff. Blogs and websites you'd find this stuff on are not as visual, not as well edited, and are hard to find or full of SEO spam.
It's introduced her to all kinds of hobbies. Gen Z is all about finding old consumer digital cameras from 2000 or even older Kodak one-use disposables and transplanting the lenses. TikTok nucleates these interests and trends.
The news breaks almost immediately on TikTok, and there's immediately insightful community commentary - why would you ever need CNN talking heads?
Every day there's a new "fad". It changes fast, on a day to day basis. Just a few days ago, there was this "an owl but from [x]" meme that was really cute/funny.
TikTok is genuinely everything. It's amazing. Much of the old internet it replaces doesn't hold a candle to it.
Not arguing against the rest of your comment, but I find the concept of "breaking news" to be generally terrible for society. News outlets should wait until they have enough information to present an event as accurately as possible, but the rush to be the one that gets there first means this is often not the case.
And I expect this goes double for randos publishing on TikTok.
So better, richer content twitter? I never used that site except for a brief period at the beginning of the current Ukrainian war, but it sounds like it appeals to the same type of person.
I had this discussion once before, I don't remember where, with I taking your position. The other guy seemed to think that entertainment was fungible, and so the entertainment of short form video was objectively better than long form, since it could theoretically be turned off at any point unlike a movie, and since it had infinite variety. Which I guess makes sense if you believe the fungibility, but I can't imagine associating in real life with such a person.
I used TikTok a few times and then uninstalled it because it’s very addictive. It’s a lot of nonsense like dances, and bits of cooking episodes, travel and destination clips, punchlines from TV shows and cartoons, memes etc. It’s a really sad thing to use honestly, makes you feel dirty for wasting all that time.
It's great that Americans can now enjoy being surveiled by private companies instead of possibly being surveiled by a government. What a great improvement
Do you feel there's no difference between being surveilled by Oracle and being surveilled by the CCP? They're both terrible, but do you really think they're equivalent?
There's also the issue of the algorithm being used for propaganda, which (again) is also terrible in the hands of either party, but with potentially very different outcomes.
It's not the same, I see it more as two flavours of bad. However, the scary thing with private surveillance is that we do not know and won't know for a while the extent it is used.
Private surveillance however has the possibility to be much worse than government surveillance. We are already seeing collected data being used by the government to carry out enforcement (see period app subpoenas and the cameras that track where everyone drives), but the private actors have a perverse incentive to surveil as much as they can and make as much actionable data on it as possible. They can then show up at the governments door and offer it.
That is, private surveillance has the potential to surveil in ways governments don't even know they want, and they have an incentive to find any hole in the surveillance market and fill it.
What's the first amendment angle here? Foreign actors aren't covered under 1A, and people in the US are just as able to publish to and consume TikTok as they were before.
Technically would be correct to say its being split into TikTok US and TikTok Rest of World , probably why one of their new ToS includes geolocating the end user for user segmentation.
Since i dont think they are going to split the app - probably keep using the same published one.
It seems like what this will basically entail is a US algorithm and moderation system, while the core app remains with ByteDance.
> The Joint Venture will secure U.S. apps through software assurance protocols, and review and validate source code on an ongoing basis, assisted by its Trusted Security Partner, Oracle.
So the new team will be in charge of content moderation, training, and "review and validat[ion]" of source code. Not actually a new app.
Good. now that it is done, can EU and the rest of the world push for regional ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp and Youtube without the US complaining unfair practices.
Chinese ownership as a security threat is currently in between reality and conspiracy realms but the US govt meddling as a threat is a proven reality worldwide.
China is currently providing weapons for Russia to wage large-scale war in Europe, while supporting a dictatorship in North Korea that regularly launches nuclear-capable misiles in my general direction.
The EU would have to put the US on a list of "foreign adversaries", with whatever political fallout comes from that. Not saying they shouldn't, but there will be downsides.
Since controlling these platforms is probably the best ROI for swinging public opinion, I'm sure it's a matter of time before they get seized (one way or another) and redistributed to reliable political allies.
I don't get it why they sold it. If the Chinese government really had a say, simply refusing would have been a better option, as Trump would have never dared shutting off an app loved by hundreds of millions of voters.
I think it was more about control. The narrative was that the Chinese government was intentionally affecting the algorithm for US users to dumb them down and affect elections.
I’m not sure about “dumb them down”, I suspect it’s more like “subtly influence popular opinion”.
My husbands TickTock feed is full of things like “10 things Americans do that Chinese think are weird”, “10 reasons Chinese cities are in the 22nd century” etc etc.
I personally don’t think that’s propaganda - most of it is factually true and would be pushed to the front of any fair algorithm because it is engaging. But I can kinda see the concern, even though I disagree with the outcome.
> US censorship, US surveillance, US narratives (patriot approved)
This is the status quo for a lot of US media, but TikTok is actually much worse. The "US narratives" in this case are in service of Trump, possibly behind closed doors as table stakes for the purchase agreement.
Only a fool would trust the political moderation on any major corporate platform at this point. Some I’m sure see this as a great win. All our media, real estate, and economy is already obviously for sale to foreign govts, but when it comes to propaganda we draw the line.
So.. US intelligence agencies and data brokers are going to mine it and US interests are going to pump it full of human and bot sockpuppets to manufacture the consent of users to be more aligned with ideas that work best for the Ellisons' interests.
Yes, this is terrible. Before now it was fine, just Chinese intelligence agencies and data brokers mining it and Chinese interests pumping it full of human and bot sockpuppets to manufacture the consent of users to be more aligned with ideas that work best for the CCP's interests, but now it's just ruined.
I’ll engage with this because I’m curious about your position. I’m not a TikTok user and I’m not American.
All the other American controlled social media platforms are exactly like your China description from my point of view: it’s American agencies and data brokers mining it and American interests pumping it.
Do you think a reasonable course of action is for us to force the sell of American platforms? I have no sympathy for what China is doing but I have no sympathy for what America is doing either.
Why do you think one’s more acceptable other than “it’s my country doing it”, assuming you are American that is.
You have no real reason to believe me, but if it's worth anything, I work with US agencies in the domain of information warfare and the relationships with platforms are tenuous if not adversarial. And nothing happens on the scale you might imagine. But if you really do believe that the US is pulling the platforms' strings, I do indeed encourage disentanglement or forcing sales as you describe. What I have seen through my work has strongly reinforced my biases against the Chinese government, but I recognize that others may view my own government in that light.
Personally, I worry more about the platforms and data brokers themselves, as I think everyone should and does. They hold disproportionate power and their incentives drive us all in the wrong direction.
> Do you think a reasonable course of action is for us to force the sell of American platforms?
Yes, absolutely. If your country's people believe that WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are a threat in the same way, they should take the same action.
(Mind you, I don't believe for a second that this was the real motivation behind what's gone on with TikTok, but I think it's a reasonable course of action to take if you think there is a threat there, regardless of what company or country we're talking about.)
What is the point of using short form content platforms as a consumer really?
Just put the political stuff aside, they are often too short for any details over any topics if not straightly brainrot, ending up making people get distracted and lost patience easily. I never a fan of YouTube shorts and instagram reels either because of the same reason.
Perhaps they are good for promotion, but as a user perspective, can anyone really point out one good reason to use these platforms?
I’m in my late 50s, and I’ve been using TikTok for over six years. Before that, the only social media I used was Facebook—not Instagram, not anything else—but TikTok pulled me in from the very beginning.
At first, it was all about the novelty: lip-syncing and dance videos. Over time, though, my interests evolved. I started following creators for travel vlogs, occasional financial advice, health tips, yoga and exercise—and last but not least, singing, which I only began at age 55.
I don’t have many viewers, and that’s perfectly fine. My account isn’t about chasing likes or comments. It’s simply a way for people to see who I am rather than engage with a random, unknown profile—if they’re curious enough to look. It also helps avoid mixed signals: when you know who I am (even though you never truly know someone), you can usually tell whether something is meant as a dad joke… or a Daddy joke
As a result, my consumption of TV, Netflix, and HBO has dropped significantly. I find it far more engaging to follow real people and see what they’re doing with their lives. And here’s the irony: aside from the first two or three seasons of Survivor, I’ve never been into reality TV—yet somehow, I’m completely hooked on this one.
[ Wordsmithed by AI ]
I have several young cousins (gen z) who use TikTok as their Google. Recipes, travel ideas, news, fashion, shopping, how-to videos. While of course a lot of their usage is passive scrolling that trains their algorithm, they're very adept at using search to find the same things I find in my browser.
It's bonkers to me, but I guess my patterns of information lookup have just calcified with age.
Your categorical error is that you think people are watching them to cover details in topics.
They are a replacement for TV. You know, the thing that people used to watch for hours upon hours a day?
I have been trying so hard to get YouTube to stop recommending shorts to me. I am pretty sure that the "Show Fewer Shorts" thing you can choose in the app doesn't actually do anything.
My wife loves TikTok to a point that she will take it personally when I complain about it, but I absolutely hate the "vertical short form video" crap that's gotten popular. I'm probably just showing my age, even with my admittedly-quite-flakey attention span, I feel like TikTok and YouTube shorts are just kind of irritating. So much stuff on there is either low-effort crap with lip syncing to some clip from a movie, or shit yelling at me with burned in giant subtitles, both of which are almost certainly part of my own personal hell.
My wife loves TikTok.
It introduces her to new fashion, new restaurants, new places to visit. Local, hyper local and hidden, and her favorite travel destinations.
It's full of bite size tutorials. Tips and tricks. Genuinely useful stuff. Blogs and websites you'd find this stuff on are not as visual, not as well edited, and are hard to find or full of SEO spam.
It's introduced her to all kinds of hobbies. Gen Z is all about finding old consumer digital cameras from 2000 or even older Kodak one-use disposables and transplanting the lenses. TikTok nucleates these interests and trends.
The news breaks almost immediately on TikTok, and there's immediately insightful community commentary - why would you ever need CNN talking heads?
Every day there's a new "fad". It changes fast, on a day to day basis. Just a few days ago, there was this "an owl but from [x]" meme that was really cute/funny.
TikTok is genuinely everything. It's amazing. Much of the old internet it replaces doesn't hold a candle to it.
> The news breaks almost immediately on TikTok
Not arguing against the rest of your comment, but I find the concept of "breaking news" to be generally terrible for society. News outlets should wait until they have enough information to present an event as accurately as possible, but the rush to be the one that gets there first means this is often not the case.
And I expect this goes double for randos publishing on TikTok.
So better, richer content twitter? I never used that site except for a brief period at the beginning of the current Ukrainian war, but it sounds like it appeals to the same type of person.
I had this discussion once before, I don't remember where, with I taking your position. The other guy seemed to think that entertainment was fungible, and so the entertainment of short form video was objectively better than long form, since it could theoretically be turned off at any point unlike a movie, and since it had infinite variety. Which I guess makes sense if you believe the fungibility, but I can't imagine associating in real life with such a person.
The "I can turn it off unlike a movie" idea is wild. We've had the ability to pause and resume long-form TV/movies for decades.
Heck, how does that person think people read books? Six to ten hour sitting marathons?
i think you are missing the analogy of people not stopping movies half way
> What is the point of junk food?
The answer to this is the same as the answer to your first question.
It has 200M users in the US (I'm not one of them), which is about half of all citizens. Do you really think it's possible they have no point?
For most people, it's a distracting little jolt of dopamine and a way to get quick news or commentary.
It's definitely not good for our brains for that to be the main kind of content we consume, but it's not useless.
I used TikTok a few times and then uninstalled it because it’s very addictive. It’s a lot of nonsense like dances, and bits of cooking episodes, travel and destination clips, punchlines from TV shows and cartoons, memes etc. It’s a really sad thing to use honestly, makes you feel dirty for wasting all that time.
It's great that Americans can now enjoy being surveiled by private companies instead of possibly being surveiled by a government. What a great improvement
”Instead of” or "in addition to" ?
Would not put it past them to influence what content people see on TikTok either.
I think you're being optimistic.
Do you feel there's no difference between being surveilled by Oracle and being surveilled by the CCP? They're both terrible, but do you really think they're equivalent?
There's also the issue of the algorithm being used for propaganda, which (again) is also terrible in the hands of either party, but with potentially very different outcomes.
It's not the same, I see it more as two flavours of bad. However, the scary thing with private surveillance is that we do not know and won't know for a while the extent it is used.
Private surveillance however has the possibility to be much worse than government surveillance. We are already seeing collected data being used by the government to carry out enforcement (see period app subpoenas and the cameras that track where everyone drives), but the private actors have a perverse incentive to surveil as much as they can and make as much actionable data on it as possible. They can then show up at the governments door and offer it.
That is, private surveillance has the potential to surveil in ways governments don't even know they want, and they have an incentive to find any hole in the surveillance market and fill it.
The CCP has far less impact on my life as an American than the US government.
This (and PAFACA in general) is a massive disgrace from a 1A POV.
What's the first amendment angle here? Foreign actors aren't covered under 1A, and people in the US are just as able to publish to and consume TikTok as they were before.
What is 1A and PAFCA?
1st amendment and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
Technically would be correct to say its being split into TikTok US and TikTok Rest of World , probably why one of their new ToS includes geolocating the end user for user segmentation. Since i dont think they are going to split the app - probably keep using the same published one.
It seems like what this will basically entail is a US algorithm and moderation system, while the core app remains with ByteDance.
> The Joint Venture will secure U.S. apps through software assurance protocols, and review and validate source code on an ongoing basis, assisted by its Trusted Security Partner, Oracle.
So the new team will be in charge of content moderation, training, and "review and validat[ion]" of source code. Not actually a new app.
Good. now that it is done, can EU and the rest of the world push for regional ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp and Youtube without the US complaining unfair practices.
Chinese ownership as a security threat is currently in between reality and conspiracy realms but the US govt meddling as a threat is a proven reality worldwide.
I am European and live in Japan.
China is currently providing weapons for Russia to wage large-scale war in Europe, while supporting a dictatorship in North Korea that regularly launches nuclear-capable misiles in my general direction.
The EU would have to put the US on a list of "foreign adversaries", with whatever political fallout comes from that. Not saying they shouldn't, but there will be downsides.
Since controlling these platforms is probably the best ROI for swinging public opinion, I'm sure it's a matter of time before they get seized (one way or another) and redistributed to reliable political allies.
Would they? There are already data residency laws, and the US didn’t have to be on any foreign adversary list for those to work, right?
whether or not they formally put the US on such a list for trade purposes, clearly they see the US as such.
I don't get it why they sold it. If the Chinese government really had a say, simply refusing would have been a better option, as Trump would have never dared shutting off an app loved by hundreds of millions of voters.
Didn't this all start with data privacy?
How is TikTok user data more private today than it was a year ago?
I think it was more about control. The narrative was that the Chinese government was intentionally affecting the algorithm for US users to dumb them down and affect elections.
I’m not sure about “dumb them down”, I suspect it’s more like “subtly influence popular opinion”.
My husbands TickTock feed is full of things like “10 things Americans do that Chinese think are weird”, “10 reasons Chinese cities are in the 22nd century” etc etc.
I personally don’t think that’s propaganda - most of it is factually true and would be pushed to the front of any fair algorithm because it is engaging. But I can kinda see the concern, even though I disagree with the outcome.
Let’s be real, we all know this is about censorship, surveillance and controlling narratives.
Old: CCP censorship, CCP surveillance, CCP narratives
New: US censorship, US surveillance, US narratives (patriot approved)
I feel like this outcome is so much worse than just banning the platform.
> US censorship, US surveillance, US narratives (patriot approved)
This is the status quo for a lot of US media, but TikTok is actually much worse. The "US narratives" in this case are in service of Trump, possibly behind closed doors as table stakes for the purchase agreement.
So what's the workaround here...VPN from another country?
Only a fool would trust the political moderation on any major corporate platform at this point. Some I’m sure see this as a great win. All our media, real estate, and economy is already obviously for sale to foreign govts, but when it comes to propaganda we draw the line.
So.. US intelligence agencies and data brokers are going to mine it and US interests are going to pump it full of human and bot sockpuppets to manufacture the consent of users to be more aligned with ideas that work best for the Ellisons' interests.
Correct. We've fixed TikTok by blowing off a law enacted by Congress to ban it and now Oracle has a live tracking of every user by GPS.
Did you mean
... live tracking by ICE
Yes, this is terrible. Before now it was fine, just Chinese intelligence agencies and data brokers mining it and Chinese interests pumping it full of human and bot sockpuppets to manufacture the consent of users to be more aligned with ideas that work best for the CCP's interests, but now it's just ruined.
I’ll engage with this because I’m curious about your position. I’m not a TikTok user and I’m not American.
All the other American controlled social media platforms are exactly like your China description from my point of view: it’s American agencies and data brokers mining it and American interests pumping it.
Do you think a reasonable course of action is for us to force the sell of American platforms? I have no sympathy for what China is doing but I have no sympathy for what America is doing either.
Why do you think one’s more acceptable other than “it’s my country doing it”, assuming you are American that is.
You have no real reason to believe me, but if it's worth anything, I work with US agencies in the domain of information warfare and the relationships with platforms are tenuous if not adversarial. And nothing happens on the scale you might imagine. But if you really do believe that the US is pulling the platforms' strings, I do indeed encourage disentanglement or forcing sales as you describe. What I have seen through my work has strongly reinforced my biases against the Chinese government, but I recognize that others may view my own government in that light.
Personally, I worry more about the platforms and data brokers themselves, as I think everyone should and does. They hold disproportionate power and their incentives drive us all in the wrong direction.
Not the person you're replying to, but:
> Do you think a reasonable course of action is for us to force the sell of American platforms?
Yes, absolutely. If your country's people believe that WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are a threat in the same way, they should take the same action.
(Mind you, I don't believe for a second that this was the real motivation behind what's gone on with TikTok, but I think it's a reasonable course of action to take if you think there is a threat there, regardless of what company or country we're talking about.)