this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 72 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (10 children)

Users are freaking out

Oh noo how will I manage without my daily cringe worthy bullshit videos mixed with ads

[–] [email protected] 81 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I think it's ironic this is posted here on Lemmy, which is what it is today mainly thanks to users of another service freaking out over how they will manage without their API access to bullshit aggregated content mixed with astroturfing.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Most of the people who used the 3rd party apps weren't people who just doom scrolled shit that was fed to them. Most of them had all the default shit blocked or unsubed. It was all niche stuff the majority was subed to that had very little ad revenue for reddit. It's why the protests didn't really work, reddit didn't give a shit about the million or so people who went with niche subs using 3rd party apps.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And your evidence for this is?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Hi, I contribute to a number of projects that require incredibly specific information to facilitate (GPGPU kernel optimizations and unit tests for BLAS) and I use Reddit to collaborate with other engineers to solve issues like doing calculus on Lie groups resulting in a divide by zero because some non-zero groups multiply to zero in the middle of the calculation. The best engineers and mathematicians I know moved here, so I moved with them to continue the dissemination of these principles. The majority of memes and shitposts offer a common forum to get real work and study done in a way that publicly offers those solutions to anyone asking the same questions. Reddit wants just the shitposts and astroturfing, so they can keep it. I have work to do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Lol I feel so called out

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago

I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You either never used Tiktok, or you spent too much time staring at the shit videos and that ended up as your feed.

Personally, I get gardening tips, legal analysis of the trump trials, and stand up comedy. It's great.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I only saw some videos on other's phones.

Also I started using newpipe for youtube exactly because I don't want an algorithm learning what I'm interested in. No way in hell I do it for tiktok.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (11 children)

I get that on YouTube. (Legal Eagle, Leja etc) Just a bit less CCP manipulation. Not that there aren't issues with YouTube. Just less than TicTok.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

YouTube shorts recommendations suck.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I just want to not see them. I dont watch shorts and I never will. Youtube can go fuck itself because I fucking refuse to watch anything in fucking portrait mode let alone narrowed down in timescale to roughly fuck all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I have trouble with YouTube. It never recommends good short form content. If I could crack that, I probably wouldn't Tiktok.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

That's probably fair enough. I don't watch shorts on any site anywhere. I tend to opt for the 20 minute 30 minute or longer videos. Sitting and working on things when I get home.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

This, basically. Google took YouTube and made its algorithm push more long form content for the purpose of generating revenue from ads. Not saying TikTok doesn't have ads in my feed but at least I can skip literally all of them.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I loathe tiktok but if someone had banned Reddit while I was still using it I would have been hella mad. On the other hand it would have been "How will I manage without unhinged shitposts mixed with ads" from the outside

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Either TikTok will win in court and overturn the law (possible), be sold (unlikely) or shut down (likely). I can't see TikTok being sold being allowed by China, and even selling part of the business just creates a new global competitor to extend out of the US.

Multiple competitors will appear in the meantime hoping to get the displaced activity. TikTok is hugely profitable and a dominant replacement in the US would make a lot of money. This will be seen as an opportunity to make a lot of money for the winner.

I can see Meta trying to make a TikTok like clone, Google trying to leverage YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk trying to revive Vine at Twitter, plus lots of startups (mostly. American but possibly from other nations) vying to win the audience.

Ironically the more interesting battle may be outside the US - TikTok versus whatever US app comes along.

The deadline is after the US election - this could also all be political grandstanding and the politicians expectation might be that the law won't stand up in court anyway.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

TikTok has hundreds of millions of users outside the US, they may just pull out [and then US users will VPN to use it like we're fucking Iran]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

VPNs aren't that hard, but I feel like you overestimate the technical literacy of the general public in the US.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

All the public will have to do is type "tiktok.com" in their browser and their computer will connect to directly to servers in China. For now, they don't even need a VPN.

Then our politicians will start discussing a national firewall. We'll show that we're better than China by doing the same things China would do (/s).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Doesn't the bill include fines for using tiktok with a vpn?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

unless the bill has changed since the last time I read it, there were fines for hosting the service in US datacenters, and fines for companies allowing US data to exist in non-us datacenters. I don't think you could interpret the bill as imposing a civil penalty to a user using a vpn and accessing it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. I read Division H of the bill (the more important to me), and civilians would only be impacted if they distribute a banned app or something. ISPs could potentially be culpable though, but I'm pretty sure that's related to hosting the infra for something like TikTok and not just allowing traffic to it.

So yeah, using a VPN with TikTok would totally work. Not sure if you could get updates to the app over VPN though, that depends on how the stores handle regions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not sure if you could get updates to the app over VPN though, that depends on how the stores handle regions.

Specifically, app stores would be required not to host it, so you'd likely have to do updates through some sort of side-loading

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm saying if you're reporting your location as the EU, could you get updates through the App Store? Or would it know you're a US customer and disallow it, even if you report that you're in the EU? Or does it use GPS location?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I would guess that it goes off of the lowest common denominator between IP address geo-location & billing address. If either of those say US, google/apple would probably be required not to distribute it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Not that I saw.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (14 children)

If they banned lemmy and reddit you would be freaking out too. The difference is many people run their businesses on tik tok. Your making fun of people who are losing their livelihood.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Well, I'm freaking out a bit despite hating TikTok and believing it's harmful to the average user. I don't believe in censorship, and I think banning an app like this is a form of censorship.

That said, even if Lemmy and Reddit were banned, I would probably react similarly. I don't need Reddit or Lemmy and can do without, but I disagree very much with the censorship.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Nah. Lemmy is a software. Reddit is an entity. They could try to ban specific Lemmy servers. They've tried to go after torrent tracker sites with little to no success. This wouldn't be any different.

I think it's illuminating and hilarious that they're actually going through with this though. I've long made the statement that capitalists and Leninist are kissing cousins on all the worst possible fronts. And here's another data point.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

How do you run a business on TikTok?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

They provide a shop front interface called TikTok Shop. It's something Meta has been wanting to do for awhile in WhatsApp.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You use it to advertise and show off your items without having a actual shop. Tik Tok also has a shop you can buy from and you can list your items on there.

The closest thing I can think of that's similar to it would be Etsy but instead of having just pics of your products you can have short videos of it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I actually get pretty good info from TT. Lawyer insight on Trump trials, video quotes from politicians, summaries of new laws, science summaries for dummies that don't have physics degrees, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Then again, the algorithm knows I skip a lot of dumb shit... cept the funny cat videos.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

For real.

Like a dozen social media apps already have reals or shorts or some shit that's basically tiktok. They're all shitty and invasive, but so is tiktok.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The algorithms for all those sites are way worse tho, I get much less variety of content, and much less news/politics content that interests me. Frequently those feeds area few months behind. You don't know what you're talking about.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Having used all three major ones, TikTok's algorithm is head and shoulders above theirs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

You are right, they should ban lemmy too since it's used for propaganda by anticapitalists! /s

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