Users are freaking out
Oh noo how will I manage without my daily cringe worthy bullshit videos mixed with ads
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.
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.
And your evidence for this is?
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.
Lol I feel so called out
Reddit and TikTok are incredibly different. And most of us that came over here from Reddit were there and we all saw the quality of Reddit going downhill for a long time. And when Reddit decided to try to be more like a TikTok style company, we all bailed.
So it’s not that ironic. We all willingly left when a company made one more decision screwing us over. These people are clawing at their phones to stay on an app.
I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.
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.
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.
I have trouble with YouTube. It never recommends good short form content. If I could crack that, I probably wouldn’t Tiktok.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I would love it if the government banned Reddit.
Lemmy I could live without. If any users are making their livelihoods on Lemmy or Reddit, they should find something more productive to do.
More productive? Dog they are small businesses that are using tik tok as a store front. Like how people run business through Facebook. What your saying is “fuck these people they should just go work a soul crushing job at a big corporation like me”
Didn’t know scamming people was such a nice business.
So people selling on Ebay is a scam? People selling on Etsy is a scam?
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.
Lol wut? I don’t think you know what “leninist” means.
There’s what they claim to be and what they are. What they claim to be, is a transitional centralized system of government aimed at jump starting communism. What they are is that without a mechanism or plan to transition. Ending up in EVERY SINGLE GROUP that has tried devolving into an authoritarian suppressive system. Benefitting largely those at the top.
The Party heads in Moscow benefited far more than the average citizen of the Soviet Union. Nearly every modern Russian oligarch has a direct line that can be drawn back to former party leadership. Xi Jinping does not live in government block housing like a regular citizen. Nor do any of the families of top party members. And should a Chinese citizen complain. They will be brutally ostracized and excluded from society at best. Jailed for life or slaughtered if they’re not so lucky. Capitalists salivate about being able to do that with impunity. They still do it. Just not with impunity yet.
no, would just switch to 4chan. That’s my last option, lol
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.
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.
Then again, the algorithm knows I skip a lot of dumb shit… cept the funny cat videos.
You are right, they should ban lemmy too since it’s used for propaganda by anticapitalists! /s
Find your voice?
Ah, the only time you’re going to hear that from the Chinese company is when they want you to prevent someone coming between them and their data feed and profits.
Nevermind the algorithms that suppress voices they don’t want to be heard.
And the fact that “their own voice” is banned in China itself. What a bunch of bullshit.
Governments banning social media based on who can use it to spy on who, instead of creating privacy regulations and enforcing them to create and regulate markets, which is kinda what they should do, to make it so it doesn’t matter who owns which app. Taking an opportunity and shitting all over it for some childish standoff should be beneath us.
I hate tiktok. I am not from the US, but banning the app that is most popular among young people while raiding dozens of university campuses? Don’t sound like a great way to get young people trust the system…
They don’t need anyone to trust the system, they just need to retain control.
They don’t really aim for them either, it’s not like most young people would go lobby them in their preferred way(money).
They’re banning it because they blame tick tok for the pro Palestinian movement. Zuck and Google have been spying on users for decades.
Hmm brand new account, first comment, definitely no Astroturfing going on here.
The Tik Tok ban is about keeping big tech in the hands of the USA. Are my account stats better for you?
The Tik Tok ban is about keeping big tech out of the hand of enemy nation states.
In doing so, yes they have also kept it in the hands of the USA.
Why not just kill the app then instead of asking for divestment? Why do they still need it?
What do you mean kill the app? The US government doesn’t have the authority to kill the app. That isn’t one of the options in the table.
And why does who need it? Who is this “they” you’re referring to?
I assume the US government wants to force a sale to a US tech company, no? Who would presumably profit from said successful app. Why not just outright ban it here? By kill I just mean make unusable. But you knew that, silly.
Why not just outright ban it here?
Thats one of the options ByteDance has. The US government can’t force a company in a different sovereign nation to sell anything. ByteDance has two options, their app is banned in the US, or they have the opportunity to sell it to a U.S. company. That’s up to ByteDance and the CCP, not the U.S. government.
Baby’s 1st comment 🥹
That’s ridiculous. Government doesn’t move that quickly. They’ve been thinking about how to deal with foreign interference for years. Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Palestine thing isn’t that interesting or important in the grand scheme. At best, the Palestinians, like the Houthis and Hezbollah, are pawns used by Iran to stir up trouble from time to time. This conflict has been going on for 80 years already and the overall trend in the Middle East is toward peace and economic integration with Israel. No one is going to push the Jews into the sea and liberate Palestine for the Palestinians.
If you don’t think Israel “that interesting or important” to the US government, you haven’t been paying attention. full stop. This isn’t about Palestine, its always been about Israel. They send way too much money to us politicians, including the one in the white house, for it to not matter “in the grand scheme”. AIPAC money alone should be enough to convince you.
Perhaps I misspoke. I mean to say that the periodic flare-ups with the Palestinians are not that important anymore. They used to be. But nowadays, Israel’s neighbours aren’t invading with tanks and, as I said, the overall trend is towards peace and economic integration with Israel. I agree with you that Israel is important to the US for many good strategic and political reasons.
Iran literally just sent drones into Israel. You haven’t been paying attention.
I’ve been paying attention to the Middle East for almost 40 years, punk. What? Iran, like, literally just sent drones into Israel? Oh no, literally what will we do? Like, oh my god, this is so terrible.
You can’t take and hold territory with drones, especially not Iranian drones. Iran is not invading Israel. Grow up and go learn something.
Iran might not be invading Israel anytime soon but they sure arent “trending towards peace” like you claim. You’re wrong about this one, and your anger betrays you here. It might shock you to learn that even at your age, you can still learn something, too. At least I know I’m uninformed and look for the truth instead of just spouting off bullshit with nothing to back it up.
That seems like quite a leap.
As bad as Meta and Google are in this respect, they are not under direct government control. It’s just different with the TikTok parent.
Given how easy it is to create shell corporations, how does any of this prevent the CCP from running TikTok through another proxy?
I.e. is all this posturing just a colossal waste of time?
Now that it’s happening, I don’t quite know how to feel.
I certainly don’t feel sorry for Tiktok though.
There are a million startups chomping at the bit to create or have their existing app become the TikTok replacement in the event it does get banned.
This is the nature of American Capitalism. A monopolistic entity is broken up for this reason or that thereby making way for competition. According to all those economists, competition is good and breeds innovation.
I don’t have a problem with this. Next go for Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft too.
I mean in all honesty if another app takes over TikTok it’ll just be Instagram reels. It’s already got a lot of cross-buy-in.
I’m not for banning shit. I am for educating. We need to show people what TikTok really is, what it does and how it affects shit.
The problem, from the government’s perspective, is that there’s no way to only see some of the fnords. If we teach people to recognize Chinese propaganda, they’ll start to recognize American propaganda too. Better to keep us stupid and then control who’s allowed to talk to us in the first place.
Ah fuck it, its just the next step the US is just mad China got this privacy invader and not them. Meanwhile Meta is the internet to most of Africa.
All major social medias have been toxic and invasive and only now does it matter to the US.
It’s not about privacy. China and the US have all the data on you they could want. It’s about control. TikTok has successfully activated their base to contact their representatives with a notification from the app. It shows that they could use it to influence our politics.
China recognizes the danger, hence all western apps being banned. If they recognize the danger, then they must also recognize the utility. Are they using it? It’s hard to say, but TikTok is what that would look like.
You mean like how rideshare apps told their users to vote in specific ways on specific ballot proposals? No talk about banning those apps.
Sure, but as far as I’m aware they’re American companies. Americans are allowed to influence our elections. Foreign agents are not. Whether they’re doing it on behalf of China or not, they’re foreign agents with a lot of political power, and have been shown to use it for their own self interest.
Billionaires might as well be considered foreign agents. They’re parasites who are doing a lot more damage to the country than any actual foreign agent has ever managed.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. Many lack the complexity of thought to understand they are being played like fiddles.
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Can someone make a federated decentralised alternative for these fellow addicts? At least they won’t be at mercy of geopolitical powers but only our local, innocent, slightly mad admins.
I realise though that it would take gargantuan effort$
I’ve heard of Goldfish and Vidzy.
A federated alternative for that already exists - peertube. Adapting it to a short form video format wouldn’t be that difficult. However, running it (any video streaming platform) is expensive. How do u plan to fund it?
I plan to kindap a one of forbes top 100. Then hold them captive until the desired result is achieved and legal matters resolved
