Awesome, do META next please!
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As far as I’m concerned META ruined the Oculus. As soon as they bought them out, I bought a Vive (which has worked great for years).
Even better
I see this as a win win
Call their bluff
they use the same algorithm across all of their companies so selling it would create a strong competitor and the chinese government is likely to block the sale anyways. tiktok revenue is a small slice of bytedance’s income, so it makes sense to swallow the relatively small loss to keep their product intact when it’s crystal clear that it’s far superior to anything else atm.
The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.
Is it good or do they just have a massive network and data advantage. If tik tok left and everyone switched over to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and they had the same amount of data tik tok has I think the experience would converge to whatever was on tik tok in a month or so.
There’s no secret sauce to tik tok, they’re throwing massive amounts of data at a recommendation AI and telling it to optimize for watch time, any sufficiently scaled company can do that nowadays. It’s more a matter of getting and maintaining an audience to create that data and content creators, both of which due to the network effect, and without federation, are drawn to the biggest service, not necessarily to the best.
I love how the media has thrown around the word algorithm. They don’t need to sell their algorithm for a competitor to compete. An algorithm produces some result output. So you could easily clone an algorithm without knowing its exact implementation.
Maybe I know quicksort, but you know mergesort. The customer doesn’t give a fuck which algorithm was used, so long as it’s sorted.
This is a bad take. Yes, “algorithm” is a vague term, but it’s incorrect to suggest that they’re easily cloned. These algorithms are what makes social media companies. Without them, they wouldn’t have the same kind of user engagement. It’s why, outside of the fediverse, social media companies try to hide or demote linear timelines. It’s why they pour most of the R&D money into the recommendation algorithms.
But that’s not really an algorithm.
algorithm is a word employed here to help dumb down the concept of the IP that people will want to buy from tiktok; no one means a literal algorithm.
That was my original point. The media and hence business / management use this term (incorrectly)
They could just say IP, or platform, or service, or implementation. But I guess saying algorithm makes everyone sound smart.
There will be a rush of US startups to replace it, and they will all be stage 1 enshittification, so they might actually be good for a while, like TikTok once was.
Or people will just migrate to the YouTube and Insta clones.
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YouTube shorts is such a hellhole that tiktokers migrating to it might improve things.
If they said or implied anything else, they would lose all leverage. The public couldn’t care less about who owns tiktok, so they need people to think they’ll lose it to have any public support.
US should call their bluff. If Tiktok gets banned, people will complain for a little bit until people forget and move on to what’s next. Why doesn’t an American company make something that’s practically identical? People will be all desperate for their 5 second dopamine rush that they will download anything.
Vine.co returns!
Could they please pull from Europe, too?
It’s Vine time! What? Just… just bring it back. Call it “Kudzu” or some crap if Elon Musk owns the rights to Vine.
Google knew youtube shorts didn’t stand a chance in a fair market.
We tried that with facebook in the eu. Didn’t work
Awesome
If the Chinese government is behind this, it’s a great play. Having Joe Biden be “the guy who banned tik tok” would severely undermine his election chances.
14 year olds don’t vote
Guess we’ll find out whether TikTok or reproductive freedom is more important…
14 year olds aren’t the only people who use Tik Tok
Lemmy really seems to generally think that TikTok isn’t massively overall popular. Lemmy would have someone thinking it’s a niche app only being used by teenagers.
They were 14 four years ago
Nice hope they won’t budge.
I do wonder if this is america being anti communist as history has shown before. Not to say China is actually communist but the economic system is hybrid socialist/capitalist and China is catching up or surpassing america so with this said what’s to say america starts using this tactic against more of chinas Chinese owned exports?
Beyond that america has meta which has done much the same as tiktok, targeting youth, furthering mental health issue, spying, anti trust and coverups yet they get a slap on the wrists.
Anti communist? With everything else we buy from China, this is the tipping point to be anti-communist? How about all the US social media platforms that China won’t let in? Is that “anti-capitalist?”
socialism has always been anti capitalism. socialism is based on principles like international revolution and a highly configured economic structures whereas capitalism is extraction of capital which western countries have been doing in china as much as china will allow but this isn’t what i am arguing.
something to keep in mind is that we don’t buy tiktok, similarly to meta and alphabet (google).
brief easy to read history of cold war activity.
Cuba and North Korea (the forgotten war) are both good to look in to. i hope the history can bring context to my previous statement as geopolitics is never as it seems.
While I appreciate the additional info, that really doesn’t add to the conversation about what the tipping point is for the parent comment.
i was not talking about a tipping point, i was focused on the geopolitics in my original comment.
Anti communist? With everything else we buy from China
would you argue America to be pro communist?
this is the tipping point to be anti-communist?
maybe but i’ll be honest, i dont know what you mean by this, the fight against communism has been a steady state of proxy wars, embargoes, surveillance and propaganda campaigns, so i would definitely say banning tiktok sits within embargo and propaganda.
How about all the US social media platforms that China won’t let in?
yea socialism is apposed/untrusting of capitalist products, usually seen as exploitive by the communist this is due in part to the never ending revolution.
Is that “anti-capitalist?”
100%
I didn’t argue that we are pro-communist.
The point of my observation was that the premise of the TikTok sale is “anti-communist” and that it’s being brought up at all against the background of all the existing, deep economic ties between the US and China. IOW the US putting its foot down on TikTok is anti-communist, but accepting everything else gets a pass?
Funny that you point out the mistrust of (in this context of social media) western products as being exploitative when the Chinese exploitation of data and use of algorithms to manipulate what we see on TikTok is exactly one of the reasons the US wants the sale.
you make a good point that Tiktok is doing some shady stuff but meta were court covertly collecting data from Snapchat through unknowing users devices.
should Facebook be banned or at least forced to sell? this is why the fiasco is coming across as anti-communist, an extension of cold war hostilities.
IOW the US putting its foot down on TikTok is anti-communist, but accepting everything else gets a pass
Tiktok offers no financial incentive to America unlike Chinese exports, apple are not about to pay a reasonable amount to create an iPhone in America, china is in a pretty good position with its fabrication and engineering, consumer products or even solar panels are far superior to what America can make on a similar budget.
Funny that you point out the mistrust of (in this context of social media) western products as being exploitative when the Chinese exploitation of data and use of algorithms to manipulate what we see on TikTok is exactly one of the reasons the US wants the sale.
this is because you view things through a capitalist scope, i am guilty of this too. Facebook as linked in the above article does the same.
They are not the same. One manipulates and exploits its own country’s citizens for profit, the other exploits and manipulates both its own and citizens of other countries for profit and government data collection.
While TikTok doesn’t offer financial incentive to any US corporation, it certainly offers incentives to the users of the platform.
Let’s not move the goalposts/butwhatabout to talking about minors using social media or Chinese manufacturing, that’s too much to get into and keep it focused on the communist/capitalist debate and why TikTok is being treated as it is.
It’s America being "anti criticise Israel "