TikTok creators mourn app where 'overnight' success is possible (www.bbc.com)
from misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world on 18 Jan 08:55
https://sopuli.xyz/post/21552537

#technology

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asbestos@lemmy.world on 18 Jan 11:28 next collapse

Oh no
anyways

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 11:36 next collapse

success, content

Making shitty videos is a stupid hobby, not a job.

themurphy@lemmy.ml on 18 Jan 13:35 next collapse

You can say the same about the whole entertainment industry then. You just prefer other things than short form, visual content.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 13:42 collapse

I cannot say that a great movie is equivalent to a meme in an animated GIF.

state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Jan 19:41 collapse

Nobody is saying that. But I will take a great meme over a shitty movie any day.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 19:43 collapse

Nobody is saying that

Well, that other guy was saying this so…

state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Jan 19:52 collapse

No, they did not. All I saw was a statement that people making a living on sites like TikTok or YouTube are also part of the entertainment industry. Which is just a fact. Whether you like short form content on these sites or not doesn’t change that fact.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 20:24 collapse

part of the entertainment industry. Which is just a fact

Your facts are yours only, and laughable too. Get a job, something that is the tiniest bit useful. But filling the internet with your inane thoughts is definitely not a job, nor does it belong in a forum dedicated to technology. The mere “fact” that any moron can pretend to have a job by putting 30 seconds videos in the latest fad is disgusting and unworthy of humanity.

Woops, I already spent more time answering your post than those idiots have spent filming themselves spewing what idiotic thoughts came out of their brains. Am I an influencer now?

skulblaka@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 21:46 collapse

Am I an influencer now?

You aren’t making any money from it, so, no.

Like it or not, people make a living doing this.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 21:49 collapse

people make a living doing this

I know. The tiktok ban may fix that for some time hopefully.

Nima@leminal.space on 18 Jan 14:48 next collapse

what’s with this curmudgeon type shit? their livelihood is at risk. just because you’re not part of the ecosystem doesn’t mean you need to dismiss a way to make money thats worked for quite a few people.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 15:29 next collapse

their livelihood is at risk

They should make a better tiktok: 5 seconds videos, it will be more insightful, and a gift to humanity… Or maybe 1 seconds videos because they will concentrate their talents. But god forbid they find a real job, that would be exhausting.

blakemiller@lemmy.world on 18 Jan 18:50 collapse

How do you feel about content like this? It’s long form, informative, and hobbyist.

Or this guy who generates customer leads to his interior design business?

futatorius@lemm.ee on 18 Jan 18:03 next collapse

They’re lice riding on the back of a large and very efficient predator.

Nothing they can do on that platform benefits humankind, though it might funnel some money in the “creators’” direction. They’re no better than the teenagers that run bindles of smack from the trap house to the junkie for a couple of bucks.

Nima@leminal.space on 18 Jan 21:04 next collapse

this is a social media app that creators can make videos on. i think you’re overreacting just a bit, man.

its not the end of the world. people making content that people enjoy on a video app isn’t going to ruin the youth.

relax.

nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz on 19 Jan 18:55 collapse

Spreading information benefits humanity.

Showing someone how to cook a recipe benefits humanity.

Informing people about things that are happening benefits humanity.

Telling your story, and letting others learn from it benefits humanity.

Entertaining people, even just for a moment benifits humanity.

Lantern@lemmy.world on 20 Jan 02:04 collapse

Their livelihoods are only at risk because they ignored the cards for the previous five years. If you’re living in the US, and haven’t spread your content out to other platforms by now, you are in that situation because of your own inaction. I refuse to sympathize with people who aren’t capable of simple logic.

Chozo@fedia.io on 18 Jan 14:54 collapse

If it pays the bills for those people, what difference does it make? Other than "me no likey", that is?

Duamerthrax@lemmy.world on 18 Jan 13:01 next collapse

Morons who should have been doing that in the first place. You never want all your content and success to hinge on the whim’s on one corporation.

biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 13:57 next collapse

Have people somehow forgotten that VPNs exist? Like millions are moving to rednote but the easier way is to literally just, at minimum, get a shitty free VPN, and still have access to tiktok.

Personally tho, I’d probably opt for a cloud server VPN if I really needed one.

Edit: this was a stupid take, I forgot the app would be removed from devices and that it will cause inconvenience.

ahal@lemmy.ca on 18 Jan 14:14 next collapse

You vastly overestimate the average person’s technical ability.

biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 14:38 collapse

Honestly, true. I must be underestimating how tired I am and overestimating how much brain power I got left because, I must say, I barely had a single thought when typing that.

shoulderoforion@fedia.io on 18 Jan 14:20 next collapse

VPN's are grand, if you're using a PC, if you're using a smartphone the app is about to be dissapeared, also if your bag is monetization, good luck getting a bank to accept digital deposits from TikTok

biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 14:32 next collapse

Oh right, I somehow didn’t think they’d remove the app at first, I thought they’d just firewall it or smthn. The monitisation part also makes a lot of sense too. Honestly I don’t have even the smallest experience with witnessing anything online get banned in my country apart from piracy.

futatorius@lemm.ee on 18 Jan 18:06 collapse

Good, they can do something else to regain their sense of self-worth, such as working the glory hole in a truck stop in Bakersfield.

biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works on 20 Jan 13:26 collapse

Although it might not seem like it, not all users of tiktok are the doom scroller brain-dead stereotype you believe. Tiktok has helped many small businesses get off their feet, allowed people and groups to get donations they may need, and has facilitated education about topics from news to interesting facts to scientific phenomenon and beyond.

Granted, it does have its negatives, like brain rot content and the hyperfocused algorithm, but it has it’s pretty amazing aspects as well.

superkret@feddit.org on 18 Jan 15:10 collapse

Any roadblock in using a social media will turn off 90% of the users.
Which means the creators will be gone, too.
Sure, you could connect to it via VPN, but most of the content you like won’t be there anymore.

biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works on 18 Jan 23:26 collapse

I fully agree with that, and I was wrong in assuming that it’d be very simple. In my country, we only got online piracy firewalled, so I don’t have experience with apps or other kinds of websites getting banned, and somehow I assumed that most of the demographics of a service would try and use it a different way just like how we use VPNs to hop on the pirate bays, but that isn’t the case.

sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Jan 14:54 next collapse

They miss the early phase of enshittification. The reason a normal person could get 50 million views in 24 hours is because the tiktok office had a way to juice the algorithm for specific videos and show it to everybody. And they were just doing this for free. Just like Facebook used to show content to people organically. Eventually tiktok starts selling ads and maximizing value, and then you have to pay for the success they used to give for free.

Wait if tiktok is a private company, maybe it wouldn’t do that exactly the same way as Facebook and Google

SplashJackson@lemmy.ca on 18 Jan 16:15 next collapse

Jesus Christ I’m tired of hearing about this TikTok bullshit every goddamn day

Soulifix@kbin.melroy.org on 18 Jan 16:52 next collapse

I've come from an era of the internet where - you're not supposed to be internet famous. That's like a frowned upon thing where people think you lead a loser life because you got infamous on the internet. Now people are fretting about how many views they get.

CosmoNova@lemmy.world on 18 Jan 17:08 next collapse

I think those „success stories“ were always at least a little fabricated by the algorithm that somewhat randomly pushed a selected few lucky users immensely just to show the rest how you can become a media sensation overnight. It gives the platform free publicity as opposed to distributing visibility more evenly. Besides the ad revenue on TikTok is almost non existent even compared to Youtube. It was never a platform that you could realistically become successful with even if you got views.

misk@sopuli.xyz on 18 Jan 17:58 next collapse

Besides the ad revenue on TikTok is almost non existent even compared to Youtube. It was never a platform that you could realistically become successful with even if you got views.

If TikTok was widely known for being bad for making money then maybe it pulled some people who didn’t care about money like on old YouTube.

Lila_Uraraka@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Jan 18:40 collapse

It literally has more registered users than there were registered for the US presidential election

futatorius@lemm.ee on 18 Jan 17:58 next collapse

Useless, brainless time-wasters, the lot of them.

Breve@pawb.social on 18 Jan 18:56 next collapse

I’m wondering how much of TikTok is actually authentic. Like when a video gets hundreds of views and likes, is TikTok padding those numbers to make users feel like they are “viral” just to stay on the platform? Even if TikTok isn’t directly doing it, how many are from bot farms just trying to “look normal” by having their sock puppets engage with “normal” videos before using them to push their desired narratives?

Maybe I should start a social network with a mysterious black box algorithm that is really just a random number generator that only goes up. 🤔

Kolanaki@yiffit.net on 18 Jan 19:46 next collapse

I imagine that people have fucked around to find out how to game the system and know more or less exactly how the thing actually works. People do it everywhere else. Shit, dudes on YouTube like The Spiffing Brit make entire videos about how the system works and how you can exploit it.

Entropywins@lemmy.world on 19 Jan 16:39 collapse

Perfectly balanced game…

EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world on 19 Jan 22:28 collapse

The numbers presented on TikTok are absolutely 100% made up nonsense.

slingstone@lemmy.world on 19 Jan 19:22 collapse

Didn’t Vine do this once, then TikTok came along and did it, more or less? Won’t there just be another one sometime before we know it?