We need a TikTube apparently.

Well youtube has both.

And I hope the long form videos take some sort video cues and don’t have 3 minute long rambling intros anymore. The one nice things about shorts is they get to the point.

Fucking YouTube shorts.

Every content creator has to partake in the stupidity because it’s that or becoming an algorithm outcast, so they awkwardly cut bits of their videos just to post a couple of those.

And then YouTube forces them in everyone’s throat, with absolutely no regard for the medium and no option to filter them out.

No, YouTube, I won’t watch your stupidly formatted 10-second bits of nothing on my TV.

Nah, it’s just enshittification. Every other video is an ad now and some videos that aren’t labeled as ads are just viral marketing ads in disguise. The “for you” page gets exhausting with all these ads, and it’s really the only way to discover new content.

Then there is tiktok live that they heavily push. Tiktok live can be sorta cool, but once the NPCing trend hit, 6 out of 10 live feeds are people unabashedly whoring themselves out for money, another 2 out of the ten are weird live “games” that are just p2p with the in currency gift system, another 10% are live open shops like Pokémon cards or freshwater clams for pearls or shit (which is kinda cool, but there are so many of them) then the last 1 are legitimately interesting live feeds.

Then it got even worse… they added competitions, which would require a certain amount of high value gifts to be sent by their viewers to obtain cash prizes for hitting certain gifting metrics. This turned almost all of the live feeds into just endless begging.

Then somehow it got worse… they added “battles” which pit two live feeds against each other. Nowadays it’s a lot of Israel v Palestine or Trump V Biden streams. There timed and whoever collects more gifts wins the match. It’s really nauseating to be honest…

It’s not people slowly realizing that tiktok is bad, it’s just tiktok actively becoming worse. The most frustrating thing is all your favorite videos are lurking somewhere on the site, but you have little control over what comes next and it often takes wading through mountains of shit to find something good.

Instagram is absolute garbage compared to how it used to be. It’s still massive. Once people are hooked, it’s hard to wean them off. People were livid at reddit, but only a fraction of those who spoke up are here

They’re hard to destroy until something (people view as) better shows up. My buddy Tom from MySpace got out while the getting was good.

TikTok is no more a social media platform than YouTube is. I’m puzzled why some people call it that and my only guess is that they’ve never used it.

More than anything, it’s that people resist change. They’ll stick to what they are doing until sometime after it becomes very clear that they shouldn’t any longer.

It’s hard because once you got a place where all your friends are, it will be extremely hard to leave because it’s not like they’ll follow you and move to something like mastadon, pixelfed, or lemmy.

My friends are on Instagram, if I wanted to find my classmates, they would all be on there. My parents are on facebook, there’s no chance for those old guys to move to something else.

Is this marketing? On Lemmy?!

Don’t be fooled. TikTok is going strong and will continue to go strong. How long has Twitter or Facebook been “on the decline?” Sure, maybe they’ve both lost a lot of users, but these kind of cultural touchstone apps don’t ever seem to go away. TikTok will be around for a long time to come.

That implies that the enshittification will stop when profits increase, but we all know that it will never stop.

We found a way to squeeze 0.00023% more profit per user.

Funny.

In theory, you can do something like that with Peertube, it’s a federated alternative to YT.

In practice, serving video content requires fuckloads of bandwidth, which has huge costs. The first thing you’ll want/need is to limit filesizes and/or video resolution. Depending on what you start with, how much initial money you have, even allowing people to watch everything in 720p might be a strain.

For paying the costs with ads, unless you can guarantee hundreds of thousands of daily views, the platforms won’t be willing to pay much, “low exposition” or whatever. Though, if the only thing that won’t be there is hate speech and dark web, you’re letting normal porn in, which can drive significant traffic, but now you’ll have to deal with puritanical companies not wanting to associate with your site, plus companies afraid of the possible backlash.

Ideally, you’d have to create your own ad server, so you’d have to reach out to companies directly and ask them if they’d like to advertise on your platform with no middlemen.

Are you going to allow copyrighted content? You’ll get downranked in searches, and probably wrecked by the DMCA.

Advertising also isn’t as lucrative as it seems. YouTube was a money pit for years - that’s probably tied to the decision to push Premium so heavily. Videos are big.

the same but opposite. YT pushes shorts to compete with Tiktok. Tiktok pushes longform content to compete with YT

Why can’t they put shorts somewhere else? I do watch them but I don’t always want them, they clog up results and recommendations so bad

Tiktok is getting worse… for users. Not for “itself”.

The article also makes some very large assumptions about longer length tiktoks being inherently worse for its audience.

I for one would love longer length tiktoks, and as for those who don’t the algorithm is extremely efficient and will filter out that style of content for those who don’t.

This is similar to the shop discussion, tiktoks gives full control over filtering this out via the #shop hashtag and disabling the shop tab.

The article really creates artificial problems with the app to justify its own existence when really these aren’t major issues that would lead to the downfall of a company or reduction in users.

Personally I’ll be the first to stop using a platform when they spam me with ads (Instagram). But tiktok is generally very manageable, much more than most other forms of social media.

I will say it was incredibly fast how quickly it transitioned to a giant money making machine compared to older platforms. It’s much more rapidly viewable, and seems to have more conversation around that then it being legitimately a worse social platform.

The COVID boom to tech is the most probable answer as it was steroids to isolation accessable social interaction. But man they aren’t even trying to ride the wave anymore but capture as much of the leftover ripples as possible.