Why TikTok is So Controvercial?

I am reading about TikTok and cannot understand why a service, that is basically a useless version of Youtube, became so popular and controversial. So explain me like a lainon to lainon: is TikTok just a stupid soykaf sheeple use because of their sheeple brains or there is something to it that I cannot understand.

>why it became so popular They have a very effective algorithm to keep people on the app. >why it's controversial Because it's chinese, and better at rotting normal people' brain than american stuff.

>is TikTok just a stupid soykaf sheeple use because of their sheeple brains you think imageboards are any different? most social media these days is basically a synthesis of 4chan and reddit, with the exception of youtube, which has a longer format tiktok is better than youtube because the content is more distilled; the typical youtube video is 10 to 20 minutes long, of which ~80% is filler and only 2 or 3 minutes are actual content. tiktok removes the filler, this makes the content better and lowers the production cost, and the algorithm is also more charitable to smaller creators. all these factors make it easier for people to produce content of their own, so in the end there is more content of better quality and a more active community if I had to guess, I would say only 1 out of 1000 youtube users uploads content, the rest are spectators. with tiktok the number is probably something like 1 in 20, and it was higher when the app started. it isn't perfect, but it is definitely better at stimulating user creativity. and there are less bots because the algorithm is fine tuned for affinity, not popularity >controversial it is chinese, it is hard to bot and the moderation is really strict (everything has to be "esrb E")

>>44605 Everything wrongthing that the west bans got posted on tiktok with free access for youth. US got big mad because Tiktok deprogrammed kids and taught them everything YT would censor

>>44611 ??? Last I heard, tiktok pushes just as much nazi soykaf as youtube

>>44612 look i dont want to post here details to avoid attracting undesirables. The core idea is still just this: tiktok allowed what got derezzed on yt They got mad at tiktok because tiktok invalidated their censorship efforts on western platforms.

Vine was same thing and was popular but went away and TikTok filled that gap. I heard their algorithm is also very good at determining what you like watching. YouTube became increasingly more distant from it's roots where there is a lot less vlogging and shorter videos visible from their algorithm and having comments on everything is just extra noise. TikTok streamlines everything and doesnt require a lot of time investment so it makes sense it became popular in this time. Why people hate on it is same reason they hated on Vine and any social media platform trying to feel superior to someone without really thinking about why trends begin and exist in the first place and venting their petty annoyance or legitimate frustration with society today. Also in US there was a lot of government propaganda against it because it is the only major social media site not under US jurisdiction so they can't abuse their power to censor dissenting opinions about the Israel Palestine conflict among other things. TikTok only collects same data as any other social media platform the whole claims on security is a lie where any genuine would have pushed for data protection requirements for all instead of a ban on a single platform.

>>44605 It's a cheap form of addicting dopamine drug that people use to help add meaning or socializing in their lives. Lots of kids use it at my college. There is no other explanation other than it feels good. I don't use it but if someone tried shoving that soykaf in my face I would get the hell away from them as fast as possible.

>>44605 I found funny how it is normalized how the girls (most of them underage) sexualize a lot

>>44613 It's a little silly to ignore that TikTok is like 80% spyware. Yes, American companies do that too, but American companies at least in theory obey the law, ie they listen when feds tell them to do something (the whole Apple encryption thing from 2016~ comes to mind). Maybe having an actively hostile and powerful foreign country having access to the location data, text, what media their consuming, etc. and being able to control what those millions of people are being shown, isn't very popular within DC. There's a larger can of worms about whether Silicon Valley actually listens to the feds, but that argument is separate to the TikTok angle, ie you can agree that silicon valley is bad and/or doesn't listen to feds while also acknowledging that China having US citizens data is bad. Anyways, the average person doesn't really understand or care what information their smart phone is giving up as long as they get to watch cute animal videos or whatever. So that's why there's a disconnect between DC and the average citizen.

Reddit is like kicking dead whales down the beach ass, literally cannot do anything, or post anything real without some dumb fuarrrking retard censoring you. Any ideas to combat this?

>>44618 >actively hostile foreign country >conflating Chinese government with chinese owners of tiktok >at least when American companies do it.. >silicon valley is bad and/or doesn't listen to the feds >average citizen doesn't care if we spy on them yeah nice try agent smith

Its Chinese so Americans have to bitch about it. TikTok isn’t any different to other social media platforms, but because the owners are Chinese its a problem. Today, anything China does is a sin to the Americans. If a Chinese man builds a car, it must be evil CCP spyware built on stolen technology to deliberately fuarrrk with America’s amazing car industry which is the best. If China has economic prosperity, well its because they are cheaters or thieves or ripping us off. At rock bottom, it’s jealousy and arrogance. They have something nice that we don’t. They are backwards yellow race, anything they make must be soykaf or fake or stolen from us. How can a lesser race be successful? They must be cheating or stealing. Complaining about privacy on TikTok is pretty fair, but what difference does it make when America has spent the last two decades spying on every single human with an internet connection? Now you might think, US surveillance is at least held back by law. But of course, US law only applies to US citizens, a Roman style global elite, and the US can do whatever it wants to non-citizens outside its borders. If you’re not a US citizen, you might as well be a slave.

>>44618 China only does the same things America does. If you aren't living in China but the US for example then something Chinese owned is preferable to the alternative. China does have data privacy laws better than the US does which is next to none. https://archive.is/iymee/

>>44610 >you think imageboards are any different? Yes. Imageboards are just a chronological list of last bumped threads. There is no secret algorithm pushing specific threads to the top and hiding other threads from view. And even though imageboards are susceptible to bots as well you are forced to evaluate every anonymous post on its own merits. There is no way for someone to pay bots to "upvote" their posts to get more visibility or any of the other games people play on social media. >>44611 >US got big mad because Tiktok deprogrammed kids and taught them everything YT would censor This. Although it's not so much the US but a certain middle east country that is most upset about kids getting uncensored information about the genocide they are committing. >>44618 >oh noes the chinese government is spying on me You don't live in china. It's your government you need to watch out for.

>>44724 imageboards arent free of censorship or other tricks. "thread sliding" is a known tactic and /p♡l/tard favorite. as well as samef♡gging and much more. impartial moderation was always a laughable myth, 4chan never pretended to be about the truth.

>>44724 >There is no way for someone to pay bots to "upvote" their posts to get more visibility or any of the other games people play on social media. you can easily pay a group of people to target a specific thread/board and turn it into their own personal insider trade and echo chamber. the lurker psychology and the idea of "culture" and "fitting in" make engineering the random idea of what a board or site "should be", which beliefs to hold and what to think pretty easy, and even most imageboard users tend to either leave or go with the flow. it's pretty easy to exploit a bunch of social instincts that don't have any reason to be in anonymous imageboards to push specific narratives and condition communities into certain beliefs. and all you need is a team of like 4-5 people with residential proxies or the help of the moderation team.

>>44726 >4chan never pretended to be about the truth And in the Lacanian sense this made it the truest site

>>44728 lacan isn't enough to actually understand 21st-century memetic warfare and your posts vividly exemplifies the why

>>44727 Many tried and then they cried cause it wasnt as effective as their raids on normal person sites. The problem is normal people care about "what does majority think" and thus fall victim to it but 4c was a bunch of social rejects. The moment the raid stopped was the moment it went back to usual and they couldnt afford raiding all threads at once. So while they spammed their soykaf things continued as normal in other threads.

>>44732 what makes you think people on 4chan didn't fall for it too? what do you think 2017 was

>>44733 What happened in 2017?

>>44605 >popular it was the new hotness filled with teenagers making very questionable choices on what to upload. i don't use it much but that has gone down afaik. I remember when it was starting to get popular 40 year old plus men would make tiktoks back to 13 year old girls singing and that was off putting. >controversial what was being uploaded and who was viewing responding see above. also it became political for everyone involved, I think blaming it on china was an out for failing domestic social media like facebook and youtube. it doesn't really matter, everyone has taken a side both defending and deriding it, and it's not much different from anything else online. Youtube even has it's own version, youtube shorts. I get the same tiktok doom scrolling on shorts without ever having to download tiktok.

The Americans think that TikTok is being used by the Chinese to secretly collect data. They do not understand the incompetence of the CCP and their complete inability to manage the most basic tasks let alone something difficult.

>>44726 There are ways to reduce the signal/noise ratio but at the end, if Anons want to post about anything, then they will, they will be see by other Anons and they will have a healthy discution. Correct the record and Shareblue have invested countless tens of millions to destroy 4chan, to no result. Even the AI bait, the 1PBTID with a clickbait question or a thirsttrap couldn't kill /Paul/. >>44632 China does not have laws. No country does. China have an authority that do what it want, like everyone. You can bet China give your data to contractors, everyone do.

>>44605 Ah, I see you have posted a lust provoking image! By my estimation the female depicted has ~ 0.6 waist:hip, heart shaped butt, full yet not egregious bosom, bangs with long dark hair, a non-threatening and receptive, demure expression, combined with a blushing face to signal arousal and receptivity (or inferior status, non-threatening) to the primal mind, fishnets, skirt, high heels to tone the legs, complete with the popular "thigh gap" and even a choke as a bonus. Jumping in to respond now!

>>44606 >They have a very effective algorithm to keep people on the app. Yeah, to be precise, it's this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663 Funnily enough, even with much of it now public knowledge, Google/Youtube can't replicate Tiktok's success for the life of them. It's ogre. I guess first move advantage is the mother of all tricks. Either that or Google's red tape is worse than we think.

>>44606 > Because it's chinese, Doesnt that alone mean it is stolen IP ?

>>45531 > Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses ... > Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations system ... Meanwhile in reality (pic rel)

>>45532 > Because it's chinese, >Doesnt that alone mean it is stolen IP ? Yes

>>44620 >conflating Chinese government with chinese owners of tiktok That's like saying Apple doesn't listen to DC. Maybe their not exactly the same entity, but thinking that DC isn't exerting influence is naive. >>44632 >China does have data privacy laws better than the US does Not saying that the US is great, but trusting China is moronic. My whole point is that having a greater evil doesn't make the lesser evil better. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust DC either, but my point was from the perspective of DC. >>44724 >You don't live in china. It's your government you need to watch out for. We live in the age of the internet. Everything is connect, and even someone on the other side of the planet is your neighbor. That's like saying "You don't need to worry about russian hackers because they're not in your country!" They can still make your life miserable is they want to, so best to take precautions.

>>44610 >everything has to be "esrb E" Your entire opinion on TikTok can be safely disregarded.

The main appeal of TikTok is its cynical reliance on passive consumption. Anybody born after 2005 will never know a world without the internet, so information and content has been completely devalued to them. The entire library of human creation is available to them instantaneously and anywhere, so everything blurs together into a big, interchangeable mass. They also interact exclusively with apps, which funnels their experience down even further into a heavily curated shortlist of acceptable content. They don't know how to search for things and consider having to look even a little bit to be an archaic, unacceptable inconvenience. Most of them won't even click on stuff. They'll be sitting around doing nothing and scroll right past stuff they know would appeal to them in the mindless, automated search of something that requires 1% less exertion from them to look at. Back when I did video marketing I kept seeing stats about how video got way more engagement on social media than image or text content did, and that data turned out to be completely fabricated by Facebook to push for more video. I knew it was a lie just from watching in person how the content was being interacted with. There's a reason why everything autoplays now. Everybody talks about algorithms, but the real killer is the delivery, the format. TikTok is a zero-effort carousel of stimulation. It's like a robot that shows you videos and is like kicking dead whales down the beach you off and feeds you crab legs and catches your soykaf in a bucket all at once while you lie there zoned out. Regardless of who owns it or how it's spying on you, the app itself is poisonous.