Of course it's a chance to rethink the internet. COVID was also a chance to rethink our responses to pandemics. Cambridge Analytica was a chance to rethink data privacy as it relates to private companies. Edward Snowden was a chance to rethink data privacy as it relates to governments. Climate Change is a chance to rethink how we live our lives, build our cities, and produce our food. In my hometown, an earthquake was a chance to rethink how the city worked.
Life is full of these chances, but we seldom take them. Whatever happens with TikTok, it'll be business as usual in no time.
RSS was too good and too decentralized to exist. It's a miracle that it's still possible to independently publish and subscribe to podcasts (notably, Spotify doesn't let you subscribe to unapproved podcasts).
I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.
I think this is the direction ActivityPub is headed.
You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)
I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.
The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.
That could definitely be it. They might also be trying to play it cool, and not appear to gloat before the corpse is even cold. Instagram is running a lot of ads on TikTok now though.
People who chant RSS seem to never get this. Publishing is trivial, search and discovery is all that matters, saying “pick your own service (separately) for discovery” is like saying write down int main(), now write down the rest of the program and you’re done. What the hell is that service? That’s 99% of the work.
In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated. Anyone who has subscribed to hundreds of feeds can probably tell you how great the signal to noise ratio is. It’s not. And that’s just for subscribing to blogs that tend to be on topic, throw in microblogs (Twitter and clones) and you quickly get all kinds of nonsense you don’t care about, e.g. baseball and politics if you follow John Gruber for Apple news. Realistically there are a small handful of really high quality feeds you don’t want to miss, and for the rest you want to follow topics, not people. TikTok lets you effortlessly do that; traditional RSS subscription model doesn’t, and no one has built that “your own service for discovery”. Ironically Reddit may be the closest thing for the following topics part, if you ignore all its problems.
Meh, I remember time when blogs I read moved from LiveJournal to RSS, and discoverability went way down.
In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.
In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.
RSS/Atom works for certain kinds of content, but not as well for others. It basically necessitates long polling and for anything that needs realtime publishing it just straight up won't work at any meaningful scale
Interesting trend I've noticed: Tiktok's users tend to like its algorithm, and its probably the app's most valuable assets, but western tech executives tend to hate it and speak of it with derision.
This stands in stark contrast with US-based social media companies, where both its users and content creators often speak like they're at war with the algorithm, yet to the tech elite these sites algorithms are tuned to perfection.
I'd guess that it comes down to differences between the outcomes that either algorithm is trying to achieve. When westerners advertise they tend to provoke a sense of anxiety and then position the product such that it appears to relieve that anxiety. So we hate "the algorithm" because it's trying to make us uncomfortable without letting us leave. We should hate the algorithm.
I couldn't speak for Tiktok's aims, but they seem different enough that its algorithm doesn't chafe in the ways that we've come to expect.
It seems pretty simple. The Tiktok algorithm is designed to push content you want to see. In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see and everything you care about gets pushed out of the way. With US platforms you always have to scroll past garbage to get to anything you care about. Tiktok just relentlessly shoves what you want in your face over and over and over again, and when it does misstep it moves on to something else before you even have the chance to consider what you'd rather be doing with your time.
> In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see
Who is they?
Anyway, you're wrong. TikTok pushes videos you want to see, while US app algos push content you are most likely to engage with. These are not the same thing. In fact, content one most engages with is content that generates outrage. Try not to get angry when you open Twitter. It's not easy.
Whoever runs the platform. That's the value they see in their platforms: the ability to control what you see, when you see it, and how you see it. You might only want to see what your friends and family have been up to, and in chronological order, but they are going to make sure you have to constantly scroll past shit you couldn't care less about to get to it, especially when that shit is advertising.
Not only do they do this for marketers, they actually think that making their users regularly disappointed and frustrated is a good thing. They think that forcing you to hunt for what you want makes finding it more rewarding and while you're scrolling past garbage/ads or searching for something you just saw, and cursing the obnoxious algorithm for hiding what you actually want they call it "engagement".
TikTok is also guilty of influencing what you see but they stay out of your way as much as possible. They bombard you with what you came for every minute you spend there. TikTok is massively popular and addictive because of that. US platforms could do that too, but their customers are advertisers - people who want nothing except to take your attention away from what you want to see.
You can go to twitter and get offended by bots, or you can go on TikTok and get bathed in dopamine. There's room enough on the internet for both experiences, but don't be surprised when people feel frustrated and annoyed by one of them and not the other.
Well yeah, you've got to stay angry at the right people at all times. As long as 49.9% of us are preoccupied with hating the other 49.9% of us, it's nice and cheap for the 0.02% to run the show. That's the social media value prop: division as a service.
People who use tiktok tell me it gets better when you have an account. All I know is whenever someone sends me a video it always tries to show the most emotionally charged stuff (e.g. war footage) right after. Now it's even showing pictures of Trump when you pause the video
i think they could if they started with "show users content they like" instead of "keep users staring at the app for as long as possible". both result in more engagement and more ad dollars, but optimizing for the latter becomes a race to the bottom with increasingly extreme, polarizing, emotion-inducing content.
the blatant algorithm manipulation around elections and politics is just the icing on the cake. sure, china is probably doing this too, but they're either being more subtle or playing a longer game. meta et al may have come out ahead for a few quarters but what's that worth if user count is declining long term?
I don't use any of these services, but it's interesting seeing your comment and some of the replies.
Just this past week I met a friend who uses TikTok and he said the same: Really good algorithm. He said when he watches "intelligent" stuff in it, the recommendations tend to be as "intelligent" or even more so. Whereas his experience with Instagram was that it quickly starts suggesting brain dead content.
Tik tok seemed to push a lot of obviously mildly retarded or fetal alcohol syndrome people at me. Felt like it was normalizing things we shouldn’t aspire to.
It’s a New Yorker article. Even if the ideas were sound, it wouldn’t be lovable. At least this one doesn’t begin with “Webster’s says…” but it does appear to be a puff piece courtesy of The Submarine[1] McCourt is using to try and drum up support for its TikTok bid.
New tech isn’t the solution to what ails the web though. The web is built on great tech, and there’s a constant forward motion to iterate and improve on the technical stack of the web. Reigning in specific anti-consumer practices characteristic of surveillance-oriented businesses is because even if you manage to make a decentralized protocol popular for a short period of time, if there is ever enough people for it to be commercially lucrative, exactly the same cycle of centralization will repeat itself.
Of course it's a chance to rethink the internet. COVID was also a chance to rethink our responses to pandemics. Cambridge Analytica was a chance to rethink data privacy as it relates to private companies. Edward Snowden was a chance to rethink data privacy as it relates to governments. Climate Change is a chance to rethink how we live our lives, build our cities, and produce our food. In my hometown, an earthquake was a chance to rethink how the city worked.
Life is full of these chances, but we seldom take them. Whatever happens with TikTok, it'll be business as usual in no time.
RSS was too good and too decentralized to exist. It's a miracle that it's still possible to independently publish and subscribe to podcasts (notably, Spotify doesn't let you subscribe to unapproved podcasts).
I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.
I think this is the direction ActivityPub is headed.
You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)
I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.
Bluesky has RSS feeds too.
I totally agree. Is there a community of like-minded folks out there somewhere? I'd love to see someone give this a try.
The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.
I take this as "nobody, including the competitors, think TikTok will actually go away"
That could definitely be it. They might also be trying to play it cool, and not appear to gloat before the corpse is even cold. Instagram is running a lot of ads on TikTok now though.
Crazier things have happened.
I know several people who are starting a new service to pick up those refugees - let’s see how it pans out!
> Twitter could've made a big video push.
They tried that with Vine and it was a tremendous flop. Launched 2013, finally killed off around 2017.
Vine was a massive hit at first. The stewards screwed it up.
RSS can distribute a feed, but that's all it does. There's no discovery or search or ranking.
People who chant RSS seem to never get this. Publishing is trivial, search and discovery is all that matters, saying “pick your own service (separately) for discovery” is like saying write down int main(), now write down the rest of the program and you’re done. What the hell is that service? That’s 99% of the work.
In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated. Anyone who has subscribed to hundreds of feeds can probably tell you how great the signal to noise ratio is. It’s not. And that’s just for subscribing to blogs that tend to be on topic, throw in microblogs (Twitter and clones) and you quickly get all kinds of nonsense you don’t care about, e.g. baseball and politics if you follow John Gruber for Apple news. Realistically there are a small handful of really high quality feeds you don’t want to miss, and for the rest you want to follow topics, not people. TikTok lets you effortlessly do that; traditional RSS subscription model doesn’t, and no one has built that “your own service for discovery”. Ironically Reddit may be the closest thing for the following topics part, if you ignore all its problems.
There was an article on HN a couple years ago that goes into more details: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...
That's even better. Disaggregate those functions into separate services. Don't like "the algorithm", pick a different one.
rss2vec
Meh, I remember time when blogs I read moved from LiveJournal to RSS, and discoverability went way down.
In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.
In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.
RSS/Atom works for certain kinds of content, but not as well for others. It basically necessitates long polling and for anything that needs realtime publishing it just straight up won't work at any meaningful scale
Doesn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub address that?
Seems like it, but I wasn't aware of it!
Yes. But atom please.
Interesting trend I've noticed: Tiktok's users tend to like its algorithm, and its probably the app's most valuable assets, but western tech executives tend to hate it and speak of it with derision.
This stands in stark contrast with US-based social media companies, where both its users and content creators often speak like they're at war with the algorithm, yet to the tech elite these sites algorithms are tuned to perfection.
I'd guess that it comes down to differences between the outcomes that either algorithm is trying to achieve. When westerners advertise they tend to provoke a sense of anxiety and then position the product such that it appears to relieve that anxiety. So we hate "the algorithm" because it's trying to make us uncomfortable without letting us leave. We should hate the algorithm.
I couldn't speak for Tiktok's aims, but they seem different enough that its algorithm doesn't chafe in the ways that we've come to expect.
It seems pretty simple. The Tiktok algorithm is designed to push content you want to see. In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see and everything you care about gets pushed out of the way. With US platforms you always have to scroll past garbage to get to anything you care about. Tiktok just relentlessly shoves what you want in your face over and over and over again, and when it does misstep it moves on to something else before you even have the chance to consider what you'd rather be doing with your time.
> In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see
Who is they?
Anyway, you're wrong. TikTok pushes videos you want to see, while US app algos push content you are most likely to engage with. These are not the same thing. In fact, content one most engages with is content that generates outrage. Try not to get angry when you open Twitter. It's not easy.
> Who is they?
Whoever runs the platform. That's the value they see in their platforms: the ability to control what you see, when you see it, and how you see it. You might only want to see what your friends and family have been up to, and in chronological order, but they are going to make sure you have to constantly scroll past shit you couldn't care less about to get to it, especially when that shit is advertising.
Not only do they do this for marketers, they actually think that making their users regularly disappointed and frustrated is a good thing. They think that forcing you to hunt for what you want makes finding it more rewarding and while you're scrolling past garbage/ads or searching for something you just saw, and cursing the obnoxious algorithm for hiding what you actually want they call it "engagement".
TikTok is also guilty of influencing what you see but they stay out of your way as much as possible. They bombard you with what you came for every minute you spend there. TikTok is massively popular and addictive because of that. US platforms could do that too, but their customers are advertisers - people who want nothing except to take your attention away from what you want to see.
You can go to twitter and get offended by bots, or you can go on TikTok and get bathed in dopamine. There's room enough on the internet for both experiences, but don't be surprised when people feel frustrated and annoyed by one of them and not the other.
Well yeah, you've got to stay angry at the right people at all times. As long as 49.9% of us are preoccupied with hating the other 49.9% of us, it's nice and cheap for the 0.02% to run the show. That's the social media value prop: division as a service.
"They" refers to the Jewish oligarchs who control the majority of the US media
The Tik Tok algorithm is great. It feeds me compelling stuff instead of trying to piss me off like Facebook.
People who use tiktok tell me it gets better when you have an account. All I know is whenever someone sends me a video it always tries to show the most emotionally charged stuff (e.g. war footage) right after. Now it's even showing pictures of Trump when you pause the video
No, I don’t think Meta hates such algorithms. It just couldn’t beat TikTok algorithm-wise.
i think they could if they started with "show users content they like" instead of "keep users staring at the app for as long as possible". both result in more engagement and more ad dollars, but optimizing for the latter becomes a race to the bottom with increasingly extreme, polarizing, emotion-inducing content.
the blatant algorithm manipulation around elections and politics is just the icing on the cake. sure, china is probably doing this too, but they're either being more subtle or playing a longer game. meta et al may have come out ahead for a few quarters but what's that worth if user count is declining long term?
I don't use any of these services, but it's interesting seeing your comment and some of the replies.
Just this past week I met a friend who uses TikTok and he said the same: Really good algorithm. He said when he watches "intelligent" stuff in it, the recommendations tend to be as "intelligent" or even more so. Whereas his experience with Instagram was that it quickly starts suggesting brain dead content.
Recommendation algorithms never worked for me. I still prefer good old search and sort.
The answer to Headlines that ask a question is almost always No
https://web.archive.org/web/20250117213235/https://www.newyo...
Tik tok seemed to push a lot of obviously mildly retarded or fetal alcohol syndrome people at me. Felt like it was normalizing things we shouldn’t aspire to.
> Is the TikTok Ban a Chance to Rethink the Whole Internet?
No. Next question.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
Love this. I’ve had the same thought for years and I’m glad to hear there’s a name for it.
If your idea of "rethinking" is to have a slightly different set of billionaires that control everything, you'll love this article
It’s a New Yorker article. Even if the ideas were sound, it wouldn’t be lovable. At least this one doesn’t begin with “Webster’s says…” but it does appear to be a puff piece courtesy of The Submarine[1] McCourt is using to try and drum up support for its TikTok bid.
Fortunately we don’t have to indulge them as the project founder’s page is here: https://www.mccourt.com/project-liberty/ and the project website is here: https://www.projectliberty.io/
New tech isn’t the solution to what ails the web though. The web is built on great tech, and there’s a constant forward motion to iterate and improve on the technical stack of the web. Reigning in specific anti-consumer practices characteristic of surveillance-oriented businesses is because even if you manage to make a decentralized protocol popular for a short period of time, if there is ever enough people for it to be commercially lucrative, exactly the same cycle of centralization will repeat itself.
[1]: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[dead]
https://archive.is/20250118032034/https://www.newyorker.com/...
Going out on a limb here: nope.
Do I wish otherwise? Of course. Will anything of the sort happen? Nope.
[flagged]
The lack of self-awareness with this post…
Never mind the shameless self-promotion, doing it while decrying self-promotion means I’m never looking at your app, full-stop.
Saying “sales pitches are bad” in a sales pitch does not help matters at all