Fuck me I guess!
programs you to be a moron
Man, sucks to be a product of the days when the only way to become a moron was with consistent effort and practice. Gone is the appreciation for craft, for the artisinal, home-grown moron.
It's funny because TV arguably already did that before the internet had chuds on centralized social media run by the worst capitalists imaginable
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Outside of the use of the term "punk", literally any GOP ghoul would say this.
This algorithm that delivers more content like the content I like and consume keeps showing me cognitively debilitating content that I continue to like and consume! Those evil Chinese app developers!Also, what's the alternative? Every other social media app, including the one you're using to post this would jump at the opportunity to have their own version of TikTok, in fact, they have tried and failed.
That’s exactly it. Kick out evil menacing oriental TikTok, replace with good wholesome all-American Instagram Reels By MetaTM
Everyone (in the tech media particularly, but also in lay commentary) seems to frame this as a matter of TikTok having the secret algorithmic sauce which the Silicon Valley firms are unable to replicate, and unable to compete with, but I truly think this is a red herring. What TikTok has (or lacks, rather) is the abysmal reputation of its Silicon Valley competitors. Due to this, it was able to attract a large number of content creators who have zero interest in setting up shop on Facebook's fifth platform, or any skuldugging Silicon Valley ad-tech company with the capital to create their own Twitter / YouTube / Instagram rip-off.
TikTok has been a rich source of original content from the beginning, many of which gets re-posted by fans on other websites. Meanwhile, whenever Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey spin up a new platform, it is dominated by communications interns and brand accounts, just treating it as a fifteenth place to dump their corporate promotions.
Note that many of the most successful monopoly platforms today (setting aside Facebook itself, the canonical monopoly platform) grew popular before their acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitch, YouTube, etc. I think it is impossible for a company like Google, Amazon, or Meta to come out and openly found a successful platform at this late date, and it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the technology. Even though Meta was in the right time and place to launch Threads, nobody apparently uses it aside from Burger King. Everyone migrated instead to BlueSky (which is perceived as independent for some reason) or, to a smaller degree, Mastodon.
The "problem" with TikTok is not their superior, inscrutable technology, but the fact that they are unwilling to be swallowed up like Instagram. Their intransigent Chinese owners don't understand that they're obligated to sell when a briefcase full of money is thrown in their face.
This is why I always say that Punk is an aesthetic
It doesn't actually mean anything
I don't even like
all that much, but his assessment of punk culture is on point.
So being pro-US and anti-communist is considered punk to this dork? I don't think TikTok did that to them.
'national security concerns' oh you mean refusing to censor genocide footage in the algorithm like Facebook reddit and google do okay gotcha
I'm not even convinced that the TikTok "ban" will meaningfully reduce its use in the US. They'll remove it from app stores, sure, but will they block the website? Will they block third party apps? Will they block people from just staying on the last official app version or downloading the app from the website directly or using a vpn to get the app?
AFAIK none of those things are on the table, which is why I predict that TikTok's "ban" will just be a blip in the app's life and another funny thing to point to that demonstrates the US government's technological incompetence.
(in fact, if the government blocks the app and TikTok responds by just making their website more user-friendly that might be an overall improvement to the experience because the worst thing about TikTok right now is how they force you to download the app when you wanna share videos and stuff)
You overestimate the willingness of the average tiktok user to use those kinds of workarounds imo. Most people aren't going to install a VPN to use social media, they'll just go to a different app/site.
I'm not even convinced that the TikTok "ban" will meaningfully reduce its use in the US. They'll remove it from app stores, sure, but will they block the website? Will they block third party apps? Will they block people from just staying on the last official app version or downloading the app from the website directly or using a vpn to get the app?
If they want to at all yes. They can force them to withdraw any CDNs in the US, ban their technical presence and any infrastructure and any company from providing that infrastructure (doing business with them), thus even if tiktok tried to preempt this by having the apps fall-back to using foreign CDNs in Singapore or Switzerland or Mexico or something the experience would be meaningfully degraded with increased load times, latency, playback problems, etc which would tend to sap interest in continuing to use it among most people. Yes some determined people of course will still use it just as some determined people in China bypass the great firewall and access western social media but it won't be a lot. It will kill it as a force in the US over time, not over-night but over months, a year.
Add in the death of net neutrality and ISPs will absolutely throttle the shit out of it on their own because they're not getting paid to say nothing of US options for having ISPs poison the DNS records to go nowhere or just straight up blocking connections to the IPs which would take further court orders or steps but could be done very easily by the sanctions department.
Tiktok could absolutely fight this on a technical level, change the app to be a wrapper for a browser and just load a version of the website that's always up to date, but if their legal presence is banned, if they can't sell ads in the market, if they have to do cross-border internet transiting for delivering content to users in all cases and if they can't pay off ISPs which by virtue of net neutrality being killed are allowed to hold content for ransom and throttle people who don't pay them, then the question is why would they as a for-profit business? It wouldn't be profitable and would only raise more panic and rage that they HAVE to be some sort of Chinese operation otherwise why would they operate at a loss in such challenging circumstances?
Trump is only waffling now because he thinks he can get them to cut a deal or perhaps grift some corruption money out of it, but he wants to shake them down whereas Facebook and the US bourgeoisie and empire want them strangled as a competitor. US intelligence wants them strangled because they're not an asset for global spying and hacking like Zuckerbook. And for those reasons I don't see the US really letting up on Tiktok. If they can force its removal globally from global Apple and Google app stores then they've killed it. It's a real commanding heights problem the world has as the US is the gatekeeper for apps for all the global phone OSes, they are the gatekeeper for payments, for SWIFT, etc. They still have a lot of strength and are just only barely flexing it. It will take years, a decade for the world to migrate away from these western dominated commanding positions and many places will take twice that long as they're not personally impacted, Russia and China have incentivizes to do so but India doesn't, your average state in Europe, Africa, Asia has no pressing reason to want to jump from the US ship to a Chinese/Russian one.
what is there for tiktok to defend against?
the main concerns were with what they did with the data and the data they collected and they already showed they collected less than american companies and did nothing with it that american companies do. the second was their algorithm which the main concern was that it promoted disharmonious sentiment in america to cause trouble but for instance they showed that with the israel palestine thing they had to suppress palestinian content in the algorithm and promote israel content on the platform because people were so anti-israel on tiktok in general that israeli content was being drowned out. so in fact they were doing the opposite of what people claimed.
their primary investors are also based in america and all their data warehouses are based in america
Nothing, it's just them wanting it to be completely American so it's easier to control what is shown.
Ie stop going against Isreali hasbara and powers that be
Yeah it's definitely the app that made Americans stupid as fuck and not like, idk, the rotting public education system and lack of opportunities for personal growth for everyone but the already rich.
You don't remember when ByteDance's CEO personally defunded the education system? It was all done explicitly because the board of directors (Xi Jinping and seven sockpuppets) told him to.
I thought they did give up the algorithm. Isn't it basically the same as any social media algorithm and Oracle got to review all their code?
Punk people, famous for... Not circumventing bans and accessing/distributing forbidden information or products through illegal means. No punk would use drugs or read banned books or attend a show in an illegal venue.
Not a yank could someone give a run down of this 'ban' I thought it would only affected federal employees?
emoji.
