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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31642 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So I finally installed tiktok. While registering, I indicated I was male. I was immediately shown what I can only describe as "anti-feminist" videos, women winning arguments against feminists, jordan peterson interview clips, etc. I generally scroll past these videos quickly, but they got more and more frequent, I probably made it worse for liking a few bill-burr clips early on, but it certainly started very early on.

My wife is a frequent tiktok user, she likes videos you'd expect of women, crafting stuff, recipes, etc. She gets also gets ton of overtly political feminist videos. Neither of us have strong feelings towards feminism. If anything, she's to my right on the gender issues.

I hear a lot of anti-tiktok rhetoric along the lines that china is invading our privacy. I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns. I know this isn't anything new, other social media apps have similar effects, but I think the effect is much stronger with tiktok. With facebook, you inherit the political environment of your friends. With reddit and twitter you can choose your own echo-chambers. With tiktok, the decision is made against your will and almost instantly.

Same for YouTube..they always recommend Jordan Peterson clips even though I seldom watch his videos. I think this puts a dent in the narrative that social media is always pro-left. I suspect the reason for this is because Jordan Peterson and non-PC political videos have a high retention rate and follow-through rate. People who watch one video are highly inclined to watch more , probably more so than other niches.

Sure, it's the same idea, but tiktok is much more powerful. You don't have to follow, like or even watch an entire video for the algorithm to respond. Being even slower to dismiss a video will boost similar videos. The youtube equivalent would be something like tracking your eye movement to see which thumbnails you're looking at. I know because I'm now getting porn-ish content after being slightly slower to dismiss videos with pretty girls.

I would be willing to bet YouTube does timing stuff too, if only because ad revenue is definitely based on watch time.

There’s a possibility that TikTok’s is more aggressive, or maybe it just gets more independent data points due to the short form. I wonder how fast Vine adapted to users.

Youtube created an entire Shorts product that's a direct clone of tiktok, so they're definitely paying attention. And even before tiktok YT creators believed YT used watch-time as part of their recommendations and tried to keep it high.

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