I was fine with memes over the past few years ... sure they are a quick dopamine hit that make you laugh or think
But now when my friends send me tiktok videos ... especially when someone has been watching these video streams for hours or days ... they start sending out the most random, inane, mindless content ... it's the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
it's the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
I think that's kind of the point. There was an article a while back that said the CCP/Bytedance intentionally serve up braindead content to everywhere outside China, while promoting educational and uplifting content at home.
I have one 50 year old friend with very little tech know how and his kids set him up with a good smartphone. I saw his family about a year ago and his kids noted that their dad often sits up until about 2 or 3 in the morning at the kitchen table just scrolling through tiktok videos. He sent them to me about once a day until I had to block him and tell him directly to stop sending me this stuff. He's since become 'aware' of his addiction and stops sending out videos as often as he did before. He still scrolls through thousands and thousands of videos a day.
It would all be funny if it wasn't so frightening at the same time.
that sounds way too bizarre to believe without seeing a source. and i know there's gonna be people replying saying it's not that bizarre, because China, but really....?
That’s such a gross misunderstanding of the separation between TikTok and China that it’s very possible purposeful misinformation.
China has no control whatsoever over TikTok, and in fact, there are US intelligence officers on the board for the American company. If anyone is “intentionally serving up braindead content…” it’s the US company, who is under strict control and observation by US intelligence agencies.
This post actually made me look for a solution and I found one! Solution to opening tiktoks without using tiktok app or site, not how to stop ur friends sending u garbage.
It made me think... mpv player can play basically any link you throw at it (thanks to yt-dlp), and we also have mpv on Android, so why can't we do it there as well. And sure enough, I found this https://github.com/mpv-android/mpv-android/pull/58, someone baked yt-dlp in mpv for Android, making it possible to open link in mpv (share >> play in mpv)
While this is useful, it could be even better! If the AndroidManifest.xml also contained support for Facebook, TikTok and Instagram links it could be set to directly open them instead needing to share it to mpv.
That's what literally all social media sites do. It is far more profitable for people to be using your app than your mobile website. Apps make it much easier to harvest data and corral the user into the exact experience you want them to have (ads, suggestions, etc).
I know not many people here are going back to Reddit but just for a second, open your mobile browser, disable the add-ons if it's firefox, and go look at Reddit currently. Within the last few weeks they have absolutely massacred it. Like, truly, it is astoundingly bad now. The original mobile redesign of the site was already terrible, but this new-new-mobile reddit is so painfully bad that the only conceivable reason for its existence is to get people to give up and use the app.
I refuse to install their app(Facebook) phone on my phone. They have basically broken the mobile site once again, so I've just stopped using it. Much easier.
Mine's been doing it too even though she knows how much I absolutely despise tiktok... There's a reason I don't have that app... Lol
And the fucking fake voices... Ugh.... Such shit.
Like, usually I use my phone with the volume completely off and I don't even want to turn it on for most of the videos I see on here or wherever but it seems like for all this tiktok garbage you need sound to even determine why the hell someone shared it with you.
PSA: If it's links on Discord, you can prefix the link with vx to make it natively embed so you don't have to click through (e.g. vxtiktok.com). This also works with twitter links (vxtwitter.com). People out there hosting these domains doing the lord's work
I just ignore them because the videos are a mess of graphics and popups outside the app. It has literally made some videos unwatchable for me as they kept getting interrupted and breaking.
It's the worst mobile website I've ever seen, which is impressive considering Facebook and Reddit have been intentionally breaking their mobile websites for years now.
As always I like promoting open source frontends for these pages. For tiktok I use proxytok. For changing any tiktok link to one of these instances use the libredirect extension for firefox, it also works in mobile
This is why I wrote a Telegram bot that uses yt-dlp to convert videos and send them directly to people. My friend group all use different socials, Facebook, tiktok, Twitter, Lemmy, etc., and the bot will take the link, download the video, then send it back to the person, and then they can forward it to whatever chats they want.
It's been pretty fucking handy. That is, if your friends use Telegram.
I thought I was getting okay at the basics, but actually visiting Japan taught me that I definitely was not. But I'm starting classes later this year, hope to become fluent eventually.
I've certainly been trying to get people into the fediverse and off the corporate side of things but yeah, I'm currently sitting at 0 conversions. It's made for some fun conversations though.
We've got the culture and to put it simply a place to go to. The barrier for new entry is just that we are all, put simply, nerds with our communities focused around that. The fediverse's main problem overall is honestly just that the majority of the population are corporatists whether they know it or not.
Tiktok sucks so hard, but then occasionally I find a minor nugget of wisdom or a piece of information so helpful that it makes me keep the app. Just the other day, some said he applies antiperspirant to his feet in order to keep them warm, because then they'll sweat less, and will get less cold in the socks. I didn't even really know that was a problem I was really having, but now, I will never have cold feet again. There's also always eelfeel, so I'm alright with it as a whole.
More broadly I do hate how kind of walled off the app is. I try to share videos on snapchat, oof, snapchat cuts it off so it's only the first five seconds of a video. Best to send the link, but then, if you don't have tiktok downloaded, it takes you either to the app store, or it hits you with the shitty web browser. Maybe fine for seeing a single tiktok, on mobile, but it's pretty bad on desktop since it's not formatted for it, and overall it, just is kind of ass to deal with, especially on repeat. Hate the modern internet.
Edit: Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn't understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Putting antiperspirant on your feet sounds deeply unnatural, chaotic and satanic. It's the kind of thing that will result in a sock-related early death.
Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn't understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Did something about Lemmy make you think we avoid the truth here?
This shit is Vine. We had this same social media platform in 2013, basically. Everyone's just freaking out about it now because it's owned by china, and everyone's been made to worry about threats to national security, even though we can all kind of agree that the american government also sucks and is heinous. It's giving me some "Only I can bully my little brother!" kinds of vibes. It's like the same shit as when europeans get brought up, at any point, anywhere, and then americans start making fun of british people having bad teeth and knife crime and stuff, even though they have basically all of that but worse. Nobody's a nationalist until another country gets brought up, and then suddenly everyone's the most patriotic proud to be an american motherfucker. It's cringe. It reminds me of when we started calling them "freedom fries".
No, I don't want to see that brainwashing garbage. It's curated to wreck the brains and society of Western democracies.
Everyone should have heard about this by now, but China's version of TikTok is vastly different than ours. It is limited to mostly educational content and has built-in screen time limits. They know what is bad about our version of it, and it's on purpose.
I'm not in TikTok or anything but isn't that something China would of course do? Like they are trying to push their app to a country that loves FREEDOM. Why would they limit content based on their controls in place in their country?
Without being signed in to tiktok any link will poad and start playing the video without sound and with a huge popover prompt to sign in. I have to dismiss the sign in, unmute the sound, and then restart it. Same with facebook links.
I don't care if a meme started on tiktok or facebook, but being linked to them is a dog shit experience.
Fair, though to my mind that's all social media, so I can't get worked up about one particular one. The reason I'm glad I was pushed off reddit is because I'd end up in a doomscroll trance there too
Well that's just capitalism. Just like the rise of sugary drinks and booze cigs etc. We're not optimizing for the well-being of people. It's all about that dough. China is the same, but instead it's just one big extra shitty company.