Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.
It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.
TikTok, IG etc are a little different as they’re actually media streams but I wanted to say that about Facebook - give me what I want on Facebook and it would be a wonderful service.
The same happened to algo-less social media sites.
I'd look at trends as well. There is a time when Facebook was hot and trendy, whereas now it's a place for people's parents and grandparents - while all the cool kids are on Instagram. I think it's safe to say that the shift there was more social than technological. Younger generations wanted their own thing.
And I'd see TikTok as being in the same vein there, especially as YouTube has gradually shifted away from being YouTube and more like CorpoTube. But there weren't any especially viable stateside competitors. The few that did exist basically just tried to be YouTube, but with less content and worse CDN networks.
No other place is as convenient to form small communities.
There's a very old fashioned 'battle of the sexes' being pushed by algorithmic content, and it's having visible toxic effects on the capacity of people to socialise, form relationships, engage in social reproduction and function normally in society. There's a vast torrent of such poison aimed at both men and women. Pretending it's only occurring to men, or that only men are being radicalised, is refusing to engage with the problem.
The comments section of literally every mainstream video on instagram reels, tiktok and the like that in any way touches on gender, masculinity, femininity etc - isn't dominated by misogynistic comments and hasn't been for years. But rather thousands of 'not all men, but always a man', 'yaas goddess', 'men aren't lonely enough', and countless other shibboleths.
The normalisation of FLINTA only spaces (and accommodation) and the like offline has brought these dynamics into the real world in ways that further isolate and dehumanise.
Let’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.
Social media as a technology isn’t necessarily the root cause of all those problems. But it is the medium by which those were allowed and incentivised to proliferate at an ever increasing pace.
When twitter changed its feeds it had to force people into the new style feed by giving them a choice but wiping their choice every time they opened the app and forcing the algorithmic slop feed.
This is long overdue and I hope all countries adopt it. It should be the default and if people want to consume slop they will always have a choice to do so.
I came here expecting an apologia for the manipulative feeds of big tech, and found one at the top. If that’s not what you intended, perhaps consider that you’re acting as a useful idiot for them.
Yes - TikTok is popular, precicely because the algorithmic feeds are designed to be addictive. They show content, not because its good, not because its what you ask for, but because its exactly what will keep your eyes glued to the screen.
I would assume that the majority of users would prefer a Facebook experience that showed them just the friends and family they follow, and nothing else.
Engagement does not correlate with want. I know people who hated every second of their time on TikTok because it kept showing them only the most awful and traumatic shit, but for the same reason, they couldn't just leave because the reason it was traumatic was because they felt terribly guilty to leave it alone. They were shown all sorts of threats about how terrible of a person they'd be if they didn't like, share, comment, etc. and they were scared out of their mind into having to do it, and that only taught the algorithm to show them more -- to seek out only the worst, most horrible and awful and traumatic content to show them because that scared them the most and compelled them the most. It's awful, horrible, sure they shouldn't have been on TikTok at all (no one should), but it shouldn't have done that to them either
Most of my crowd seem to have left them behind because they went from a tool where I could see what my people were up to, and maybe the odd update about a band or a business I was interested in, to "Here are 50 things you have no interest in and by the way I deprioritised what your actual friends post".
This happened so much that most of the actual friends wandered off, making those posts even rarer. There seems to be a de-networking effect.
Should government be legislating that social networks work the way I want? Very good question, probably not. Am I still happy with this change? Broadly yes.