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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

To your first paragraph I can only say: fuck that.

If that's the future, I can expect a split between the tech savvy using niche text interfaces that have served us well for decades, and the polished ultra-capitalistic corporate vast majority of the internet using video to create viral sub-minute """content""".

I hope you are wrong with the idea that TikTok clones will become the future "credibility minded social platforms" because it sounds dystopian form of idiocracy. Not everything can be reduced to quick-acting 30 seconds short videos.

(Of note: I am very aware of the incredible publicity TikTok is having on this forum, being touted as the future of the internet that we should just embrace.)

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I think this is a similar dialogue to when twitter was up and coming. TikTok has also already raised their length limit a la twitter. Once VR/AR becomes popular we will probably have a corresponding short form viral media platform. And so forth and so on.

We were already on the internet blogging and chatting on IRC when Twitter appeared. Posting "Enjoying a coffee on the beach right now" on that new platform wasn't much of a revolution.

Using short video for content instead of text is a massive paradigm shift [1], let alone VR/AR so popular for people to routinely consume content that way. The information density of text is unparalleled, the best video platforms can hope is for video to work alongside text, not to replace it altogether. Same story for VR, and this one doesn't have the technology yet. It is too bulky, too slow, too cumbersome. One day, but IMO it's a decade away still before it's ubiquitous and replaces scrolling your twitter feed on the toilet.

1: "What about YouTube?" — YT replaces TV, it's not replacing text or blogging. The point of my comment is disagreeing with the idea that facial credibility will be the future of media. I don't know where I'm going exactly with my rambling, but I feel I would loathe a future where the "news" is delivered in 30 seconds viral-made video snippets.

It wouldn't be so bad if the content wasn't an army of attention and money-seeking influencers. Those influencers will burn out once the truth about the creator funds finally wears them out.

Tiktok also encourages parroting information, and that leads to corruption of information. They really need to create more niches than the one channel they're runing to thrive.

But imagine a TikTok UI on something like Ted Talks, where you could scroll through a variety of speeches until you land on the one you want... Or even Netflix implementing that for movies, or YouTube for music videos. It would finally create a new way of finding new things quickly. There is great benefits to TikTok's method when done properly. The question is whether or not creators will be properly paid or not...

For news I'd probably rather scroll through well composed story intros to find what I want to hear more about than to watch an entire show these days to be honest. Once I find something I like then I can give it more attention. I used to wait through commercial breaks just to hear vital news, now it's much easier to just go to CNN and get pelted by pop-up ads on mobile... hah.

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