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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

This one surprises me. TikTok is so... different of a platform. I find it utterly jarring and revolting, my wife and kid find it fun and engaging, all for the same reasons. It seems like you're either going to get engaged in a video rabbit hole, or turn away.

In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory.

Threads at least made some sense, as Instagram is still a more slow paced, time to reflect type platform. TikTok less so.

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A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments.

I think there's probably a way that text can be built into the app that works alongside what's there and makes it a more interesting experience than just looking at screenshots.

This is very untrue. It's just your personalized feed that is filled with that, because you happened to watch just enough of them to let the algorithm know you're interested. Other people see one of these videos and just swipe down immediately and never see one again. Please don't try to guesstimate the amount of content on tiktok in any given category just by your personal experience, because it's heavily biased because of just how the platform works.

There has to be something about TikTok algorithm that it won’t work with quick readers/addicts/those in “the spectrum”. It wasn’t TTS but last I tried I too got series of uninteresting content. The system just didn’t register my fulfillment.

You can scroll through the "Discover" tab which has depersonalized trends across the whole app. I just took a quick scroll through and it seems like at least ~5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen. There's been at least a few recent trends over the past few weeks that have been almost entirely text (beige flags, all the greenscreen text trends, #groupchat, etc).

Anecdotally, I also see clusters of text-only posts every few weeks, even though I always either pause to read or scroll immediately through.

I would argue that "5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen" is a huge moving of the goal post from the original claim in this sub-thread: "just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments".

I definitely used to get videos with walls of text that are obviously trying to game the algorithm by getting you to read an essay to increase watch time. Once I habitually scrolled away from them I stopped getting them. That isn't even related to the claim of voices reading screenshots of tweets or reddit comments.

I absolutely believe that videos exist where there are text-to-speech readings of tweets or reddit comments and that the commenter referencing them sees a decent amount of them in their own feed. But I do not believe they represent a "decent amount" of the majority of TikTok users feeds.

I guess it depends on what you consider a "decent amount". Within the overall context of whether text posts would be popular or not on TikTok, 5-10% of globally-trending posts being text-heavy seemed like a decent amount to me but YMMV.

But, you are right that I was talking about text posts in general rather than directly responding to the videos about reading text from reddit/twitter that this subthread was discussing though. I see those often but I don't see them currently trending.

Aren't you also generalizing how much content is in a category based only your personal experience?

> A decent amount of TikTok "videos" are just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments.

Not for me, I get exactly zero videos like that. I always chuckle when I read someone say "Most videos on TikTok ..." since they seem totally oblivious to the fact that there isn't a single TikTok experience. You get what you get and I get what I get.

It reminds me of an older guy I know who stated in front of a bunch of young men "All of the videos on TikTok are scantily clad 13 year old girls doing dirty dances". It was second-hand cringe embarrassing.

I think baby boomers, gen-x and a decent portion of millennials still think of social media as being broadly targeted like TV stations used to be. Even YouTube doesn't come close to the insane customization of TikTok.

Ever heard of first impressions? Not everybody is going to spend time tweaking some invisible algorithm. If it doesn't show them what they're looking for, why should they stick around? It's not like people sign up to Tiktok to keep in touch with friends.

Somebody new to YouTube is going to think there's nothing on it besides Mr Beast, iPhone reviews and culture war nonsense, because that's what the front page shows to a signed out user. I imagine Tiktok is similar.

> Not everybody is going to spend time tweaking some invisible algorithm

Well, there are exactly two options with TikTok. Either you use the app or you don't. If you don't use the app then you probably shouldn't be making definitive statements about what content is on the platform.

If you do use the app then it will quickly (I mean within less than 1 hour of use) customize itself to your preferences. There is no "tweaking". Just by interacting with the app (swiping up on videos, viewing comments, allowing videos to replay, etc.)

So if you have been on TikTok for roughly 1 hour or more then you are getting a significantly customized experience that almost no one else on the platform is going to get. That isn't true on YouTube or really any other kind of media experience that existed prior to it. That is why older internet users can't really reason about it effectively and tend to make statements that sound out-of-touch to younger users.

> If you don't use the app then you probably shouldn't be making definitive statements about what content is on the platform.

One can use the app for any amount of time, and make any comment they wish.

If there's a critical mass of people making the same criticisms of the app, maybe the explanation isn't "you're using it wrong".

Does it matter if it's not for you if it is for other people?

It's like saying "There's no video game videos in my feed so why would TikTok make a feature related to gaming?"

I find basically all social media sites too confusing to use, starting with when I first attempted to use Facebook around 2010 and couldn't figure out where the hell anything I posted "went" or where anything I saw was "coming from" and couldn't figure out the distinctions between various pages or types of posts. I'm told by a longer-time user buddy that the UI made a lot more sense in the early, .edu days.

I spent years not realizing Instagram posts could have more than one image. Now they have videos, too—are mostly videos, even—which just seems wrong to me.

Twitter confuses the hell out of me. Tiktok is constant frustration, if I try to use it.

I swear, I'm not even that old and was definitely not old when I first encountered a lot of these sites. IDK how they're so successful when I find their UIs totally unusable. Must be a me-problem, I guess. I manage to figure out shit like Paradox Games UIs without too much trouble, and they're regarded as exceptionally dense and hard to learn, so it's not a general problem of mine with all UIs.

Don't feel bad friend, I'm basically the same way. I ended up just giving it all up anyways, other than text based forums like this one.

You should have seen me try to use Snapchat for the first (and only) time!

I recently came to the realisation that I've been trying to rediscover h2g2 ever since I left it. It's the only social media site which has ever made good sense to me. I'm currently on Mastodon, and disliking it intensely.

>In any event, how in the world will this work? Go from watching vids of people shuffle dancing to a cut of some AITA text post and back again? It just sounds really strange, in theory.

It will most certainly live in a different tab than the main video feed.

Right now, the tabs are: Video | Shopping | IM | Account

It'll just become: Video | Text | Shopping | IM | Account

Or account will move to top right corner.

Threads was also aiming to fill a vacuum left by Twitter. A vacuum that I suspect doesn't exist for TikTok users in the same way.

There's a category of user that wants short form video, who started on Vine, did not move to Twitter after Vine was killed, and then ended up on TikTok. TikTok's success seems to be in part specifically because those users did not want (at least originally) a text focused social network, even one that had reasonable UX around short form video.

As someone who used to use TikTok, I do laugh when people describe it as a place where there are "people shuffle dancing". Yes it might have been what initially made the platform successful, but it far far beyond that now.

Each person's experience is different of course.

How do you find it revolting when all it does is show you content similar to the stuff you like?

It's uncanny at recommending videos that are highly specific to niche content I like. Nothing comes close.

Oh, not the content of the videos, more the noise and autoplay nature of it. I was searching for a better word, but landed there.

FWIW, I feel the same way about Shorts. Apparently, if the last thing you watched was a Short, the next time you open the YouTube app, it just starts playing some random video. I loathe this feature.

It shows really short videos which means if I like it it's over anyways. The search is basically broken and trying to find specific videos on topics is impossible. The videos I want more of never come.

It's like a typical early internet video: a 15 seconds video labelled wink where someone does a closeup of an eye and winks. Cool when that was a technical achievement kind of lame now.

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