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Comment by SuperHeavy256 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you are missing something. Because you're seeing tiktok as a product, not as a community of millions of people. There are tens of thousands of small family-owned businesses that are only able to survive because of Tiktok. For a lot of the younger crowd, Tiktok is part of social culture. Cutting out a part of someone's life like that is not a decision that should be taken lightly at all.

Peace.

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There’s tens of thousands of families that depend on income from meth production or trading. Meth is part of the social culture for a significant subset of people.

Are you giving an example of a false equivalence? Because if so, you nailed it.

How is it false equivalence to refer to two products that people use/sell to provide for their families, yet the product has been proved to cause great harm to communities, especially children [1]?

[1] https://theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/04/how-tiktoks-a...

It's a community of millions of people, but which are seen by the millions is subject to the CCP's algorithm.

Just search for "Uighur genocide" and see how many negative Tiktoks you find.

Now go on any western social media platform, search for any contentious topic, and notice what's banned. It's not stuff that's harmful to the government (eg. Gaza/Israel topics) it's stuff that advertisers think is harmful (racism, unlabeled porn, etc.).

Also, restraining from banning a platform because some people can't be arsed to also post to IG reels or other platforms is their own fault as entrepreneurs.

Out of interest, I just tried this. "Uighur genocide" was the fifth auto-completed search result. In the "Top" tab, the first video was a (maybe Chinese) guy saying he never saw any discrimination against Uighurs and maybe Americans should ask about the Hawaiian cultural genocide. The video next to it was from (presumably) Uighur people saying that they were suffering cultural genocide and China was selling their organs. Below that was a snippet from Wikipedia saying that China had been committing cultural genocide against the Uighurs.

The prominence of the Chinese guy "denying" the cultural genocide was interesting - I wouldn't assume he's a plant (it's equally likely he's just a rabid nationalist) but the placement of the video does strike me as a little odd. It had 300 likes, but rates higher than the second video which had 5000 likes? Does smell a bit.

This is from Singapore, by the way. I assume geography makes a difference.

The Tiktok search ranking does this for every query. There is no obvious rhyme or reason for the sort. There's a filter button to change how it's sorted, but by default I can never figure out what it's doing.

I search for "retro pc":

1st result 47k views, 4 months ago

2nd result 457k views, 2 years ago

3rd result 9k views, 1 year ago

4th result 133k views, 1 year ago

5th result 1k views, 5 months ago

Make it make sense!

Then it's time for them to move on to a new platform.

The fact that people have become dependent is no good argument for keeping the platform around.

And, with that said, if TikTok disappears - a new platform fill its void, as well as other platforms absorbing users. If there's a demand, someone will supply.

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