Wow that is really a great competition but I guess TikTok really doing great because there are lot of funny and good content or videos uploaded.
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Billions of downloads doesn't tell you if 'something is growing' it's the Daily Active Users. Ask them how TikTok plans to make money in order to remain profitable and they will completely fall tone deaf.
This article tells you nothing about TikTok outperforming instagram.
Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.
For example if your interested in bike, can you find cool bike related stuff ? Or is it just some people doing funny thing with some music on it ?
I tried it a few months ago and found only funny videos.
It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.
I like Instagram or YouTube because I can follow thing I'm interesting in.
Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.
I removed the Youtube app from my phone and bookmark from my toolbar. That's how annoying I felt their ad scheme was.
In a sense it is very pure; it is not about anything specific and, more importantly, it is not about showing a fake, happy, successful version of yourself.
While I am too old to participate in it, as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging).
> It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.
The reason to create an account would be not to watch videos but to make videos. In that tiktok feels a bit like a teenager version of a twitter, youtube chimera.
We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful global companies.
Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric gives more credibility to their internal numbers.
I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just me.
I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh" people won't use it much longer.
Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move.
I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with)
First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.
What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
If anything, social media is moving the opposite way, where people are requiring more stimulation and information.
More stimulation but less information.
I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back.
I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about violence, the shills will always use the word "ISIS" somewhere in their message.
It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC astroturfing not a big deal? Maybe my concerns are valid but that doesn't justify further concern about the influx of PRC messaging vectors to the USA, i.e. tiktok?
When I worked in the PRC I got to see first hand the strong-arm of the Party. Every business involved in communication had a government official whose entire job was to ensure the company "protected the social wellbeing of the people of the PRC" or similar. I can only assume tiktok has the same and I can only assume it's a matter of time before the Party starts directing the company to leverage their access to a massive US audience in a way that benefits the "social wellbeing," i.e. by disseminating PRC propaganda.
I used to listen to podcasts a ton but switched to listening to lectures or conference talks.
The people most "easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns" certainly—at first glance—don't appear to be the same people who are most comfortable using modern media channels.
I don't know what GP's expectation was - that the internet would turn everyone into Aristotle?
There's also https://www.tiktok.com/trending
edit: And HN too, apparently. Like clockwork, downvotes galore. I'm willing to hear someone on the other side out on the Uyghur genocide if they'd like to offer their perspective on it.
(I don't mean to start a flame war, but they are topics where EU and Canada tend to disagree with major US trends)
- pay creators
- deal with harassment
The two things, of course, that Twitter is totally incapable of doing. It's not clear how TikTok is responding to the same pressures.
The Kindle app may not require ability to pay via the internet, but it helps. There's also a big step to wanting to read.
Neither of these apps are going to hit the numbers that mostly non paid communications apps will hit, because of the difference in markets.
Amusingly, when you look at the comments to yours here in this thread, they try to shift the conversation to "Look at what US does in <region>" without actually talking about what you specifically are bringing up. I see this pattern a lot now, whenever you bring up any thoughts such as yours in this realm involving China, a lot of whataboutism in reply happens. Sad to see this happening on HN.
I think that is the core to its success (and was for Vine). Instagram became a platform for people to promote themselves or some product and people are fully aware of that nowadays.
Turns out that these beliefs don't actually work. They're self indulgent nonsense. We could afford them for a while, but now that we have actual competition, we can't. We need to go back to old school attitudes, buckle down, get our heads out of our asses, and compete.
I enjoyed this article: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a9335/upvote...
I also rarely visit Reddit, but for Facebook and Twitter, I guess there has been plenty of research on how people can manipulate public opinion by sharing/voting, and also the impact of their respective algorithms for promoting content?
Of course, Tik Tok is no different, and we should be worried. They do the same thing, only it's not 'our' lobbies and we have little control on them.
> The move allows Facebook developers to focus more exclusively on features and improvements for each individual app. Of course, it also requires users to download another Facebook property onto their smartphones, a not-so-subtle way for the company to increase app downloads.
I found this on Beluga, but it smells of an acquihire and rewrite, and predates the split by a few years: https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/
Essentially, TikTok is the only app in the top five that isn't owned by Facebook.
New to the Internet and young people have less qualms about trying things and are often able to spread things with word of mouth.
Google plus got mired down in the real name policy and the account consolidation and the usually problems associated with Google (which includes an association with Google).
1) In this case the nation working behind the scenes is China. American imperialism I concede is bad. However, the Chinese have quietly been breaking over 50 international regulations and laws from the WTO and universal declaration of human rights.
2) The Chinese do care what you do. Just last week the Swedish government was going to give an award to an activist in Sweden, and the CCP threatened the entire country - pathetic. The Australians said they do not agree with Chinese human rights violations, so they were denied entry (clearly they care). I also question how one can determine what is "challenging" the CCP when it is a mercantilist nation with hands in every basket.
3) Enforcing the war on drugs all over the world? Like asking China not to ship fentanyl? Sure.
4) America is pushing the war on financial privacy? Hello, have you seen Alipay and Wechat before? Do you realize cash is still a major way that some people get paid in America? Perhaps in swift you could argue undue transparency, but wire transfers are a different subject.
5) American intellectual property infringement? ...do you mean like the Chinese forced intellectual property transfer?
Lastly, on the CS Lewis quote. America is constantly at odds with its conscience. Half the country is constantly calling out the other half. In China if you don't tow the imperial / mercantilist line your social credit goes down and your freedoms are limited.
Challenge it on what? Currency manipulation? Unfair trade practices? Influencing elections? Going against every international body and established rule, and building island military bases to seize new ocean territory from its neighbors? Building concentration camps to imprison millions of minorities who have committed no crime? Propping up N. Korea to use its instability to further Chinese international negotiations?
So if China isn't challenged on any anything of importance, it doesn't care what you do? All countries do bad things and they should all be challenged on it. Why would China be different?
Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has 1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the world.
I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to be in China.
If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company.
If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't ~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are completely unbelievable.
At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed that more than 65% of their users are under 25.
real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/
>With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease...
>So much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination. It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary.
In comparison, what the PRC offers is very specific to China. The government wants to see China grow strong and lead the world. They may or may not get there, but these values offer little value to the rest of the world, especially those that have already adopted the liberal values.
Wether it's an oligarchy of party elite, or oligarchy of robber barons pulling the strings makes little difference to the lives ruined.
Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime (born in 1993). Don't know what you mean on hypocrisy on nudity, but I only became comfortable with it when I visited Scandinavia when I was 22; seems like Canada has a similar issue.
I'll maybe give you medical care, but this is an incredibly complex topic. To think that public health care isn't monetized is a naïve point of view.
Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US. That's my honest opinion.
Hell, just think of how many excessive deaths have been caused around the globe by the USSR's push of socialism, retarding growth by decades everywhere it won.
You'd have to be a hard core ideologue to not look at the 20th century and think the "red danger" wasn't the most evil thing to ever happen to humanity.
Wait what? Chinese social media is astroturfing at its best (worst?) and it’s not even close, it’s not even possible to say something without a Wumao[1] matching you post to post with total BS. It’s much more blatant than English forums IMO (but maybe that’s just me being a native Chinese speaker in a reverse situation)
The Gutenberg revolution had its critics. I think criticising the Internet as a medium has parallels to that. That's not to say any arguments made are idiotic, just that they may miss the point. I think there are reasons why the view counts are so different that don't imply the Internet is a shitty medium.
Firstly, a 3 hour podcast takes 3 hours to listen to, generating one click per three hours of listenting time for that podcast. TikTok videos take a few seconds to watch, so in 3 hours you're doling out thousands of views.
Secondly, views are distributed differently for those types of content because everyone finds roughly the same things funny, but only few find the same things interesting. If you want to watch something funny, you're probably not gonna spend much time finding suitable content, instead just consuming whatever is popular, so a handful of videos end up with insane amounts of views. But if you want to take up a hobby project you'd pick something that interest you, which is very different from what might interest me, even within the domain of CS and maybe even within subdomains of CS, so views are distributed more evenly for instructional videos.
And now we're here comparing the view counts of popular funny videos to instructional videos. I think it's clear why that might not be a good data point.
I agree with you, but a lot of people seem to think these values are automatically parts of America - a "system" as you described it - instead of things we all have to actively achieve every single day. It's a "use it or lose it" kind of thing in my opinion. We have some of the worst voting rates in the developed world. We have illiberal values and behavior creeping into both sides of the political spectrum. On the left we have the language police, cancel culture, and a general attitude that no part of American life can take place outside of the government's sphere of influence. On the right we have blatant xenophobia, voter suppression, and a refusal to deal honestly with our country's legacy of racial oppression.
Those values you listed are not magic totems that we can summon to fend off the specter of Chinese totalitarianism without any real work on our part. If we don't actively pursue them, defend them, and set examples for our children, they will die off.
I think things have flipped. TV used to be for serious content, Internet for cat videos. Now it's going the opposite way.
I'm not even talking about China, but just the fact that their business model is also based on being creepy, stalking their users and then serving them cancer aka ads.
I hope one day we'll have a mainstream social media platform that doesn't rely on stalking to fund itself, or at least allows to pay to opt-out.
As a European, I'd rather have my data stored on US servers than Chinese servers.
Hell, Facebook probably has better security than the NHS.
Chinese GDP growth is headed for <5% anyway.
This is the entire reason behind "with Chinese characteristics". There is no universal Chinese model to export, the Chinese system is a product of constant experimentation that is highly situational and enabled by advantages of Chinese scale. Most countries are constrained in demographics, geography etc to replicate what China has done. The closest applicable model behind Chines development is Manchukuo, strategic protectionist policies that establish domestic industries which has fueled other Asian tigers like Japan, Korea and Taiwan. What's unique to China is sheer scale enables her reach great power parity in many fields and the ability to absorb failures without losing too much momentum. At the end of the day, the only oppression that China will export is surveillance state technology like Huawei Smart City but that's an commercial commodity like weapons, not ideology.
IMO people are worried about Chinese influence because US influence is declining - that shining house on hill has become dilapidated in the last 20 years. Blaming the nouveau riche neighbor won't solve America's problems, nor will trying to stop them from getting that new pool nor coercing others in the neighborhood to avoid the new neighbors house party.
In terms of content: remember when Instagram first became popular, and you started using that more compared to Facebook, because FB just felt "stale" and old while IG was the new and exciting thing, with better and more exciting content? That's basically the different between TT and IG now.
I suspect they are with many people, they are a very strong motivator to only use the platform when you have some form of adblock enabled that prevents you from seeing the ads at all. They probably also reduce the total number of views = total number of ad impressions for people not using adblock.
If you believe the US is the only actor that benefitted from this development, you're somehow ignoring about 800 million people and over two dozen countries who remained free and independent thanks to NATO.
Regarding all the problems you listed: I think the reason we see these issues come up nowadays is in large due to the fact that the "modern" way of life that currently dominates the world -- the system that encourages individualism, consumerism, and duality, has simply met its end of life. We cannot solve the problems you listed from a dualistic viewpoint. Heck, we can't even get people to help save the environment. In that sense, I do see that we will see a huge shift toward the more Eastern values (especially the notion of interdependence) in the near future, but certainly not the ones pushed by the PRC.
There's actual reputable and recent research about 50c Army abroad - they don't exist.
Beyond Hybrid War: How China Exploits Social Media to Sway American Opinion https://www.recordedfuture.com/china-social-media-operations...
>While researchers have demonstrated that China does want to present a positive image of the state and Communist Party domestically, the techniques of censorship, filtering, astroturfing, and comment flooding are not viable abroad. We discovered no English language equivalent to the 50 Cent Party in Western social media.
50c also don't engage in political arguments like the comments you're concerned with:
How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument https://datasociety.net/events/databite-no-94-jennifer-pan/
>In contrast to prior claims, her research shows that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. Her work infers that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime
Anti Chinese bots however do - this one is particularly ironic since the researchers went out looking for pro CPC bots only the find the opposite.
Chinese computational propaganda: automation, algorithms and the manipulation of information about Chinese politics on Twitter and Weibo. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2018.14...
>In line with previous research, little evidence of automation was found on Weibo. In contrast, a large amount of automation was found on Twitter. However, contrary to expectations and previous news reports, no evidence was found of pro-Chinese-state automation on Twitter. Automation on Twitter was associated with anti-Chinese-state perspectives and published in simplified Mandarin, presumably aimed at diasporic Chinese and mainland users who ‘jump the wall’ to access blocked platforms.
The only somewhat legitimate claims of Chinese bot on western MSM was the Twitter release with zero method or attribution. Independent analysis show the scope of activity is trivial. https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewa...
>The amount of content directly targeting the Hong Kong protests makes up only a relatively small fraction of the total dataset released by Twitter, comprising just 112 accounts and approximately 1600 tweets, of which the vast majority are in Chinese with a much smaller number in English.
People are too paranoid over pro-China voices, there's plenty of Chinese diaspora out there willing to call out US hypocrisy. There's also billions of people in non western aligned countries who feel the same way. US has more skeptics than just China, especially after the last few years. Instead of viewing people as Pro-China, consider many people are just not anti-China. Alternatively, people aren't so much as Pro-China as anti-US. There are non Sinophobic bubbles out there. The most parsimonious explanation is just people with different opinions.
I don't think anyone doubts that there is a large contingent of nationalistic internet users in China which is very often on display, but going from that to asserting that this is coordinated is quite a leap.
The next generation will see it as they grow up, so it'll be smoother for them.
On Amazon’s scale, there’s a very common mistake made by people in the 11 countries where Amazon delivers (out of a possible 192): they don’t realise that Amazon is actually hardly available internationally. They can’t have a billion users because they don’t serve countries with more than 800M inhabitants.
AWS is a different story but it’s B2B. And I think that Amazon (Prime) Video is available more widely but Amazon, for all it’s Revenue and Market share isn’t a billion-user company.
And if you have plans for 20-50 years you don't even need military or police force
Just buy any politician and push your ideology and rewrite history books. And in 50 years people can't think that was something else
And 50 years it is a lot. In rusian federation that was done by less that 5 years
1984
only idiots believe this. tiktok can be an extension of the ccp propaganda grand scheme.
Followed by an 8 paragraph monologue about American imperialism, the prison industry, etc.
Of course this isn't verifiable, and maybe you're right, perhaps it is just one angry guy in China. I do not really care who it is, I am just trying to point out how we're quick to flip out about Facebook ads bought in Rubles, yet when it comes to Chinese troll artistry we are completely silent meanwhile Russia is a declining power and China is a mercantilist adversary.
In the west we can criticize our governments and are arguably more free. in china you can't and are arguably less free. I know where i would prefer to live.
Since the US is Canada's largest trading partner, this will always be the case, but there are huge and important differences in the level of involvement. Famously the level of involvement in the Iraq war was almost non-existent. Canada's involvement consisted of patrolling surrounding waters, and approximately 100 Canadian soldiers who were embedded in American forces as a sort of culteral military exchange[1].
I didn't say that - I think the US reaction to the threat was horrendous.
> Or "red danger" did (and do) less despicable things?
That's whataboutism - you would hope that a country that bills itself as "land of the free" would aim for a little better than that.
I don't see the US trying to export or push that idea/policy and i can't see it ever gaining traction in canada or the EU.
This is the reason that Silicon Valley is pushing minimal guaranteed income: rich people need to pay off people who they can’t provide a job for anymore.
However, that does not excuse your ignorance. A totalitarian regime that has caused more death than any other regime in history; one that primarily values wealth over freedom; one that does not believe in the sanctity of human life (ie Uighurs) is not fit to be influencing global culture.
Moreover, I agree American foreign imperialism has caused awful things to happen, but one thing no one ever realizes: this is the only time in human history that the world has had a monopole aka one dominant super power by far. Usually the world is bipolar or multipolar. Yet the last 70 years has yielded the fewest deaths from war as a percent of the global population in history. Should America be upset with its past? Sure. However, if China had been the global monopole for the last 70 years I do not believe the total death toll from war would be so low. thanks for ur opinion
Something like 200k people died in the civil war that ensued in Guatamala after the US-backed coup. And that is but one example. It could be argued that a lot of the violence and instability in Latin America is as a result of US intervetion.
Medical care monetisation: sure there is a big private industry, but it's scales different than in the US. And it did not say that it does not exist, only that we tend to disagree on the trend (ex: pharma insurance, now deployed in some provinces, and likely to become federal).
Nudity: granted, I'm from Quebec, it might be different, but things like nipples, breastfeeding, nudity in art, being naked in locker rooms, seeing friends naked (non-sexually), etc. people tend to be much more indifferent about nudity and more comfortable with their body. Obviously, that's a huge generalization and perhaps anecdotal, but I heard this often.
Ah, and I guess with regards to violence, is our difference in free speech: hate speech is not permitted (with exclusions for religious groups, because of LGBT issues, iirc).
Again, these are what I think are non-aligned trends, and topics that have an impact on moderation/algorithms online, not a hard truth. Obviously not everyone agrees on these topics, some regions are more divided than others, and these views tend to evolve in time.
None of that says "real" to me. It was all about showing how happy and successful they were.
I think what boggles HN readers' mind (mine included and I'm Chinese btw), is that in a place that's purportedly Orwellian or at least bearing resemblance to it, creativity is supposed to be severely oppressed and virtually non-existent. Yet the reality is quite the opposite.
They weren’t a competition by any means, and would (speculation) most likely die if they didn’t tap into Facebook resources.
WhatsApp was only real big competition Facebook bought so far.
That one would personally prefer to have the freedoms of the privileged class of the US is not in question. But the US ruins lives at a 3x higher rate in prisons than China does. And it's not organ harvesting, but is cruelty that is personal, financial, and petty. Medical care is routinely denied, long term imprisonment in solitary conditions is considered torture in other nations, and is common in the US. And undeniably, prison is applied more frequently and for longer terms to a minority set of races in the US akin to how China persecutes minorities. (again I agree the degree is different but point out the rate is higher in the US, and ruined lives are still ruined). Those affected in that system really don't have the freedom to opt out of it.
Edit: The robber barons cruelly end lives too...
https://twitter.com/AllOnMedicare/status/1184644551987777537
That may be so in some cases, but my experience is that the propaganda is a reflection of the zeitgeist of Chinese people. Propaganda works because it taps into fundamental beliefs and grievances of the masses. It may distort or channel it into certain directions but it is actually quite aligned with prevailing schools of thought in China and Chinese historiography.
Some of these include:
- The west is hypocritical, the goal of western human rights and democratization is to weaken or subvert China's rise with the goal of ultimately replacing a strong centralized Chinese state that encompasses its present borders for several independent states along ethnic lines and geographic lines that would be easier to manage from a western perspective.
- The fundamental strength of the west up to now is due to superiority capacity for warfare, subjugation of foreign lands through brutal colonialism and exploitation of their natural resources. Now the west in criticizing China in Africa and one belt and road initiatives is simply a cynical maneuver to kick down the ladder after one has already climbed up it.
I could go on, but from these two points stem all subsequent arguments and I think they provide the fundamental rationale for argument over all points of conflict between China and the west.
Hell, just think of the violence, misery and excessive deaths that have occurred across Latin America and the Middle East because of the USA's interventions.
My point is that just because the USSR did worse, doesn't excuse the USA's actions, which still have an impact to this day.
That's what's got me skeptical. There's a lot of people saying TikTok proves Twitter killing Vine was a bad move, but Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are wildly different "social networks". IMO the equivalent of putting Amazon, Youtube and Wikipedia on the same "website" category.
WhatsApp is incredibly useful. It's perhaps the "lamest" of all social networks— it doesn't have "creators", it's not known for its cool filters, it has no "likes", but it works and where it's used, it's as ubiquitous and used as phone numbers once were.
Facebook is very utilitarian too. IMO they haven't become "uncool" because they dropped the ball— they went for the general population. It's like they purposefully toned down their "cool" brand to widen the age of users that could associate with it. Now you can not only find pretty much anyone on Facebook, but also buy and sell on Marketplace, find a Job, find events, restaurants, find groups for parents, study groups, groups for people with rare diseases, the list goes on.
TikTok is very popular, but what's the demographic and what's the value proposition here? Teenage entertainment? If so, they're competing with Instagram, but also YouTube and Netflix. It's also perfectly plausible its users will outgrow it by the time they go to college or enter the workforce, or once the ads pick up to keep with the operational expenses.
The real challenge for the company will come in the form or retention and the broadening of their product + user base to compete on the next level, as something useful and not just entertaining, IMO.
Well one benefit of a censorship state, is that it's easy to censor all the astroturfers.
It's the difference between setting a house on fire to acquire the land, and buying a land lot where a house used to be.
You need to check out the rose glasses you're wearing yourself
Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
> Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US.
Canada did not suffer a financial crisis to the extent that the US did in 2008 because banks here are regulated very differently than in the US. Also, the likelihood of medical bills causing financial ruin is much lower here.
I dont want my country to become once again a russian satellite. China is too far away but will feed Russia to influence my part of the world.
Seriously muricans get your shit together.
Or if you go to any high end department store, more than half the models in ads are not Chinese. The models present a luxurious, enviable lifestyle.
Any random Chinese person can name at least 10 Hollywood celebrities and hum 10 American songs.
This type of “influence” is much more powerful than what China is currently capable of. And until Americans are like that, I’m not worried at all about “Chinese influence.”
Now if you are strictly talking about government sponsored astroturfing, then look up Operation Earnest Voice and Project Mockingbird.
I also recommend Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
Throwaway account since I don’t dare discuss some topics with my real account
Relevant crosslink in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21575365
There is plenty of evidence showing China's propogandistic influence on Hollywood movies. References to Tibet, Taiwan, etc. are often removed.
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
There are no historical artifacts claiming that USSR ever had a serious plan to "steamroll" Western Europe. If anything, they were deathly terrified of NATO incursion into Russia and almost pathologically attached to creating a buffer zone of Warszaw Pact states.
Please do not mix up US cold war propaganda with historic facts, those are not quite the same.
Note: this also happens in pretty much every other thread about a country that isn’t America. God forbid anyone ever discuss anything else, Americans want to relitigate the same old tired “why my country sucks” debates!
And for what? Is any useful information being conveyed? No, it’s mostly just some kind of social status signalling — Americans of certain insecure social class feel the need to complain about America at every opportunity to distinguish themselves from people of a lower social class because patriotism is coded as a low-class activity.
Yes you’re all very sophisticated and I’m sure you like high speed trains and such. Can we please stop talking about the same thing all the time?
Love,
A non American
> Reddit is overrun with pro-PRC shills and trolls
I challenge you to link one example in any popular post. My experience is that if you dare to say anything remotely pro-China, you will get downvoted to oblivion.
I've spent countless hours looking at this problem in HN data, which admittedly may not be representative of the internet at large, but is the most relevant here. By far the overwhelming finding is that users are massively prone to leap to "astroturfing" (or "shill", "troll", "bot", or "spy") based solely on hearing something they dislike on a charged topic. This is plainly a psychological bias—probably one we all share—and it dominates all discussion on the topic by at least 99% if not 99.9. The phenomenon is so universal, and conforms so closely to what I see on other platforms even though I can't study their data, that I have to believe it's the same everywhere.
The parsimonious explanation for comments expressing strongly opposing points of view is that humans are the same on both sides of any divisive topic: emotionally charged and primed for reflexive, predictable responses. That's why these arguments are all the same (in the case of China v. US: "but imperialism", "but totalitarianism", etc.) and also why they are off topic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
This was the top subthread before I marked it off topic. That's mostly because of upvoters, but the reason we ask people not to post this sort of flamebait is that upvoters simply can't resist it. When it comes to indignation, upvotes are a statistical cloud of fruit flies showing up near a decaying banana.
I know you're sincere but sincerely burning this place down is still destructive.
That's what is reported. I highly suspect JTF2 was involved since the beginning. This directly proving my point of the government misleading the people.
[0] - https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/war-crimes-in-the-da...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/war-crimes-in-the-da...
I agree people also need to enjoy a lengthy book once, an inspiring piece of music or whatever floats your boat, but aren't you painting a too gloomy picture?
You don't have to worried about things that are "obviously propaganda." If you even mention a nuanced take on what the CCP is doing in Xinjiang, you'll instantly get downvoted to oblivion (like this comment) and branded a shill, so the same would happen to legitimate disinformation. The Russian propaganda used in the US was designed to create more divides in order to weaken democracy. For example, an fake advertisement may advocate to "teach the controversy" of evolution in a blue state to encourage atheists to be hostile to Christians and vice versa.
Smarter every day has an interesting miniseries about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4&vl=tr
I definitely wasn't trying to start a flamewar, let alone a nationalistic one - I do see an aggressive amount of pro-PRC posts (on other platforms), I have no proof that they're PRC agents other than the fact that they're posting things that one would consider "pro-PRC." I have no proof that similar isn't happening against the PRC on baidu, other than that I don't see it. So is the issue that my post was on too tenuous a thread, based on your data on HN? I certainly didn't mean to imply the presence of shills on HN - I almost never see pro-PRC posts. I specifically called out facebook, twitter, and reddit to avoid that implication.
Perhaps it would have been better to construct my post without mentioning shills at all? I am concerned about the PRC gov's role in communication applications and technology, and I am curious what others (HN crowd particularly because they're almost universally more knowledgeable than me) have to say on the subject.
If the answer to all my ramblings is "don't pin random conspiracy theory shit on the PRC here" that's totally acceptable as well.
You sound like a good candidate to visit China. Experience the difference between east and west for yourself. Let me assure you, I'm very thankful to live in a Democracy. There isn't parity on this issue.
Note that these complaints of mine are against the Party, not the people of China as a whole. Xi Jinping and his cronies are a fresh brand of evil.
"Much of TikTok's growth has been driven by an explosion of users in India, who accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. "
From what I've seen of tik tok it seems it's mostly young kids and teenagers lip syncing music, dancing, and doing comedy sketches.
Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app
It doesn't matter how infrequent the comments we dislike are relative to the whole. What matters is the absolute number of them that an individual reader encounters. If it's more than some threshold value N, they will conclude that the entire place is hostile, even if the hostile comments are a tiny minority. At a psychological and even a biological level, that makes sense: once a place has generated N painful experiences, it's dangerous. Percentage of the total is irrelevant. Indeed, it makes a place even more dangerous if most experiences there are pleasurable, since one will be inclined to stay—exposing oneself to future smacks—and to let one's guard down, making the next smack even more painful. We all have a version of this, and though N may vary per person, I bet it's lower than most of us would predict.
This phenomenon has some interesting consequences. One is that it enables you to guess with high confidence what someone's views on a topic are, based on how strongly they believe HN (or whatever forum) is biased against them. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the feeling that it is shows what they find painful and therefore what they disagree with. Also, the intensity of the belief in bias grows with the intensity of their view on the topic. That is, the more passionately you believe X, the more pain an anti-X comment causes, the more strongly you will believe that the forum is anti-X.
Another consequence is that the closer a forum gets to being unbiased, the more all sides will believe that it's actually hostile to their views. That seems weird in the wild, but it's simple: the more diverse the comment stream is, the more likely all sides are to notice disagreeable comments and thus receive painful impressions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own? Just a moment when someone or something isn't barking at you to listen to this or buy that. I at least can't think clearly about something else if someone is reciting a story to me. Scary when most podcasts also have advertising, so you are getting a subconscious dose of that during all your waking hours.
I think they also nailed the music aspect of content creation. Whereas other platforms are actively hostile to users using unlicensed audio, TT licenses popular music which saves a boatload of effort on the content creation side and just makes it all more compelling to watch. Contrast that with takedown notices and little support for including sound at all.
Tik Tok doesn't have formal interest groups the way that reddit has subreddits, but there are definitely niche communities that congregate around hash tags. The big ones include visual and audio artists, and there are big pet communities there too. I haven't seen aquarium enthusiasts (mostly because that's not my niche), but I'm sure they're out there. Tik Tok is in the middle of a huge ferret craze because of this cute video of a dancing ferret [1] for example.
So yes by absurd infiltration I’m talking about Chinese nationalists in general. Why not give a clear example? Because there is no verification of identity on YouTube or any social media
Tik Tok isn't free from toxic behavior or those problems with insta-models and travel vloggers by any means, but my impression has been that it's a surprisingly friendly and welcoming community, especially compared to a lot of other social networks
What's your reasoning for that? I think pre-WhatsApp acquisition most people would argue that Facebook would have died if it did not acquire Instagram...
Yes, there are many arguments that can be brought up about differences between newspapers and social media, etc., but I strongly feel like it is essentially the same kind of neo-ludditism that will play out the exact same way. Something new will come up after social media, and then people will jump on that as the next thing that "degrades the society". We can already see a micro-version of that, with people lamenting how "back in the old days, blog posts were long form and meaningful, not like those tweets and instagram posts".
Pretty big difference between listening to Wendy Williams vs, I don't know, philosophical debates and deep dives into history and all sorts of intellectually stimulating things. Most people I know including myself listen to the latter which is nothing short of welcome mind-expansion and I'm a more interesting person as a result of it.
People listening to podcasts or reading books really aren't the people I'm worried about in the modern era.
Since there is no Google Play Store in China, you will only find TikTok there [in the Play Store]. To install 抖音 you simply download the apk from their website and side-load it.
Since the article states
> TikTok has hit 1.5 billion total downloads across the App Store and Google Play
I believe that IOS has around 13% market share in China. So this is missing out on A LOT of downloads.
Then again it's hard to believe that there are 1.5 billion downloads for tiktok (ios + android) and 抖音(just ios). Then that must mean that it's not counting 抖音 downloads on Android.
Is that what TikTok is? I only use 抖音 which is definetely not that (there are a lot of dog videos, Bart Baker singing patriotic songs, Bart Baker staging skits where he makes americans love Chinese snacks, Alan Walker's team posts pretty frequently, and like 2-minute episodes of original dramas). Some video game highlights and like some really shallow plots where A treats a service worker badly, and then they show A's significant other be disgusted by the behavior and give the service worker a giant tip or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street...
[2] https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
[3] https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
People are always looking for the 'surprising' reasons why society is really in decay and everyone's living their day-to-day lives completely blind to it - except us few who know better.
There's huge demand for this sort of thing to be true, it's been the basis of every cult ever, plenty of extreme political movements, religions, and a million think pieces through history. Yet life and culture always ends up being far more boring and resilient than predicted.
Oh wow, I haven't even thought of that one until you mentioned it, but it certainly seems to ring true for the people I know as well.
So sometimes I'll have to download it when I don't have access to a desktop, send or read a message I needed to, and then uninstall it.
GMail comes preinstalled in a lot of phones, and you can also use the service with different mail client, so you can't really compare two numbers and call that a day.
The US government is basically run from corporate interest, which has served people well for 50 years when things are good. But those corporations have no loyalty to the US. As political and economics interests shift, expect those large corporations to follow there own interests, not those of any nation.
The Chinese government, for all of its many faults, is making sure that Chinese corporations serve the interest of China. Corporations currently located in the US no longer even pay lip service to being interested in supporting the people of United States.
Yeah the worst part is that I can't tell my boss to screw off because it's my company :D We do some customer support on Facebook because so many of our users are there, otherwise I wouldn't be touching it with a 12 foot pole either.
Most of the content in those shows is still fluff and nowhere near as information dense as a lecture from Stanford or MIT. Take talking machines as an example, an interview with a guy like David Blei will be very shallow and watered down for the general audience, I'd much rather listen to him give a lecture at a machine learning summer school.
I believe you about intent, but the sad fact is that intent doesn't matter in cases like this, because the dangers are mechanical and predictable. Arson is worse than negligence, but from a fire-prevention point of view there's little difference; and since many more fires are started by negligence than arson, it's the bigger problem.
Sadly, those kinds of people make some of the best consumers, and many online companies (from advertisers, to game developers, to news sites) are optimizing for that kind of addictive, short attention span engagement.
How has the official US line held up, historically, when it comes to coups vs socialists in Latin America? Why should it be different this time?
On Instagram there is a tendency to push for that one perfect photo, on tiktok it looks like there is more a push for content. (obviously there is a continuity between them)
Especially with the "reply" functionality (I don't know how it is called, but you can reply to other users's video by making your own video that will appear the the side) the posts are often in the style of commentary.
In terms of online persona, on tiktok it is almost natural to post a video of your pimples/acne as funny video while on IG it would feel strongly out of place.
Genuine question to people who use the app: how does it add value? Or is it a even better attention grabber?
Why do I have to suffer the repeat annoyance? And even when I've skipped the same ad twelve times, why do I then have to watch the ad full length before I can continue to the video? At what point does Google treat me like an adult that can decide the relevance of content?
This is the very reason I cut the cord on Cable TV.
It's always a joy reading your thoughts on moderation and communities in general--keep up the awesome work!