Post last updated 20 hours, 27 minutes ago
I don't view social media fondly: Facebook? Boomer graveyard. Instagram? Garbage. Reddit? Hot garbage. X? x-tra hot garbage. YouTube? I don't really count it as social media, even thought it has made strides in that direction in recent years. TikTok? Well...
As the title says, I find it hard to definitely put TikTok in a category. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to stick with me, like I could go watch 2-3 videos and close the app just fine, but I would get sucked into Instagram Reels for hours. I also seem to find a lot more "premium" content on TikTok than on Insta: channels like etymologynerd for example appear a lot more frequent in my feed on TikTok.
I think it boils down to the algorithm and the search function. TikTok has a stellar search function in my opinion, you can find pretty much anything you want, even if you just vaguely know what you look for. And the algorithm seems to behave, not giving me too many wild things and generally getting the hint to not show me a certain thing if I reported similar content.
Now, I'm well aware of how the same algorithm pushes new accounts down the far-right pipeline in mere hours and in general how it viralizes toxic content. Also, just the fact that TikTok has a special "good" algorithm in China tells you more than enough about some of its underlying goals are in the rest of the world.
So yeah, I'm torn on TikTok, but I also hope I can stay where I'm now: not really engaging with it too much.
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