I was fine with memes over the past few years … sure they are a quick dopamine hit that make you laugh or think
But now when my friends send me tiktok videos … especially when someone has been watching these video streams for hours or days … they start sending out the most random, inane, mindless content … it’s the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
it’s the kind of material that keep a monkey occupied.
I think that’s kind of the point. There was an article a while back that said the CCP/Bytedance intentionally serve up braindead content to everywhere outside China, while promoting educational and uplifting content at home.
I have one 50 year old friend with very little tech know how and his kids set him up with a good smartphone. I saw his family about a year ago and his kids noted that their dad often sits up until about 2 or 3 in the morning at the kitchen table just scrolling through tiktok videos. He sent them to me about once a day until I had to block him and tell him directly to stop sending me this stuff. He’s since become ‘aware’ of his addiction and stops sending out videos as often as he did before. He still scrolls through thousands and thousands of videos a day.
It would all be funny if it wasn’t so frightening at the same time.
50 is still too young. Endless scrolling should only be for old people who literally can’t do anything. Kids need to do physically stimulating things like playing outside, adults need to do mentally stimulating things like playing video games. Old people don’t need to do anything, they can veg out to short form.
Legitimately, when I was quitting nicotine, I would scroll on my phone when I was getting withdrawal pangs, and it helped.
Nowadays I have to watch myself, or else I’ll potentially lose hours. I know exactly what addiction feels like: going without and satisfying what feels like a need - it feels right. And these apps are definitely addictive. I didn’t really notice until I tried to stop.
I’ve had no trouble curating my feed to mostly professionals, psychologists and pet behaviorists. Occasional cute animal videos
that sounds way too bizarre to believe without seeing a source. and i know there’s gonna be people replying saying it’s not that bizarre, because China, but really…?
Absolutely reasonable thing to ask.
Grep for “Companies like TikTok” to find the relevant portion.
The guy talking isn’t exactly a scientist and this ain’t a rigourous peer-reviewed study, but it does seem like he knows at least a little about what he’s talking about. Take it with a grain of salt.
That’s such a gross misunderstanding of the separation between TikTok and China that it’s very possible purposeful misinformation.
China has no control whatsoever over TikTok, and in fact, there are US intelligence officers on the board for the American company. If anyone is “intentionally serving up braindead content…” it’s the US company, who is under strict control and observation by US intelligence agencies.
Why are you lying? Every Chinese company is under the CCP’s boot, as made evident by the one time Tencent tried to fight it
Oh shit!
This post actually made me look for a solution and I found one!
Solution to opening tiktoks without using tiktok app or site, not how to stop ur friends sending u garbage.
It made me think… mpv player can play basically any link you throw at it (thanks to yt-dlp), and we also have mpv on Android, so why can’t we do it there as well. And sure enough, I found this https://github.com/mpv-android/mpv-android/pull/58, someone baked yt-dlp in mpv for Android, making it possible to open link in mpv (share >> play in mpv)
It works for instagram and all other shit.
If you are sending the links through discord/chat with embed add vx in front of tiktok and it becomes playable in discord itself. (https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8b81Gu1/ -> https://www.vxtiktok.com/t/ZT8b81Gu1/)
In a removed move, a normal tiktok link will have a play button on the icon like it should play, but can’t. This one actually will.
So do we need to download something from your link to make that work? Or is it already part of MPV?
I felt this way with instagram. My phone can barely handle the web app and you can’t even replay the video without an account. Truly garbage UX
Im pretty sure that meta purposefully makes the mobile websites for all their products as shit as possible to get people to use the real apps instead
That’s what literally all social media sites do. It is far more profitable for people to be using your app than your mobile website. Apps make it much easier to harvest data and corral the user into the exact experience you want them to have (ads, suggestions, etc).
I know not many people here are going back to Reddit but just for a second, open your mobile browser, disable the add-ons if it’s firefox, and go look at Reddit currently. Within the last few weeks they have absolutely massacred it. Like, truly, it is astoundingly bad now. The original mobile redesign of the site was already terrible, but this new-new-mobile reddit is so painfully bad that the only conceivable reason for its existence is to get people to give up and use the app.
Man i really miss old reddit, what a shame. I hope lemmy continues to grow, none of my hobbies have active communities yet like they do on redddit
I just shared this with my wife, since she has started sharing TikTok lately.
Mine’s been doing it too even though she knows how much I absolutely despise tiktok… There’s a reason I don’t have that app… Lol
And the fucking fake voices… Ugh… Such shit.
Like, usually I use my phone with the volume completely off and I don’t even want to turn it on for most of the videos I see on here or wherever but it seems like for all this tiktok garbage you need sound to even determine why the hell someone shared it with you.
PSA: If it’s links on Discord, you can prefix the link with vx to make it natively embed so you don’t have to click through (e.g. vxtiktok.com). This also works with twitter links (vxtwitter.com). People out there hosting these domains doing the lord’s work
