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Seer of Blood (Wyatt) and Witch of Void (fractal)


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Campster
@Campster

What makes this real fun is when you realize that TikTok quietly hides comments with external links by default to keep people in its ecosystem, but doesn't tell you. So if you try to, say, cite a source to prove disinformation your comment appears to you but no one else. This further confuses threads and makes pointing to factual data or debunking someone's bullshit all but impossible.

I've become convinced that TikTok is an amazing platform for misinformation, if only because it is built to destroy context. Videos appear out of order via an algorithm, no one can link to anything external to cite sources or point to authority, and surrounding discourse is frayed and scrambled. It's shockingly easy for absolute nonsense to take root and spread among people who want to believe it unchallenged.

This is part of how you get the "Venezuelan gangs have taken over multiple apartment complexes in Colorado, the cops have ceded the ground to them, and our only hope is the Hell's Angels who have promised to come in and solve the problem with racialized violence" story in right wing circles. It's also how you get the "Chase Bank Glitch" story where dozens upon dozens of TikTokers posted about how gullible rubes are doing a viral check fraud scheme en masse when there's no real evidence of that ever happening.

It's an entire platform built to facilitate stories of people eating tide pods or that someone put razorblades in Halloween candy.


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in reply to @Campster's post:

Every time I open tiktok I am frankly overwhelmed by how hostile it is to a user wanting a clear, concise, chronological presentation of videos that you have searched for. It so so desperately wants to feed you a steady conveyor belt of random slop, please please PLEASE let us just show you whatever the fuck we feel will keep you on the app the longest, no neither of your feeds will only show you stuff from the people you follow, not even the one that's supposed to do that. You searched for something? How about you buy shit instead. You went to someone's profile? Please let us show you their videos in a completely randomized order.

tiktok's ui is nightmarish, i can't spend 10 minutes there without getting completely overwhelmed. there's tiktok shop, tiktok lives linking to shops, random ads, another ad to buy coins for whatever purpose, a person with the worst opinions on the planet just rolled into my feed, few more ads, and oh! i just lost a few hours of my day that i'll never get back

As someone who enjoys the option of "people you're following in chronological order" and "just lemme see what slop The Algorithm thinks I need to see", even the slop feed is poorly designed. Every 5-10 tiktoks in the For You Page is one I saw earlier in my feed! Some are just randomly from 6-12 months ago! Sucks!

To be fair it seems no video-based platform can figure this out. I like how YouTube started tracking what videos you've watched and exactly how far you are into them with that little red progress bar on the thumbnail but will still gladly recommend you watch videos it is gleefully agreeing you have already watched.

I hate that! I made a post about it awhile ago, but when I heavily use the Watch Later playlist/feature I am constantly getting recommended the videos I've already put into my Watch Later. I've already told you I will watch this video! don't show it to me again, show me a different video!

i genuinely cannot use tiktok because it feels like something that was designed to maximize the time the user spends scrolling and seeing advertisements, as if every part of it is made to confuse or anger the user.

scrolling through the front page as a new user gave me conspiracy theories about how chatGPT was secretly someone's real soul or how justin bieber was part of an adrenochrome ring. and that's when i stopped because it was so completely overwhelming. it was after only a couple of minutes of scrolling too.

i genuinely worry about how this has affected the way in which misinformation spreads. i've seen videos debunking outlandish claims of dragons being real that were posted by shitty joe rogan AI voices talking over generic "satisfying" footage. i used to work with a caretaker who believed an alien society existed because a parent made a series of videos of their child talking about communicating with said aliens. it's scary!

I think a real contributor to this is that since tiktok is SO enormous and everyone understands that they're only observing a very tiny, curated slice of it, it's really easy to assume that the misinformation is built on actual firsthand information that you're just not getting on your fyp.

I don't know the specifics of tiktok's algorithm, but my impression is that it rewards videos that discuss a topic without context -- because then everyone's reaction is to search for context & scan the comments just to figure out what the video is even about. If everyone is engaging with comments and searching the topic in your video, that must have been a pretty interesting video, so it gets promoted. That's my hunch, anyway.

And since the search feature is universally understood to be completely terrible, your first thought after failing to find context is always "ugh, I can't find the original video" instead of questioning if there even is an original video, and if any of this is actually happening at all.

TikTok is also great for scams/MLMs. I get ten dozen "Legacy Builders" lives a day, aka unfortunate stay-at-home moms and other vulnerable to disinfo. folks who get sold a "digital marketing" course whose entire contents consists of "here, build this website to sell the same digital marketing course to others" and yet they are 100% convinced it's not a scam.

a related thing that sucks: YouTube's public API allows you to fetch the text of all comments, paginated, until the end. TikTok's public API does not. Their closed research API apparently does, but I wouldn't know. You can jank your way into UI scraping them, but that peters out somewhere in the hundreds/thousands range (it's varied over the years). So unless you're an academic (maybe), as of the last time I checked there may be literally no way to surface them -- especially the buried ones the OP mentioned. Everything might as well be ephemeral.

kinda funny that the "information preserved in all its triteness" bit from mgs2 can now be considered quaint, stopping short of predicting information would be not just preserved but actively shaped into unrecognizable, half-heard, trite slop

I guess we're watching completely different versions of TikTok. In all my years of using the app, I haven't seen a single conspiracy video. All my fyp is funny skits, good recipes, super creative crafts, recent scientific discoveries (showing the original research papers in the background), thoughtful and balanced cultural commentary, cool songs and music videos, cute dances, and fun facts.

In the very beginning of using the app, the algo did try to push some weirder things on me: thirst traps, creepy pastas, Live-s of people looking for trouble...

I remember a hilarious sequence where it showed me a live of a dude in a MAGA hat with a sign saying "God exists! Prove me wrong!"

I said "Not interested." Literally 2 videos later I got a different Live of some chick with colourful hair with a sign along the lines of "If you vote Red, you should be ๐Ÿ’€!"

Like before, I immediately told them I'm not interested. I did the same with some thirst traps they tried recommending me, and it's been smooth sailing ever since!

But I agree, their comment system is absolute shit. It's only there to tell you: "This is NOT a place for discussion! Keep scrolling, you monkey!" It's the only aspect of TikTok I don't like.

But to be fair, you can say that for all social media. Writing a comment on FB, Insta or YT feels like you're pissing in the wind, and places like Reddit and Twitter (sorry - X :D) seem specifically designed to discourage nuanced discussion and encourage group think...

fun fact: youtube ALSO quietly hides comments with links! plus when The Algorithm decides you have misbehaved. seems like a sensible way to stop bots, but really annoying when you encounter it.