- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Some irony there. Tik Tok wants to be more like Youtube with its long form content. Youtube wants to be more like Tik Tok with its shorts content.
Neither seems to be winning the opposing battle.
Fucking YouTube shorts.
Every content creator has to partake in the stupidity because it’s that or becoming an algorithm outcast, so they awkwardly cut bits of their videos just to post a couple of those.
And then YouTube forces them in everyone’s throat, with absolutely no regard for the medium and no option to filter them out.
No, YouTube, I won’t watch your stupidly formatted 10-second bits of nothing on my TV.
I’m so done with shorts I’ve added the whole shorts element to my adblocker… you can’t select the seeker bar in shorts, you can’t autoscroll lol literally a retarded copy of tiktok with zero user experience functionalities
You can select it on mobile but it’s super god damn glitchy and infuriating. I wouldn’t mind shorts when they’re helpful and jump straight to the point of how to fix/do something I’m looking up if it weren’t for the garbage seeker bar.
If you need to you can always replace the
shortspart in the url withwatchto get the normal interface back.Can this be automated?
there’s probably already a tamperMonkey script out there, check greasyFork or something
The best is when it’s a video shot in landscape that has been letterboxed to fit a phone screen and then pillarboxed to fit a TV screen, so the net result is a video that could fill the whole screen being displayed inside a tiny rectangle in the middle.
It is like all those anti-detection tactics of pirated movies on Youtube.
We need a TikTube apparently.
I had to buy one of those for my dog
YouTok has entered the chat.
You do what, now? Is tok’ing what the kids are calling it these days?
You tok I tok we all tok a tick tok.
does…does the tiktube go inside you?
If the companies had their way, it would go directly in to your brain
Just the ads, and you can’t turn them off. Ever.
I think I saw that episode of Black Mirror
I think they’d rather put it directly in your wallet.
Just the tik.
With enough lube, yes
Depends on the attitude.
YouTok
Well youtube has both.
And I hope the long form videos take some sort video cues and don’t have 3 minute long rambling intros anymore. The one nice things about shorts is they get to the point.
Short-form videos are basically a form of cancer that keeps you alive with shots of dopamine every 15-30 seconds. I avoid those things like the plague.
Brevity is the soul of wit
Vine understood that. TikTok doesn’t and YouTube shorts is a glitchy mess. I use an extension to hide them because of it.
Why is youtube capping to that small time frame. Even most tiktok videos are like 2 minutes long minimum. Maybe that’s just the algorithm working for me, because I refuse to invest my attention in anything with that low of an information payoff.
Those long rambling intros have started to happen on TikTok more and more
Unfortunately, if twitter has shown us anything, it’s social networks are ridiculously hard to destroy, even when actively self-sabotaging
Instagram is absolute garbage compared to how it used to be. It’s still massive. Once people are hooked, it’s hard to wean them off. People were livid at reddit, but only a fraction of those who spoke up are here
The average user doesn’t even know anything happened.
API? That’s like being gay or trans right?
Instagram is not actually worse than before, sure, the content there is worse, but people spend more time on it, and as such it is doing its job as a social media platform well
I hate it that being successful and being a piece of shit are not mutually exclusive
Enshitification is a milestone in the life of a product now.
What’s changed about Instagram? I’m not familiar enough to know, but I don’t feel like I’ve heard anything all that controversial about it outside of Meta’s general “pay to remove ads” thing. I certainly haven’t heard anything about systemic enshittification like I have with Twitter, Reddit and TikTok; have I missed anything?
It used to be you saw what you subscribed to. Now every third posted is suggested. Many of them have paid to be suggested, not even talking about the ads which seem like every other post. It used to be about pictures, now it’s all reels, loud and obnoxious.
Ahh, that’s the same path Facebook went down a decade ago then. Yay, capitalism…
I know it doesn’t fix the fact the ruined main feed, but if you click on “Instagram” on the top left then select “Following” from the drop-down that appears, you will get a chronological feed of only the people you follow—no ads no suggested posts. Only reels if they were posted by someone you follow.
Right on! I never knew that!
They make it basically impossible to know about unless you are told. 😩
If only you were commenting on an article that discusses what happened to Instagram.
They’re hard to destroy until something (people view as) better shows up. My buddy Tom from MySpace got out while the getting was good.
Digg on the other hand did not see it coming.
God I miss pre-Digg Reddit.
You’re back there now! Lemmy now is pretty much like Reddit pre-2008.
They were falling off as of V3, V4 deffo killed them off though.
Nowadays they’re (kinda) back as a daily dose website.
Dude cashed out right at the peak, then took his money and travels the world with it. Tom never has to work another day in his life.
Well time to make a good open source alternative.
Some kind of federation
In the proper space, that’s a real enterprise
More than anything, it’s that people resist change. They’ll stick to what they are doing until sometime after it becomes very clear that they shouldn’t any longer.
It’s hard because once you got a place where all your friends are, it will be extremely hard to leave because it’s not like they’ll follow you and move to something like mastadon, pixelfed, or lemmy.
My friends are on Instagram, if I wanted to find my classmates, they would all be on there. My parents are on facebook, there’s no chance for those old guys to move to something else.
TikTok is no more a social media platform than YouTube is. I’m puzzled why some people call it that and my only guess is that they’ve never used it.
“Social media” just means a public place where the plebs can upload content and interact with other plebs via the internet without knowing a lick of html, Internet culture, or anything technical really. If they are so lucky, some might even be graced by the attention of a minor internet celebrity, the modern day patricians.
I agree, it all went downhill when we stopped having liturgy exclusively in Ecclesiastical Latin. Plebs can now use internet without knowing HTML too. How will they know their place?
When Internet communities were still a relatively niche thing and I (preteen to early teen) was already on the Internet, I had great dreams that in the future everyone would be on it and this would cause society to be awesome.
Everyone is now on the Internet. This has not made society awesome.
You mean the websites where people can be social around media … is not a social media?
People seem to be selectively stretching definition of social media but are rather inconsistent in applying this label. Yeah, plenty of platforms and websites can be described as social media but we generally go with calling them by primary function. YouTube and TikTok are video platforms first. Reasons why Twitter and TikTok are going downhill are vastly different, reasons for their resilience or lack thereof will be very different too.
Oh no!
Anyways
It’s so funny one wanting to become the other, yt went to shit after shorts and tiktok is doing the same.
Why can’t they put shorts somewhere else? I do watch them but I don’t always want them, they clog up results and recommendations so bad
I hate that on the YouTube mobile app the shorts take up the entirety of your screen when you first open it. Like they really want you to watch shorts over their regular video content. And YouTube shorts still to this day don’t even work. If you open YouTube and watch 50 shorts a day, once a day for a week, after the first day you’ll see like one new short a day. There’s no algorithm, it just shows you the same exact shorts in almost the same exact order over and over again.
Why use the YouTube app? Firefox with ublock, never see an ad again
FF with Ublock is not a very comfortable experience. I much prefer Newpipe.
I have a Google 1 family account which comes with YouTube Premium.
They really fucked up the user experience for the older user base. Kids love those shorts though.
I mean I’m not even anti-shorts. Like I like shorts and Reels and such just fine but the YouTube shorts are literally just broken on top of being kinda shitty to begin with.
deleted by creator
Because everyone thinks they have to offer everything to get more users and increase the bottom line.
They’d rather be a jack of all trades than a specialized expert in a field.
I keep getting shorts (not anymore i fixed that) when i searched for something and they often feature stuff not related to my search. Like me searching for tubeless bike tire instruction video and the shorts in between are a alien looking dark purple baby and a short where some muslim looking guys are waving a scimitar at a goats neck…like what in the actual fuck does that even do on youtube?
Shorts need to be ended imo, so i blocked them.
@Squizzy @yamanii This extension does exactly that (at least on desktop) and stops doom scrolling without removing them entirely: https://github.com/doma-itachi/Youtube-shorts-block
the same but opposite. YT pushes shorts to compete with Tiktok. Tiktok pushes longform content to compete with YT
Sounds a bit more like the format is getting very exhausting to people, and more people are recognizing the unhealthy effects.
So now they need to go the opposite direction to try and fix it
Nah, it’s just enshittification. Every other video is an ad now and some videos that aren’t labeled as ads are just viral marketing ads in disguise. The “for you” page gets exhausting with all these ads, and it’s really the only way to discover new content.
Then there is tiktok live that they heavily push. Tiktok live can be sorta cool, but once the NPCing trend hit, 6 out of 10 live feeds are people unabashedly whoring themselves out for money, another 2 out of the ten are weird live “games” that are just p2p with the in currency gift system, another 10% are live open shops like Pokémon cards or freshwater clams for pearls or shit (which is kinda cool, but there are so many of them) then the last 1 are legitimately interesting live feeds.
Then it got even worse… they added competitions, which would require a certain amount of high value gifts to be sent by their viewers to obtain cash prizes for hitting certain gifting metrics. This turned almost all of the live feeds into just endless begging.
Then somehow it got worse… they added “battles” which pit two live feeds against each other. Nowadays it’s a lot of Israel v Palestine or Trump V Biden streams. There timed and whoever collects more gifts wins the match. It’s really nauseating to be honest…
It’s not people slowly realizing that tiktok is bad, it’s just tiktok actively becoming worse. The most frustrating thing is all your favorite videos are lurking somewhere on the site, but you have little control over what comes next and it often takes wading through mountains of shit to find something good.
But that is exactly how TikTok is supposed to work no? They condition the user to swipe until they see what they want. In the beginning you get great content and are conditioned to like the swipe. But after a while more random shit gets introduced and you end up “searching” for the content you want with many little distractions here and there. At least that’s how I was told it to be from friends.
There might be some truth to that, but you can reset your algorithm with a click of the button. It will be as if your fresh to the app all over again, it does not change the frequency of ads, nor does a new account. The frequency just increased at some point, full stop. I know because my wife has been using it for years and my account is probably like 6 months old.
More good news! Please!
Don’t be fooled. TikTok is going strong and will continue to go strong. How long has Twitter or Facebook been “on the decline?” Sure, maybe they’ve both lost a lot of users, but these kind of cultural touchstone apps don’t ever seem to go away. TikTok will be around for a long time to come.
Last I checked Facebook was as popular as it has ever been.
Jeez. I guess I was misremembering some data. You’re right
Stop, I can only get so erect!
We found a way to squeeze 0.00023% more profit per user.
The enshittification continues, until
moraleprofit improves.That implies that the enshittification will stop when profits increase, but we all know that it will never stop.
Now I am imagining a world where profit doesn’t stop.
Like all the money gets centralised more and more until everything is owned by a single tiny group or even one person. They literally have all the money in the world.
And everyone else just … stops using this money, since there is no point. Then they start using a different form of currency like pearls because that is the only way now to trade between non-owning people. Making all this money completely useless.
I don’t really agree with this post, at least in title (and not in the way many commenters seem to be “agreeing with it” despite maybe not reading the article).
Tiktok is getting worse… for users. Not for “itself”. It’s the same as Facebook or even other tech based services like Uber. They start off good and very user friendly to draw people in, often operating at a loss for years… and then they clutter themselves with ads and other monetizing features.
I don’t know Tiktoks profit loss margins but I’m guessing that it’s financially near or at its absolute peak performance so far, just as Facebook has continued to raise profits year after year despite often being detested more and more as time goes on.
I will say it was incredibly fast how quickly it transitioned to a giant money making machine compared to older platforms. It’s much more rapidly viewable, and seems to have more conversation around that then it being legitimately a worse social platform.
The COVID boom to tech is the most probable answer as it was steroids to isolation accessable social interaction. But man they aren’t even trying to ride the wave anymore but capture as much of the leftover ripples as possible.
Definitely. I think a lot of it is just that other websites like… already took the time to figure it out. Sites like google, YouTube, Facebook, they all had to take 10+ years to figure out how to effectively monetize. Tiktok doesn’t need to really “wait” because it can just copy off their papers
That’s actually a really fair point. Why would you wait to do what is working for other sites when the goal is to waste as little investor money as possible?
COVID means the money is available, the path is pretty much discovered. So they took the moment and ran with it. Hm.
Tiktok is getting worse… for users. Not for “itself”.
The article also makes some very large assumptions about longer length tiktoks being inherently worse for its audience.
I for one would love longer length tiktoks, and as for those who don’t the algorithm is extremely efficient and will filter out that style of content for those who don’t.
This is similar to the shop discussion, tiktoks gives full control over filtering this out via the #shop hashtag and disabling the shop tab.
The article really creates artificial problems with the app to justify its own existence when really these aren’t major issues that would lead to the downfall of a company or reduction in users.
Personally I’ll be the first to stop using a platform when they spam me with ads (Instagram). But tiktok is generally very manageable, much more than most other forms of social media.
Very much agree on all fronts. I think articles like this in part often spring up just because… a great deal of people enjoy clamoring around some “haha evil tiktok is finally ending!!, but it’s just… not really the case and tiktok being more “evil” than any other major app is really not substantiated in my view.
There definitely have been some changes. I absolutely get more “non ad-ads” in my feed (as in, content that is clearly being paid for but not marked as an advertisement and played off as organic content), though I’m not even sure if this is really the apps “fault” as much as it is creators.
When I left tiktok, I feel like I was getting an ad every 4 or so minutes, almost all of it scammy fastbfashion brands. I think I left tik too fully at the same time as the reddit protests.
Is that a bad thing?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company is pushing its eCommerce so hard you hear about it more than any other topic on the app, both in ads and organic videos from creators hoping for a share of the profits.
In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format.
Outrage is brewing among a growing contingent of users who post videos arguing TikTok is ruined now, and analysts say the company is jeopardizing its success.
But TikTok spearheaded the short-video revolution, and it risks straying from its core use case of fun, entertaining clips and losing its edge.”
The problem was bad enough that The Atlantic ran a story with the headline declaring “Instagram Is Over.” As time wore on it seems Meta has stuck the landing, but only through abandoning or at least retooling the projects that were alienating users.
Instagram honed its Reels product, ditched its shop, and embarked on a PR campaign promising that the app was hearing and responding to complaints.
The original article contains 975 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“horizontal content”
I mean… C’mon. WHAT RATIO?!
Maybe TikTok does understand me.
Good. Hurry up.
We should start our own video platform, with no rules other than hate speech prohibition and dark web-esque content removal. Never sell to Google. Never sell to Tencent. Never IPO. Just maintain the servers and hire enough technicians to maintain a content scanning algorithm. Keep it small and provide a cleaner experience by not fucking around with adblock users. Just have a platform that utilizes ads, don’t punish adblockers, and with those metrics in hand, approach advertisers and charge less than youtube charges.
In theory, you can do something like that with Peertube, it’s a federated alternative to YT.
In practice, serving video content requires fuckloads of bandwidth, which has huge costs. The first thing you’ll want/need is to limit filesizes and/or video resolution. Depending on what you start with, how much initial money you have, even allowing people to watch everything in 720p might be a strain.
For paying the costs with ads, unless you can guarantee hundreds of thousands of daily views, the platforms won’t be willing to pay much, “low exposition” or whatever. Though, if the only thing that won’t be there is hate speech and dark web, you’re letting normal porn in, which can drive significant traffic, but now you’ll have to deal with puritanical companies not wanting to associate with your site, plus companies afraid of the possible backlash.
Ideally, you’d have to create your own ad server, so you’d have to reach out to companies directly and ask them if they’d like to advertise on your platform with no middlemen.
Yeah “just maintain the servers bro” isn’t going to work. The bandwidth alone is insane. There’s a reason why there are fewer and fewer Lemmy servers since June 2023, even as total users are growing.
Are you going to allow copyrighted content? You’ll get downranked in searches, and probably wrecked by the DMCA.
Advertising also isn’t as lucrative as it seems. YouTube was a money pit for years - that’s probably tied to the decision to push Premium so heavily. Videos are big.
Funny.
