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.
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’m actually okay with someone interviewing Putin because there is such a large degree of “what the fuck is this guy thinking?” That seems genuinely unanswered by both academics and laypeople.
That being said, Tucker Carlson is like… laughably not the guy who should he doing it. You’d think his audience would question why Putin would let, of all people, a disgraced ex cable news host interview him.
Yeah, from any experience I have with actual, real life “leftists” it’s that they’re by and large exceedingly normal people who are very willing to like… politely sit in on the local dems meeting because everyone involved knows there’s about an 80% overlap in desired policy.
“Tankies” are more like people role-playing a particular ideology, in the same spirit that new “trad catholic” people are largely just role playing weather they know it or not, and most of them grow out of it by 25 or so. Exceedingly few of these people actually practice these views in any significant way in the real world.
I hear you, I just want to reiterate that the discussion at hand (from the OP down) is specifically talking about that specific high school age bracket, which is why I’m invoking it so much. Culture is obviously going to be different between age groups, and a lot of that difference is imo a direct “opposition” of that previous group.
Just very anecdotally, I remember seeing a goofy little post, very clearly made by a gen-z individual, stereotyping millennials as this kind of chronically depressed, down on themselves type. Which I thought was kind of funny. Even something like the “trend” of “being depressed” the next generation will recognize and (consciously or subconsciously) change their own behavior based on it.
I don’t think there’s too much to say. I am largely just spitballing on a pattern I’ve noticed at least with fashion and “aesthetics” in that age group over time.
Appreciate the conversation as well. I’m new on the site and it really is like night and day compared to trying to have a polite little conversation on Reddit.
This is a shockingly big issue that impacts a lot of things outside of even mainstream journalism.
For instance: I’m a Wikipedia editor in my spare time. I enjoy editing Wikipedia. However, one caveat of the “notability” standard in Wikipedia is that a given page has to have a particular amount of references to it from “notable sources” (often, academic sources and big news agencies).
Unfortunately - what this means is that Wikipedia has a huge lean towards topics that essentially only pertain to areas where a lot of journalism is centered, which is often NYC and parts of the West Coast. Entire rural regions or countries will have major events ‘not qualify’ for a Wikipedia page due to the lack of “notable” references - while what are essentially inside jokes by New Yorker yuppie types will have entire pages published.
There’s just a big problem with representative coverage in media and unfortunately groups like Palestinians and Muslims are severely underrepresented
If it helps you, imagine the following - as I believe your personal experience may be clouding things slightly .
Directly prior to the very “Emo / goth / punk / skinny jeans” time of around 2004-2010 was the early 00s. Now, in some ways the early 00s were very bleak. It was post 9/11, the economy did not like the possibility of a major war, and simply put many people genuinely thought it was some end of an empire time where further attacks on US soil might become common. At the same time, it was still the era of boy bands, brightly colored and flashy technology and clothing, blonde hair, and going to the mall + beach with your friends. Bad things were occurring, but the cultural zeitgeist for that age demographic was still in a “bright and positive” phase
Yeah, but I think a lot of it is just high schoolers trying to be different than the last generation. I don't think that Fox News was in charge of people getting really into Bob Ross 10 years ago.
I’ve always felt like these things are cyclical in a way - just in that people are constantly rebelling against the last generation.
When I went to high school in the early 2010s there was this huge movement of like… positivity and sunshine and wellness and feminism and good times for all. Bob Ross was on everyone’s mind and Pharrell’s “Happy” blasted on the stereo, people wore really bright and mismatched and often gaudy outfits.
This was seemingly “in response” to that mid 2000s emo/grunge/depressed aesthetic which was very dark and moody. And now, in response to that 2010s positivity we seem to get this really jaded, “actually, feminism sucks and becoming a ‘trad catholic’ is chic” movement.
It’s annoying, and I’m sure we’ll see an opposite shift again in 5 years.
Yeah god bless the woman I’m sure she had good intentions - but she’s not living in some 1990s public service announcement where the nice policeman gives valuable lessons to children.
Police are like… an absolute last resort “I need someone shot” measure. The fact that we also have them (for no particular reason) also authorize things like reports for insurance related incidents is a pretty colossal failure of “the system” as a whole
A video I’ll have to check out later. It has however, been a game absolutely getting “Astro turfed” into social media in my experience though (as in, I get a ton of tiktoks of people saying “wow this scene was so sick!!” But it’s the same 2 scenes every time and neither of them are cool in any way) - and that’s normally a pretty bad sign.
I just used it and I thought it was kind of cute. It’s obviously “useless”, but as a small (I assume temporary) change I thought it was interesting to see how different “genres” of videos tend to color code themselves in the thumbnail.
I’m all for small, fun little things in websites. Like anytime google has an interactive daily theme
I play D&D with a guy who plays one of these games. It’s so strange. It’s clearly cheap junk, it has absolutely awful reviews everywhere but he just… plays it casually and talks about it like it’s any other major multiplayer game.
It’s weird but I guess he likes it so, who cares? I’m guessing that these studios spend an incredibly low amount of development, a good amount on misleading marketing, and coast by with a moderate playerbase of a maybe a couple thousand people
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.