I have a few feelings about it. First, I’m an average middle-aged middle-class straight white cisgendered male and the TikTok algorithm feeds me tons of stuff that is very pro feminism, pro trans rights, anti racist, pro labor. In a very touching and uplifting way a lot of times, actually. I’m a boring person but VERY passionate about these socially liberal issues and it gives me what I want and need to feel like a force of good, keep up with social issues, stay involved in some way feel passionate. My TikTok feed is woke as shit and good for me. I simply don’t see this on Facebook, YouTube and all the rest. I don’t see it. Of course everyone’s algorithm is different…
So maybe TikTok uses my attention for evil…data harvesting, influencing, hacking…I don’t know. I don’t trust china any more or less than most people. But how much do we trust meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc? I don’t particularly.
I may just be naive…but I do see a lot of good things that TikTok does, as dumb as it sounds.
YouTube is so horrible now I hope it’s reaching the tipping point where even non tech people may get sick of it and look elsewhere. There is no reason to have ONE giant main fucking video site and that’s it for most of the English speaking world. I need to look up how to do grout…or open this smoke detector…or beat this video game…no reason that all these videos cannot be hosted via other websites or just self hosted with the affordability of bandwidth. I’ve loved most of what google has done for a long time and they won the browser wars, crushed Mapquest, destroyed hotmail and yahoo mail…now everything is turning to shit. Google search all but refuses to find what you’re searching for. 15 second video…30 second ad. No.
I don’t know if federation is the answer but YouTube being ubiquitous for internet video has got to go.