Technology

I'm wondering how much of TikTok is actually authentic. Like when a video gets hundreds of views and likes, is TikTok padding those numbers to make users feel like they are "viral" just to stay on the platform? Even if TikTok isn't directly doing it, how many are from bot farms just trying to "look normal" by having their sock puppets engage with "normal" videos before using them to push their desired narratives?

Maybe I should start a social network with a mysterious black box algorithm that is really just a random number generator that only goes up. 🤔

I think those „success stories“ were always at least a little fabricated by the algorithm that somewhat randomly pushed a selected few lucky users immensely just to show the rest how you can become a media sensation overnight. It gives the platform free publicity as opposed to distributing visibility more evenly. Besides the ad revenue on TikTok is almost non existent even compared to Youtube. It was never a platform that you could realistically become successful with even if you got views.

I've come from an era of the internet where - you're not supposed to be internet famous. That's like a frowned upon thing where people think you lead a loser life because you got infamous on the internet. Now people are fretting about how many views they get.

Jesus Christ I'm tired of hearing about this TikTok bullshit every goddamn day

They miss the early phase of enshittification. The reason a normal person could get 50 million views in 24 hours is because the tiktok office had a way to juice the algorithm for specific videos and show it to everybody. And they were just doing this for free. Just like Facebook used to show content to people organically. Eventually tiktok starts selling ads and maximizing value, and then you have to pay for the success they used to give for free.

Wait if tiktok is a private company, maybe it wouldn't do that exactly the same way as Facebook and Google

Useless, brainless time-wasters, the lot of them.

success, content

Making shitty videos is a stupid hobby, not a job.

Morons who should have been doing that in the first place. You never want all your content and success to hinge on the whim's on one corporation.

Oh no
anyways

Have people somehow forgotten that VPNs exist? Like millions are moving to rednote but the easier way is to literally just, at minimum, get a shitty free VPN, and still have access to tiktok.

Personally tho, I'd probably opt for a cloud server VPN if I really needed one.