Maybe it's just my TikTok feed being in a bubble, but my impression is that there's not nearly as much content being produced for the platform anymore because of the poor monetization strategy. There was a time where it could keep showing you new content regardless of how long you were swiping, but now it has started to show me posts that are often multiple months old. Sometimes I'll watch a handful of videos and the timeline just loops back to showing me stuff it has already shown me previously.
Their monetization strategies also just kinda suck in general. You can either make an ad demonstrating some product which you sell on their shop, or you're part of the revenue-share program which doesn't pay out much and which includes a limitation on how frequently you can participate before getting capped.
It definitely feels like we're past "peak" TikTok.
Honestly... As I was writing this post I started to think more critically about the kind of content I'm being shown and it definitely seems like propaganda when scrutinized more closely. I don't really get any obvious anti-American content, but they sneak in an awful lot of pro-Chinese cooking videos.
Edit: thinking more about anti-American propaganda, I do get recommended a decent number of Trump parodies... And as for anti-UK propaganda, it has also shown me lots of videos of people taking down ULEZ camera poles. Admittedly, I hadn't really connected the dots until writing this, but I definitely feel like I was slowly being brainwashed and nudged without realizing. So as of writing this update I'm deleting TikTok and shifting my position against the platform.
I witnessed a pretty alarming situation on TikTok surrounding the story about the Dalai Lama asking a young boy to "suck his tongue." Traditional news outlets ran the initial story, and then followed up shortly after to provide important cultural context, as well as the Dalai Lama's apology.
My girlfriend's TikTok For You Page, on the other hand, only showed her stuff about the initial story and then she never heard anything else about it. We both walked away from this news story with completely different views of reality.
Maybe it's a coincidence or caused by some less nefarious reason, like an algorithmic bias towards newer news, but it seems very suspicious given China's relationship with Tibet.
> Maybe it's a coincidence or caused by some less nefarious reason, like an algorithmic bias towards newer news, but it seems very suspicious given China's relationship with Tibet.
My SO who is of Vietnamese origin noticed a similar issue.
VN and China have a very acrimonious relationship, and there definitely is a push in Vietnamese language TikTok to both rehabilitate China's image which has been perilously bad since the 2014 standoff [0], as well as to rehabilitate Trump's image.
It's hard to ascertain how much of it is manipulated via the algorithm, but either way there is a lot of content that is generated and posted on TikTok with a pro-Russia or pro-China slant and to a level incomparable to other platforms.
Their monetization strategies also just kinda suck in general. You can either make an ad demonstrating some product which you sell on their shop, or you're part of the revenue-share program which doesn't pay out much and which includes a limitation on how frequently you can participate before getting capped.
It definitely feels like we're past "peak" TikTok.
Honestly... As I was writing this post I started to think more critically about the kind of content I'm being shown and it definitely seems like propaganda when scrutinized more closely. I don't really get any obvious anti-American content, but they sneak in an awful lot of pro-Chinese cooking videos.
Edit: thinking more about anti-American propaganda, I do get recommended a decent number of Trump parodies... And as for anti-UK propaganda, it has also shown me lots of videos of people taking down ULEZ camera poles. Admittedly, I hadn't really connected the dots until writing this, but I definitely feel like I was slowly being brainwashed and nudged without realizing. So as of writing this update I'm deleting TikTok and shifting my position against the platform.