People don’t like it because:
- It’s the new thing. If alcohol were introduced today it would be banned in every country on earth. People tolerate Facebook, Twitter, Insta because that’s what’s been around. They all do the same thing, but TikTok is new and scary.
- Short form video is scary! It’s a new form of entertainment, and old people don’t like new forms of entertainment. See: every newly introduced form of entertainment in history, books included.
- They are misinformed about what data a mobile application can and cannot do, and the level of security built into both iOS and Android. Rest “assured”, they are collecting as much data as they can – just like every app creator on the planet. What they aren’t doing is capturing mic data while you’re sleeping (that’s not how microphones in phones work), stealing your passwords from your clipboard (OS’s notify users about clipboard paste)
- China bad. This primes people to consider negative press about it with a less skeptical eye, feeding the above points. (Don’t misconstrue me as being pro-China, I’m not, and that’s not what this post is about.)
You have to start somewhere. Learning something on tiktok is the start of the process, not the end.
You start with a thread and you pull and you pull and you pull and pretty soon you have enough thread to sew yourself an entire wardrobe.
You can’t start at the end or the middle or a third of the way through. You start at the beginning. You can’t research something if you don’t know it exists. You start with an idea, a question, not the answer.
You are looking at this like an adult looking backwards, not a young person looking forwards. You can not learn in reverse.
Tiktok is a feed. You watch a clip under a tag and then swipe to the next one, right? This is not designed to learn. If there is a way to search and interact like YouTube, I sure do not know about it and it is not used often since most people will just scroll though the feed.
On YouTube and LBRY, you search for something and watch it. Yeah you can have a feed too with YouTube and LBRY but this is optional.
Another thing I do not like about TikTok is you cannot browse TikTok in the browser, they force you to install their app, which is one reason I don’t use it.
How can you search for something that you are unaware of?
You gather ideas, ask questions, and then you take them somewhere else.
Again, you are thinking in reverse. An adult with a few decades of experience under their belt. Tiktok, in part, appeals to young people because they inherently have a beginner’s mindset. Everything is new and there’s much to learn.
Are many tiktok users gathering ideas, asking questions and looking into this stuff further? I do not see this at all. I did not see this with Vine users when Vine was around and I do not see this with Instgram users which is simular to Tiktok, being a “scrolling feed platform”.
I do see YouTube users and LBRY users having the most curiosity compared to other platforms.
I get it, many YouTube users watch a few videos they maybe suggested to them by an feed or algorithm, then explore this further. How Tiktok and Instagram are designed, it a feed.
You make a point that it could get an idea planted in your head. However to my understanding the user will need to go to another platform like YouTube to explore an idea further since Tiktok is not designed for this.
Yes. You don’t see it because you don’t use it.
You can very much search and follow creators and topics. You can view a feed of just subscribed profiles. I do wish there were ways to make lists of profiles to have more focused feeds at different times, but that’s hardly a scathing indictment.