Comment by PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca on the amount of slop saying "wait till the end" is too damn high

I’m a man of culture, i see Tiktok, I open Tiktok 😌

I still have an attention span

For your own well-being I hope that is a joke

The man of culture part was.

Generally I think the dislike of Tiktok has to do with purity culture more than anything else. I typically find people who hate on Tiktok to be misinformed, willfully ignorant, massively hypocritical, or a combination thereof

I think realising something is specifically designed predatory addiction engine and then practicing self restraint to avoid that product isn’t being misinformed or something to be ashamed of.

TikTok, YT shorts, IG, they are all the same, and are categorically unhealthy for anyone; much less the youth.

See, this is the purity culture, and it’s always so selectively applied.

Things can have both good and bad aspects. Lots of good things can be bad when used too much.
Lemmy is much the same way. You say it was specifically designed to be an addiction engine, but all that involves is showing you things you like. Lemmy is the same, just that the algorithm is so simple that it can’t show you any discovery or new things.
You can find similar arguments about almost every part of the internet.

Are there problems with Tiktok? Of course. There are also amazing parts of Tiktok. Just like Lemmy. Just like Mastodon. Just like pixelfed.

You misunderstand the key design principles though. They are designed so that people struggle to have the strength of will to put the apps down, because every third thing they click through is generating ad revenue.

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but I, like many others, have no issue putting it down when I’m done with it. I personally check it for about 10 minutes when I wake up and before I sign off for the night.

Its worth noting that Lemmy doesn’t have an algorithm, it just shows you posts in chronological order (technically not true, as there are community ratios and such, but it’s true enough for a general statement).

My disdain for these apps is born from watching family and friends waste days (sometimes 8+ hours at a time) on them, and then often being totally incapable of recalling anything they’ve watched or learned. It’s actively harmful to their health.

No, I understood perfectly.
Capitalism causes apps to be shitty
But you don’t understand that capitalism isn’t the only reason that apps become shitty.

And out comes the big “algorithm” Boogeyman, decried by people who don’t know what an algorithm is.

You know why it’s easy to put down Lemmy? Because it does a horrifically shitty job at presenting you with new content that you’re actually interested in. That it. That’s the entire story. You’re less addicted because it’s less enjoyable. That is literally the entire thing.

Lemmy has all the parts needed for the same experience: an infinitely scrolling list of bite sized content. The only difference is that there is way less content here, and there is no discovery (meaning it keeps you in your own self-defined echo chamber).
Lemmy is a reddit clone, and if you’re gonna tell me that people aren’t addicted to reddit at similarly “dangerous” rates then I’ma full on call you a liar with my entire full chest.

What about the people who are worried about the harmful mental and physical effects that TikTok has on people? The privacy concerned trying to keep their data safe? What about empty and repetitive content? TikTok is a wormhole of negative behavior, and as much as there can be interesting content on the platform the majority is overhyped and recycled garbage(independent of your interests). If the platform was not a massive conveyor belt feeding empty content for the sake of money I would be somewhat ok with it. I’ve tried TikTok, Vine and even Snapchat and personally it is quite fun doing short video content(informative, silly or otherwise) but I do not enjoy being treated as a pig to be fed.

What about those people? They’re mainly the aforementioned hypocrites.

You’re worried about Tiktok privacy? Good, you should be. You should ALSO be worried about privacy everywhere else you go. Where is your concerned about Lemmy’s privacy? People who think Lemmy is private are like the people who think that blockchain makes your transactions untraceable.

You’re worried about being fed empty content? Ok I guess. Where is your concern about brainrot content on Lemmy? Nobody is being outraged by !hmmm@lemmy.world or !memes@lemmy.world or !showerthoughts@lemmy.world.
And if you think all content on Tiktok (or most content presented to users) is like that, then that says more about whoever told you that than it does about Tiktok.

You seem more than happy enough to be a pig being fed by Lemmy.

You may call this whataboutism.
I call this a hard look in the mirror and a call for you to reflect on why you’re ok with it some places and not others, and if perhaps it’s related to purity, or elitism, or ageism, or racism.

Would you care to explain why and how is Lemmy feeding me? I’m not saying Lemmy is exempt of the bad kind of content and behaviour or even me getting addicted to social media(federated or otherwise), but it is surely not motivated to do so because it gains nothing from doing so. Last time I checked federated platform do not use algorithms to filter and sort content, do not show advertisements and so on.

Final question, what would one that has those corcerns have to do so that they would not be a hypocrite? Asking geniunely… Are you concerned about those things? And if so what have you done about it?

PS: I do not hate TikTok just because, I hate any predatory social media platform, video game publisher or stream service. I have switched to every possible FOSS alternative and taken the recommended privacy practices.

Lemmy is an infinite feed of empty bitesized content. It may not have a purpose in feeding you, but it does all the same. Or what do you mean by “feeding”? I interpret that as presenting you with the mental equivalent of empty calories. It’s not motivated by ad money to do so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not motivated, or that it even needs motivation to do so. In fact, Lemmy is largely just a reddit clone, so simply by copying reddit it inherited many of the UX design choices.
All social networks, including federated platforms, use “algorithms” to surface content. The algorithm that Lemmy uses is very simple, but using a more complex algorithm is not inherently bad. People use “algorithm” as some kind of boogyman word without understanding it or considering what it means.

To not be a hypocrite you should treat all social networks with a similar critical eye. I’m not gonna say that they’re all equally evil, but when you criticize something that other people like, then you should be willing and even eager to turn that same eye on the things you like.
I am concerned about those things. I do very little about it. It’s a cost I just have to be aware of when I use these services. Specifically wrt social networks I stopped using the ones that don’t bring me enjoyment.

Wrt Tiktok specifically, I find it less predatory than the other for profit platforms, but I don’t blame people for not using it if they don’t like it. I just check myself before I say anything elitist about social networks preferences

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