I tried it. The majority of videos for a new user account came up as either incredibly inappropriate videos of tweens or incredibly racist videos of tweens (seriously, I was surprised at how many racist/pedophile jokes came up). Maybe if you curate your liked videos you can get out of that, but I genuinely felt uncomfortable using it as a 30yo.
I also tried after hearing people on HN speak so highly of their recommendation system.. I only watched (in full length)/searched for/liked videos of a specific gender/race/age group.. yet even after liking over a hundred videos, then 100% of the videos they suggested to me were the wrong gender/race/age group. YouTube on the other hand is capable of recommending the correct videos after watching just a couple.
It’s very easy to conduct this experiment, just make sure that the race you target doesn’t represent the majority of the users in your proximity. For instance, if you’re in Norway then try to get TikTok to recommend Asian girls aged 20-35.. sounds like it should be easy, right?
Like most anything else non-simplistic, it's easy to form an inaccurate picture of something with a casual examination, and TikTok is one of these things (in that it contains communications from humans, on of the most complex things in existence).
An example of the good stuff you can run across on TikTok is this lady:
Roughly, she made some videos lamenting the phenomenon of how her children and grandchildren have ~"forgotten" her, despite the fundamentally important role she played in their life in the past.
I couldn't find the original video (why can't you sort by date posted!!!???), but these give you an approximate idea:
I think it would be fair to say she has a feeling of not being wanted/valued, not being useful in the complex new world we've created. Something like that.
Well as it turns out, these posts seem to have struck a chord with a fair amount of people (35.8K Followers, 396.5K Likes), and she now fairly regularly does live streams (she was initially extremely hesitant, because she didn't really see why people would want to watch, which is somewhat paradoxical to her original complaint) with >100 (last time I watched) people watching who just ask her random questions and she answers them. Everyone seems to get something out of it: she now has a genuine purpose and value in life, and viewers have the opportunity to ask questions for which the answers cannot be found on the internet, if they're even there at all.
I personally think this is a form of Magick[1], and I mean that not only unironically, but I think this is what we need to get us out of the absolute mess we've created on this planet. Education, logic and critical thinking, which we're not nearly as good at as we perceive, doesn't seem like it's anywhere near up to a task this large.
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