TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article. Scrolling through TikTok it will start showing you live streams every once in a while, and they tend to fall in to patterns like:
* baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby
* people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not)
* people with these vibrating bowls of sand with crystals in them, and they take crystals out of the bowl every once in a while to show you
* a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker
\* there was also a variation where it was a kid deleting games off their PlayStation when they got a certain sticker
* people pretending to sleep, and if you donate different kinds of stickers, it plays different loud sounds or trigger lights to "wake" them
* people freestyle rapping on the spot, but it's more like
melodic rambling to the same backing track, so you don't really have to rhyme, you just have to rap in a way that sounds like it rhymes or makes sense
* and my favourite: some workers in what seems to be a Chinese factory assembling something like AirPods. they take the airpods, they take the case, they put the airpods in the case, and they throw the whole thing on to the completed pile
I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on.
It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. The whole game is to give viewers a reason to use stickers on the show, which gives the streamer money (and TikTok like 70% of it).
TikTok live is kinda wild. You never know what you're going to get. One thing I like about it. My favorite was a live stream from a small town festival in Bali. Started off with a bunch of acrobats doing slapstick comedy. Ended with dancers in elaborate dragon masks, and the crowd joined in to make it a big dance party. Was so much fun. I now have a new resolve to go visit Bali.
I also really like all the truck drivers who do cab views. There's an ambulance driver somewhere in Vietnam who livestreams his shifts. Oddly mesmerizing to watch him zip through dense city traffic without a care in the world.
Quite a few people who seem to found the best hustle possible. They go daily to Disneyland and other parks. Somehow get enough gifts and tips to pay for it.
Also like the bars that stream their house bands. That one guy who rides a scooter around downtown LA late at night and gets in weird conversations with drunks. A guy who races Matchbox cars on his track and keeps track of the winners in a pseudo league. An Italian man who looks vaguely like Mr. Bean and does an almost endless stretch of magic tricks.
The one that I think about often is this 19 yr old guy in the Ukrainian Army. Only caught him once. Back in the summer. He and his unit were not yet on the front lines but his superiors had him digging a trench anyways. He was half-assing the digging while his comrades relaxed under trees and occasionally yelled something that would make the young guy laugh. He'd perk up anytime someone with a cute girl avatar would say something to him. They'd say something that made him just beam with happiness. I'll always wonder what happened to him. I hope he's ok.
Disney "influencers" are such a scourge on theme parks. Normal visitors take loads of photos and videos, often at inconvenient times, but when it comes to being in/on the attractions, they usually put their phones away and shut up.
Most rides at Disney parks have pre-shows about 3/4 of the way through the line that set up the story for the ride. Sometimes these are audiovisual, sometimes animatronic, but always with audio and almost always dark.
Likewise, most Disney rides are "dark rides" where the ride is primarily in the dark with animatronics and the scenery lit by carefully designed show lighting.
Influencers have seen these pre-shows and rides a thousand times and don't care about them. They keep there full-brightness phone up and filming for them and talk over them to their audience. It's incredibly distracting and immersion breaking.
I imagine Disney sees them as a net-positive though, as I'm sure they drive tons of ticket sales. Most influencers are travel agents who get paid by Disney, or are affiliated with a travel agency.
> I imagine Disney sees them as a net-positive though, as I'm sure they drive tons of ticket sales. Most influencers are travel agents who get paid by Disney, or are affiliated with a travel agency.
FWIW, I dug into this a while back because I was curious.
Most of them don't get 'paid' by Disney in a traditional sense, but will get things like exclusive access to press events/rides, free upcoming products, or in the case with that flop of a star wars hotel a "free $7,000 hotel stay."
All of which lets them technically say "I'm not paid by Disney, they just gave me this to show all of you!"
Most of their money comes from donations/stickers/whatever the latest term for it is from the livestreams.
Usually the order with Disney showing off new stuff goes something like
> Most of them don't get 'paid' by Disney in a traditional sense, but will get things like exclusive access to press events/rides, free upcoming products, or in the case with that flop of a star wars hotel a "free $7,000 hotel stay."
>All of which lets them technically say "I'm not paid by Disney, they just gave me this to show all of you!"
So they literally are not receiving any meaningful payments from Disney. A “$7000 hotel stay” you can’t even resell is worth very little compared to $ in bank.
Also, you forgot about Club 33. Those folks sometimes get better treatment than the regular passholes.
> So they literally are not receiving any meaningful payments from Disney. A “$7000 hotel stay” you can’t even resell is worth very little compared to $ in bank.
Except it's $7k that they most likely would have spent themselves as a business expense to try and get money from their streams. It's still Disney paying them, just in an alternate way.
It's why YouTube, Amazon and others require you to disclose that you got the item for free, because that can significantly alter your view and is basically turning you into an ad.
How many "normal" people would spend $7k for a 2 day hotel stay where you basically are stuck in someone else's itinerary? Hint, not enough to fill out 100 rooms consistently, even within 2 days. But it was all "OMG THIS IS AWESOME YOU HAVE TO DO IT" from the 'influencers.'
>Also, you forgot about Club 33. Those folks sometimes get better treatment than the regular passholes.
Oops, yep. Forgot the $100k Disney club. Plus the timeshare suckers.
> Except it's $7k that they most likely would have spent themselves as a business expense to try and get money from their streams. It's still Disney paying them, just in an alternate way.
So and so. Here’s an exaggerated example: Disney likes your consistent shilling and grants you a Club 33 membership valued in many tens of thousands.
Even as a big Disney influencer there’s a very good chance you’d never have paid for this.
From a legal POV whether or not something like this is compensation isn’t clear, it’s highly dependent on the specific details. An influencer absolutely can legally receive gifts from Disney knowing that they’re almost certainly hoping for those gifts to pop up on that influencers feed.
> It's why YouTube, Amazon and others require you to disclose that you got the item for free, because that can significantly alter your view and is basically turning you into an ad.
I always assumed that was a legal requirement. Isn’t it technically classed as fraud (or something?) to not disclose that you were sponsored by the resort?
Obviously this will vary by jurisdiction, but it's a relatively new problem in all of them. (At least, the format is new and it hasn't been obvious if/how the old rules apply.)
In the UK for example the advertising regulator decided it's advertising, kind of like a 'product placement' on television, and therefore needs to be clearly so/declared.
Most of the influencers I saw talking about that Star Wars hotel when it opened were basically shitting on it. I felt like their reviews were pretty unbiased.
> The IRS have a completely different point of view.
Oh, I fully agree and I would bet a majority of them know that as well, they just have figured out a way to use some weasel words to act like it's not a payment to the general public.
It's because there is no exchange, if I give you a birthday gift can that be considered income? Obviously not as I am not asking for something in return.
However:
If I buy you a gift and we agree for the gift you do task x for me. Now that is income and the value of the gift must be considered income on your tax return.
Disney isn't saying "here is a room for free if you do x, y , z"
Disney is saying "here is a room for free" and that is the end of it.
Of course the obvious issue for Disney is that the influencer might never do the review of the park and never in a million years could Disney take them to court complaining services were not rendered.
You cannot give a gift with expectation of return.
So it's not income.
But it's limited because the one giving you the gift really has to trust that you'll do the thing you do.
I am surprised Disney would bother to be honest. I thought their theme parks were popular enough already.
> It's because there is no exchange, if I give you a birthday gift can that be considered income? Obviously not as I am not asking for something in return.
> However:
> If I buy you a gift and we agree for the gift you do task x for me. Now that is income and the value of the gift must be considered income on your tax return.
Caveat donor! The hand of the taxman extends somewhat further than laid out here.
It will be marked as an expense outgoing to a third party by Disney, and the third party will be named or identified. That third party if did not account for that income and get audited, will be provided a demand letter. Vast majority of the "audits" are fully automated using cross referencing expenses & deductions to incomes.
There is no such thing as "free" when it comes to the US IRS.
> Aw man, did the Star Wars hotel shut down already? I was hoping it would stick around until the check cleared for my kidney so I could take my family.
Nah, but you can book it for literally 2 days for now, which is somewhat unheard of for something like it, especially with the Disney and Star Wars name attached.
Talk with people around you and try to get agreement that if there's a disruptive influencer you'll all chant "Turn off the phone! Turn off the phone!"?
I could see that. I enjoy the live cam tours because my partner is immunosuppressed and we're not going anywhere for a while. So it's nice to visit virtually. But I hadn't thought about the actual visitors and what they would think about it. I could see how they'd loathe these people constantly recording and being obnoxious about it.
* very drunk single women talking about how no one loves them and fishing for comments from wackos telling them how beautiful they are
* working class people streaming their entire shifts. Something mesmerizing about watching a guy knocking down trees, a smart ass machinist talking smack while operating a lathe, 4 Uzbeks putting running shoes together, or timber being milled into boards in a very non-OSHA compliant plant in Indonesia.
* micro talk shows where only 50 people are watching 4 talking heads who don’t know each other debate politics. These ironically are better than a lot of cable news since you actually get people who have wildly different views talking to each other, and they will take the time to resolve factual disagreements on Wikipedia between making points.
When the Canadian trucker protest was going on the media mostly did such a bad job of reporting, but if you dig around on tik tok live it was easy to find the guys in the lead trucks chatting with their friends and families back home about how things were going and how much they loved “driving through this beautiful country”. Sometimes I would be one of 70 people watching. Same goes for the early streams out of Ukraine. The ease and quality of mobile streaming on tiktok feels like a huge revolution in social media that’s just getting started. Real McLuhan global village stuff developing.
As always with TikTok, your experience will vary based on the videos you watch, favorite, save, and the creators you follow. What appears for any given individual is highly tailored to the things they seem to find interesting.
I, in contrast, get gamers (kind of like a lo-fi twitch channel), accounts I follow, and the odd musician. I have honestly never seen any of the live streams you mention.
The pessimistic view is that Tiktok is a customized propaganda machine.
Pre-internet everyone consumed the same media, TV, newspapers, radio, magazines. You had to read older books or listen to smaller, probably local artists to get a different viewpoint.
Now no one shares the same information feed, no two Tiktok feeds, Twitter feeds, Facebook/instagram homepages are the same.
It's making for interesting societal changes. How will future historians be able to judge the intentions of society of they can't view our individual feeds, previously you could refer to news reports, but now it's just lost in the day to day feeds of billions.
> In a corner of the large room a chime sounded and a tinkling mechanical voice called, "I'm your free homeopape machine, a service supplied exclusively by all the fine Rootes hotels throughout Earth and the colonies. Simply dial the classification of news that you wish, and in a matter of seconds I'll speedily provide you with a fresh, up-to-the-minute homeopape tailored to your individual requirements; and, let me repeat, at no cost to you!"
Go back 100 years and just because people had more shared media, it didn't make everyone think the same. There were communists and fascists, people who loved or hated new technology, music, etc.
Historians reading newspapers learn what a small part of society thought, and hopefully read them in the context of as much other information from the time. But maybe the newspaper made something that hardly anyone really cared about seem like the main opinion, or vice versa - it happens now days, likely more back then.
If anything social media might make things easier for future historians, with literally billions of opinions written by everyone from homeless people to billionaire CEOs, all within large datasets to be analysed.
More importantly though is the amount of semi-political & marketing-related polling that goes on. By semi-political I mean things politicians want to know, rather than polling about politics - people regularly get polled on anything from transport ideas to favourite songs. And I imagine that's a huge trove of data compared to what there is around public opinion even decades ago, yet alone centuries.
The divisions we had were already bad enough. Now amplify those up to eleven with social media, and you end up with the perfect tool to endlessly divide society in difficult to detect ways. People seemed to be at least somewhat aware what the doctrines of the various -isms were, even if warped through propaganda. Customized echo chambers can make it impossible for any affected slice of the population to ever experience how deep in they really are, and get a genuine impression of what people outside are like and what they think. Best case, they are seen as ignorant, worst case as a danger, which can lead to violence being seen as a legitimatd tool to deal with them. We have seen what this can lead to on Jan 6, 2021.
On the contrary, the one social medium that puts everyone in a shared, global space rather than customized "echo chambers" (twitter) causes more trouble than the rest of them put together, not least your own example.
I don't get these kind of comment. What are you trying to say? That the reason this person see this content is their fault? They secretly want to see these type of videos?
There are a lot of articles and videos showing that sometimes watching just one video will suggest a ton of videos related to it, no matter if you are not interested. Machine learning and deep learning is not perfect, and sometimes the goal of the companies is not clear and may not align with your goals.
Sure, your experience will vary on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok based on the people you follow, that's the goal of hyper-personalized feed. But you still get a trend, a social effect of the network.
For example, on Youtube, you need "clickbait" thumbnails. So even Tom Scott, who 's content is educative and entertaining, needs to follow the "trend" of Youtube to get views.
But I see these comments every time someone is blaming the weird content they are seeing on their feed: "Oh me I only see nice stuff, stop watching weird stuff". I think we can have a deeper conversation than that.
What I'm trying to say: It's more complicated than the parent makes it sound. The parent makes it sound like "if you're on TikTok, this is what you see."
> TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article.
> It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling.
However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth.
TikTok's algorithms are scarily-effective (dramatically more effective at tailoring than all of your other examples), and thus what you see is indeed a direct reflection of what you watch. Any single video (ads excepted), or even trend, just doesn't appear globally on TikTok.
> However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth.
It's a direct reflection on what tiktok's algorithms think they know about you so far, modulo what they think they know about the contents of the videos they are showing. They have a good recommendation engine, sure, but it works on average over large populations through the limited funnel of video interactions, and their video understanding and inventory is similarly limited. This is even before considering that they clearly add some kind of extra exploratory weight to new content they don't have a lot of data about from you.
Their machine learning is basically fancy statistics on watch data, not a peering-into-your-soul Oracle, it's very possible it gets some people's preferences very wrong and is still profitable for larger population segments.
I find my recent experiences with the algo amusing. It very heavily weighs new creators that I may have watched a single video all the way through, so much so that perhaps every 4th video would be old content (couple of months old) from this new creator. It gets super annoying super fast that I have to resort to blocking these individual creators (marking as "show less" does absolutely nothing for me). I also note that the algo seems to run out of interesting content for me after about 20 minutes or so - at which point the videos are further and further away from my interests.
Should maybe post on a throwaway but: it will show me the gay version of tit-tok, let's just call it putting a bunch of sweatpant season thirst traps in my feed.
Often videos with like 100 views or even less.
Their ML is likely categorizing d*ck prints, visible nipples, and a bunch of other human monkey brain dopamine drivers.
Instagram will recommends shirtless people. But TikTok takes it way farther. And probably a good reason it got so popular to begin with. People are creeping on kids.
More on this point, there was a great article by the verge I think on how different tik tok was on the same city border ukranian vs russian.... wild war vs bliss
I've seen several of the creepy / disturbing live videos described above - the begging family and the baby with the large deformed head specifically. Each have been shown multiple times, despite immediately reporting them. So this isn't a unique artefact of OP's experience. There clearly are ways of bringing these videos, which are clearly pretty far outside any normative preference pattern, to the front of the algorithm.
Shouldn't have to point this out - but I do not search for, like or watch anything remotely similar on Tiktok.
These videos are punishment for watching videos flagged as unapproved.
Think about what you watched right before these videos, its coded to being a feeling a disgust so you assioate that with the previous videos.
YouTube does the same thing with ads of kids dying in hospital, screaming for help on the start of 'controversial' content. Most of the time it makes you click back and watch something else.
That's a hell of a claim. Any citation for that? I could see Tiktok doing something that extreme, but it would be incredibly bad press for youtube. Simpler explanation might be that lower priced ads run against dubious content and that those tend towards the more spammy and extreme.
There is no way to completely avoid a certain type of content in an algorithmic feed. As good as the algorithm is, unless they have a "no variation or A/B testing" policy (doubtful), eventually you'll run into something that doesn't conform to your "profile."
> However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth.
I really do not think this is true, and is what the parent is getting at. Yes, the videos shown are a reflection of _past videos_ shown to you, and your reactions to them.
That does not mean that they are a _direct_ reflection on you, or an acknowledgement of the truth. The first videos shown to you, or a random stray video with off-content, whether you like them or not, can have a strong biasing effect.
TikTok’s algorithm is deeply flawed to draw any conclusion about. Its a deep reflection on what other people in your content branch accepted, not you.
Simply looking at the comments on a video you disagree with, just to see if others are appalled or brainwashed is something that the algorithm will interpret as deep interest in that kind of content. I have to go find the “not interested” button. Its sad because all those other people are really stuck in that rabbit hole.
> What are you trying to say? That the reason this person see this content is their fault?
You can control the feed by tapping on a clip you don't like and selecting 'Not interested'. Less successfully by immediately swiping to the next clip. In this way I have got rid of live streams, cats and girls doing dance or PoV trends.
But if you do in fact have a quick peak at the live streams, cats and girls doing dance or PoV trends, TikTok will keep showing them.
> However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth.
If this was the whole truth we could as easily excuse facial recognition algorithms failing non-white people by simply saying that non-white people are more difficult to identify.
The algorithm is a human-made thing and subject to conscious intents or subconscious biases of its makers.
Here's why I post like that. People who don't use TikTok see comments like the parent and think that's all TikTok is. So then they assume that everyone who uses TikTok must be into that stuff, because that's what they're there to watch. Non-titktok users seemingly do not understand how wildly variable the experience is person to person. It's not about blaming the poster, but about bringing perspective that we're not all just there happily watching live streams like what the poster described.
I don't interpret the parent (article) as saying that is all TikTok is, but that it is possible to encounter or host these streams on their platform, which is objectively true.
It's hard to blame the average passerby for harboring contempt for TikTok. I joined at one point and the content they show "brand new" accounts trends extreme. I assume they do it to find the edges of the new users' comfort zone, but I don't blame anyone who takes one look and says "eff this". My feed got much more tolerable after a few days of periodic swiping, but I uninstalled it a long time ago and have no interest in returning.
> What are you trying to say? That the reason this person see this content is their fault? They secretly want to see these type of videos?
Nah, it's not about intent, but it is about profiling. They're saying that e.g. gullible-seeming people will be algorithmically matched with videos trying to con them out of something, while non-gullible people won't be. People who watch more videos by creators with religious values will eventually be recommended religious content; while people who don't do that, won't. Etc.
Think about it less like users being matched with things they'll appreciate; and more like creators being matched with the audience most receptive to their message.
> There are a lot of articles and videos showing that sometimes watching just one video will suggest a ton of videos related to it, no matter if you are not interested.
This isn't a failure of ML. They've got the algorithm doing exactly what they want it to do. It just isn't serving you.
TikTok is a two-sided market, where the supply is "engaged eyeballs" and the demand is from advertisers with ads to show them (where a regular video producer is just an advertiser who provides enough retention value to the platform with their "ads" that they get paid rather than paying per impression.)
TikTok's algorithm isn't trying to match you with the videos you'll most like; rather, it's trying to optimize the amount of money ByteDance extracts out of its advertisers by optimizing for three things:
1. keeping the eyeballs engaged, by showing them videos which are predicted to increase the particular user's session duration in the app;
2. showing the "engaged eyeballs" the most profitable ads, under the proviso that any given advertiser can filter for eyeballs with specific demographics/interests;
3. (here's the clever bit) — nudging the eyeballs toward videos that will allow them to plausibly say that a given user has a given high-CPM interest, and thus now show them the high-CPM ads.
The third factor is what makes the "one video causes your recommendation feed to completely change" thing.
An very close analogy would be to dating (another imbalanced-demand two-sided market where demand is a passive judgement while supply is an active offer.)
Picture person A walking into a nightclub, looking for a date, but not actively talking to anyone. They sit there, and wait for other people to come up and talk to them. The people that come to person A might be somewhat random at first; but, as the people in the club notice a pattern in who's doing best talking person A up, the supply-side will self-select — they're profiling person A, and "recommending" themselves based on said profiling.
But then, at some point, imagine person A quietly mentioning to one of these strangers "I think I might like [niche interest]." And this news spreading throughout the club.
Now, if there's anyone who likes [niche interest] in the club — suddenly, they think they have a chance. And if having [niche interest] is rare, maybe there are a bunch of unsatisfied single people with [niche interest] who've been desperately waiting for someone like person A to show up. So now there's suddenly a stampede of people, all with [niche interest], trying to get person A's attention. Willing to pay money to get person A's attention, even. So much that the club manager (who happens to be easily bribed) is willing to cordon off the area around person A and set up a queue of all these interested people, so that the "rabble" who aren't so intensely interested (and so aren't willing to pay a bribe), won't even get a word in edgewise any more.
That's TikTok. You're person A. The advertisers are the desperate people in the club. And a single clicked video can be the whisper of acknowledgement of a niche interest they were hoping for.
yes you can still end up seeing stuff you hate because it's ragebait. so you may "hate it" but you also have a revealed preference that you lowkey like it bc it's something to hate on.
Likewise— I get people streaming NES games, musicians (piano, guitar, harmonica, ocarina, harp, and that bagpipe lady), and then occasionally someone cooking or doing a Q&A on something like relationships.
The only truly "sleepy" lives I've seen are ones where it's someone quietly studying/working and using the live as the accountability part of the pomodoro method. Like, "I'm going to study for 20 mins, then we can chat for 5 mins, then I'm going to study again for 20 mins, etc."
It says to me that you spent a lot of time curating your TikTok experience, and the other person didn’t. So you are right, THAT says a lot about who you are. See how that works. Shitty, huh.
> baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby
I think I know which baby you’re referring to. If it’s a mom tending to the baby, then that baby is fine. I agree it’s shock value, and in fact is so shocking that I took a screenshot of it: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1512778289676496902?s=2...
But the truth is that the baby is profoundly disabled and is barely responsive. Using them for social media attention at least gives you some money to better tend to them.
(There are lots of examples in that thread which illustrate your overall point. Tiktok can be quite the carnival.)
They do not better care for them. In many parts of the world, deformed or mutilated children are just tools for strangers, who traded them in, to improve begging results.
the one i'm thinking of is a full grown (i think) brasilian guy who has his head bent like full backwards and just sits there rocking back and forth and saying "please i need help guys" or sum.
To me, the most interesting thing out of the list is that I've only seen two categories from the list: people sleeping and the assembly line workers (covering a wide range of industries).
Other kinds of livestreams that seem to be persistent categories:
- people in classrooms, libraries or other social settings, livestreaming themselves
- insides of mosques, presumably with the camera hidden somewhere
- space station footage with random background music. Sometimes footage from space walks, mostly Russian ones
I think it goes to show how wildly different people's TikTok experiences can be, depending on what the algorithm decides and what TikTok decides to push in your region.
>> I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on.
What’s so wild or appealing about this — that would entice someone to continue their time on TikTok?
The gist of many these sorts of videos, is to do a familiar activity but with steps that don’t make sense. This starts your brain’s little curiosity/real-time-explanation loop.
Like the videos of a guy lighting a firework, shoving it in a tube, filling the tube with a potatoes and then covering that with putty. They catch me for a few seconds every time, just slightly longer than a video that made sense would; and I think that extra second or two is all they need to jump up the algorithm’s ratings a little.
It’s not just this. It’s the “long tail of this”. That particular example might not sound too appealing, but when you scroll through the livestreams, you’ll find hundreds of other niche things.
I spend my time watching artists draw, watching people play FF6 for nostalgia, and putting mustaches on Ellie from the last of us: https://imgur.com/a/rLjU7Ux
> it will start showing you live streams every once in a while, and they tend to fall in to patterns like:
FOR YOU.
What TikTok chooses to show you is extremely personalized, I have never encountered any of the live streams you describe above.
I mostly get young good-looking guys trying to promote their OnlyFans.
...and I don't think most people on TikTok get livestreams like that, so I would be very cautious about making any sort of sweeping statements of what the experience will be like for other people.
That said, I'm absolutely delighted about all the absolutely crazy things and the enormous diversity of stuff you can get on your feed. TikTok feels just like GeoCities did on the early web, it's a bazaar of the bizarre, and trends change so fast that you never get bored, and corporations still haven't been able to suck the joy and life out of the thing yet.
I find odd when people critique tiktok for having some kind of content when it is clear that's what the algorithm has given them or other times they maybe use the app for a couple minutes and never really get to a personalised stage.
In any case, I never really encounter very many Livestream when I'm on the for you page. Could this be because I almost always don't engage with them? I'd like to get good looking guys promoting their OF.
Start hitting the heart button whenever you see 'grey sweat season' stimuli. Unintentional will eventually surface clearly intentional thirst trap small business owners.
or posts with corn emoji in place of a word that starts with P. Or trends that are really just thrust your hips in loose fitting shorts. Or guys who point to song name which is really their twitter handle.
This is definitely the case as many TikTok accounts are fake. They’ll take something like a prerecorded live event from Mr. Beast, create a fake TikTok account with a name that looks like Mr. Beast, and then stream the previously recorded live. Without fail there are always THOUSANDS of people watching these thinking it’s the real thing and donating money.
happens a lot even on twitch and youtube too. With this tool that shows small channels, there are a lot of channels with the same thumbnail and the channels would have gibberish channel names https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/channel_previews.php?game...
Some of those sound like some of those carnival things where you have to throw a ball at a target to have a clown go in the drink.
The others sound like "outrage porn", which is most of the content on subreddits like diwhy and shittyfoodporn. Doing things wrong or exaggerated on purpose to elicit a reaction and engagement.
Weirdly enough, come to think of it, Epic Meal Time started trends like that over a decade ago - just make stupid, expensive and exaggerated food that doesn't look appetizing at all... yet strangely compelling.
And no matter how many times you click "Not interested" on the livestream, you will keep getting it every so often. I also get the crying kid with cards, sleep livestream, and deformed baby one all the time.
Oh and you forgot the one where they have a calculator app open set to 999,999,998 or something and if they just get two more gifts they will see what happens when you get to one billion, but they are always so awkwardly slow and keep decrementing the number so it never reaches it.
That calculate one is a whole genre on to itself: TikToks where there's a goal the streamer is working towards to do something, but they do it so slowly that it never happens. People keep donating to see the thing happen, the streamer doesn't want the thing to happen because then the donations stop, so they only pretend like they're going to do the thing.
Like that damned guy stacking bolts in a giant column.
I’ll admit that I have never used TicTok — mostly because it always sounded toxic/unhealthy from the start — and this comment/article seem to reinforce that.
It’s really crazy — and a bit scary — how much messed up stuff can proliferate a single app.
I used it once with my wife to see what it was, all it seemed to be was EXTREMELY LOUD MUSIC playing over various things, it was annoying. Not everything needs music. We didn't last two minutes.
I used it briefly and was disgusted by the amount of political garbage that was flowing. I'm glad I stayed off. There's nothing in the above list that I want to see.
I used to tell people that even if Trump had the wrong reasons, he had the right idea when he wanted to ban TikTok.
Here's another:a guy using tweezers and pliers to peel the egg shell off a...raw egg. Keeping the contents inside the thin translucent layer under the shell that he can't tear or he "loses".
Or: people packing sweet boxes.
Worst is when you see random people doing streams cause they're bored. They're alone, playing music, answering semi private questions and pandering to strangers. I don't even know what to make of it.
There are a lot of eggs. People in the comments seem to go crazy for it. And the point? At the end he basically pops the egg anyway and starts all over. And yet ppl send him “roses” the whole time.
There's also multiple streams where the streamer has a mouse click counter with a [+] and a [-] button. They are clicking to get to some outrageous number like 100000000 and every time you give them money they take 10, 100 or 1000 clicks away or they destroy their mouse and they are begging you to let them finish clicking. This goes on for multiple days.
> people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not)
Do a web search for “TikTok fake disorder”. Or specify one directly, such as “tourette” or “ADHD”.
Sounds like a theatrical live streamed griftopia with TikTok being the middle person at the top of the pyramid scheme dictating who gets paid or not and even if you, they keep 70% and you take the rest with taxes and other fees.
As long as the algorithm glues many of its users to their screens as much as possible with the money coming in, the grifting show must go on.
Yep. It's like an advanced version of Twitch, with the begging for subs replaced with stickers, the payout being different, and the pretense of playing games or building a community cut out because it's based off of the recommendation algorithm and virality instead.
I don't have TikTok but one of the most impressive things I've seen while watching my mom scroll is the live streams of folks with a thick stack of lottery tickets, scratching them off one by one. They all admit they only have about a 70% return on investment, which means those streams are largely a loss unless they're making a good amount of money on donations.
The reason I refuse to get TikTok is that I am certain my psycho-emotional state cannot handle content like this. Especially item number 1.
Is this normal? Is it safe for the human mind to consume content like this constantly? How does this affect production of dopamine? Is this what children are seeing?
The reality we live in today is so much more fucked up already than any of the cyberpunk dystopias we still copy and celebrate in our mainstream media (hello, Cyberpunk 2077).
Or it's just regressive: We're back to the traveling circus and the freak show, but different middle men.
And then you deleted TikTok, after all the only reason this depraved shit exists is because people keep watching it? One thing to go "the algorithm is making them do it", another entirely to fall into its trap.
I’ve seen some wild stuff online but some of this just seems gratuitous. It’s not just for maladjusted kids on an Indonesian throat singing forum either, it’s being beamed to everyone’s phone.
Every time it comes up I see almost this exact same comment--maybe it is the same comment? I kind of wonder.
I never see any of this content. Maybe I'm not on it enough, but all I ever see are mostly just people talking. There's a guy who "races" pool balls on a treadmill, but except for that and an occasional person building some strange contraption, it all just seems like extremely mundane (and in my mind boring) chats.
One live it has shown me a couple times, and I'm not sure if it is always the same person or a genre, is someone carefully dissecting an egg, trying to remove all the shell while leaving the membrane intact.
I also get a decent number of ones in Spanish of people exploring creepy things, like an abandoned building or a forest at night. As I don't speak Spanish I'm not sure exactly what is going on.
I keep getting an Italian dude in a pizzeria making pizza while he's humming, singing and talking to the audience. And yesterday I got a guy on an assembly line repairing pallets. Best part of tiktok if you ask me. (Worst part is that there's a lot of people with mild developmental disorders that publishes their lives on the app. It doesn't feel right.)
I'd be a little more generous and say "Buskers as a service". Stuff like:
> * a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker
Is clearly performative and meant to entertain the audience.
No "tips" to be made on Chatroulette? That's my guess.
I do remember one amusing thing we did back when Chatroulette was still fairly novel - hung out at a local dive bar where one otherwise boring evening's entertainment was Chatroulette on a projector screen with a webcam pointed at the bar patrons.
Any time we hit a disembodied penis, we would all cheer and laugh. They always disconnected right after. Had some fun talking to folks in other countries and around the US. I think it was a lot more fun when it was still the novelty du jour early on and hadn't quite become 90% (literal) wankers yet.
lmaooo facts. you forgot the innumerable 14yr old girl putting on way too much makeup that's half thirst trap and the 8yo fortnite kid raging at his xbox.
btw i'm pretty sure i know exactly which live you're talking about with the house of cards guy. about the only kind of lives i actually like are the debate ones which can be kinda interesting.
No. This is not true. HN likes to believe it's "smarter" but how do people forget that the app stores take a 30% cut off the top? These aren't charities, these are digital live streaming fits.
You see TikTok in the title, and you just blindly believe it.
It seems (from doing the math in the article) TikTok is taking ~40% of the cut. You can argue that's still too much, but that's a far cry from 70%.
> With TikTok declining to say how much it takes from gifts, the BBC ran an experiment to track where the money goes.
> A reporter in Syria contacted one of the TikTok-affiliated agencies saying he was living in the camps. He obtained an account and went live, while BBC staff in London sent TikTok gifts worth $106 from another account.
> At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69% of the value of the gifts.
Because to me it sounds just like a publishing label that takes a massive cut between the actual content producer (tiktok user) and the platform (TikTok).
If that's the case, that's just another situation just like what happened between Spotify and the artists. I heard a lot of noise about it, but turns out Spotify only takes a 30% cut. Why do artists complain about their 70% cut? Oh, that's because artists signed to a label only get a fraction for it, while their label gets the rest. That has nothing to do with Spotify and all with contracts between artists and labels. None of that applies to independent artists with no label, who all get their full 70%.
Is "a TikTok-affiliated agency" basically acting as a music label here?
Rather than giving money to organisations and charities that can distribute donations cheaply and fairly to those that need it, people give direct to the prettiest/most entertaining/most harrowing channel on a social media app and even then most of the donation ends up in the pockets of middlemen and for profit corporations.
> people give direct to the prettiest/most entertaining/most harrowing channel
Donors have always liked this sort of thing, that's why organizations invented "sponsor a child" to give people the experience of direct giving to particular recipients. Mediating it through an organization is probably fairer than this totally disintermediated giving (especially if, in reality, the money is pooled and spent on needy communities), but the impulse has always been there.
It's because our compassion evolved to respond to visual stimuli, not facts about sufferring.
We should be cautiously skeptical and analytical about these things. Otherwise we get paradoxes like the monstrosity of factory farms, the produce of which we use to feed our pets that we love. The end result is mass scale harm and suffering if we rely on gut moral instincts and don't use reason.
Stepping one step behind, rather than financing government initiatives to improve/maintain vital infrastructure that will directly affect whole populations' lives, people will donate to private organizations and charities with shiny goals but way lower impact at scale, if the money ever gets used toward the described goal in the first place.
There's of course many reasons people make these choices, and I think that's where the interesting discussion lies and what we could focus on improving.
Many high-profile charity organizations have also resorted to such tactics for donations. There are so many banner ads on mainstream websites with close-ups of miserably crying children and poor parents to guilt-trip unassuming viewers.
Adding to the spectacle, we have westerners displeased with a Chinese platform siphoning off too much of their direct aid, which is being sent to displaced Syrians who likely wouldn't be in this situation were it not for the US.[1]
That's one heck of a stretch, essentially anti-American propaganda.
The US was one of a dozen countries which supported Syrian citizens standing up for human rights against a murderous dictator's violent suppression of the Arab Spring. The pro-freedom Syrians would likely have been successful with less violence if not for Russian backing of the Assad regime.
Granted, without US support the rebels would have just been rounded up and killed by Assad without the conflict really reaching the point of civil war, so if you squint at it enough, ya you can kinda see that technically some of the displaced people wouldn't be displaced, they'd just still be living a terrible oppressed life under Assad.
"The middlemen said they worked with agencies affiliated to TikTok in China and the Middle East, who gave the families access to TikTok accounts. These agencies are part of TikTok's global strategy to recruit livestreamers and encourage users to spend more time on the app."
Fascinating and rare insight (to me) on how they acquire some of their users. Recruiting high value livestreamers isn't new (see Twitch) but the target here is radically different: people that don't even have a phone. That's one desperate (or at the very least aggressive) rollout. Like a Jehova's witness for social networks.
> TikTok clearly states that users are not allowed to explicitly solicit gifts, so this is a clear violation of their own terms of services, as well as the rights of these people
Why does the headline want to suggest otherwise?
To me it sounds like users want to profit from the donations, they get 30%
If they used proper infrastructures to encourage people to donate, they'd get 0%
BBC yet again is using and spreading the "TikTok bad" propaganda
Having an under-the-table way for users to beg and skimming 70% of the proceeds is bad in my book. This isn't just Tiktok allowing scams, it's Tiktok profiteering as middleman in the scams.
Instagram scams are also bad, however I don't any place in your link Instagram is active participant, they lazily fail to crack down. Claiming these prove "the West" is ganging up on TikTok is the worst form of "what-about-ism".
Because TickTock isn't following its own stated policy as the article demonstrates without a doubt. But you kYounow this because you obviously read the article since that quote is from it
TikTok. They post the full math toward the bottom. TikTok took 69% off the top, the money transfer shop took 10% of the remainder, and the middleman got a 35% cut of what was left, leaving the family with $19 of the original $106 donation
So, is the App store not taking 30% off the top (29.68)?
TikTok would end up with $43, and the result is $33. Withdrawing from the Local Money transfer shop is outside of TT, and then after that, I don't know what "TT middlemen" are, but that happens after the withdrawal happens to get the numbers they are sharing.
The shop and the middleman are outside the control of TikTok.
From the article, a $103 donation ended up as a balance of $33 in the TikTok account. If we assume TikTok has not negotiated a better rate (doubtful), then the math looks like:
Donation: $106
After App Store 30%: $74.20
After TikTok: $33
Which puts the TikTok commission at a (still egregious IMO) 55%
Fair point. I guess Twitch takes 50% from their streamers (and runs ads for the folks who don’t sub). YouTube takes 30%. So TikTok is at the high end, but the number is not as insane as it first appeared to me.
> But when the BBC used the in-app system to report 30 accounts featuring children begging, TikTok said there had been no violation of its policies in any of the cases.
I totally agree. If we (for the sake of argument) were to assume that TikTok allowed this, obviously there's nobody offering these people any better alternatives. So why should TikTok be demonized? The people who critizise TikTok are free to build a better and cheaper platform themselves.
It's funny how these journalists spend all this time researching these stories but miss a very important point - Google and Apple take a 30% cut off in-app purchases. Governments take sales taxes/VAT as well - up to 25% in some European countries.
Apple's cut is taken at the time users buy TikTok coins, not at time of donation/withdrawal. You get more TikTok coins for the same amount of money on web because they don't have to give Apple/Google a cut. So once your fiat is converted to a TikTok coin it's already "clean", meaning all app cuts have been accounted for.
The giver buys 100tiktok coin for 100usd. The receiver gets 100tiktok coins from the giver. For google/apple to get there 30% cut, the 100tiktok coin can't convert back to 100usd.
You buy two coins for $0.02 and they give one diamond or $0.01 to the recipient. This looks like a 50% cut but after App Store fees and taxes it's more like 25%.
TikTok gifts are not charitable donations. They are in-app purchases. For every gift you buy, streamers earn "diamonds" which can be withdrawn for cash.
You cannot built this kind of functionality without giving Google/Apple a 30% cut, plus they collect sales tax and VAT on your behalf.
I'll give you an example. If I sell an in-app purchase for a price of £1 in the UK, £0.17 go to the government, and £0.25 to Apple/Google. I'm left with £0.58!
That's the point and the title is misleading. If you buy goods from an organization because you'd like to support their cause, that's not a donation but a simple purchase. Even though 'donation' is not mentioned here, it is implied in many of the comments I read in this thread. But that's far from what it actually is and how the transaction is worked. The story would actually be outrageous if some vendor took x % from a 'donation'. But that's not the case here. These are 'purchases' with the intention of helping someone. Nevertheless, the intention doesn't matter at all here. If you want to donate, you'll have to look for a place to 'donate'. And then your transaction will be handled accordingly (hopefully).
I missed this when I read the title. TikTok does not have a charity feature and the money in this case is not going to charitable organizations. They are regular live streams where people are asking for money and watchers are giving money through a standard "tip" feature of live streams.
70% cut is surprising, I thought it's 50% like Twitch. Indeed, Googling "tiktok streaming gift cut" still tells me TikTok takes 50% commission on multiple sites. I wonder if there are withheld taxes or something.
Unfortunately it’s a meme that you can’t make any money on tiktok compared to other platforms. The money comes from sponsored content and Amazon affiliate links. Tiktok itself pays out very little, especially vs YouTube.
it's not the best comparison imo. For twitch's own gifting system(Bits), streamers get 100% of the bits when streamers cash out(100bit = $1 but when purchasing it, 100bit costs ~$1.3). the 50/50 split for the subscriptions(when a viewer subscribe to a streamer - 3 tiers, the cheapest being $4.99, and streamers would get half of that)
lol, what an ingeniously evil way to steal tips: invent your own currency (so you have a monopoly) and then keep a huge spread between the buy and sell prices. If restaurant owners could figure out a way to do this, they would.
Ugh, how long until those tip screens start offering “gamification” like this?
So they take roughly 30% of the bit value, and I believe bits cost more if purchased from their app to offset the Apple tax, meaning in comparison they'd take roughly 60% in a comparative setting. Slightly better as you can avoid the mobile store's chunk, but still an apt comparison.
App stores are taking 30% off the top. The article doesn't talk about that, so I wonder if they are taking the total and working from there.
$1000 in donations means $300 to the app store, which would leave $400 for TikTok and $300 for the streamer. While that still doesn't look as good, 40% is significantly less than 70%.
Edit: In the test they performed, it's clear they are ignoring the app store fee. Simply put, this is a really misinformed article at best.
Its pretty clear that anything about China will always have some negative aspect to it in western media. Like there are literally articles like "China has made xx% adoption of green energy, but at what cost?"
So you think it’d a good thing to have virtualized begging as an industry while the platform takes a huge cut with no disclosures? Or that it’s not worth reporting on?
TikTok isn't promoting the begging industry and does not offer "charity" type services. There is lots of cost structure around the OMG tiktok took 69$ that the reporter has no insight on such as "app store" fee, possibly bandwidth fees, or whatever.
If tiktok was heavy handed in moderation of content, the article would of been written "Evil CCP censors refugees attempting to make money via streaming"
70% of every dollar you donate to a beggar goes to Tiktok. It's understood that Tiktok, like every other business, has costs. What they do with the money (pay 30% to X, 20% to Y) is irrelevant.
Some % of the 70% is profit, therefore the evil CCP is profiting off begging refugees.
Are these refugee begging because your evil country color revolution them and cause them to be in that situation? That should be the real story which is missing... like propaganda
App cut is taken at the time of purchase not at time of donation or withdrawal. So on iOS it costs 30% more to buy a coin precisely because they give a cut to Apple. But once the coin is in the system, the cut has been paid and gifts do not have an additional 30% cut.
Also people compare this to twitch, but for twitch's own gifting system(Bits), streamers get 100% of the bits when they cash out. the 50/50 split for the subscriptions(when a viewer subscribe to a streamer - 3 tiers, the cheapest being $4.99)
However well intentioned the gifts in this article are, it’s be hard to convince me that most gifts sent through TikTok are “charitable”, and sorting that out on the App Store side seems like a nightmare.
Are these actually considered charitable donations though in Google's eyes? The article talks about "digital gifts" so it's not "donations" in the legal sense.
That's very much the same as the AWS marketplace. I have an image that should be getting 1000$ per month but Amazon sent 362$ this month. The actual payment is always very far from what the daily reports tells you and it's not like they've withheld the taxes from it...
If they were withholding taxes, I would guess that, in most jurisdictions, they would be required to notify you formally, and quite possibly the taxing authority as well.
Ah I see the Meta PR team have been busy. It's pretty clear that Tiktok actively doesn't want this on their platform, and not in a passive "Well, we say we don't want it, but we let it happen". They don't want it and are actively working against it. But instead of hitting the "Report" button, the Beeb decided to write an article.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Cyberbegging came way before like Badoo livestreams, TikTok nailed picking features of so many apps and put it well together and you get stuck to it. You got to taste your own dog food and food of other to see what people really like and get hooked.
Thanks to our current monetary system, begging is going to be a huge industry in the future.
Why work when you can make more money begging? Once you understand how the system works, begging carries no stigma. Money acquired through begging is more deserved than money acquired through big finance, big corporations or big government. I consider begging to be the most honorable of all rent-seeking professions; instead of extracting free money behind the scenes by befitting from all sorts of schemes, you do it face to face, out in the open, totally honest.
As an example Oxfam spend over 70% on humanitarian work and development programs. Some of that will likely include expenses of things like tents and food and also wages for medical staff and lorry drivers etc. But most charities don't just hand out cash
Other than "proxy charity" (where they just pass on money), would you not expect that 100% of charitable donations go towards expenses and wages? What else would they be doing with the money? Presumably you're donating precisely because you want them to do the work that you're paying for?
I guess OP means that very little of donated money gets to actual help to those suffering - materials, food, clothing etc.
I previously saw estimates between 85-95% is spent just on salaries of these NGOs and expenses related with their offices, cars, travelling to meetings etc.
I live in Geneva, the mecca of all these NGOs, there are hundreds of them. They even have NGOs grouping other NGOs. We are talking about one of the most expensive places on earth that they keep renting offices, often good flats too (at least the big ones do this) and paying employees swiss (untaxed) salaries. Its extremely ineffective way to do some good.
Well, I think the grandparent is thinking of charities whose owners rake in millions; the expectation is that people working for a charity do it for charity, moreso than making a lot of money; everyone should get a fair wage, of course, but it does seem like a lot of the people at the top of a charity earn exorbitant wages.
Then there's where the money goes to. Is it a charity that does good work, or is the money going into people lining their pockets? I believe famously that relief funds for Haiti, New Orleans, or the tsunami were mismanaged, stories like millions being donated but only a dozen houses being built. I found [0] which breaks down where the record 6+ billion dollar that went to the tsunami relief ended up at.
Not really, let’s say the charity is for providing mosquito nets against malaria. The expectation is that any donation goes to providing more nets and not to pay for expenses and wages.
One receives money and then pays a 3rd party organization to install mosquito nets. This charity has very low "overhead" in that a huge portion of their income immediately leaves.
One receives money and then pays employees to manufacture and install mosquito nets. Even if this charity installs more nets it'll have higher overhead than the other charity since things like wages are considered overhead.
First, no your statement is not true. You cannot hide expenses in third party companies and suddenly they are not overhead.
Second imagine two companies:
- (a) One uses all the extra money on providing nets and delivering them to users in a low cost way so perhaps 0 overhead with the extra contribution.
- One uses all the extra money to give it to pay staff, so perhaps 100 overhead for the extra contribution.
Both might be needed, but in general the reason overhead numbers exist is that people are more willing to give when their money goes directly to something they need.
In the first case all of the money is donated. Handing money to people to buy nets would absolutely be counted as programs.
I think that givewell and charity navigator are valuable things. The charity that receives the bulk of my giving is considered highly efficient by both. But I do think that a narrow definition of efficiency does limit certain kinds of charitable organizations.
But expenses and wages are what is providing the nets!
If you want 100% of the money to be spent on nets, just buy nets yourself, but that isn't enough to provide mosquito nets to the people in foreign countries who need them.
Clearer terms are "overhead" and "programs". Overhead includes salaries, fundraising, marketing, general expenses, etc. Program spend is how much they spend on programs from the stated mission. Providing nets would fall into the latter category.
But I don't want nets, I want people to be helped by nets and that requires a lot of work. So the efficiency of a charity is a way of saying that if you give $10, that means $10*efficiency nets in hands of people that need them.
Although I partially agree with you, it is easy to show why your reasoning doesn't work. Let's say I create a charity to provide nets. I pay myself 99.99% of all donations and use the rest to fly somewhere myself and hand over 10 nets so I get a free vacation as well. And this is not a wholly theoretical discussion, I am sure there has been a charity like this.
Perhaps some garbage charities. Puppeting this sort of thing as a general truth is damaging to the charities that are doing good work. I suggest you do a little bit of research (charity navigator, giving what we can, effective altruism, etc.) before you say this sort of thing again.
I was surprised to see so many comments here from people who apparently use TikTok. The HN audience tends to be familiar with the technology ecosystem and the ways it can be abused. I cannot fathom why anyone here would willingly go anywhere near something as obviously bad as TikTok.
Sometimes it's just fun to see what all this fuss is about and delve into it. I used TikTok for a couple days and paid the zoo a visit. Like most people here (I'd assume), I closely observed myself using this app and wondered how it would effect my behavior. After a few days I got the feeling that I've seen everything this platform has to offer and left. Everything for the experience!
TikTok livestreaming reminds me of Mojoworld (from the X-men). A TV with infinite bizarre channels. One channel is a boy endlessly flipping through papers and then randomly stacking them. Another is a man asking for donations so he will eat a spoonful of maggots. People playing all sorts of video games, instruments doing weird and random things...
> TikTok said it would take prompt action against "exploitative begging".
> The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%. But it declined to confirm the exact amount.
Did they find the people responsible for this outrageous grift?
Is it safe to use TikTok again without the danger of seeing poors?
Hardly surprising. No different or in fact worse than the alternatives then for monetisation and pleasing the algorithm. So once again TikTok screwing over their billions of users.
Why would anyone expect anything different or better, when the same privacy violations, monetization leeching is happing again as this time it is competing to be worse than the rest?
The solution is to normalize begging. Make it cool. Begging should be re-framed as a fun, ethical way to earn an income. Also, in many countries, such income classifies as a gift and so is tax free!
> But when the BBC used the in-app system to report 30 accounts featuring children begging, TikTok said there had been no violation of its policies in any of the cases.
After the BBC contacted TikTok directly for comment, the company banned all of the accounts.
> It said in a statement: "We are deeply concerned by the information and allegations brought to us by the BBC, and have taken prompt and rigorous action.
TikTok is notoriously inconsistent in the application of its TOS. One person I follow was set up as a partner (which includes things like bank accounts and drivers licenses), yet their account was banned for the personality being under 13 (she's 31). The remedy? Send a picture of the drivers license TIkTok already has associated with the account to prove her age.
there's literally a whole genre of live trolling where you try to get people who are obviously under 13 or close enough to say so and they get banned hella quick usually.
>> TikTok is notoriously inconsistent in the application of its TOS. One person I follow was set up as a partner (which includes things like bank accounts and drivers licenses), yet their account was banned for the personality being under 13 (she's 31). The remedy? Send a picture of the drivers license TIkTok already has associated with the account to prove her age.
> Turns out that TikTok, like many other companies, is made up of individual humans, and not some all powerful uni-mind.
Though you'd think in a case like this, they'd have the ID on file or be able to easily infer from their account metadata that the person is over 13. It seems like more of a case of dumb one-size-fits-all processes or laziness on the part of the moderator.
These companies don't care about banning people because it's more profitable not to - unless you upset someone about a trendy topic like gender.
This week I reported someone on Twitter for telling me to kill myself ("Kill yourself" was their exact words). Twitter said they found this "Doesn't violate our rules".
Part of the problem is that TikTok appears to have relied far too heavily on automation for moderation. I was suspended for saying "America is worse" and also for saying "God isn't real". Many girls have been banned for showing their shoulders. But I guess those users aren't bringing in money like the ones taking donations.
>- unless you upset someone about a trendy topic like gender.
I am very active in the online trans sphere and let me tell you, they don't care about that either. The situation is not that any topic has a focus, the online moderation of sites of this size is simply flawed. Only clear hate speech is grounds for banning and muting. And even then, when I say clear, it's about keywords that trigger algorithms.
In my experience, the same string can result in different moderation based on unknown factors. For example, I used to report the trans slur of the "t" word and Facebook would remove the content. Now, when I report it, the comment stays posted. Maybe it has something to do with the age of the post or the number of positive reactions to it. Maybe I reported too much and the false positives resulted in my account being banned from reporting comments. Similar behaviors on other platforms.
> For example, I used to report the trans slur of the "t" word and Facebook would remove the content. Now, when I report it, the comment stays posted.
Isn't that also a slang term for a transmission? An automated rule for that that would probably result in far too many false positives: merriam-webster.com has the transmission sense as the first meaning, and has collected many very recent usages from auto magazines: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tranny.
To be clear, I reported it under photos of people who are trans while it was used as a slur in comments that were derogatory. Usually, this would result in the comment being deleted.
This is only an example to show there is no conspiration about moderation of gender related topics. You get the same issues with other slurs and other topics.
KYS has traditionally been a one way ticket to a twitter ban for sure.
With the impending Musk acquisition, perhaps the staff have lost their zeal and are preparing for more "free speech", as violent language and calls to violence online is often labeled.
An automated moderation system should be smart enough to detect sympathy. And if it's in doubt, it should leave it to a person - a native speaker of the given language, because a lot of these systems are trained on English and western language and sentiments.
> An automated moderation system should be smart enough to detect sympathy.
That sounds like a super hard natural language understanding task.
> And if it's in doubt, it should leave it to a person - a native speaker of the given language, because a lot of these systems are trained on English and western language and sentiments.
That costs lots of money that could be going to the shareholders or executive compensation instead.
I know that my comment is a trivial observation, but an automated moderation system capable of detecting sympathy sounds like science fiction. Frankly it seems like humans struggle at it.
yeah it is but "k1ll your$self" or whatever got through for a while, then it was "unalive", then "un@1ive" or sm when that got filtered, i've even seen "commit queen elizabeth".
trying to filter automatically based on message is a retarded strategy.
I was suspended for saying "America is worse" and also for saying "God isn't real"
What is it about TikTok that makes you go back to it at least twice after being suspended?
If I was suspended from a platform for doing something innocuous, I don't think I would go back, only to be suspended again, and then presumably return once more.
I'm not on TikTok, so I don't understand its value. But is the content really so good as to subject oneself to that kind of arbitrary treatment?
It's more of a meme, but people are always looking for the boundaries.
There was one weird one that featured a teenage girl getting all kinds of wet things thrown on her to make the shirt cling (followed by some guy coming into view yelling and falling over for some reason?).
Keep in mind that there's a lot of teenagers (mostly boys) on there who really don't need much to get excited.
I don't use tiktok and haven't seen the videos so this is just a guess, but my first thought is they were doing the old hollywood trick of showing bare shoulders with the rest of their body out of frame, maybe covered with a bubble bath, to imply nudity without actually being nude.
It is extremely difficult to get people banned from Twitter even for repeated harrasment and clear hate speech. There are also lots of reports of people getting banned for trivial things. Two possibilities are widely believed:
- mass-reporting works even if somebody is innocent, if you get enough reports
- poor quality control: decisions are made by single individuals, and mistakes or even just a misclick may result in a ban. Remember that these people are working 8+ hour days just clicking on offensive tweets the system shows them.
I got a temporary bans for the classic joke "old people should be killed at birth" some time back, MONTHS after I posted it. I really can't understand how it works.
Completely fair. Not saying twitter was in the wrong. Just acknowledging that I received a moderation action for something that was somewhat similar to "kill yourself".
I've seen people pushing extremist views promoting gender-based genocide: "kill all men". Not only did they not get banned, they actually went on reddit to laugh at all the "virgins" reporting and denouncing them. They were that certain of their own untouchability.
If they're gonna police free speech, the least they can do is be consistent about it.
I don't understand how this bigoted person (madeofpalk) thinks that agephobia is acceptable. Why does anyone feel the need to continue perpetuating hatred against PoA?
It can be a bit like black people using the N word, OK in context.
We are all getting older, we have elderly relatives who we love and aging is just an obvious part of life. In that context people won't take it personally and understand the nuance. I can bitch about boomers to my boomer parents without contradiction. And I don't get offended if the kids in my family call me an old person. It is funny because it is so universal.
Obviously that does not justify anything exactly and we should be respectful. But there is good sense in being generous and not taking offence.
>These companies don't care about banning people because it's more profitable not to
That's why they banned (and continue to ban) Donald Trump, one of the most notorious Twitter users of all time (who singlehandedly kept CNN in business).
>This week I reported someone on Twitter for telling me to kill myself ("Kill yourself" was their exact words). Twitter said they found this "Doesn't violate our rules".
Sounds reasonable, no? Just saying "Kill yourself", which is a colloquialism for "f@uck off" or "get bent", shouldn't result in a banning in my opinion. If, in fact, the person was trying to convince you to do so, that's evil, and is a totally different story.
> Sounds reasonable, no? Just saying "Kill yourself", which is a colloquialism for "f@uck off" or "get bent", shouldn't result in a banning in my opinion.
That's where we are on social media. Making the good faith argument that telling someone to kill themselves is not harassment or death threat.. just a normal thing to tell each other.
It’s not normal or healthy, but said once by an individual in isolation, it’s also clearly not harassment or a death threat.
What’s bonkers is this genuinely childish trend of lobbying authority figures to limit what others are allowed to say or hear, and who is allowed to speak, instead of just blocking and moving on.
Companies aren't consistent internally. At least Twitch had a list of 'do not ban' users leaked, and they also banned some high earners while defending others. Rationality is not a given.
True, but not necessarily nefarious, as implied by the title.
The ease with which begging can be done on mobile livestream is part of the reason why people do it on TikTok.
Not everyone has the wherewithal to set up a GoFundMe and the existing distribution network to effectively market such a campaign. TikTok gives people with nothing but a phone a chance at an audience, a chance at virality and therefore a chance of raising funds.
This is an outcome from lowest barrier to entry, not perverse profit seeking from big tech
This isn’t surprising. Your local grocery chain store does the same thing when they ask if you want to donate to whatever charity they’re promoting that month. At least there it’s obviously a “finders fee” as they wouldn’t get the amount of engagement if not for the store. But if you want to donate to a place always do it directly. Facebook also takes a good chunk.
"Rather than receiving a customer’s donation as income, the company serves as a holding agent for that money, Zaretsky said. Customers may tally up their cash register donations for their own tax returns, but stores are not allowed to claim those."
I went and check. Doesn’t seems so. 0% for charitable organizations (which means they loose money as they need to cover payment processing fees) and less than 2% in most cases for personal ones (which seems to be in line with general payment fees).
I doubt they bother, they probably just pay whatever low fees they negotiate and then count the fees they have to pay for the charitable ones out of their slush fund and count it as an expense. It's not like they aren't getting income in other areas.
The marketplaces that are entirely charitable stuff have to charge or source (they often have a checkbox you can use to "donate" to cover the fees, so you give $10.30 instead of $10 so the charity gets $10).
Perhaps in your area that is happening, but not in mine (NJ). 70% fee is outrageous. 20% would even be difficult to swallow. But there are grocery chains that do the right thing. As with any charitable giving, you need to be aware of who you're giving money to and how they'll be using the money.
I’d consider that a donation to the grocery store and worthwhile. Those are some of the worst, lowest paying jobs. People treat retail workers horribly and grocery is where everybody goes. And grocery is known for awful margins.
Don't kid yourself. Grocery store executives are doing just fine for themselves. Donating does not make life any better for the front line workers.
If you want to help, support your local independent stores and avoid the chains. I know that's not practical for everyone and can be more expensive but better conditions for workers doesn't come cheap.
Even for the millions-paid CEOs it doesn't end up much when divided out among all the workers.
You can do much more for retail workers as a customer by not being an ass and by doing things like putting things back where you found them instead of leaving eggs in amongst the produce, etc.
Huh? This is when you go to the grocery story and at checkout they ask if you want to donate to the Red Cross or St Judes Hospital for Children or some other large well known charity. This isn't a donation to the employees, although I've seen tip jars you could use to tip the folk who bag your groceries if you'd like.
Thankfully, it appears, according to another responder that they're not taking chunks of money out of these donations and they're getting to the charities.
* baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby
* people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not)
* people with these vibrating bowls of sand with crystals in them, and they take crystals out of the bowl every once in a while to show you
* a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker
* people pretending to sleep, and if you donate different kinds of stickers, it plays different loud sounds or trigger lights to "wake" them* people freestyle rapping on the spot, but it's more like melodic rambling to the same backing track, so you don't really have to rhyme, you just have to rap in a way that sounds like it rhymes or makes sense
* and my favourite: some workers in what seems to be a Chinese factory assembling something like AirPods. they take the airpods, they take the case, they put the airpods in the case, and they throw the whole thing on to the completed pile
I came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on.
It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. The whole game is to give viewers a reason to use stickers on the show, which gives the streamer money (and TikTok like 70% of it).