TikTok is now the most popular website

JAMedia said:
OTOH most of the world feels the same about Google, Facebook, twitter, instargram etc and the USA. IE they trust the USA about as much as they trust Russia or China.
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Americans think they are the most important and think the world revolves around them so - as an American myself - I would honestly acknowledge that's the right thing for others to do.
 
JAMedia said:
OTOH most of the world feels the same about Google, Facebook, twitter, instargram etc and the USA. IE they trust the USA about as much as they trust Russia or China.
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As has been said, the debate isn't really about principles but about power

Though I would argue that it's preferable to have Americans spying on you if you're going to be spied on ;)
 
ahalpert said:
the ban bill has been introduced: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/tech/...ill/index.html

I have no idea if it will go anywhere
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You can't do that. The internet was designed to route round blocks. As, ironically, the Chinese discovered when they shut down the internet over Tiananmen Square a few decades ago. As we have seen recently neither Russian nor China have been able to block things despite trying.

Again, ironically, the state blocking web sites and platforms will put the USA alongside China and North Korea. Somewhat counter-productive?
The rest of the world, or at least large parts of it, might start doing the same to Facebook, Twitter, Google?
It is a slippery slope.
 
JAMedia said:
You can't do that. The internet was designed to route round blocks. As, ironically, the Chinese discovered when they shut down the internet over Tiananmen Square a few decades ago. As we have seen recently neither Russian nor China have been able to block things despite trying.

Again, ironically, the state blocking web sites and platforms will put the USA alongside China and North Korea. Somewhat counter-productive?
The rest of the world, or at least large parts of it, might start doing the same to Facebook, Twitter, Google?
It is a slippery slope.
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Isn't Europe already doing exactly that with the GDPR? If you don't follow their data rules, you're not allowed to operate there.

That's somewhat similar to what the US asked of tiktok, although their demands were more stringent. (Sell your american unit to an american subsidiary, or something to that effect)
 
ahalpert said:
Isn't Europe already doing exactly that with the GDPR? If you don't follow their data rules, you're not allowed to operate there.

That's somewhat similar to what the US asked of tiktok, although their demands were more stringent. (Sell your American unit to an American subsidiary, or something to that effect)
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GDPR is a bit different. It is not saying who can own what and acts on all companies equally.

How would you feel if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube all had to do the same around the world? That is sell their over seas parts to locally owned companies?
The problem is the internet and business is global and "countries" are somewhat out dated and irrelevant.

I am not sure how you solve this problem. Especially as one of the biggest offenders (historically) was the USA.
I think there has to be a rethink. The problem is money and power always win out over ethics and doing the right thing.... :-(
 
JAMedia said:
GDPR is a bit different. It is not saying who can own what and acts on all companies equally.

How would you feel if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube all had to do the same around the world? That is sell their over seas parts to locally owned companies?
The problem is the internet and business is global and "countries" are somewhat out dated and irrelevant.

I am not sure how you solve this problem. Especially as one of the biggest offenders (historically) was the USA.
I think there has to be a rethink. The problem is money and power always win out over ethics and doing the right thing.... :-(
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I wouldn't personally care. And yes, the internet is global. But countries still have boundaries and militaries.

USA vs Europe is not USA vs China. USA/Europe have mutual defense pacts, share intelligence, etc. USA/Europe have been imposing limits on the use of Chinese hardware in communications and critical infrastructure because they view China as an untrustworthy competitor if not an outright adversary.

I'm not saying that the USA is different or better than China as concerns privacy violations leveraged by commercial access. The issue is just that they're not playing on the same team
 
ahalpert said:
USA vs Europe is not USA vs China. USA/Europe have mutual defense pacts, share intelligence, etc. USA/Europe have been imposing limits on the use of Chinese hardware in communications and critical infrastructure because they view China as an untrustworthy competitor if not an outright adversary.
I'm not saying that the USA is different or better than China as concerns privacy violations leveraged by commercial access. The issue is just that they're not playing on the same team
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How wonderfully naive
 
Here's an insightful article by Cory Doctorow about the lifecycle of monopolistic internet platforms (Facebook, Amazon, etc) and why they become diminishingly useful.

Here's the part about Tiktok:

Tiktok is many different things, including "a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones."

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-f...ia-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes's Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyba...yone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users' ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience – the rest of the time, it's full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

"Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not."

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and "projects" handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much "liquidity provision." Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/d...-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok's format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the "heating" that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven't asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there's only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users' feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing...

For many years, even Tiktok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
 
The length of that article/blog is out of control. lol

Never heard of him and maybe that audience expects that, but wow.

___

In the history of life, products-services-things change, especially when money is involved, and everything eventually runs its course, for better or for worse.

There, most of the same thoughts in one sentence.
 
NorBro said:
The length of that article/blog is out of control. lol

Never heard of him and maybe that audience expects that, but wow.

___

In the history of life, products-services-things change, especially when money is involved, and everything eventually runs its course, for better or for worse.

There, most of the same thoughts in one sentence.
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What he actually said is that Internet monopolies historically degrade their service after entrenching themselves in order to maximize profit by squeezing their partners (publishers in the case of Facebook, sellers in the case of Amazon) and watering down the quality of their service to the customer (by showing an increasing amount of paid content instead of quality search results). And that now this is happening with TikTok

That life cycle doesn't happen with everything. Take Apple computers. They're still solidly made. People still use their machines for a decade. New models cost around the same as the old ones did but are improving each year.
 
What are some examples? j/w

TikTok's algorithms are better than ever, and as a normal consumer I think Amazon has improved every single year.

Not sure you can compare social media applications to physical products, technical necessities, like Apple computers, phones which are likely now immune to any consequences, like, forever. Always will be used no matter what unless some new computer is invented that can teleport you.

What are some examples of the Internet monopolies, I want to know so I can understand the thought-process better. Facebook or Myspace are not answers I'm looking for, but I'm trying to think of some other ones where the service was degraded.
 
It's true about the monopolies/monopsonies, even when technically they are not monopolies/monopsonies. Having such a dominant position in the market place allows them all sorts of shenanigans.

I am anti-ban but I am pro enforcement of the existing contract law. And YouTube/Facebook/Twitter have blatantly disregarded them in the past.
 
NorBro said:
.

What are some examples of the Internet monopolies, I want to know so I can understand the thought-process better. Facebook or Myspace are not answers I'm looking for, but I'm trying to think of some other ones where the service was degraded.
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Here's the part from that article about Amazon:

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.
This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don't search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of ****. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
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I searched "cat beds" and see no ads at all. I kind of want a cat tho.

But ads for what? Ads for specific cat beds or something else? I see all different cat beds you can buy.

Does anyone else see ads? (I went through the first 5 pages.)

As far as everything else, what is Amazon supposed to do? What alternative is there for this larger-than-life corporation with hundreds of thousands of people interested in selling products on their platform? Or an Internet program which attracts hundreds of millions.

There is not enough life to start going down this business practice cleansing hole.

IMO, a narrative is being painted...certainly there's truth but also some smoke that perhaps would not exist if one was on the other side of the wire transfers.
 
NorBro said:
I searched "cat beds" and see no ads at all. I kind of want a cat tho.

But ads for what? Ads for specific cat beds or something else? I see all different cat beds you can buy.

Does anyone else see ads? (I went through the first 5 pages.)
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He's saying that sponsored listings are ads. He's also saying that Amazon brand entries are essentially ads. And I think he's saying that more of the entries that are not explicitly labeled sponsored have paid to receive a higher listing.
 
well, that's how life works so I would expect it? not you?

I guess I'm just confused why that wouldn't be considered normal.
 
Ideally, life would continue to improve. That author thinks life would be better under a different model of network

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn't want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers' messages would be delivered to willing listeners' end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "woke shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.
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