I found the pacing for the Chinese version to be so God damn excruciating I had to stop like 8 episodes in. I keep meaning to try again.
I found the pacing for the Chinese version to be so God damn excruciating I had to stop like 8 episodes in. I keep meaning to try again.
Yeah I think you hit on the issue with your last sentence- a story that’s so nonlinear, idea focused, and time-spanning, I don’t trust them to adapt it and keep the nuance.
I’m going to watch it but if those two assholes ruin something else I love I’m going to take a shit on their doorsteps.
Jack Black
Smoking what? Tobacco? Or based on your user name, weed? And if weed, by what method? I’ll assume joints.
In terms of greatest harm I’d guess
Tobacco x2 week > Sugar chewing gum> Joints x2 week > non sugar chewing gum.
Absolutely. Especially those who believe in miracles.
Not unless those things are owned by foreign companies, which I doubt those are
I’m in a line of work where I see death very very often.
I don’t know what I’ve learned from it. Besides that it’s coming. I also know there are things worse than death. Often, in the end, people/families can’t accept it, and they end up uselessly suffering.
Yeah it’s relatively easy to reuse most webcam cameras, you just have to get them connected to a USB cable, then most computers will immediately recognize them as cameras.
Thank you for those resources, they are pretty compelling, especially the Twitter thread, which if true, is good evidence that China has used the data to target specific individuals. That’s a problem. And the individual bit is important because I’m unpersuaded by “mass data collection” arguments because a) everyone is doing that and no one seems to care and b) basically the same data is freely purchasable.
The harms associated with the first few links are definitely real, but I would certainly be interested in an apples to apples comparison to other platforms, especially YouTube.
But I think it’s also important to recognize that there is a lot of good that comes from TikTok as well. If I can get personal here, I’ve moved away from family and friends to work a demanding job, and I’ve found some sense of community on TikTok with people who are into the same hobbies as I am, which I’ve had difficulty finding IRL. It has also given voice and community to [certain groups of] marginalized people, and, (for better or for worse) is a major platform by which creators can generate revenue by which a lot of them survive.
Obviously a lot of that COULD and SHOULD be hosted on a different platform without all these issues, but right now they are not, so we need to make sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I pointed it out in other comments, but I feel as if the current bill provides too much power to the executive to unilaterally ban foreign outlets from functioning in the US. I’m not a nutty free speech absolutist or anything, but I think anything that has the potential to shut out alternative perspectives like that takes us closer to Chinese style censorship, not farther away.
Ironically, I wonder if a better solution is mandatory integration of positive content algorithms like it seems like douyin has. But then the question is, who picks what’s positive? Is religion positive? Patriotism? Depends who you ask.
All in all, I think social media of all kinds has been basically the worst thing to happen to the world in my lifetime, but I think that that the cat is out of the bag on it and we’re just pretty fucked.
Thank you for the honest and level conversation here, I do appreciate it.
I usually just harvest usable parts like the hard drive and camera and call it a day.
Alternatively, if you’re able to plug an external monitor in and get it to work for setup, you could install some sort of Linux distro on it and run it headless for lots of different purposes.
Here is the full text of the bill in case anyone was curious.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text?format=txt&r=1&s=1
In case I’m being downvoted because you think I’m worried about a slippery slope for no reason, I’ll link the full text of the bill here.
The process is basically that the president determines that an app is an issue, notifies Congress (who does not need to give approval), then within a certain time period the foreign owner of the all must divest ownership or it would become illegal to distribute that app.
There are definitions laid out in the text. I see nothing that would stop them from banning foreign news sources or potentially foreign shopping platforms except for the clause about “permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content”, which could be broadly interpreted.
Do you really want to give the executive branch basically unchecked power to limit our access to voices from outside the country?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text?format=txt&r=1&s=1
I agree with you. The difference between the other platforms mentioned and TikTok is that TikTok is where the action is right now, so it’s the target. The unverified hearsay problem is certainly there, but I don’t think it’s inherent to TikTok more than any other platform. No matter the platform, rage and engagement are the most important things so the algorithms will always reward them. Even YouTube’s algorithm has been highly criticized for funneling people down extremist pipelines.
The TikTok algorithm is incredibly efficient at locking people, especially young people, into scrolling forever. That’s bad. However that same criticism has been made against more traditional social media platforms too. Twitter especially has a similar although less effective problem.
Besides vague gesturing at China, I don’t see any problem that TikTok has that isn’t already present in other social media platforms. If we want to go after all of them, I’d 100% be for it, but this legislation is too targeted and creates a dangerous precedent imo.
100% agree on the searchability. It’s totally unusable.
Too lazy to look up who said it, but there’s a quote I like that goes something like “conservative seeks to have an in group who the law protects but does not bind, and an outgroup who the law binds but not protects”
I agree that would be problematic.
However I’m not willing to allow the government to ban a social media platform that a lot of people enjoy and rely on for community building (or even their livelihoods, in a lot of creators’ cases) on a “what if”.
Think about the precedent this sets. What could it be used on next?
I’m not here to be pro-china, and I definitely believe that they’re putting those things in douyin. I’m just not convinced they’re purposefully putting negative things in TikTok purposefully to harm mental health.
This is anecdotal and my personal experience, but I haven’t noticed any pro-ccp things on my personal algorithm. What I do notice is anti-US and anti-capitalist content by Americans. Whether or not they are shills, I can’t say for sure, but it feels like it would border on conspiracy theory thinking to suggest that many of them are.
To clarify the isolation comment, I mean that TikTok is a place where community building and the spreading of ideas or news (not necessarily good or bad ideas/news) spreads rapidly, especially among young people, in a way the people who run traditional media can’t control. Taking away this tool makes us more reliant on forms of media that they do control.
This may sound like a rhetorical question but I promise it’s sincere.
Why would I be more concerned about China having my data than when the US has the potential to collect that same data AND MUCH MORE through surveillance that we know they do? My own government has a much higher potential to do me harm than one on the other side of the world.
How do you differentiate purposeful manipulation vs it being a natural effect of Western social media? I stopped using Facebook and Twitter because it was obviously toxic and affecting my mental health. I use TikTok a fair amount and don’t find it nearly as bad.
It’s also possible that there’s manipulation in the other direction. In their own app they could be artificially increasing positive content while allowing the natural social media toxicity and ragebait to dominate in other areas.
My personal opinion is that TikTok is a way that peer to peer information and news travels very quickly in a way that they can’t control, and they don’t like that. As with all things, they want to keep us isolated.
It’s a tough choice between some professional accomplishments and my relationship with my wife