TikTok adds text-only posts as social media battle escalates

QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz to Technology@beehaw.org – 87 points –
TikTok adds text-only posts as social media battle escalates
bbc.com
19

at this point all social media will evolve into the exact same formats.

At one point nearly every platform was adding stories, and now they add long text posts. Everybody wants to feast on Twitter's corpse.

This will definitely not make me use TikTok. I can only imagine what kind of garbage people will post on text form. I'm obviously not the target demographic for that platform but I cannot comprehend what people enjoy about it. I had some old coworkers who used to send me tiktoks daily and they were annoying, insane, made no sense. Now put that in text format.

I wonder if you can listen those text posts with that horrendous machine voice. Well ofcourse you can.

The way social media companies just chase each others features is ridiculous. They can't be content with being unique or offering a specialized feature set. No, they all have to do image posts, then stores, then video, then short videos.

However, anything that helps kill the trend of every goddamned thing being a video even when it doesn't need to be is a very welcome change

If TikTok starts allowing standard hyperlinks it would dramatically reduce the platform's peak harm potential. Tiktok's single biggest problem rn is that it is literally impossible to cite your sources - that's why it's the runaway global leader for misinformation. Adding text would help, bringing it back down to regular Facebook levels of social erosion and election distortion.

runaway global leader for misinformation

I'd really like to see that study if you've got it handy

Fair enough - I don't have one. At least not to hand. There has been a LOT of reporting about misinformation, disinformation, and fucked up cultural trends unique to TikTok, but I used that phrase hyperbolically to reinforce my actual point: that it is literally impossible to cite sources on TikTok, making it the only social network where credible, knowledgeable, expert, and authoritative creators cannot in principle be distinguished from hoeseshit.

My instagram usage nowdays consists of me scrolling past 20 videos untill I reach the end of my feed and then close the site and realize it gave me zero content. For some reason I still go there once a day.

"These cigarettes used to make me happy," he opined as he took another drag.

The moment I realised that is the moment I quit both cigarettes and Meta products...

Every app wants to capture all of your time, but what these app companies don't realize is that it's sometimes better to do one thing really well and capture 100% of time spent on that particular thing.

TikTok already handles text posts - it's called "teenagers pointing at captions on their videos and making faces". It's the culture, and TikTok has excelled at this very video-focused culture. Adding text posts will bore the sorts of people who are on TikTok for videos and may result in less engagement, not more.

The Internet is a mess

My slice is my mess. The slices owned by corps are theirs (and maybe the people who confuse their identities with them)

Stories, short videos, now short text, I truly don't get why they have to copy ALL the features of each other