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TikTok Is Destroying Itself From the Inside Out
(gizmodo.com)
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Nah, it's just enshittification. Every other video is an ad now and some videos that aren't labeled as ads are just viral marketing ads in disguise. The "for you" page gets exhausting with all these ads, and it's really the only way to discover new content.
Then there is tiktok live that they heavily push. Tiktok live can be sorta cool, but once the NPCing trend hit, 6 out of 10 live feeds are people unabashedly whoring themselves out for money, another 2 out of the ten are weird live "games" that are just p2p with the in currency gift system, another 10% are live open shops like Pokémon cards or freshwater clams for pearls or shit (which is kinda cool, but there are so many of them) then the last 1 are legitimately interesting live feeds.
Then it got even worse... they added competitions, which would require a certain amount of high value gifts to be sent by their viewers to obtain cash prizes for hitting certain gifting metrics. This turned almost all of the live feeds into just endless begging.
Then somehow it got worse... they added "battles" which pit two live feeds against each other. Nowadays it's a lot of Israel v Palestine or Trump V Biden streams. There timed and whoever collects more gifts wins the match. It's really nauseating to be honest...
It's not people slowly realizing that tiktok is bad, it's just tiktok actively becoming worse. The most frustrating thing is all your favorite videos are lurking somewhere on the site, but you have little control over what comes next and it often takes wading through mountains of shit to find something good.
But that is exactly how TikTok is supposed to work no? They condition the user to swipe until they see what they want. In the beginning you get great content and are conditioned to like the swipe. But after a while more random shit gets introduced and you end up "searching" for the content you want with many little distractions here and there. At least that's how I was told it to be from friends.
There might be some truth to that, but you can reset your algorithm with a click of the button. It will be as if your fresh to the app all over again, it does not change the frequency of ads, nor does a new account. The frequency just increased at some point, full stop. I know because my wife has been using it for years and my account is probably like 6 months old.