The Internet is a mess
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.
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 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.
