Tag: tiktok

Bluesky is making social media fun again (and other thoughts on social media for Nov 2024)


Bluesky is making social media fun again, and that’s a good thing. For example, you have people developing creative new apps that show Bluesky skeets (posts) like the digital rain in the Matrix or firehose effect or a nightsky. All very cool.

It has some asking: is Bluesky the new Twitter and is that a good thing? Right now I would answer Yes to both parts of that question.

One thing for sure, people are paying attention and piling on. As the New York Times noted, Elon Musk and his swing to the right had much to do with people fleeing Twitter (ok, X.com).

What’s odd is that they are mostly going to Bluesky. After all, Bluesky is not the only game in town: Threads still exists. However Bluesky is rolling out features that are making Threads and X users want to move the butterfly app. And Threads has noticed and has started making changes. (While also trying to deal with their engagement bait problem.)

Will the changes at Threads be enough to keep Bluesky from surging to the lead? We will have to wait and see. Meanwhile I am interested in learning more about Bluesky and how I can experiment with it. If you feel the same, check out their documentation and read about the AT protocol.

Not everything about social media is fun and good. Over on X.com you have Elon making nazi jokes and spreading election conspiracies. Maybe he should spend less time doing that and more time on  X.com’s technical problems. I’ll leave Ed Zitron have the last word on Elon Musk (he has several words, and they are all rightly scathing). While over on visual social media, we have TikTok users spreading misinformation on melanoma. And famed YouTuber MrBeast being sued over ‘unsafe’ environment on upcoming Amazon reality show. Not good and all.

I once believed that new developments in social media were over. But the growth of Bluesky has convinced me otherwise. I’ll be curious to see how it grows over the next few years. Hopefully people like Musk and other fans of Trump (ahem, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz) stay away.
 

Some thoughts on blog posts vs reels for advice

I spotted this post — Eponis | Sinope (Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to…) — and as usual I thought: I should share this because it contains a few nuggets of good advice and others would find it helpful.

Sadly, though, it reminded me of a reel I have seen in various forms on Instagram. Like many reels, that particular reel was less about passing on good advice and more about gaining attention to the creator of the reel.

That’s the thing I do like about blog posts and I don’t like about reels. You could come across a blog post, get the information you need, and never know or care about the person who made it. When you come across most reels (and I assume tiktoks), you might get information you need, but they seem more about the maker than the advice.

I realize this is a matter of preference and not a matter of right and wrong. I prefer just getting the information, while others prefer knowing the person who is giving the advice. Given how Tiktok and Reels are overtaking user generated content, I am likely on the losing side.

I’ll keep sharing helpful things here: that’s been the purpose of this blog since the late 2000s. I’ll also try to 99%**of the time not make it not about me. 🙂

 

(** did I say 99%? Ok, maybe it’s closer to 90%…😄)

Hula hoops, or if you don’t understand NPC streaming or Pinkydoll, maybe you’re not supposed to

There was a fair amount of hubbub last week about the woman above who is known as Pinkydoll. Most of what it came down to is: what is going on??

Well if you are curious, I’ve found these three pieces useful in getting a better understanding of the phenomena: this is from the Washington Post, this is from Vice and this is from knowyourmeme.

As for me, I find it interesting because it combines a number of new media and ideas, from TikTok to gaming to monetization of audiences. The fact that they all roll in together makes it especially bewildering to people not familiar with those things. But like I said, if you don’t get it, maybe you aren’t supposed to. I’m familiar with that feeling, but I feel like many younger than me are not, and it was that cohort that was complaining about this last week.

Culture arises from new ingredients. These Internet things are as much our culture now as new books and new films. Get used to it. Hula hoops arise in all forms.

All social media companies are bad, but some are successful. (Social media roundup, April 2023)

All social media companies are bad, but some are successful. The older ones like Meta and Twitter have fallen on difficult times for many reasons. They are bad companies doing badly. And the new kid on the block, TikTok, has gotten all the wrong attention recently. It’s a bad company doing well, at least in some aspects. Let’s talk a look.

Meta/Facebook: Meta continues to do poorly, and I for one am glad about this. Remember, no matter how stupid Twitter is or how creepy tiktok is, Meta/Facebook is all that and worse. For how they are creepy, read this on the slow death of surveillance capitalism in WiReD. Or this bit of outrageousness on how GoodRx leaked user Health data to Facebook and Google (Google is also bad.) And it is not just GoodRx: Cerebral did it too. Sure health web sites like GoodRx and Cerebral are horrible, but the social media companies facilitated it.

As for stupid, just think of the metaverse. Or don’t. Disney is giving up. More will too. And that will lead to more Facebook/Meta  layoffs.

Tiktok: Tiktok continues to be under fire politically. And Mark Z would love to see it get shut down and replace it with Instagram Reels.

Despite all that, it continues to thrive, and things that take off there really take off. For example, here’s a piece on how Sofia Coppola’s daughter went viral with her one cooking tiktok. TikTok gets our attention.

For some companies, it gets too much attention. So they panic when they see people are using tiktok to definfluence others, for example.

Other Tiktok pieces that got my attention: this piece on Olivia Dunne, college gymnast has 6.7 million TikTok followers. I don’t, but Some people like Cory Doctorow. If you are one of them, you will like his piece on Tiktok’s enshittification. Speaking of crappy, this is on borg drinking and tiktok. Young people being dumb is not news: the innovative ways they are dumb is.

Twitter: Let’s not forget good ole twitter: Elmo Musk continues to drive the company into the ground. Twitter ad sales plunged 46% while TikTok Pinterest gained. What a genius he is. He’s saving the company money by falling behind on rent. And  laying off staff.  Firing top engineers. And employing his  “extremely hardcore” approach. Then he follows up with more layoffs, including Esther Crawford, who made a big deal about being hardcore and sleeping on the office floor in a sleeping bag. That worked well.

All those layoffs were good for system stability. NOT. Some stuff on the twitter outages can be found here and here (on how a single engineer brought twitter down).

No wonder people headed for the exits. Initially  more than a million people switched to Mastodon. That lead to things like this: Movetodon: Find your Twitter Friends on Mastodon this. Even Medium got into the act and  opened mastodon subscription memberships.

Additionally here’s two pieces on their tech. One on their API and one on their rss feed. Enjoy while you can. David Crosby did. He  was great on using twitter.

Finally: here’s a piece on how a community came to a Toronto restaurant’s defence after one-star review. Good for them. Online reviews mostly suck.

And hey, let’s not leave off Substack. In January they said: Don’t start a year. Start a Substack. I guess.

On surveillance capitalism, Tiktok edition

If you are like me, you can be spooked at how much social media companies know about you. I’ve become so concerned that I recently moved over to Duck Duck Go for some of my searches in a (vain?) attempt to prevent this from happening. I also have some privacy tools installed on my browser in the hope I can cut down on the information companies are gleaning about me.

We all have our ideas on how they do this. If you want to know how one company does it, see:  How TikTok Reads Your Mind.

More on surveillance capitalism here.