#but vines whole algorithm wasn’t as aggressive

[boysnberriespie]

I’m realizing that when people say “This social media platform is dead” what they really mean is that it’s incredibly difficult for anybody to become famous on that platform nowadays.

[megacircuit9universe]

Times Change

WED JUL 08 2020

Trumps numbers... approval rating, and polling numbers in all the states that could possibly matter this November... are so bad right now that Trump has threatened media outlets, including FOX News, for posting the latest numbers, which he says are all fake.

He’s also been ranting on Twitter about how the upcoming election is going to be rigged, and doing speeches, such as on July 3rd at Mount Rushmore, in which he’s ranting about how liberals and Democrats are enemies of the state, including teachers, and the media, and that they’re all conspiring to end America and bring forth a scary dictatorship where conservatives will be persecuted and punished.

His little pal, Tucker Carlson, over on Fox... is running with that ball and helping to plant the seeds in the dysfunctional brains of his audience, that if Trump loses, it will be because the election has been rigged by a vast liberal conspiracy.

Well... if by, rigged, they mean... influenced by a level of Presidential incompetence so astronomical that nobody in the country can’t see and feel it quite painfully... and if by, conspiracy, they mean... a vast majority of voters have agreed to use their voting powers to vote him out of office... then, sure!

But what this all says... the warlike paranoid rhetoric against not just all races (it used to be just Muslims and South Americans) but all US citizens who would dare to oppose Trump... coupled with the cries of a rigged election to come...

...is that he know’s he’s going to lose.

And they know... he’s going to lose (his junta).

So, the best plan they can think of at the moment is to try and foment violence if he loses... in an attempt to intimidate the rest of us into backing down.  

Don’t you vote him out, or we will unleash our army of brainwashed morons to take to the streets with guns and torches blazing.  We will throw the biggest tantrum the world has ever seen.

But, after everything else we’ve been through so far... we’re not simply desensitized to the threat of more upheaval... in the case of this threat, we’re like, bring it on!

People are already in the streets standing up to walls of fascist cops in riot gear every night. You think anybody’s scared by the idea of a bunch of red hat idiots coming out of the woodwork with their shotguns and assault rifles?  We have shotguns and assault rifles too!

This is America... everybody has a gun!

We don’t use them on the cops, but if Backwoods Bob, or KKKarl wants to show up in attack mode, because they’re pissed off about the outcome of the election... shooting their asses in self defense is justifiable homicide, so let’s go!

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court and the Pentagon have already shown conclusively, in the past month, that they have zero loyalty to Trump.

BLM has brought together a huge coalition of not just white and black people, protesting and fighting side by side, but also Native Americans, Arab Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, Jews, Amish, Wiccans and other Pagans, atheists, scientists, gay, straight, lesbian, trans, even some Christians, and yes, a not trivial number of Republicans.

Gen X was always there for the fight, along with a few Boomers, and a few Silents, but now Millennials are finally on board, as is... everybody’s celebrated new heroes... Gen Z!

Which brings me back to Tik Tok...

Tik Tok has been instrumental in bringing the above mentioned coalition together... though it took SARS CoV2 to be the catalyst that mobilized us against racism, fascism, and Trumpism, here in 2020.

As social media platforms go, Tik Tok has outmatched all of its predecessors... who were all, in their own ways, very impressive... from MySpace, to YouTube, to Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Vine.

It has old roots, being a merger between Musical.ly which has been around since 2014, and what began as Douyin back in 2016.  2018 was the year that what we now know as Tik Tok, was born, and quickly rose to the top of the app charts.

It inherited a huge user base of teenagers, but also filled the gap left behind by Vine, which died in 2016, and Tumblr, which was dealt a critical blow in late 2017, when it was sanitized of all explicit material.  

Ignored completely by the mainstream, Tik Tok was also blown off fairly aggressively by established YouTubers as a platform of vacuous content, of no interest to anybody above the age of 15, other than pedophiles.

 But when Covid19 hit the world stage in early 2020, forcing everybody on the planet to shelter at home, and grapple with boredom... Tik Tok went mainstream in a big way. 

It was the only social media app left, where it was acceptable not to wallow in depression and political defeatism (Twitter), not to be out shopping, globe trotting, or partying (Instagram) and not to be making long form videos in a professional studio with 100K subscribers and a Patreon (YouTube). 

This is when most of the millenials, GenXers, Boomers, and even Silents began to get on board... to have a go at finding their own niche in the Tik Tok universe.

And this brings us to the key to Tik Tok’s popularity... its algorithm.  

Well, its algorithm, coupled with an elegantly simple interface, and perfect upper time limit for videos... just over a minute. 

It takes only ten minutes, scrolling through Tik Tok videos, liking the ones you like, for that algorithm to start visibly tailoring your feed to what you want more of.  And over the course of just a day or two... doing this, and following whoever you’d like to see more of, even when they aren’t going viral on the For You page... you can quickly cultivate an addictive feed that you’re happy to scroll through for hours.

Some say it’s just a sinister ploy to keep you on the app, in order to steal your data but... all social media apps do that.  Tik Tok simply does it better.  It’s algorithm is superior to Twitter, Facebook or even YouTube, allowing you to tailor your feed on the fly in real time... if times are changing that fast... which they have been.

So, why the long love letter to Tik Tok now?

Well, this week, it’s suddenly in peril.  It’s been banned in India, could soon be banned in America.. and after losing those two massive markets... could just die.

It began with China passing a law last week that, for national security reasons, it needed to have access to all app data collected by all apps based in China... which includes Tik Tok, which is owned by a Chinese company known as ByteDance, headquartered in Hong Kong... the province which has been in a struggle to maintain what little autonomy it has left from the Chinese mainland for several years now.

India... which was recently embroiled with a border dispute with China that resulted in a military skirmish, immediately banned Tik Tok, for fear of their citizens data falling into the hands of Xi Peng.

But Tik Tok has an American CEO, who, in a move to save the app from getting banned in America, announced that the Hong Kong headquarters would be moving overseas.

That didn’t do much to calm the Trump administration, however... who have only just pieced together that Tik Tok was truly behind the disastrously low attendance of his recent Tulsa rally... and also a key social media channel for BLM and other anti-Trump movements to organize and coordinate (and one they can’t penetrate and manipulate, as they did with Facebook and Twitter four years ago).

So now, both Trump and  his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo have gone on record saying they’d like to ban Tik Tok in the United States.

It’s not clear yet if this ban will actually happen, though it seems likely.

It’s even less clear how a ban in both India and the US will affect the fortunes of Tik Tok.  

VPNs will make it possible for users in both countries to continue using Tik Tok, so... over the short term, it will remain accessible... at least to those hardcore devotees who have come to rely on it.

But, barring a massive sea change in the general popularity of VPNs... which is not out of the question, in these increasingly authoritarian times around the planet... the loss of most of the two biggest markets could cripple Tik Tok.

People say, What about supply and demand?

Well... the most likely fate would be for Tik Tok to be bought out by a non-communist company, say a US company like Google, or Amazon.  

That’s been the trend for over a decade now.  Yahoo bought Tumblr.  Twitter bought Vine.  Facebook bought Instagram, etc.  But more often than not, in these cases, when the hugely popular platform gets bought for billions by the big corporation... the big corporation drops the ball and drives it into the ground.

YouTube being bought by Google is probably the least dismal of these examples, but YouTube is nothing like what it was back in the early twenty teens, when it was a platform for anybody with a web cam in their bed room to talk to the world, and get famous.

But then again, this IS 2020...

Tik Tok has redefined the entire dynamic of social media, at the same time that SARS CoV2 has drastically altered the global economy... meaning that the twenty-teens model of both things, and how they work together... could well be out the window by now.

And this brings us, in tonight’s final analysis, to a fundamental truth that Trump, for all his diabolical plotting to game the 2016 campaign process... has failed to plan for.

Times change.

Twitter was the shit back in 2016, wasn’t it?  What a brilliant move for a dark horse boomer candidate turned President to troll the shit out of it every goddam day for years on end, right?

Well, he’s killed Twitter now.  The whole universe, as it was in 2016, has disintegrated... in no small part thanks to Trump’s abuses, neglect, and incompetence.

But also just the march of history... climate change, global pandemic, technological breakthroughs, economic upheaval, civic unrest, etc.

They like to say those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.

I say... those who ignore the future, get eaten by it.

Tempus Edax Rerum.

Time consumes all things.