Is the TikTok ban a chance to rethink the whole internet?

(newyorker.com)

10 points | by mitchbob 3 hours ago

10 comments

  • xnx 1 hour ago
    RSS was too good and too decentralized to exist. It's a miracle that it's still possible to independently publish and subscribe to podcasts (notably, Spotify doesn't let you subscribe to unapproved podcasts).

    I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.

    • Animats 4 minutes ago
      RSS can distribute a feed, but that's all it does. There's no discovery or search or ranking.
    • ikesau 43 minutes ago
      I think this is the direction ActivityPub is headed.

      You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)

      I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.

      • xnx 40 minutes ago
        Bluesky has RSS feeds too.
    • arch_deluxe 51 minutes ago
      I totally agree. Is there a community of like-minded folks out there somewhere? I'd love to see someone give this a try.
      • xnx 46 minutes ago
        The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.
        • portaouflop 9 minutes ago
          I know several people who are starting a new service to pick up those refugees - let’s see how it pans out!
        • aquaticsunset 33 minutes ago
          I take this as "nobody, including the competitors, think TikTok will actually go away"
    • theamk 49 minutes ago
      Meh, I remember time when blogs I read moved from LiveJournal to RSS, and discoverability went way down.

      In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.

      In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.

    • packetlost 1 hour ago
      RSS/Atom works for certain kinds of content, but not as well for others. It basically necessitates long polling and for anything that needs realtime publishing it just straight up won't work at any meaningful scale
    • nicoco 1 hour ago
      Yes. But atom please.
  • spamizbad 1 hour ago
    Interesting trend I've noticed: Tiktok's users tend to like its algorithm, and its probably the app's most valuable assets, but western tech executives tend to hate it and speak of it with derision.

    This stands in stark contrast with US-based social media companies, where both its users and content creators often speak like they're at war with the algorithm, yet to the tech elite these sites algorithms are tuned to perfection.

    • __MatrixMan__ 27 minutes ago
      I'd guess that it comes down to differences between the outcomes that either algorithm is trying to achieve. When westerners advertise they tend to provoke a sense of anxiety and then position the product such that it appears to relieve that anxiety. So we hate "the algorithm" because it's trying to make us uncomfortable without letting us leave. We should hate the algorithm.

      I couldn't speak for Tiktok's aims, but they seem different enough that its algorithm doesn't chafe in the ways that we've come to expect.

      • autoexec 18 minutes ago
        It seems pretty simple. The Tiktok algorithm is designed to push content you want to see. In the US social media platforms are designed to push content they want you to see and everything you care about gets pushed out of the way. With US platforms you always have to scroll past garbage to get to anything you care about. Tiktok just relentlessly shoves what you want in your face over and over and over again, and when it does misstep it moves on to something else before you even have the chance to consider what you'd rather be doing with your time.
    • rayiner 11 minutes ago
      The Tik Tok algorithm is great. It feeds me compelling stuff instead of trying to piss me off like Facebook.
    • chenzhekl 29 minutes ago
      No, I don’t think Meta hates such algorithms. It just couldn’t beat TikTok algorithm-wise.
  • zaphirplane 17 minutes ago
    The answer to Headlines that ask a question is almost always No
  • mitchbob 2 hours ago
  • ripped_britches 27 minutes ago
  • salt-thrower 32 minutes ago
    Going out on a limb here: nope.

    Do I wish otherwise? Of course. Will anything of the sort happen? Nope.

  • al2o3cr 2 hours ago
    If your idea of "rethinking" is to have a slightly different set of billionaires that control everything, you'll love this article
    • SllX 56 minutes ago
      It’s a New Yorker article. Even if the ideas were sound, it wouldn’t be lovable. At least this one doesn’t begin with “Webster’s says…” but it does appear to be a puff piece courtesy of The Submarine[1] McCourt is using to try and drum up support for its TikTok bid.

      Fortunately we don’t have to indulge them as the project founder’s page is here: https://www.mccourt.com/project-liberty/ and the project website is here: https://www.projectliberty.io/

      New tech isn’t the solution to what ails the web though. The web is built on great tech, and there’s a constant forward motion to iterate and improve on the technical stack of the web. Reigning in specific anti-consumer practices characteristic of surveillance-oriented businesses is because even if you manage to make a decentralized protocol popular for a short period of time, if there is ever enough people for it to be commercially lucrative, exactly the same cycle of centralization will repeat itself.

      [1]: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

    • hardbants 1 hour ago
      [dead]
  • khalilsautchuk 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • barakm 1 hour ago
      The lack of self-awareness with this post…

      Never mind the shameless self-promotion, doing it while decrying self-promotion means I’m never looking at your app, full-stop.

    • jrflowers 1 hour ago
      Saying “sales pitches are bad” in a sales pitch does not help matters at all
  • cryptonector 48 minutes ago
    > Is the TikTok Ban a Chance to Rethink the Whole Internet?

    No. Next question.