How are people feeling about the Tik Tok ban?

Reddit is so full of takes on this. Seems like most people are mad about it? Here are my unorganized thoughts…

-I kind of hate the short form video format. I think it’s unhealthy, we already have an attention span problem and reels/shorts/tt are like giving coke to an ADHD toddler. People have compared social media to smoking. I thought that was crazy once but now I think it’s an apt comparison.

-I can’t believe people think this stifles free speech. That’s the dumbest take. No one is stopping you from dancing in front of your iPhone and sharing the video. We are stopping the Chinese Communist Party from having an algorithmic distribution control over your dance videos. Use another platform.

-Tik Tok dug their own grave by being too good at addicting kids. Parents see their kids retreat into these accursed smart phones and we instinctively know it’s not great. A 10% effort at social consciousness would have done a lot for change the negative perception people have of this app. Maybe even just not allowing the scroll to be endless.

-Meta’s problem is that unless you’re a full time creator it’s almost impossible to build an audience. It’s pay for play over there. As a small creative business owner, I can tell you that it has been incredibly annoying to deal with their forced pivots. First we could post pictures with text. Then we all had to do snapchats via “stories”. Now we basically have to be mini video producers, which takes like 10x the time and effort, AND they want you to pay for boosting it AND they want you to subscribe to their verified service which only grants you baseline customer support. It just gets harder and harder to use the platform and the reward is always held a little further away.

-Social media sucks. I include Reddit in this evaluation. I’ll be celebrating the death of Tik Tok.