What kind of knowledge are all you getting from Tiktok? Technical knowledge? Philosophical? I thought the app was for lip syncing + lazy cheerleading and the occasional Chinese data mining. But I am perfectly happy hopping on the bandwagon if it has substance!
I just use all the various sites as tools, instead of having loyalty anywhere. Search for something you're interested in and see what shows up. YouTube is definitely no longer the central repository of everything that it once was. A good way to demonstrate the average difference between YouTube and TikTok is to show the same video from the same guy, but optimized for different platforms. This is a video on deadlift form (in weight training):
No idea what the deal is, but I'm guessing the YouTube algorithm is optimized for longer form videos so a lot of stuff ends up with just a lot of filler. The TikTok video is everything in the YouTube video, but with all the fluff removed. I've also used TikTok for foreign language lessons with excellent results, largely for the same reason. The videos tend to have a lot better information density than what YouTube optimizes for.
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Also, just watching that YouTube version again. Perhaps one of the best things is no more "If you like this video be sure to like, subscribe, and comment below. It really helps the channel out." An algorithm that relies on such a stupid, gameable, opt-in metric is always going to be inherently dysfunctional.
The “meta game” of optimal length on YouTube has been shifting towards longer videos for quite a while - one of the more important metrics towards monetising is “watch hours”. So you get a lot of filler.
YouTube also has shorts, which it measures somewhat differently (as views as opposed to watch hours).
Great links! Thank you for this comparison. I am a huge fan of spreading content across platforms as to avoid a monolith. I will be looking in to this Tiktok. And I truly cannot stand the "smash the like" whatever every. single. damn. video.
It's a totally under rated platform imo - there are a lot of high quality creators!
In particular I'm following UX (@designertom), CX and design channels as I'm still transitioning from backend to full stack development. Tech news, Producthunt-like content (especially in bleed edge areas like AI), art stuff, technical gardening (@transformativeadventures), science stuff (@hankgreen) and health/workout (@dr_idz).
The initial problem with tiktok is that you need quite a bit of time to train the algorithm to actually give you the stuff you want as the search and other discovery areas are really bad on purpose.
Also worth noting that Tiktok now supports long form content so some video can get pretty long. The player also has 2x video speed and good seeker so it's easy to roll through a lot of information very efficently!
I use it to figure out AI image techniques. Basically the theory is in papers, the nearly accepted stuff is in blogs, but the people on cutting edge are in youtube and tiktok trying 100 things before they can post 1
