TikTok boom: Brits spent a quarter of their waking hours in lockdown online – Ofcom Brits are spending more time than ever online, according to comms watchdog Ofcom's latest Online Nation report, and it's all thanks - surprise, surprise - to coronavirus. In April, at the height of lockdown, the average person was online for four hours and two minutes each day. That, the regulator says, represents more than a …
Wow! I'm shocked, stunned and my ghast couldn't be more flabbered!
Who would have suspected that people locked down in their homes would try to communicate on the inter toobs?
Whether or not more hours a day becomes habitual or not will depend on whatever becomes ''normal' in society; Dan Doodle's comments sounded like wishful thinking.
I mean, there's the work computer, online eight hours a day to talk to the work servers, and the home laptop, online all the time it's turned on... might be sixteen or seventeen hours a day. Or are they just counting the time I'm actually accessing something? And if so, how do they tell?
TikTok is a revelation. Rather than looking online for news or something to read which is inevitably dull and only a slight revision on what you read a few hours earlier, TikTok is something positive, interesting and informative to watch ( once it's learned that you aren't interested in dancing videos ).
You might think it inane but it beats reading shampoo bottles when you're on the toilet.
"TikTok is something positive, interesting and informative to watch"
But what exactly does that have to do with TikTok? It confuses me in exactly the same way as Twitter - there are already plenty of ways of posting text and videos, so how exactly does imposing a length limit as your sole distinguishing feature suddenly make it desirable? TikTok is literally just a really shit version of YouTube, or Vimeo, or even Facebook, so what exactly is the point? Hell, speaking of Twitter, anyone remember Vine? Probably not. TikTok is an exact copy of it. But no-one cared in the slightest and even the cash-haemoraging Twitter decided it wasn't worth keeping. So why is TikTok suddenly considered so amazing, and full of interesting, informative stuff when it's just a poor copy of existing services, including ones that have already failed when trying to do the same thing?
God I'm old. Now get off my lawn.
Facebook is for friends and family sharing bits of their lives, some nastiness, some of the worst politics of right and left. Instagram is similar to Facebook but picture oriented and doesn't really have politics so is nicer.
Twitter is for nasty mobs arguing over minutia - it's responsible for the worst of left wing politics ( right wing stuff doesn't tend to take hold ).
I'm trying to get less Twitter in my life. I've uninstalled it from my phone.
TikTok is different in that 1 minute videos are shared, (automatically?) categorised and watched, one after another, by people whose account is deemed suitable for the video. You can also follow people who you find interesting. For example I see occasional videos from a British doctor talking about weird medical facts, etc. I see historical facts ( a chap who collects WW1 memorabilia does interesting videos ).
The videos are one minute long and, once you've "trained" it by skipping tedius stuff like the dancing, it's mostly interesting. If you like the thing you watch it, if it bores you you skip it or press "not interested" and it learns to give you interesting things.
It's the first social media platform that pretty much always makes me happier when I use it. The rest are either often nasty or boring.
My guess is that TikTok "won" because of the algorithm of which video to show you works much better than Vines ever did ( I never used Vine and I only installed TikTok out of curiosity but I'm glad I did ).
It's not competing with YouTube because it decides what to show you rather than the other way around so it's much more passive.
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