TikTok and the Fall of the Social Media Giants
Cal Newport,
Aug 02, 2022
There are two types of feedback for an AI-driven social media recommendation service: explicit and implicit. Explicit feedback includes things like likes, follows, retweets, etc., where the user is actively expressing a preference. Implicit feedback is everything else, and includes things like what you view, how long you watch, your facial expressions, etc. For the purposes of this article, Facebook is based on explicit feedback, while TikTok is based on implicit feedback. Why does this matter? The author believes that if Facebook follows TikTok into relying on implicit feedback, this will be a "poison pill" that "that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution" and leaves us with "more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements." Sure - except it just doesn't matter. There's a third type of feedback, which I'll call "third party feedback", and that's all the feedback that comes from someone else and influences what you see. That's the most important kind of feedback. Advertisers, political campaigners, people promoting their own videos - these are what matter to both TikTok andf Facebook. That's what we don't see in "more human online engagements" and that's why their success and sustainability is so limited. Via Helen Blunden.
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