this is like using an "ethically produced" brick to smash your foot with; The method of manufacturing the brick isn't the problem.
These formats are designed for a specific purpose; maximizing engagement to extract value.
so we've remove the incentive to extract value but we leave the predatory design that maximize engagement? You working in a different milieu but you are bringing the worst parts of the previous milieu along for the ride.
Please, anybody working on this kind of alternative social platform, we need to rethink how we interact online; decentralization leaves the worst parts of modern social media completely unaddressed.
On one hand, it seems impossible to supplant with Tik Tok without the engagement bait. On the other, replacing the additive sites with something just as addictive seems pointless. It is a tricky puzzle.
It's not necessarily the case that Loops is just as addictive as TikTok. Because TikTok is more than just short term videos. It's also a recommendation algorithm that slurps up as much information as it can about you to predict what you'll want to watch next. This recommendation algorithm plays a big role in making TikTok addictive. And as far as I'm aware, Loops does not have this functionality. It will just show you videos based on a much simpler algorithm that takes into account how recent a video is and how many likes/comments it has, or something like that, which will make it less addictive.
I’ve started wondering if I want a smartphone at all lately. The whole paradigm gets creepier by the day and the global corporate expectation you have one makes me not want it.
The unfortunate truth is that TikTok is just a dopamine hit machine. There's no puzzle here, this project is just "we built an open source slot machine that you can install in your own home". Replacing the casino is addressing a pointless problem.
I enjoy watching TikTok, especially local or niche creators who have just a couple hundred followers. This is not going to be a problem as you imagine.
One of the unspoken parts of the open source social media movement is to put the 'social' back in the 'social media'. There has been a fine line between true user-driven content and centrally-controlled (and often authoritarian-lite) algorithms; with major players (advertisers, oligarchs, governments) putting their thumb on the latter half to ensure that everyone stays isolated, divided, and pacified.
Everything you called out is a symptom of that control: engagement baiting, algorithmic manipulation, censorship and suppression. Absent these items, social media can be an incredible force for good and a hopeful longer term future of more peace.
Yep. Anything similar to what was Vine (i.e., TikTok, Youtube Shorts, Instagram Reels; e.g., very short videos with infinite scrolling) is ultimately too consuming literally a drug that robs one of the ability to concentrate and patience.
I think we need to encourage long form videos from 5 minutes to 1-2 hours and organize stuff around metadata (title, keywords/tags, lists, unique identifier) to mesh with a living, standardized ontology in a curated, sensible fashion that disallows proliferation of slop, too low quality stuff, and spam. From there, choose your own recommender and related algorithms/plugins.
The big gotcha of decentralized video platforms is content distribution that doesn't hug a self-hoster's server with barely any traffic.
I do not know how to phrase this politely. I like the platform and the concept is interesting. But the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.
You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it. I havent used Loops but im assuming its the same crowd as on Mastodon.
While I'm not interested in "short form" videos I had the same curiosity regarding the userbase and wanted to check myself.
The only way to look at the web view is to sign up, so I did. I completed E-Mail verification, then the account was disabled immediately with a pop up message to contact support. Not worth the effort.
I just tried exactly the same (at https://loops.video ), but I was able to watch without account, and registering afterwards also worked. Guess it's something on your side.
I can too, now. I wonder if any changes were made or if it was just a problem on my side.
Checking loops.video now, these were the first 5 videos I saw, in order:
1. Left-Wing American Politics
2. Promotion of the Fediverse and Loops
3. Left-Wing American Politics
4. A Non-English Play
5. Left-Wing American Politics
6. Stop Motion Flipbook Thing
7. Advocation for Loops Itself and Decentralization
8. Loops Promo
9. Left-Wing American Politics
So out of the first 9 videos, 4 centre around American politics, 1 I couldn't understand, 3 were promotion for the service I was currently using and only one was interesting and understandable.
> You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it.
What are you talking about? Sports, cars, and comedy are present everywhere on the internet. Guns are more of a niche and not without controversy, and it's certainly true that the incumbent networks place restrictions on some gun related content.
I'm from Canada, and I like cars for many of the same reasons I like programming. They're complicated, fickle, and go fucking fast when you get everything right. It's like mainlining adrenaline and validation at the same time.. who wouldn't like that?! They're just fucking fun
>You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it.
I'm pretty sure you can find all of those things on TikTok and Youtube Shorts. If you're talking about federated platforms, probably all of it but guns. And if you can't of course no one is stopping you from starting a channel or instance yourself.
I posted a cool clip from the UFC and got banned even though the content had a warning. It wasnt even that violent just a clean headkick ko.
If I started an instance it would get defederated because people would take one look and assume its toxic. But its not, Im not, I've spend years in the leftie techie activist spaces and cause no issues.
The whole point of federation is that you can build communities that share common values. I'm not sure what more you want. We can't force everyone to like the things you like.
However, it is a little silly to suggest that UFC is not extremely popular. I myself have wasted hours flipping through UFC reels.
You’d get defederated by instances that find that sort of thing objectionable, I guess. But, if you think it is a popular niche, couldn’t a separate community grow? That’s the whole promise of decentralization.
The problem with TikTok isn't the form, which is effectively StumbleUpon for short-form video (or Dave Winer's "river of news" in video form, if you prefer).
There's brainrot content on all platforms, but there's also ArtTok, BookTok, CraftTok, EduTok, FoodTok, GardenTok, HistoryTok, MathTok, MusicTok, PoliTok, ScienceTok, TechTok, and lots more.
Unlimited skipping until a video is sufficiently stimulating had a negative impact regardless of the content, while people limited to ten skips in ten minutes did not experience a negative impact. This suggests that the format itself has harmful cognitive effects.
Scrolling through a comment thread in an online forum such as this requires a lot of context switching. Does the context-switching theory of brain rot apply to text based feeds as well, or only video?
The problem I find with it is that it's such a monoculture. Everyone is copying everyone else.
As an example: there's this stupid skit going around. Someone asks a waiter "Could I ask you about the menu please?". The waiter comes really close and goes like "The men I please is none of your business".
It's an ok joke but I've seen literally 20 different people doing the same skit in the last two weeks and it gets so damn annoying. And it's not just this one. There's always one that is viral and everyone copies it.
Obviously meme formats from when I was younger (images and text) are fine, but meme formats that are newer (video and text) and brainrot. Or maybe it's just the same thing every generation does where they think the generations before them were hopelessly out of touch but the kids nowadays have no taste...
My impression is that it's a lack of remixing. I don't think recreating the exact same joke with different people in the video is particularly novel. It seems less like meme/remix culture and more like how you find a slightly different version of the same item (or literally a repackaged item from the same factory) for sale on Amazon from fifty different "brands" that have random ass names.
The meme could be good. The mixes could be good. But...is that what is actually happening? Or is someone hoping to create their own version that gets view in competition with the original so they can squeeze out some monetization from a trend and hoping the algorithm lotto smiles upon them?
I used TikTok and also never came across a meme like that. Or maybe I did once or twice, I just quickly swiped away (or if something I’m not interested in is shown repeatedly I click not interested and it’s gone at least for a long time). If you’re shown the same meme from 20 different people chances are you just kept watching them, maybe with disapproval, but your device can’t read your brainwaves yet so the service just thinks you’re super interested.
And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
It’s a culture thing I guess. Overlay videos of other videos and the memeing videos has been in TikTok since the beginning. Youtube would probably ban the former under a copyright strike or something.
Most memes and most application of memes were not that funny. Scrolling reddit 10 years ago is not that different from TikTok just with pictures instead of videos.
Eh. They really weren't. "I'm firin' mah lazer" wasn't funny and yet for a while it was ubiquitous. I'd wager in fact that most memes weren't inherently funny: their purpose is in-group signalling for the most part.
Those aren't the kinds of book-related videos that I see, so at some point The Algorithm must've decided I wasn't interested in porn for women (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I'll come at it from another angle. Some of the most popular podcasts (and YouTubers) produce hours of long-form video (an acceptable format) daily. Without naming names, some of those convey less information in 2-3 hours of video than some short form creators do in 2-3 minutes.
The medium influences the message, but the channel still matters.
(And some messengers, especially public intellectuals, are not doing the long form video/audio at all. One prominent TikTok poster has a $$$$$ job as a public intellectual and outside of short form, the other options to consume his content involve $$$ subscriptions or $$$$ in-person events. I'll take his 5-minute videos over those alternatives.)
Separately, I am chuckling at people saying TikTok is "all X" or "nothing but Y" or "overrun with Z." Do people still not know that statements like these are confessions?
Bluesky proved no such thing. Merge bluesky with truth social and you’d be back to the same thing again. Both platforms are just full of people retreating into smaller bubbles, the underlying issues are still there just less common.
I feel justified turning this around on you and asking what is good about it? It's disposable media. In and out of brain in seconds. There are any number of better ways to waste time let alone ones that don't show you ads.
You're pardoned, but I have much more fond memories of magazine baskets in bathrooms. Today you should at least have a Switch in there ;)
But also, of course people aren't just using these apps in the bathroom, they are using them everywhere. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't miss scrolling the bathroom.
The Economist app and Inoreader are higher on my front page than Instagram is, so I am being slightly tongue in cheek.
But I do maintain that there is a place for mindless time killing. Life is stressful, I'm constantly switching between different projects and responsibilities, and a few minutes of mindless scrolling is nice.
But it is very addicting and can very easily vacuum up many hours of time I can't get back.
Oh ya, I did not mean to rag on mindless time killing! I just mean, I used to doodle or play guitar or drums far more often than I do now when I was looking for mindless distractions (which is not to say that any of those things can't also be mindful, which is maybe my point? I dunno). And of course I watched a lot of TV which, back then, was more limited so at least had the benefit of being able to use it as common ground when meeting new people. Nowadays it's a viral video that a million people have seen has not been seem by billions. Any even so, we could have a much more in depth conversation about Star Trek than an 8 second video we both happened to see.
Anyway, I'm a bit crusty about the world right now so sorta going off. Don't mind me.
They are absolutely not the same! I mean, they come in all forms so yes, they are overlaps, but many magazines have long form articles that you can take in over several, uh, sessions. You can re-read them catching new things each time. As a guest, bathroom magazines had that funny specialness to them in that they were curated by the host. You get "recommendations" far outside of what The Algorithm would ever give you (this is actually how I learned about Scott Pilgrim comics 25 years ago). You're basically "forced" to read/look at something the host actually cares about which, if you were interested in the material after having some private time to digest it on your own, made for more meaningful conversations, way better than, "Hey! Check out this video I like! I'm going to watch with you and eagerly await your reaction!"
But the most basic functionality of going to the next video is only available via scroll (no keyboard arrow down?) and it has a really long animation and delay?
Just feels awful to use.
I feel if you wanna win in this space, especially with people who prefer more "free" platforms, then the non-app version should be a bigger priority IMO.
Aw man can we not flip the script and maybe build less of these things? It’s saturated and not really helping society but rather creating more addiction machines.
Great to see this progressing.
Tried it out just now after last testing it over 6 months ago.
I’d say the main “feature” id want to see added is a mandatory field on upload to tick if it’s AI content. Then a tag on videos that are Ai and at the account level to filter out AI content.
This is actually pretty exciting. Excited to see how this turns out.
But I am wondering how to keep it financially possible to operate the platform.
Also, 95+% of the users probably don't care that much about censorship and privacy enough to switch platform.
Glad to see more platforms on the Fediverse. Couldn’t be less interested in this particular one since it’s short form video. Those who like this medium: enjoy.
I may find short form video distasteful, but it’s less distasteful than those who want to dictate the media formats that others consume. Get a grip, people.
the format isn't inherently bad, it's the algorithm optimizing for engagement over everything else that's the problem. short video is actually great for tutorials, explanations, behind-the-scenes stuff. i make AI-generated video content and the short form works well for documentary-style clips where you're mixing stills with selective animation.
the real question is whether federation changes the incentive structure enough. if the recommendation algo is still optimized for watch time, you just get tiktok with extra steps. if instances can tune their own ranking, that's actually interesting.
Counterpoint: The format is bad. The constant stream of videos, skipping between videos at (relatively) your own pace, the anticipation about the next video; it's similar to electronic gambling machines.
Gambling is bad because it wastes people's money. Short-form videos just waste people's time, the same as the hours of television that older generations spend watching every day but with more diversified propaganda.
"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. people wasting time staring at screens is the prevalent problem of today. with TV it was not as bad because there was/is only one in a room so it becomes shared experience. phones are worse.
Go a little further. Think about "how." How do slot machines get people to waste their money for hours-on-end? How does TikTok use short-form video to get people to scroll for hours-on-end? What is the mechanism?
It's OK to waste time. All art and entertainment is a waste of time. Most of what people do on HN is waste time. Arguably anything besides eating and procreative sex is a waste of time.
To use the analogy of other vice industries like gambling or alcohol, would you rather buy those products from shady unregulated vendors or more transparent regulated entities?
That’s the type of analogy we might make in this case.
Obviously many people (literally billions) like this format and use it in relative moderation to unwind and kill time. Hell, I’ve even gotten productive helpful information out of the format on occasion.
It’s also taken a critical role in journalism and current events.
Unless you’re advocating prohibition, the cat is out of the bag.
Being able to find a short form video alternative that isn’t owned by commercial/government interests is a positive thing.
Question: how many people do you think would watch your short form ai videos if they had to actually seek them out and choose to watch them? The reason why the format is problematic is because it feeds off the dopamine hit of scrolling to the next piece of unknown content.
It’s well known that if people need to be intentional about what they consume they consume far less. Something tells me 15 second AI videos aren’t at the top of most people’s lists.
There’s a reason why we don’t want to show kids fast pace videos with cuts that are less than 4s: it’s not good for the brain. The format is just not good for us
It's not just bad, it's the worst format that could exist, if radio and TV have already ruined the attention span this one seems to have the aim of doing just that by showing short content with almost no effort to understand it, a lot of context switching every 10-15 seconds and videos designed to attract as much attention as possible.
It's interesting, I doubt it'll ever be successful.
Look, the reason a lot of content makes it's way to Youtube, tiktok, and twitter, etc is because the creators can earn money from the platform. On youtube and tiktok, you can send gifts to your favorite creator. That incentivizes creators to create content.
loops will never have that feature. It's really hard to legally distribute money like that. But further, the decentralized nature of it means that you'll never know if your funds ends up in your creator's account or the instant account.
Without any sort of path to make money, the only content on the platform will be works of passion. Maybe that's a good thing, but it means these people will ultimately burn out.
But on the plus side, it means you probably won't end up with an endless stream of AI slop.
Instagram pays hardly anything. I don't know anyone doing it for that reason. It's more advertising for their other services. Like onlyfans, selling physical stuff, lectures, events etc.
And of course the people who do it for fun, usually the best content. It doesn't matter they'll eventually stop. There's always new ones.
I'm not sure about tiktok, but I doubt they pay much more than insta.
"Open-source TikTok" is like reading "open source slot machine". Not something you should be proud of, no matter how much you sugarcoat it with "All the fun of short-form video, none of the corporate control"
Short form content is a medium that isn't going away. Short form content is not inherently harmful, although short form content replacing or displacing other important mediums arguably is. When I think about the issues stemming from short form content, I don't think about the inherent medium, I think about the providers and their capabilities to use the sum of all consumed content by a user in the name of a ulterior motive at scale. While I haven't investigated it too deeply, Loops seems to be an effort in patching that. Is your objection in the marketing language or in the inherent technology?
Short form user generated content being served in our faces in a constant and ever updating feed fucks up our brains. It does not matter if it's proprietary or FOSS or non profit.
>Is your objection in the marketing language or in the inherent technology?
I think saying it's like an open source slot machine is pretty much self-explanatory
For 20+ years World of Warcraft has dominated the MMORPG genre. There have been a host of challengers and they've all miserably failed. In fact, there have only been a handful of successes (eg UO, EQ, FF14).
And what do almost all of these challengers have in common? Some version of "the PvP is going to be amazing". Why do these companies like PVP? Because it's essentially user-generated content. It increases time spent in game without having to create content, which is expensive.
Thing is, players of this genre don't want PVP. Even in WoW, I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase actively engages in PVP activity. So, by focusing on PVP, you're actually cut your potential market by 90%. Before you've written a single line of code or created any artwork. Put another way, you're spending valuable development effort on features only a tiny minority of players care about or even want.
I'm reminded of this whenever somebody on HN talks about federation. The only people who care about federation are... other people on HN. It does literally nothing for users. It greatly complicates the implementation. The last successes of federation are POTS and Email. It's quite literally never succeeded since. And the problems with federation that POTS and Email continue to have to this day should be an object lesson in why it's a bad idea.
Choosing federation from the start is choosing to lose. I'm sorry but it's true.
A small minority of loud neurotics shouldn't get to dictate what social media other people use. I don't know a single person who feels like social media has affected their mental health; it seems to be a uniquely American leftist thing.
Small minority? What about all the studies and statistics both from third parties and from the social networks themselves showing a direct effect on the _majority_ of users? Not that I expected a better argument from someone that crams in "leftists" as an unwarranted snide remark
I mean, I love the idea behind the fediverse, but the problem is, as long as you got federated instances of anything, instance admins will use their userbase for petty bxtchfights and purity contests.
and no, selfhosting is not an alternative, anything Fediverse requires a lot of resources, is ripe with exploits and exposes you to significant legal risk from griefers (e.g. you get DM'd CSAM by someone, your server automatically downloads it => congratulations, you are now a pedo under at least German law).
These formats are designed for a specific purpose; maximizing engagement to extract value.
so we've remove the incentive to extract value but we leave the predatory design that maximize engagement? You working in a different milieu but you are bringing the worst parts of the previous milieu along for the ride.
Please, anybody working on this kind of alternative social platform, we need to rethink how we interact online; decentralization leaves the worst parts of modern social media completely unaddressed.
If there is an algorithm putting stuff on people’s faces then there will always be an incentive imo.
Everything you called out is a symptom of that control: engagement baiting, algorithmic manipulation, censorship and suppression. Absent these items, social media can be an incredible force for good and a hopeful longer term future of more peace.
I think we need to encourage long form videos from 5 minutes to 1-2 hours and organize stuff around metadata (title, keywords/tags, lists, unique identifier) to mesh with a living, standardized ontology in a curated, sensible fashion that disallows proliferation of slop, too low quality stuff, and spam. From there, choose your own recommender and related algorithms/plugins.
The big gotcha of decentralized video platforms is content distribution that doesn't hug a self-hoster's server with barely any traffic.
I don't have a TikTok account, never have and I doubt I ever will. Am I missing anything?
I gave up fags (cigarettes) around eight years ago. Would you like some ideas for coping and abstention strategies?
You'll never find sports, guns, cars, comedy and a lot of other mainstream content on these platforms even though there is nothing inherently offensive about it. I havent used Loops but im assuming its the same crowd as on Mastodon.
The only way to look at the web view is to sign up, so I did. I completed E-Mail verification, then the account was disabled immediately with a pop up message to contact support. Not worth the effort.
Checking loops.video now, these were the first 5 videos I saw, in order:
1. Left-Wing American Politics
2. Promotion of the Fediverse and Loops
3. Left-Wing American Politics
4. A Non-English Play
5. Left-Wing American Politics
6. Stop Motion Flipbook Thing
7. Advocation for Loops Itself and Decentralization
8. Loops Promo
9. Left-Wing American Politics
So out of the first 9 videos, 4 centre around American politics, 1 I couldn't understand, 3 were promotion for the service I was currently using and only one was interesting and understandable.
What are you talking about? Sports, cars, and comedy are present everywhere on the internet. Guns are more of a niche and not without controversy, and it's certainly true that the incumbent networks place restrictions on some gun related content.
Modern masculinity has lapped femininity in how utterly performative it is. This shit is so tiring.
I'm from Canada, and I like cars for many of the same reasons I like programming. They're complicated, fickle, and go fucking fast when you get everything right. It's like mainlining adrenaline and validation at the same time.. who wouldn't like that?! They're just fucking fun
Are football and F1 not immensely popular in Europe and the rest of the world?
> Modern masculinity has lapped femininity in how utterly performative it is. This shit is so tiring.
People like what they like, big whoop.
I'm pretty sure you can find all of those things on TikTok and Youtube Shorts. If you're talking about federated platforms, probably all of it but guns. And if you can't of course no one is stopping you from starting a channel or instance yourself.
If I started an instance it would get defederated because people would take one look and assume its toxic. But its not, Im not, I've spend years in the leftie techie activist spaces and cause no issues.
However, it is a little silly to suggest that UFC is not extremely popular. I myself have wasted hours flipping through UFC reels.
There's brainrot content on all platforms, but there's also ArtTok, BookTok, CraftTok, EduTok, FoodTok, GardenTok, HistoryTok, MathTok, MusicTok, PoliTok, ScienceTok, TechTok, and lots more.
Unlimited skipping until a video is sufficiently stimulating had a negative impact regardless of the content, while people limited to ten skips in ten minutes did not experience a negative impact. This suggests that the format itself has harmful cognitive effects.
As an example: there's this stupid skit going around. Someone asks a waiter "Could I ask you about the menu please?". The waiter comes really close and goes like "The men I please is none of your business".
It's an ok joke but I've seen literally 20 different people doing the same skit in the last two weeks and it gets so damn annoying. And it's not just this one. There's always one that is viral and everyone copies it.
The meme could be good. The mixes could be good. But...is that what is actually happening? Or is someone hoping to create their own version that gets view in competition with the original so they can squeeze out some monetization from a trend and hoping the algorithm lotto smiles upon them?
And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
congratulations on discovering mimesis
edit: which is to say I'm not positive the format isn't the problem.
Those aren't the kinds of book-related videos that I see, so at some point The Algorithm must've decided I wasn't interested in porn for women (not that there's anything wrong with that).
The medium influences the message, but the channel still matters.
(And some messengers, especially public intellectuals, are not doing the long form video/audio at all. One prominent TikTok poster has a $$$$$ job as a public intellectual and outside of short form, the other options to consume his content involve $$$ subscriptions or $$$$ in-person events. I'll take his 5-minute videos over those alternatives.)
Separately, I am chuckling at people saying TikTok is "all X" or "nothing but Y" or "overrun with Z." Do people still not know that statements like these are confessions?
this level of reductive thought termination goes nowhere
This is a great writeup on why short-form content is overall a net negative for us with a human brain.
If I'm on the toilet not having a fun time, pardon me for wanting to see some cat videos instead of solving a Rubik's Cube, I guess?
But also, of course people aren't just using these apps in the bathroom, they are using them everywhere. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't miss scrolling the bathroom.
But I do maintain that there is a place for mindless time killing. Life is stressful, I'm constantly switching between different projects and responsibilities, and a few minutes of mindless scrolling is nice.
But it is very addicting and can very easily vacuum up many hours of time I can't get back.
Anyway, I'm a bit crusty about the world right now so sorta going off. Don't mind me.
But the most basic functionality of going to the next video is only available via scroll (no keyboard arrow down?) and it has a really long animation and delay?
Just feels awful to use.
I feel if you wanna win in this space, especially with people who prefer more "free" platforms, then the non-app version should be a bigger priority IMO.
Needed 2 tries to sign up, and uploading a video from the camera roll failed (5-7 tries)
I’d say the main “feature” id want to see added is a mandatory field on upload to tick if it’s AI content. Then a tag on videos that are Ai and at the account level to filter out AI content.
Otherwise it’s going to be a slops fest.
But sure, something like this probably requires a fundamentally different revenue model. Maybe even the one where people donate to server operators.
I may find short form video distasteful, but it’s less distasteful than those who want to dictate the media formats that others consume. Get a grip, people.
the real question is whether federation changes the incentive structure enough. if the recommendation algo is still optimized for watch time, you just get tiktok with extra steps. if instances can tune their own ranking, that's actually interesting.
Gambling is bad because it wastes people's money. Short-form videos just waste people's time, the same as the hours of television that older generations spend watching every day but with more diversified propaganda.
That’s the type of analogy we might make in this case.
Obviously many people (literally billions) like this format and use it in relative moderation to unwind and kill time. Hell, I’ve even gotten productive helpful information out of the format on occasion.
It’s also taken a critical role in journalism and current events.
Unless you’re advocating prohibition, the cat is out of the bag.
Being able to find a short form video alternative that isn’t owned by commercial/government interests is a positive thing.
It’s well known that if people need to be intentional about what they consume they consume far less. Something tells me 15 second AI videos aren’t at the top of most people’s lists.
"people don't want to watch my AI slop, it's the algorithm's fault!!"
Ha
haha
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/01/here-are-the-apps-battling...
Look, the reason a lot of content makes it's way to Youtube, tiktok, and twitter, etc is because the creators can earn money from the platform. On youtube and tiktok, you can send gifts to your favorite creator. That incentivizes creators to create content.
loops will never have that feature. It's really hard to legally distribute money like that. But further, the decentralized nature of it means that you'll never know if your funds ends up in your creator's account or the instant account.
Without any sort of path to make money, the only content on the platform will be works of passion. Maybe that's a good thing, but it means these people will ultimately burn out.
But on the plus side, it means you probably won't end up with an endless stream of AI slop.
And of course the people who do it for fun, usually the best content. It doesn't matter they'll eventually stop. There's always new ones.
I'm not sure about tiktok, but I doubt they pay much more than insta.
>Is your objection in the marketing language or in the inherent technology?
I think saying it's like an open source slot machine is pretty much self-explanatory
1. users and initial flywheel. 2. content moderation.
And what do almost all of these challengers have in common? Some version of "the PvP is going to be amazing". Why do these companies like PVP? Because it's essentially user-generated content. It increases time spent in game without having to create content, which is expensive.
Thing is, players of this genre don't want PVP. Even in WoW, I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase actively engages in PVP activity. So, by focusing on PVP, you're actually cut your potential market by 90%. Before you've written a single line of code or created any artwork. Put another way, you're spending valuable development effort on features only a tiny minority of players care about or even want.
I'm reminded of this whenever somebody on HN talks about federation. The only people who care about federation are... other people on HN. It does literally nothing for users. It greatly complicates the implementation. The last successes of federation are POTS and Email. It's quite literally never succeeded since. And the problems with federation that POTS and Email continue to have to this day should be an object lesson in why it's a bad idea.
Choosing federation from the start is choosing to lose. I'm sorry but it's true.
Until enshittification happens. Example: the fall of Freenode.
I mean, I love the idea behind the fediverse, but the problem is, as long as you got federated instances of anything, instance admins will use their userbase for petty bxtchfights and purity contests.
and no, selfhosting is not an alternative, anything Fediverse requires a lot of resources, is ripe with exploits and exposes you to significant legal risk from griefers (e.g. you get DM'd CSAM by someone, your server automatically downloads it => congratulations, you are now a pedo under at least German law).
One alternative I’ve heard of that apparently became popular is Skylight: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/26/tiktok-alternative-skyligh...