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I dont really understand this. Does tiktok have a group call feature now? Or are they equating short form videos of strangers to “hanging out”?
Yeah I would consider Discord as more of a space people can “hang out” in.
I use discord but I didn’t realize how much others used it till I got new roommates. They basically have it perpetually open on the side, a perpetual portal to their friend network
It’s one of the easiest ways of calling and texting friends without exposing your phone number.
I rarely open discord on my PC, but I have it as an app on my phone which is always connected.
Yeah I open discord every morning before I open slack for work. I manage two 2k+ communities and am an active member of dozens of other niche communities… Two of which involves members meeting up regularly IRL. It’s the best tool for direct social engagement on the Internet.
Yeah I was on board until the tik tok part
It’s less about hanging out and more about occupying the time I guess. Teens hang out in a third space being social because it burns free time and releases dopamine. When you can achieve that by sitting in your room, getting dopamine by watching tiktok and sending them to your friends wordlessly, the need for the third space drops
I kind of get what the Twitter post was trying to get at its just written poorly. Anything that’s not them participating in the economy is considered bad.
The death of the third place predates tiktok.
Tiktok has DMs and livestreams, which can kind of shake out to be about the same.
Are kids disallowed from hanging out in parks, school clubs, or others’ homes now? What’s changed?
Nothing, it’s a ridiculous argument as a rationalization for arguing against the tiktok ban. I’ve seen a number of posts today trying to paint it as some attach on democracy or youth culture. The fact is that tiktok captures a giant amount of data and is directly accessible by a hostile foreign government. The ban makes sense.
The ban makes sense because companies in the US tried and failed horribly to gain traction in their youths. And it was critical of western governments being complicit in war crimes in Palestine.
Tell me, before tiktok, how many war crimes US commited were conveniently swept under the rug without consequences?
Can’t have public be aware of that, can we now?
But US wants to shape the narratives for the rest of the world with facebook, instagram and twitter and others. Failing to do that in their own country, they want to ban it as a last ditch resort. Can’t have narratives that don’t align with their propaganda and be critical of their military industrial complexes.
But you do you. I have no horse in the race but I love the outrage when people are on the receiving end of “foreign influence in social media”. Not like social media companies in the US were surveilling rest of the world for the last decade.
And it’s not like US hasn’t done this to Japan when it was going to become a better economy before.
Cope.
Wow, what a bunch of crap. Are you really, really holding up tiktok as a bastion of truth? Are you not aware of the many was crimes that US soldiers have been involved with that have sparked global outage, way before tiktok existed, because there really is a free press?
The US doesn’t have soldiers in Gaza, it’s not commiting war crimes there. You can make a good case that the arms were providing to an ally are being used to commit a genocide, which is plenty bad enough, but don’t weaken the term “war crime” by using it inappropriately. And it’s not like people are only finding out about it through tiktok. Go read NPR and you’ll see quite a lot about it. Read AP. Read Reuters.
But sure, go trust a site whose algorithms are controlled by the Chinese government and think that you aren’t being manipulated. You do you.
Exactly… if you want news - go to the sources of news. If you want funny dances and horribly acted skits - go to social media
Parks are miserable, school clubs are worse, and it seemed like when I was a kid everyone was too embarrassed to have someone at their house.
Why are parks miserable?
Back in the day parks were well maintained by people who cared because they were a primary place many folks went to hang out.
Nowadays Xbox and the internet exist. So parks are much more poorly funded, poorly cleaned, and can be dangerous due to lack of oversight or supervision.
It depends a lot on where you are and where you go though. I went to a very nice park just last year that was clearly well maintained, and I’ve gone to some severely sketchy looking parks for the better part of a decade before that. As with all things, nothing is a monolith. But some parks are truly miserable now.
Can you elaborate on the effect of Xboxes on the parks budget? You kinda postulate that there is a connection without ever substantiating that.
People have things they can do inside for fun now, ergo less people (especially less kids and teens) are visiting parks. Nobody visiting the park means nobody has a vested interest in working or paying to upkeep it, and nobody is complaining about its lack of upkeep.
People couldn’t have fun inside before xboxes? Come on now.
You know as well as I do that people are sitting at home on the couch far more in the modern day than ever before in human history.
I don’t know man, even in my grandparent’s youth, 19 teens to the 1930s, they complained that city parks were dangerous, full of trash, and often homeless camps. The only ones that weren’t were parks that were in areas rich people spent a lot of time in. This seems to be the same today.
Ever been a teenager at a park? All that’s there is grass and maybe some picnic tables. What’re you gonna do? Smoke weed and sit? Throw a ball? The shit is boring and comes with weather.
And somehow there’s more stuff to do standing outside a storefront?
I used to go into Walmart to play Rock Band because we couldn’t afford to buy it.
Yet somehow the garbage dispensary known as tictok is preferable? Fuck off.
Parks are not miserable. It sounds like you’re the miserable one.
Sounds to me like you were born old. I didn’t say shit about tiktok. I don’t use it. You’re here to whine about others looking something you don’t like.
parks
A bunch of teenagers hanging out in a park will probably have the cops called on them
school clubs
The budgets for clubs have been cut. Also, there’s no school in the summer
others’ homes
If you don’t drive there’s no way to get there.
Tiktok spun up the Chinese disinformation bots
TikTok suggested that its users should petition politicians and the public to prevent its punitive purchase. It’s just kids with degenerating attention spans.
Glad to see someone pointing this out.
There are so many beautiful parks that are within walking distance or a short bike/bus ride.
How about libraries or all of the game shops that host free events for everyone to join?
Get your head out of your phone and see the life around you!
I think it’s very regional. Libraries and parks are going to get the first cuts when local government tightens its belts, they’re often save havens for the unhoused or those otherwise let down by society, and together that means in many areas they’re seen as maybe not unsafe, but not places overprotective parents want their kids going.
Absolutely. In fact, I have found that areas with the most disposable income also get the best city funding. So the people who can afford to pay for third spaces (restaurants, clubs, golfing) also have the nicest local parks and public spaces.
In my city, the low-income area local parks are literally paved with concrete and next to train tracks, busy streets and/or factories. It’s utterly bullshit
Read the room. You’re on lemmy. Land of entitlement and rage. Parks and libraries won’t be cool until they can figure out how capitalism and Joe Biden are trying to destroy them.
My man, you are completely Reddit brained. What are you even saying?
Six months ago, everyone hated TikTok because of the data collecting and spyware…… Now it’s a nationally beloved American icon of freedom and expression….
Simply different people expressing their opinion when they’re the ones concerned with the change happening at the moment.
…ooooooor TikTok propaganda through social media works… Never on me though!
I still hate TikTok and am glad for the ban if it makes you feel better. Basically, what the other person said. It’s spyware trash that uses the way it controls opinions to control opinions on this topic too
coughs
Biggest online ad company is an American. Their job is to create and manipulate general public opinion for companies
Ok you win this round. Let’s agree to compromise - can we break up, ban, or regulate all of them?
Absolutely, now how do we go about that?
Violence
deleted by creator
I still hate it for that, but I also hate that the US government only cares if our privacy is violated by foreign actors and not a bunch of Silicon Valley dweebs.
Honestly, while it’s obvious why Tiktok is getting singled out, I hope it can be used as a precedent for cracking down on other data collecting companies.
It won’t, though, particularly because it’s specifically not required for TikTok to allow users to download their data if they’re divested to an American company before the deadline. Had anyone really cared, this would be a case for data privacy laws. But that’s not what it’s really about.
I know the details of the ban, but it will still bring the conversation to the general public more then not doing anyway at all.
I don’t feel confident about that. The bill has two elements of wide appeal: 1) General distrust of China and 2) General dislike of TikTok. At least from what I’ve seen, very little attention has been paid to the privacy/data collection part of the bill outside of tech-saavy circles. I feel like GDPR would’ve been the much larger push for data privacy, but it has lost its novelty and nothing has changed on this side of the pond. Hell, even Cambridge Analytica hardly sparked any lasting changes.
1.I don’t trust China.
- I don’t trust Tiktok or like ultra short form media.
So cool, cool.
I really don’t have a horse in this race. Politics is a spectators sport and I’m just coasting until climate change makes this all moot.
My point wasn’t really that you shouldn’t care about those things, just that I don’t think this bill will make any difference when it comes to increasing data privacy protections. In the “best case” (by government standards), TikTok will still be around. It’ll just be operated by a US company, and those have not exactly been known to be responsible with user data.
The biggest concern even for people who hate TikTok is the broad wording of the bill that possibly restricts using a VPN to access said banned sites. It’s a very dangerous precedent to set and is a much bigger part of the opposition than any particular love of TikTok.
Yeah I think no one stops to ask who those silicon valley jerks sell our data to. The answer is anyone. Including big brother who otherwise cannot legally collect it - but it’s legal now because a company did it and we bought it!
Exactly. It’s like it’s only bad if China gets all our data and influences us without Zuck and Musk getting their cut. But as long as they have to buy data and ads from them it’s fine.
If you can’t see why it’s exponentially worse for a foreign country to illegally gather data from citizens of another country, I don’t know what to tell you.
This is not to excuse it happening from American-based companies either. It’s bad. But china doing it is a whole different level of bad.
Except that China can just buy it from American companies, mostly because our government won’t do anything to protect our privacy.
it’s even worse if it’s GCHQ gathering it and then just handing it over to the CIA, where the cia gathering it themselves would be illegal, but they use treaties and diplomacy as loopholes to subvert our actual legal protections.
Astroturfing
Jesus Christ not everything is fake, it’s one of thy most popular apps in the world of course there are people like it.
You really need to try and get back in touch with reality
What if I told you that having absolutely no community third spaces is a result of car dependency?
Ever heard people complain that it’s impossible to just meet new people in real life because everyone everywhere is busy? It’s because we don’t have third spaces anymore, and one really big reason for that is car dependency. People really don’t like to drive, for the most part, and they’re generally not going to go drive to hang out somewhere; it becomes both dangerous and a special pain in the ass if alcohol enters the equation, as it does for many (but not all) third spaces. In short, if people go to a third space, it’s usually going to be one inside their own hyper local community or they won’t bother. These are all generalities, of course; miss me with anecdotal exceptions. Well, we keep our cities badly zoned and low density so that you don’t really have hyper local third spaces, you just get weird, semi-local, sanitized big box “third spaces” (massive sarcasm quotes) like Chili’s or Starbucks that don’t actually fill that role. They just want you to spend money and get out, there’s no actual tie to the community.
Having an outdoors that’s so utterly lifeless and hostile to anything that’s not a car that kids “hang out” on social media is neither normal nor desirable, unless you’re a tech exec, I guess.
What if I told you that having absolutely no community third spaces is a result of car dependency?
Then I’d suggest that if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem is going to look like a nail.
Like, I get it, fuck cars, but North American culture has been car dependant while having history of having the some of the highest third space membership, even in my own lifetime. While I accept it as a factor of the erosion, it’s unlikely to even be the primary factor.
Yeah a big part of third space culture where I grew up was things like “let’s go to x” followed by six people getting in a car with two seatbelts because the nearest “x” was like 20 miles away. And the car itself could be a meeting place if someone who barely interacts with your group hears about a trip and asks to jump in the car too
Yeah that works great assuming you have an already-established friend group within walking distance and parents that either have the time and will to chauffeur you around everywhere, or friend’s parents willing to do so with your own parents giving you the “freedom” to be driven around by people that are more than likely near-to-complete strangers to them. Which, in the age of helicopter parents, is a dying breed, and the first option almost completely excludes children of young, single, low-income, and otherwise struggling parents.
The decline in religion is more responsible for lack of third spaces than car centric cities.
That can be more or less true depending on the community. I imagine in the central and southeastern US, the decline of religion has been especially devastating in that regard. However you don’t see that pattern replicated in much more secular western Europe. In fact, they’re doing just fine for third spaces.
You must be an alcoholic.
I actually love to drive and wish I had a car to get to the games shop in a reasonable fashion for D&D or MTG where I’m only really expected to spend money for tournament entry because kicking ass isn’t free.
Barely touch the stuff myself, but I do consider myself practical. A lot of people like to drink in social settings, that’s neither endorsement nor criticism, but reality. I prefer taking my bike or walking so much more than driving, and it regularly bothers me that anywhere I could want to go is out of range or impractical/unsafe to reach by bike or pedestrian infrastructure. I don’t like driving, I find it expensive, a general pita, dangerous, ecologically damaging (not just CO2, driving just one kilometer can produce up to a trillion microplastic particles in the form of tire dust), and just really not that fun. But hey, to each their own. I just kinda wish we hadn’t built our urban environments to the exclusion of everyone but drivers.
We didn’t built our environments to exclude specifically non-drivers. We are all competing and driving is simply a massive advantage. It also means that places generally don’t have to be super close together to have business traffic and therefore benefit more from cheaper real estate.
yes that is why our suburbs are condensing into chains and big box stores and can barely support themselves, because driving is such a massive advantage to all businesses everywhere.
All sarcasm aside, please just watch this video: Not Just Bikes - How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer [STO2]
If that interests you at all, I highly recommend watching the rest of the strong town series of videos from not just bikes
Nah. Because car transportation is massively subsidised and the automotive industry is so influential, modern cities were built for cars instead of people.
Sure, we weren’t “targeting non drivers”, but we were exclusively building for cars.
We’re now reaping what we sowed - cities are now hostile to pedestrians.
What a fucking braindead take.
This is fucking braindamaged, 3rd spaces are dying because of social media not some conspiracy to destroy them in order to make kids work.
Jesus christ, you really can tell when someone just hasn’t suffered enough in their lifetime.
While money and car centric infrastructure plays a role, people being addicted to their phones robs them of the desire to overcome the car and being poor in order to spend time with their friends!
In the town where I grew up, there was a tiny park downtown where all the weird kids hung out. It was a funky little park which had a lot of character. Then they renovated it and I never see anyone there anymore when I go back.
Of course, they took out all the benches and they took out the trees and walls that gave a modicum of privacy.
There were always paranoid kids who thought the cops were watching the park from other buildings such as one of the bars across the street (college town) but getting rid of everything that made the park theirs and taking way any feeling of privacy killed it.
My daughter is 13 now. We’re in another town. There is so little for kids to do. She spends most of the time talking to her friends on Discord.
Boomers:
Kids don’t do anything anymore. They just sit on their phones inside all day.
Also boomers:
Hello, police? Yes, there is a group of teens at the park. I think they have drugs or sex stuff.
Does no one remember what being a kid was like? Most people, especially teens, don’t care enough about you to be plotting against you. Let people live their lives.
I forgot to say that the cops raided the park one day. The whole town was outraged, but it definitely didn’t help matters.
It’s not like Tik Tok is doing things out of the kindness of their hearts, kids. They’re making money off of you. I bet if there was a meatspace location that tracked all your conversations and pushed ads to you they’d let you hang out there for free, too.
mmmmm…meat space.
Nothing about this is true what the heck? Kids aren’t just banned from ever being anywhere, my friends and I hung out in parks and at restaurants and at eachothers’ houses all the time. And anyone who’s been on social media and thinks it’s an appropriate place for kids is very sus or naive. Even the most squeaky clean of sites are cesspools of bullying and grooming and right wing propaganda, and any use beyond looking at memes and catching up with irl friends should be supervised to some extent.
This post acts like we live in a dystopia where kids aren’t aren’t allowed to do anything and need social media to have any friends, which is only the case in really shitty circumstances where a kid is super lonely irl or somehow lives somewhere with no park or library or other good hangout spots. The banning of one specific app (which you can just get around with a vpn) isn’t going to disenfranchise all zoomers overnight, it’ll be a minor inconvenience people get over when they get a vpn or go to a different site. I just wish the people pushing to ban tik tok would apply the same pressure to American companies also pushing propaganda and doing shady stuff with your data
Also the new law is not taking tiktok away it’s just forcing the app to be sold to an american company
I can’t help but feel like all the “tiktok ban” discussion is straight up disinformation trying to scare kids
One of the things the USA desperately needs is benches.
We eliminated all our benches in an attempt to get homeless people to disappear, but lo an behold they still exist.
It’s time to bring back public benches.
Tbc I understand the sentiment here, but it’s not a very well thought out take. Plenty of advertising revenue is being generated by teens’ presence on tiktok. They are being exploited monetarily by an extremely hostile and repressive foreign power.
I get that there are nuances to this but it’s not “oh look the teens’ one free place to just be is being taken away!” It’s not free in any way.
Like yeah, we should be building community infrastructure to allow for teens and humans in general to have meaningful engagement with each other. In no way is any social media platform a solution for that deficit and it’s dumb to pretend it is.
IMO it’s pretty sad for anyone to think that using a social media app is equivalent to hanging out with friends. You’re filtering your entire reality through a corporate controlled micro-computer basically.
It’s also a myth that teens don’t have anywhere to hang out. They could just go out and do it if they wanted to, people most likely won’t give a fuck if they see some kids hanging around somewhere. There are parks, libraries, malls, streets, alleys, underpasses, etc. (Adjusts the onion on my belt) … Back in my day we just went out and walked or biked or skated somewhere and did random bullshit wherever.
Hehe, there’s someone fearing about losing their dopamine source. Typical addict behavior.
The confusing part of this is that they think this is a teen issue, like they see adults loitering everywhere. There’s logic behind why you don’t see them doing it because they have their own homes to hang out at but if four adults were hanging out by the door of a shop they wouldn’t get special treatment.
In most places adults gather outside of their homes you also need to pay for outside of parks
Where are kids banned from hanging out? When did this happen???
A group of unsupervised teens probably can’t just hang out in a Wal-Mart. That’s probably the kind of thing this is about.
Why you’d want to hang out in a Wal-Mart is something I don’t understand, but different people have different ideas of fun.
I could see hanging out at Walmart if at least one of them is buying something. I don’t think anyone is allowed to just hang out in a store if they’re not buying something though lol
Yeah that’s the problem. Where do you go to just be?
Not fucking Walmart lol
Ya
We used to hang out at the park, or go to someone’s house, or go to the movies, or just drive around lol… I’m sure there were a few other places but I can’t think of what they were now. I guess those are unacceptable for today’s kids?
Snooze.
Wake me up when there’s something interesting to do.
So what you’re implying here is that in order for you to go somewhere to “just be”, there needs to be some sort of entertaining distraction made available to you at no cost? That seems like the literal opposite of “just being”
We raised $3’000’000 in my hometown to have the city build a skate park. Someone pocketed the money and gave us a quarter pipe, two rails, a box, and an incline in an old unused tennis court. You can fuck right off with your assessment of me.
It’s a war on teens!
More like a war on the poor if you wanna go there, which has a lot of overlap with teens. But also stores are not really meant to be hangout spaces.
They would not have been possible 20 years ago either
This idea is called a “Third Place”. Your first place is home, the second place is work, and the third place is another place that isn’t the first 2. There used to be more of these like malls, plazas, parks, and others. In the last few decades, these places have gone away, had funding cut, or otherwise died. And like OP is saying, there are places that have been created to fill this gap, but they have been monetized :(
I realized that I treated Reddit as a third place. It was somewhere I felt like a community existed that I could talk to people and just hang out. It wouldn’t surprise me if people felt the same about Tik Tok or Facebook. So when one of those places is threatening to leave, it makes sense they feel there will be a void created.
Not sure what a good solution would be as this is a complicated issue.
