TikTok literally checking up your ass at this point
Don’t use Tiktok. But also, don’t use any social media run by large corporations. You deserve better than that.
Alas, laws are coming into place where large, centralized, social media platforms will be the only ones able to operate within the law.
Also I really wish someone would start a non-profit driven dating/hookup app. Grindr is a perfect example of full enshittification, keeping users on the platform as long as possible, needing paid accounts to do anything at all. The world is in a loneliness crisis, we could be using this tech to actually fix it, instead the tech exacerbates the problem to get ad views.
a little reminder that trump’s bringing in a lot of reactionary doom and gloom, and the solution is revolutionary optimism. seriously!
In this day and age with greedy billionaires everywhere doing a bunch of heinous bullshit just assume you are being watched all of the time.
at this point, we need to organize. seriously!
Soon this data will be collected by far-right oligarchs like Larry Ellison through Oracle. We really need a huge push to urge everyone to stop using TikTok.
Soon this data will be collected by far-right oligarchs like Larry Ellison through Oracle.
And maybe the Chinese and Russian governments, too, paying top dollar through a bunch of cutouts.
what would lenin do?
what would lenin do?
Completely go against the basic ideas of Marxism, seize power, and purge the actual communists who disagree with you?
are you a council communist?
I don’t consider myself a communist at all, just a student of politics
have you been reading up on socialist/communist theory?
Even worse.
I wish I could packet sniff or monitor what apps are doing what on my phone. If I install a calculator, I only want it to math some numbers, not harvest data from me.
Apple is supposed to mention this in the App Store but even then it’s just a tag on an app and there’s no more details.
You can. PersonalDNSfilter on f droid. Its great. And scary.
You cant install anything on android without it asking you for permissions.
Stop using apple and you will have slightly more control.
Here are the permissions used by a calculator app Android tells me has “No permissions granted”.
You can’t deny any of those.
I know you’re on iOS but for anyone else who’s on Android, TrackerControl is a great easy to use app for this purpose
But for iOS OP, maybe AdGuard would help?
Anytime you download an app, by default ir has permission to use your Cellular Data and WiFi and indexed by Siri. Best you can do is void all those and not give it any unnecessary permissions
If you have enough data (like 50+GB), try to keep WiFi off and use only cellular and disable the apps celllular oermission in the Cellular section in Settings
Doesn’t DuckDuckGo offer a subscription service that monitors/blocks those requests?
People should stop using these ad and tracking apps disguised as some useful app.
TT is not a useful application, it’s a mental sickness virus. It leads to hate and self harm.
So is grindr. Most dehumanizing app ever, so manipulative and full of ads.
It does give you sex in return for data, which compared to most apps, is a better return ratio.
It’s not sex in return for data, more like “you get sex, you lose confidence and any sense of self-worth, we will also show you ads every 3 seconds.”
I would recommend that you should reflect on how you use the app. The gay community has given me far to much confidence.
Gay communities are not all the same around the world. It kind of is part of the problem, grindr applies an insensitive one size fits all model. US gay culture prevalent in grindr pushes promiscuity, distorted body images and sex centered stereotypes. It used to be that the app was simply a proximity chat with basic profiles. This was a safe haven for gay men in homophobic cultures that needed a way to identify, contact and interact with other gay men without fear of violence or discrimination. Yes, it was about sex, but it was about sex as a reactionary channel for frustrated desires for human contact and emotional connection.
Today it is so enshittified and has added so many anti features that it has shifted to be the opposite. It has turned into a harassment machine, that frustrates and enrages users in an attempt to make them pay money for premium features, that used to be free, or get rid of the new ones that nobody uses. Which signals users to be and act even worse to each other in order to circumvent the exploiting anti features.
Then it also pushes things like penis size obsession, high risk multipartner encounters and unprotected sex, with a high dose of body shaming on the side. All that while showing an ad every 3 seconds (I’m not exaggerating). Without mentioning that it has always been a privacy nightmare, a vector for minor’s abuse, sex work and drug trafficking. With the app owners never doing anything of value to actually protect the users. Grindr has gotten kids and adults raped and murdered before. But it promotes PRep (in countries where the drug is banned because homophobia), so, yay!
Skill issue
9 times out of 10 that tap or message you just got came from a fucking bot. Grindr is such a shithole app.
Do you want to see sexy men from your cumputer? Here’s my secret link bit/PHGR
To be more honest:
Tiktok is actually very useful to find
- very specific recipes
- rare places to visit
- specific tutorials
- content in rare languages
- insight from countries and cultures not found in regular media
- some manifestation footage from the pov of the people
- even some war/violent event footage before moderation and is better than Youtube, Reddit or a regular search engine for those.
However, it also has huge amounts of
- misinformation
- political propaganda
- dumb people
- pseudoscience
- mass surveillance
and it’s usage has negative effects on brain such as:
- reduced attention span
- distorted time perception
- boredom intolerance
This is cope. TT feeds you the information you don’t need or search for it. If you search you will find better sources for everything. It’s just a big advertisement platform.
Also tf is manifestation footage?
A manifestation (or “manif” for short) is the word for a (political) protest in some languages
Ahh I thought it was in English too
No, I interpreted it as a form of religious magical practice that’s somewhat popular on social media
Lmao there are self-called witches on tiktok 😭
How tf is this cope I don’t even use this shit. Just give me the better sources for everything then ? Because I know people who use it and they find things hard to find otherwise. Just because it’s a shit social media doesn’t mean you should lie about what it can do.
Manifestation footage is footage of a manifestation. Quite often people I know who use tiktok talk to me about things going on in other countries that are not talked about in public media
I don’t think its a good source for any of these, because its short videos. You don’t actually look for information there, because searching for specific these specific videos is hard. If you want specific information you gotta read, because text-based info is searchable.
Recipes are on recipe websites, interesting places in local forums, same with rare languages. Tutorials are all over the internet.
Protest are definetly not on the Chinese run social media, unless China wants it to be amplified.
It’s maybe good for memes.
Videos come with hashtags which are text and thus searchable, then the algorithm recommends similar videos or other with the same keywords that are related.
A lot of information is better in a visual format than text: tourism guides and art for example.
Sure but you must know the forums and they have way less user base than TT where you have all content with a single search engine.
Yes there are a lot, note that they have a different feed for chinese citizens where there are probably way less.
To be objectively honest, all the useful things you listed are and always have been available elsewhere in the internet.
People have turned into idiots the past few years who cant even use the internet/computers properly. Because corporations brainwashed them.
Give me a search engine with as much easy to find specific content then ?
I’d trust Askjeeves to give me more reliable information than TT
Google? Query, then click on the video’s tab. Don’t want to use Google? You can also use Duck duck go, startpage.com, or anything similar using the same steps.
Stupid comment. Search “rare places to visit” on google and get ready for 10 pages of AI slop articles and those that are not AI are always the same copy pasted from each other. On tiktok locals will make their own list of prefered places and show them and how to go there.
Use before:yyyy/mm/dd and/or after:yyyy/mm/dd in the search box to specify date ranges, and search for results before 2020 to remove all the AI slop.
Much easier than giving away your data to a company known for spreading misinformation, pushing AI content and genuinely worsening social interactions online and in real life.
Oh, the horror. DDG is only better because it’s not the big G, otherwise it returns the same nonesense search optimized slop. If your data is not important, russian site yandex gives different hits (def better for the high seas). There’s also a paid websearch (forgot the name) that seems legit.
Internet is dead.
The paid one is Kagi and search results are pretty good.
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Yikes! Glad I never used TikTok
