TikTok

“There's no checks and balances when it comes to the ownership and management of all these new digital platforms. Like you see all these TikTok kids get exploited way, way worse than I did. I mean, it's not like the movie industry where you have overtime sheets…”

“If you want kids, go to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Snapchat. If you want CEOs, go to LinkedIn. If you want technology people, go to Substack. If you want, ah, 25 and above, go to Facebook.”

“So now, I think TikTok has that imbalance, YouTube Shorts has that imbalance, and LinkedIn has that imbalance.”

“They won't do anything about it because if they do keep kids off below 13, then the kids will just go to TikTok. So, you know, I understand why Instagram doesn't do much about underage use but it's a trap.”

“TikTok manually censors all their highly popular content.”

“TikTok is a very manipulative experience algorithmically, right? They bias towards happiness. They bias towards humor. Like, they don't want you talking about sad topics because political topics often are sad topics, right?”

“This is Facebook is trying hard to catch up with tick tock. It can't.”

“I don't think the Biden administration is the balls to ban it. I really just don't. I mean, everything that I've seen you know, they did the Huawei thing. That's cute. Everybody knows Huawei is a Chinese spy operation. I just don't think that they're willing t…”

“For me, the question isn't like, Is there gonna be some form of TikTok spin out disinvestiture ban? It's gonna happen at some point.”

“There's a big barrier to entry in some of these cases, especially when you talk about video, because video is, you know, it's expensive to move around is expensive in terms of user time in terms of how people consume it. It's cereal as opposed to parallel. So,…”

“Even Facebook's own research shows that passive media consumption leaves people worse off. And that's why they went through this whole moment to do meaningful social interactions, but they ended up pivoting right back to this TikTok style of media.”

“Potentially, but I think it'll honestly be better than what they're currently doing, which is YouTube and TikTok and Twitter, you know, Facebook and so forth. So I would prefer my kids are playing with chatbots than they're playing with what they currently hav…”

“This is my hottest of all takes, which is That the app stores are forced to ban TikTok on January, and then Trump day one says, put it back. So there, it's gone for like a half hour.”

“They don't need aggregators. They don't need communities to surface things for them. It's kind of becoming it's, it feels counterintuitive, but essentially if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you…”

“And I do think that's possible. And even a couple of years ago, and even last year, it wasn't possible. It's only, it only starts to become possible now because you couldn't build something that would not do to get off TikTok. Cause let's think about what do y…”

“And I basically think that the TikTok model, which is like short form video married to machine learning is the, like, The way that slot machines outcompete everything on a casino floor, I just think that, like, outcompetes everything.”

“I think people are going to start to turn off from the algorithms, from TikTok. Like, we're leading towards a moment of rejection where people are going to want something different.”

“The TikTok algorithm has no purpose other than that attentional purpose. And this is true even of, like, media companies, even NBC News or ABC News or Hollywood producers and directors. Like, they want big hits, yes, but they're also human beings that have, li…”

“I think it's possible to do good work in any medium. Like, there are people who do great stuff on TikTok, great stuff on Instagram Reels. There are people posting on Blue Sky and X and Threads that I, like, learn from. There are amazing YouTube videos that I'v…”

“If you thought about something like that hard cap, right, which is totally content independent, that it would be in a similar constitutional space.”

“I wouldn't want it to have any political bent, whether it was going to be something that would be, like, bought and controlled by, you know, investors with left-wing leanings or right leanings. Like, it just seems, yeah, again, trading one manipulation for ano…”

“I don't think it's going to happen. Fourteen billion versus forty billion. And we don't actually have confirmation from Xi Jinping or from any one on the Chinese side.”

“The meta social media apps are now competing more and more with Tik Tok and YouTube. They're becoming, they're not really stages on which people generate content, communicate with each other. They are of course pipelines, which entertainment and entertaining a…”

“I think Twitter's text posts are, have been extraordinarily resilient. It was like, it's like this, you know, it's ability to survive The changes in the way people use TikTok and reels and social media.”

“There's no such thing as social networks anymore in this world that you're hoping for, where there's no reverse chronological order, or there's no algorithmic feed. it, it's long past the point in time where that was even a possibility, and I think that You k…”