![]() ![]() The For You page, TikTok’s main portal, pulls videos from anywhere and everywhere over time, the algorithm that powers it tailors the content to you based on how you watch and share each type of clip. The Home feed is an ambitious, or maybe desperate, attempt to recreate TikTok’s special sauce (not the pink kind). (Instagram stories were the company’s successful answer to Snapchat reels, a less successful rejoinder to TikTok.) Meta turned to a familiar tactic to regain relevance in the meantime: cribbing features from its contemporaries. ![]() In October, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced grand plans to pioneer the metaverse and move social media into virtual reality, eventually conceding that the technology needed to do this won’t be mainstream for another five to 10 years. Meanwhile, Facebook’s total user base declined for the first time at the end of 2021. Many young people are turning to TikTok and Instagram instead of Google to search for information such as where to get lunch more and more, they rely on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube for news, as opposed to traditional outlets. TikTok is now the closest thing the internet has to a town square, a place where every major news story, fashion trend, and cultural moment is filtered and repackaged into a short-form video. (If you’ve recently heard about coastal grandmothers or pink sauce, you have TikTok to thank, or maybe blame.) And if a meme doesn’t originate on TikTok, it usually ends up there, graduating from Twitter or Reddit to achieve true ubiquity. TikTok generates many of the most inescapable memes, trends, and online debates. Now TikTok is much more than a viral dance factory. are 10 to 19 years old-a demographic that Meta is hoping to win back. An estimated 25 percent of TikTok’s users in the U.S. Last fall, the app hit 1 billion active users. (Part of that DNA comes from Musical.ly, a lip-synching app that TikTok swallowed up in 2018.) But it truly exploded in the early days of the pandemic, when much of life moved online. TikTok is a short-form video platform that became famous for viral dances performed by the likes of fresh-faced tweens and teens whose queen was Charli D’Amelio. In other words, Facebook now wants to be TikTok. ![]() But with Home, Meta-the parent company of Facebook and Instagram-is clearly steering its users to an experience that emphasizes posts from pages and people you don’t know: viral content selected by an algorithm for maximum entertainment value and slack-jawed viewing time. When I logged on last week, that meant a video of a man rescuing a sloth from the road and a screenshot of a meme from Twitter about introverts.Ī separate new tab, Feeds, will show you only the people you’ve chosen to follow. ![]() While the familiar main page, formerly known as the News Feed, used to be where family, friends, and other accounts you follow have long shared humblebrags, dubious headlines, and slices of everyday life, the new Home page combines those things with posts from strangers it suggests based on your past Facebook activity. Last week, the social-media giant introduced two new different versions of your Facebook feed. If you’ve logged into Facebook recently, as almost 2 billion people around the world do each day, you may have noticed something new in your feed: more strangers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |