She agrees with you. https://moz.com/blog/is-tiktok-the-new-google

I hope Elon can make Twitter into a super app and we can bid anything China goodbye.

phuketrichard wrote: ↑Tue Jan 10, 2023 11:46 am And it’s not just for the kids

It is just for kids. Adults using it are suffering some form of mental impairment.

#ChangeMyMind

For people in early twenties it has has partly replaced Google already year ago. They don't google restaurant/sights recommendations, they check them from TikTok. And I do understand why. You get lot of information from a short video than long text and video. Even more than you could ever get from written text really.

No, but it's an extremely good way to do business. We've just bought a used 2016 Prius off my wife's beauty products and most sales come through TikTok.

TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging
12 October 2022

Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.

Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value.

The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that.

TikTok said it would take prompt action against "exploitative begging".

The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%. But it declined to confirm the exact amount.

Earlier this year, TikTok users saw their feeds fill with livestreams of families in Syrian camps, drawing support from some viewers and concerns about scams from others.

In the camps in north-west Syria, the BBC found that the trend was being facilitated by so-called "TikTok middlemen", who provided families with the phones and equipment to go live.

The middlemen said they worked with agencies affiliated to TikTok in China and the Middle East, who gave the families access to TikTok accounts. These agencies are part of TikTok's global strategy to recruit livestreamers and encourage users to spend more time on the app.

Since the TikTok algorithm suggests content based on the geographic origin of a user's phone number, the middlemen said they prefer to use British SIM cards. They say people from the UK are the most generous gifters.

For five months, the BBC followed 30 TikTok accounts broadcasting live from Syrian camps for displaced people and built a computer program to scrape information from them, showing that viewers were often donating digital gifts worth up to $1,000 an hour to each account.

Families in the camps said they were receiving only a tiny fraction of these sums, however.

With TikTok declining to say how much it takes from gifts, the BBC ran an experiment to track where the money goes.

A reporter in Syria contacted one of the TikTok-affiliated agencies saying he was living in the camps. He obtained an account and went live, while BBC staff in London sent TikTok gifts worth $106 from another account.

At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69% of the value of the gifts.
In full: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-63213567