The Evil that is Tik Tok

[Tjack]

    First off, I will grant you that I am old.  I am so old that I remember reel to reel tapes even before there were 8-tracks. I’m so old I remember when the most mobile phone you could own was installed in your car, you needed to have a special operator place the call for you and the only place you saw one of those was on TV.  I am in fact so old that I’m not sure I spelled Tik Tok correctly.

  But in spite of all that, I’m beginning to think that this thing is not simply a matter of me not understanding a new thing but something that is actually dangerous.  In the last 24 hours I’ve seen a news report about one kid in the U.S who died doing a TT challenge about choking yourself unconscious and another about a young woman in Australia who will have permanent facial scars doing some “freckle beauty secret” she got off the site. 
   What the hell is this crap exactly?   I had heard about something where a person or celebrity dumps ice water on themselves for some charity but I never understood how that raised money exactly.  Now it seems that this is just the dumbest idea wins in some lemming like quest for 15 seconds of fame (15 minutes being too long to hope for the attention span of the current teen)

    Is there some company/group/whatever who can monitor what the hell is on there to see if there might be something dangerously stupid happening?

[Trencher]

Its youtubes lack of taste and decorum combined with the relentless and incessant stupidity of twitter. A potent stew of evil and depravity indeed. 

[Grailknight]

These stupid people have always been around. It's just that now they have the ability to show their stupidity to the whole world and get attention for it.

[unclevlad]

I agree with Grail.  Most of it isn't evil, altho promoting a dangerous product might be.  Russian roulette goes back a LONG, LONG ways.  Frat hazing is a combination of stupid and bullying, and has caused quite a few alcohol poisoning deaths, for example.  Oh, and for really graphic examples...go on over to DarwinAwards.com and read the stories for those awarded and nominated.

 

The ice bucket challenge was a Big Thing in 2014.  The point was to get a bunch of people to pledge money if you did it.  It started as a fundraiser for ALS.  Couple people did it for, IIRC, a friend who had ALS.  It caught on with social AND mainstream media;  quite a few pro athletes took part.  VERY! successful...to the tune of $200M +.

 

The rest of it?  Kids being kids.  The sense of immortality and invulnerability...nothing really BAD can happen from this.  Yeah, to be sure, it's more dangerous because normal adolescent stupidity can only impact a tiny few;  with social media, well, the reach is enormous.

 

Can it be monitored?  Are you gonna monitor every platform?  How many tens of thousands of hours of video are posted on TT or YouTube every day?  Who's gonna pay for this?  And what counts as dangerously stupid?  Heck...there is an auto ad that may still be running, but certainly ran for quite some time, on broadcast TV.  SUV driving along, 3-4 young-ish (late teens, early 20's, it appears) girls.  They start taunting/daring each other to jump into a lake they're just driving by...fully clothed.  And of course 3 of the 4 do it;  the 4th says "it's too comfortable in here" because, well, that's the tag line for the ad anyway.  Still...you see the others running out and preparing to go in.  Stupid?  Foolish?  Pointless?  All of the above.  Dangerous?  Actually, yes, *at times*.  Cold-water lakes can be tricky, and if you don't know what the shoreline is like, they *can* be dangerous.  it is unlikely, tho.  But while it is staged, hey, the behavior is absolutely believable, as stupid stuff like that DOES happen.  So here's a major mainstream ad that really, actually, is promoting and glorifying stupid behavior.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Social media is a cancer.

[DShomshak]

I just heard on All Things Considered yesterday that Snapchat is removing its "Speed Filter." I*think* that means that while you send a Snapchat video message from a car, the service splices in a message of how fast you're moving. Supposedly, some young people took this as a challenge to show they were messaging at 100+ mph, with the predictable result of some of them crashing and dying. (Tho, Snapchat claims the filter was removed because it wasn't popular enough.)

 

Last year, IIRC, was an interview with a doctor who tried compiling statistics on "Death By Selfie": People dying because they think they'll get lots of Likes by showing themselves hanging by one arm from a skyscraper, in front of an oncoming train, or some other flagrantly stupid and dangerous situations.

 

All very sad for family and friends, but I am cold-blooded enough that I cannot see these deaths as tragic. Not when so many people die through the stupidity, malice and greed of others.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Tjack]

16 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

I just heard on All Things Considered yesterday that Snapchat is removing its "Speed Filter." I*think* that means that while you send a Snapchat video message from a car, the service splices in a message of how fast you're moving. Supposedly, some young people took this as a challenge to show they were messaging at 100+ mph, with the predictable result of some of them crashing and dying. (Tho, Snapchat claims the filter was removed because it wasn't popular enough.)

 

Last year, IIRC, was an interview with a doctor who tried compiling statistics on "Death By Selfie": People dying because they think they'll get lots of Likes by showing themselves hanging by one arm from a skyscraper, in front of an oncoming train, or some other flagrantly stupid and dangerous situations.

 

All very sad for family and friends, but I am cold-blooded enough that I cannot see these deaths as tragic. Not when so many people die through the stupidity, malice and greed of others.

 

Dean Shomshak

      The writer Larry Niven said it decades ago....”Think of it as evolution in action.”

My original idea was that if I put a video on YouTube showing the fun of beating the odds at Russian Roulette then the company that owns it would pull it for the common good.   I just don’t see anything parallel happening on TikTok.

[unclevlad]

Which is pretty much the basis for the Darwin Awards.

 

Looking around, I saw (in a few places) that 100 hours of video are posted to YouTube...every MINUTE.  I can't find the same kind of statistic, but let's say it's 10 hours of video per minute.  Or 600 minutes posted, every minute.  So you need 600 monitors working full time, 24/7 if people are going to be doing the monitoring.  3 shifts at around 800 people per shift.  Every day.  That's expensive as all heck.  Developing automated software isn't simple either.

 

Now, ok, there can be measures enacted and take-down protocols.  There would be some, as there are obviously things that would be illegal to post.  But you'll never legislate away stupid.

 

Mmm...for some reason, one of the all-timers came to mind.  Jon Eric Hexum...male lead on a beefcake and booty show called Cover Up.  He was goofing off on the set with a prop gun loaded with blanks.  Put the gun up to the side of his head and pulled the trigger.  End of show.  

 

Or another stat:

 

https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/trauma/news/when-its-kids-vs-trampolines-kids-often-lose/mac-20431484

 

1 million emergency room visits from trampolines, between 2002 and 2011.

 

So that even starts begging the question of what's the line between risky (unmonitored trampoline) and reckless (choking to unconscious)?

 

 

[Tjack]

35 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

Which is pretty much the basis for the Darwin Awards.

 

Looking around, I saw (in a few places) that 100 hours of video are posted to YouTube...every MINUTE.  I can't find the same kind of statistic, but let's say it's 10 hours of video per minute.  Or 600 minutes posted, every minute.  So you need 600 monitors working full time, 24/7 if people are going to be doing the monitoring.  3 shifts at around 800 people per shift.  Every day.  That's expensive as all heck.  Developing automated software isn't simple either.

 

Now, ok, there can be measures enacted and take-down protocols.  There would be some, as there are obviously things that would be illegal to post.  But you'll never legislate away stupid.

 

Mmm...for some reason, one of the all-timers came to mind.  Jon Eric Hexum...male lead on a beefcake and booty show called Cover Up.  He was goofing off on the set with a prop gun loaded with blanks.  Put the gun up to the side of his head and pulled the trigger.  End of show.  

 

Or another stat:

 

https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/trauma/news/when-its-kids-vs-trampolines-kids-often-lose/mac-20431484

 

1 million emergency room visits from trampolines, between 2002 and 2011.

 

So that even starts begging the question of what's the line between risky (unmonitored trampoline) and reckless (choking to unconscious)?

 

 

Thats what happens when you don’t understand what you’re playing with.  He didn’t know that when a blank goes off there’s still the wadding coming out at bullet speed as well as the the flame and concussion gasses from the muzzle flash.   Harmless at a couple of feet but when pressed up against someone’s temple....

[pinecone]

19 hours ago, DShomshak said:

I just heard on All Things Considered yesterday that Snapchat is removing its "Speed Filter." I*think* that means that while you send a Snapchat video message from a car, the service splices in a message of how fast you're moving. Supposedly, some young people took this as a challenge to show they were messaging at 100+ mph, with the predictable result of some of them crashing and dying. (Tho, Snapchat claims the filter was removed because it wasn't popular enough.)

 

Last year, IIRC, was an interview with a doctor who tried compiling statistics on "Death By Selfie": People dying because they think they'll get lots of Likes by showing themselves hanging by one arm from a skyscraper, in front of an oncoming train, or some other flagrantly stupid and dangerous situations.

 

All very sad for family and friends, but I am cold-blooded enough that I cannot see these deaths as tragic. Not when so many people die through the stupidity, malice and greed of others.

 

Dean Shomshak

As my great grand used to say "Stupid is a Capital Crime"

[unclevlad]

Of course, the modern take on that is "Politics is a Capitol crime."