To be honest, several social media and video-sharing platforms have a heated vendetta against TikTok. The platform swooped in and ruined Instagram’s, Facebook’s, YouTube’s, and Snapchat’s day. It continues to be the most downloaded app on both the Play Store and the Apple App Store. This prompted YouTube to make shorts, Instagram to make Reels, and Snapchat to make Spotlight. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, but TikTok is at the head of the table.
This is why Facebook will redesign the app to make it closer to TikTok
A memo posted from a Facebook executive, Tom Alison, (via The Verge) gives some insight into what the company wants to do. There’s a lot of PR speak in the memo, but the gist of it is that Facebook is going to redefine how it shows posts. Instead of showing people posts based on who they’re following and the content they view (you know, the most sensical way), the company is going to push content from anywhere. This is the model that TikTok and the clones follow. You swipe up and get a completely random and unrelated video from whoever. Yeah, there are tags and whatnot, but it’s a gamble what you get. This is what Facebook will do with its feed.
This will be a headache for its users
Facebook can say that this is for the users all it wants, but we know that TikTok is taking a bite out of Facebook’s profits. One thing that social media users gripe about is that platforms force-feed them the most popular content and not the content that they actually want to see. If you’re into, say, music or animation, you’d want to see more content about those things. However, the algorithms typically share the more trendy and popular posts. These popular posts, a lot of people agree, are just nonsensical; the typical “TikTok-esque” posts. These are usually the ones shown on social media, and it can get irritating to people who don’t want to see stuff like it. Facebook is going to redesign the app so that it can be more like TikTok, but we know that a lot of people won’t like it. We’ll have to wait and see if it turns the company’s fortunes around.
