He’s got a lot of low-hanging fruit to pluck and he’s not afraid to roll out a wheelbarrow for it.

It’s been sliding all month.

It’s slid 8% over the last month. But at a 282 p/e, it could lose 90% and still be overvalued.

Tiktok’s user base is quite large

875 million to over 950 million daily active users (DAU) globally as of Jan 2026.

It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.

TikTok was the better alternative. That’s half the joke. As soon as it caught on, the plutocrats stepped in and seized control

Not unlike how Facebook bought out and gutted Instagram or JP Morgan took over Reddit and cleaned out all the lefties before taking it public.

That’s before you get into the marketing budget that social media needs to build the kind of massive userbase you’re asking for.

How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely

In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.

The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!

So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.

It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.

With planned obselecence they might as well

I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control

TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.

The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.

not bringing it under US billionaires specifically

That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.

Gavin Newsom was enthusiastically in favor of forcing the sale of TikTok to US-aligned billionaires under Joe Biden.

Wonder what changed.

But so much of the content is uncreative.

Enshittification, baby. Once people know where the feed bar is, they just keep slapping it until pellets stop falling out. The Algorithm rewards imitation, not invention.

A lot of these services really hinge on a tight-knit community of active content producers who fuel engagement and reap some kind of dividend on the back end.

Loops is a technology but it’s not much of a business. The company is literally run by just two guys. They’re not going to bring on prolific content producers without a much more aggressive marketing strategy.

We’ve further mechanized the process of sales and marketing in an industry that we’ve been at the forefront of since the turn of the 20th century.

Modern anti-AI guys would have been eating up Adbusters 'zines 30 years ago.

So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.

Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.

Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.

I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.

Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.

But that won’t stop society from imploding.

Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.

You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.

If this was all they were doing, I’d agree

It takes an enormous amount of ultra pure water to make a micro chip

Israel has some of the most advanced desalination facilities in the world