Turns out, all you needed to do was say "jumping out of boiling water is woke" and frogs will turn up the heat themselves.

My bet is that too many frogs are gonna leap, that this is far too shitty a situation right now. They are gonna work extra overtime to cool it down some for now, collect & put some frogs back in the pot. And then slowly turn up the heat again.

I also do believe this is an incredibly hard technical moment. Elli-Tok has nearly no chance of suceeding in building their own algorithm, from square 1, since they don't have access to the ByteDance algorithms. I don't know what access they have to international content and internstional viewing habits, don't know if US content flows to TikTok actual and if they get any algorithmic help from that. This feels like a suicidal business, buying a brand name but lacking any and all of the means to maintain product quality.

There probably are real technical problems here. And feed preferences are probably just gone, while Elli-Tok rebuilds its own perhaps isolated perhaps loosely connected fork, while as said above probably lacking the content and viewer data to work from.

But just as Ellison's bought CBS then let it be overrun & destroyed by the hollow Free Press propogandists (pretending to be neutral, I say as my eyes roll out of my head), I also tend to think they thought they could get away with doing what they want. Maybe they will get away with this project. Maybe it is all isolated US only content, maybe it is swamped with right wing agitprop from here on out. Maybe half those viewers here keep scrolling forever and that's good enough to make the incredibly fantastically rich happy with their US government facilitated acquisition, that sundering an interesting diverse well tuned network is maybe or maybe not a delight but a necessary thing to claw under for this desired class propoganda. But I tend to think they're alas probably smart enough to learn quickly this is not how you boil a frog, and tend to think Elli-Tok is going to (suck for a long while either way, but work to) dial down the right wingism & divisionism a lot, then slowly work it back up.

(But man, watching these buffons mishandle CBS, watching ridiculous bald faced "salute to Mark Rubio" sure makes it hard to believe they have any competence at all.)

Different topic but the extremely critical TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek skewering the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ok'ed this absurd international media property theft is amazing to read. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706