TikTok & the trickiness of getting credit on the internet
I like how this piece from Vox / The Goods, “On TikTok, who owns a viral dance?” explains the backstory of some of the most famous moves on the app while also situating the larger question of artistic credit as a growing pain that all major social media apps have had to contend with:
Part of the difficulty in crediting dancers is endemic to the TikTok platform. On TikTok, it’s supremely difficult to determine whose video came first. The feed is not chronological, timestamps are not included with videos, and hashtags are sorted by popularity, not time. That means that if someone with more followers steals your dance, it’s likely theirs will be the one that blows up...
And, as writer Rebecca Jennings notes, the way we credit things online tend to stem directly from the design of the product — in the absence of clear cues like timestamps, you’re leaving it up to users to get creative / harness public sentiment to make their own rules about who owns what:
Twitter, for example, clearly shows the date at which a tweet was posted, and a search bar that makes it easy to suss out tweet-stealers. Tumblr’s reblog function and Facebook’s share settings allow people to repost content on their own feeds while still giving credit to the original creator.
Instagram made things much messier. Reposting others’ photos has typically amounted to screenshotting, which makes giving credit a choice rather than a standard. As Instagram proliferated with meme accounts that grew explosively by stealing content from all over the web — other people’s tweets, Tumblr posts, comments, and videos — a reckoning soon followed…
Anyway, just some thoughts on good vs. terrible app design for no reason and definitely not because the difference may be directly tied to the state of western democracy or anything…
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