How to know you've made it big as a corporation: Your take any action, and mainstream media finds a way to link that action to the company literally dying. Ideally they use a credible blogger or economist, but it's hardly required.
I think that as long as Doctorow is the face of the movement... with articles like this, we aren't going anywhere and corporations probably don't mind him.
Conciseness is a virtue. When's the last time a corporation has ever produced a 2000-word essay on the reasons you should buy their game? Or a political party releasing a 3000-word essay on the virtues of their economic proposal for public viewing? If the best minds of our movement can't get a point across without, to put it on an extreme note, blathering on and on all over the place, they aren't afraid. Slogans and catchphrases have more power than detailed essays. To quote the 80s cartoon Pinky and the Brain, "Simple Ideas for Simple Minds" is a much smarter strategy for taking over the world.
It's even better when it's behind a paywall. You will pay to read a long essay? The only reason you would do that is if you already care about the subject. Anyone who doesn't care yet won't ever see it or pay for it or read it, so nothing happens at all.
I get that most people never read these sort of documents, but I think some people do and take it seriously, or at the least, would interpret the absence of such a document as a red flag for an ideology lacking intellectual rigor.
Other than it's yet another hit piece (YAHP at this point) against TikTok, not really. Are they doing shady shit? Probably. Is there a social media site who isn't doing shady shit? Probably not. As such, will this kill TikTok? Probably not.
TikTok, even with this change, is still primarily connecting users to users, and not users to brands. This makes them more valuable than any other social media site to those users. Even when TikTok makes missteps.
I honestly believe US Entrepreneurs want TikTok's word-of-mouth success with Facebook's profit margins. But they miss what makes TikTok good - what it connects users to.
Instagram, Snap, even YouTube have the video format down well enough - it's the community they can't just re-create (without changing how they do monetization). A vast majority of creators I follow on TT are on IG and YT, yet I'm never shown their videos. I am, however, shown about a billion ads and repeated videos for every novel video I see.
