What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed vine.
Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move.
I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with)
First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.
> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
It's more of an addition rather than evolution. Also it's relatively new to westerners so there's the "new fangled" part of it. I tried it (albeit a year ago) and all I saw were a bunch of teen agers acting goofy and not really doing much to further civilization. It's definitely social though.
I’ve been a user for a year now. It used to be that people watched it for the bad content - then intentionally bad content. The biggest TikTok compilations were “TikTok cringe”. But now...the content is actually good!
The metrics make sense: as a user of both platforms, I'm spending far more time on TT these days than IG. My biggest gripe is Instagram is absolutely filled with ads: you get ads in between stories, ads in between posts, then a good portion of actual posts are "sponsored" (so ads from the posters themselves)... it's just a really bad mire of advertising and people trying to sell me stuff. Meanwhile TikTok is still fairly ad-free (I get an ad while scrolling maybe once every 10 mins?) and the content is just better.
In terms of content: remember when Instagram first became popular, and you started using that more compared to Facebook, because FB just felt "stale" and old while IG was the new and exciting thing, with better and more exciting content? That's basically the different between TT and IG now.
In the past I used IG to interact with people from niche communities (primarily aquarium related) but I left both because it was acquired by Facebook and I was seeing the huge increase of ads and sponsored posts/accounts as you describe.
From what I've seen of tik tok it seems it's mostly young kids and teenagers lip syncing music, dancing, and doing comedy sketches.
Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app
TikTok is the first social medium I don't get. It isn't very good at figuring out my tastes and just serves me generic hot people content. It doesn't try to figure out who I might want to contact with either. Maybe I'm getting old or something.
From a fraud perspective, it would be extremely cheap to fake downloads.
Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric gives more credibility to their internal numbers.
I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just me.
It is almost hard to trust CCP entities given their track record. Businesses in China do not conform to audits like Dodd-Frank [1] making it extremely hard to verify any data coming from within Chinese borders. Just last week, researchers found that CCP-supplied organ donor data had a near-perfect match with organ transplant data [2] suggesting that CCP has been doctoring the data. Just look at the graph of the data [3], which shows anomalous near-perfect match of a quadratic function.
It's probably not fake. My teenage sister has gone from "TikTok is so cringey" a few months ago to "I actually kind of like it". It's now socially acceptable to use so it's in the clear. I saw someone using it on the airplane last week too.
Im surprised at peoples comments like "its not organic growth" and "they'll never be profitable" - how is TikTok different to snap/insta/fb in the early years? The thing that matters in that biz is hitting critical mass of users. Then they can spend the next 10 yrs bleeding their users in long tail of platform stickyness.
I recently was watching a stream where the topic was playing bootleg versions of games on an Android tablet. Instead of microtransactions, many of the games would forcefully stop the game and prompt the user to install TikTok in a way that looked impossible to avoid. This definitely seems to imply that TikTok is directly paying for installs and gives me doubt about their organic growth.
> TikTok poses a major threat to Facebook and Instagram in particular.
Billions of downloads doesn't tell you if 'something is growing' it's the Daily Active Users. Ask them how TikTok plans to make money in order to remain profitable and they will completely fall tone deaf.
This article tells you nothing about TikTok outperforming instagram.
While I agree that downloads in and of themselves aren’t super telling, if we think about the conversion rate to user this is still an insane amount of people. At 20% conversion, that’s 300M users. Even 1% DAU from that would be 3M people and probably from a segment of people that are the most valued (ages 14-25) to instagram from an audience perspective.
Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.
Does it matter? Even if they are on tiktok (whatever that is, I am getting too old for that shit) watching something without ad, they are not on instagram watching something with ads.
"It is the third most-downloaded app outside of gaming this year. Numbers one and two are WhatsApp and Messenger, while four and five are the Facebook app and Instagram."
Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.
There was competition and FB used their war chest to buy them all, sans messenger. They forced people to download messenger to see FB messages on mobile. They also lied and said you had a message when you really didn’t. Just to force the messenger download.
This is less because Facebook is big and more because it’s the largest tech company without an OS. More people use Google or Apple’s native Mail client, browser, calendar.
While I do agree that this space needs competition, I can't see a scenario in which this can happen. The combined user base of all the facebook apps is a considerable percentage of the world's population. Take out people with no access to internet or living in dictatorship or dictatorship-like regimes and you get probably north of 90% of all internet users. I know people in their 70's and 80's using facebook at this point. And while some countries are more skeptical about it, my country has fully embraced it. To the point where "having a website" is a synonym of "having a facebook page". In reality almost all businesses use facebook exclusively(which is a huge problem for people like me who have blocked all facebook services from my network but that's my problem). The only way a competitor could come into existence at this point the way I see it is a complete collapse of facebook as a company(as in bankruptcy). No one will ditch something that is essential to their existence for something that will only drag them down. Look at G+: IMO as a product the execution was absolutely flawless. Yet it's no more.
At lot of comments in these threads fear-mongering about China, but if it weren't for a powerful government asserting that FB, etc cannot acquire ByteDance and the like, then 5/5 would be FB owned. This space only has competition because China aggressively enforces it.
The US government is basically run from corporate interest, which has served people well for 50 years when things are good. But those corporations have no loyalty to the US. As political and economics interests shift, expect those large corporations to follow there own interests, not those of any nation.
The Chinese government, for all of its many faults, is making sure that Chinese corporations serve the interest of China. Corporations currently located in the US no longer even pay lip service to being interested in supporting the people of United States.
To be fair, I've downloaded Messenger like 6 times this year because they prevent you from using the messaging capabilities of Facebook in a mobile browser - even if you request the desktop site.
So sometimes I'll have to download it when I don't have access to a desktop, send or read a message I needed to, and then uninstall it.
Tech in the west has been complacent for years, and it's not just leadership either. People whine constantly about "work life balance" and spend all day demanding that employers ban everything that offends them. The Chinese, meanwhile, are killing it. Only in the west do we indulge bizarre and self serving ideas like "you do more when you work less" and "what people contribute is less important than the way they make others feel".
Turns out that these beliefs don't actually work. They're self indulgent nonsense. We could afford them for a while, but now that we have actual competition, we can't. We need to go back to old school attitudes, buckle down, get our heads out of our asses, and compete.
I'm glad to see Facebook's turf being taken over, however this invader is no better than whoever got dethroned.
I'm not even talking about China, but just the fact that their business model is also based on being creepy, stalking their users and then serving them cancer aka ads.
I hope one day we'll have a mainstream social media platform that doesn't rely on stalking to fund itself, or at least allows to pay to opt-out.
I think they also nailed the music aspect of content creation. Whereas other platforms are actively hostile to users using unlicensed audio, TT licenses popular music which saves a boatload of effort on the content creation side and just makes it all more compelling to watch. Contrast that with takedown notices and little support for including sound at all.
Like clockwork you can't mention anything vaguely related to China without someone accusing everyone else of being a pro-China shill. This is a fucking social network. We don't bring up Guantanamo Bay and the NSA scandals whenever Twitter does anything.
Astroturfed or not TikTok has excellent creators (for now anyway I'm sure it will be ruined as it becomes more popular if history teaches us anything about fads). Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app. It's easy to burn 1-2 hours mindlessly watching absurd videos.
I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh" people won't use it much longer.
You're thinking of vine, which felt like it was just hitting critical mass when twitter killed it off. TikTok has grown so big because of the boost it started with from people looking for a vine replacement. At least that's what it feels like, I don't have the numbers to back it up.
Do you even know TikTok is not available in China? The brand was specifically created for western countries. In China the same company (ByteDance) owns a hugely popular short-video app called Douyin. These two apps do not share content for obvious reasons (yes, communist censorship and all that).
I think what boggles HN readers' mind (mine included and I'm Chinese btw), is that in a place that's purportedly Orwellian or at least bearing resemblance to it, creativity is supposed to be severely oppressed and virtually non-existent. Yet the reality is quite the opposite.
One cannot simply compare total number of downloads (Tiktok) to number of monthly active users (Instagram) to make assertion that Tiktok may be as big as Instagram.
TikTok's grown so fast I have to wonder if it's a fad. It's built around a pretty specific interaction. When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there? Will they be able to pivot to something more engaging, or will that just look too much like Facebook or Instagram?
TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and China is a totalitarian state, so it's basically owned by the Chinese government. Is it too paranoid to worry about all the videos and their metadata being controlled by the Chinese government?
[+] [-] bransonf|6 years ago|reply
Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move.
I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with)
First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
- pay creators
- deal with harassment
The two things, of course, that Twitter is totally incapable of doing. It's not clear how TikTok is responding to the same pressures.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faizshah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subsaharancoder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryuukk_|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] parliament32|6 years ago|reply
In terms of content: remember when Instagram first became popular, and you started using that more compared to Facebook, because FB just felt "stale" and old while IG was the new and exciting thing, with better and more exciting content? That's basically the different between TT and IG now.
[+] [-] authoritarian|6 years ago|reply
From what I've seen of tik tok it seems it's mostly young kids and teenagers lip syncing music, dancing, and doing comedy sketches.
Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app
[+] [-] timwaagh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|6 years ago|reply
Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric gives more credibility to their internal numbers.
I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just me.
[+] [-] president|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street...
[2] https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
[3] https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
[+] [-] trophycase|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedi72|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] butler14|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzelinskie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|6 years ago|reply
Billions of downloads doesn't tell you if 'something is growing' it's the Daily Active Users. Ask them how TikTok plans to make money in order to remain profitable and they will completely fall tone deaf.
This article tells you nothing about TikTok outperforming instagram.
[+] [-] enahs-sf|6 years ago|reply
Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.
[+] [-] cm2187|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keepper|6 years ago|reply
We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful global companies.
[+] [-] darzu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m12k|6 years ago|reply
Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.
[+] [-] wil421|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|6 years ago|reply
Then I realized how good Facebook knows its market.
[+] [-] axegon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron_harkonnen|6 years ago|reply
The US government is basically run from corporate interest, which has served people well for 50 years when things are good. But those corporations have no loyalty to the US. As political and economics interests shift, expect those large corporations to follow there own interests, not those of any nation.
The Chinese government, for all of its many faults, is making sure that Chinese corporations serve the interest of China. Corporations currently located in the US no longer even pay lip service to being interested in supporting the people of United States.
[+] [-] DelTaco|6 years ago|reply
So sometimes I'll have to download it when I don't have access to a desktop, send or read a message I needed to, and then uninstall it.
[+] [-] tinyhouse|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quotemstr|6 years ago|reply
Turns out that these beliefs don't actually work. They're self indulgent nonsense. We could afford them for a while, but now that we have actual competition, we can't. We need to go back to old school attitudes, buckle down, get our heads out of our asses, and compete.
[+] [-] jariel|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
I'm not even talking about China, but just the fact that their business model is also based on being creepy, stalking their users and then serving them cancer aka ads.
I hope one day we'll have a mainstream social media platform that doesn't rely on stalking to fund itself, or at least allows to pay to opt-out.
[+] [-] dxl32|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nagyman|6 years ago|reply
I think they also nailed the music aspect of content creation. Whereas other platforms are actively hostile to users using unlicensed audio, TT licenses popular music which saves a boatload of effort on the content creation side and just makes it all more compelling to watch. Contrast that with takedown notices and little support for including sound at all.
[+] [-] Smithalicious|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] durpleDrank|6 years ago|reply
I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh" people won't use it much longer.
[+] [-] partiallypro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] progval|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoumTAC|6 years ago|reply
For example if your interested in bike, can you find cool bike related stuff ? Or is it just some people doing funny thing with some music on it ?
I tried it a few months ago and found only funny videos.
It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.
I like Instagram or YouTube because I can follow thing I'm interesting in.
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
I remember there was a vaguely similar services from Twitter, and that somehow never caught on.
[+] [-] AMerrit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headsupftw|6 years ago|reply
I think what boggles HN readers' mind (mine included and I'm Chinese btw), is that in a place that's purportedly Orwellian or at least bearing resemblance to it, creativity is supposed to be severely oppressed and virtually non-existent. Yet the reality is quite the opposite.
[+] [-] xivzgrev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themagician|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bxparks|6 years ago|reply