How TikTok Is Rewriting the World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So I forgot about it and did not open the app after that. But then every few days or whatever I would get a notification and it was TikTok. What I remember was that it was mainly random teenage girls saying or doing something trivial and mildly entertaining or just stupid but while they were doing it they were subtly showing off their legs or bodies in some way.
Since I'm not a teenager and half of the videos were quite annoying, I had to uninstall it.
https://twitter.com/kenjac/status/1099426350488866818?s=21
https://twitter.com/mikaela_wild/status/1097558817364234241?...
The issues where it hurts is INSANE data usage and the fact that you basically need headphones to use it. Audio is so important to the experience and coupled with the data usage, it is hard to get lost in the app when not in private/wifi. Even with those 2 restrictions, it gets more eye time from me than instagram/snap chat and facebook combined.
It does tend to track to a younger age group, but many of those users were on the app when it was still musically, showing some real power to keep a userbase year over year. And then you have a ton of users who came to it once vine collapsed.
It is the only social media app that I use where I don't know anyone IRL that I follow. I think that is a big distinction from all the other big players.
It could be wonderful, but I'm entitled to assume that advertising is "best foot forward" and conclude accordingly.
There's a frequently-quoted XKCD cartoon about how the world is so big that it's always the first time that someone has heard about something. It's always someone's first time to watch some silly cat videos, crazy pratfalls, and stupid stunts. We all do it, and I'm not going to say there's anything wrong with it. What I will say is that it never seems to be a sustainable business; things like TikTok seem to burn through the available "fresh new underbrush" really quickly, then it's another year or two before the next hot thing like this shows up and quickly burns through all the people for whom this is new.
You can actually see a lot of gifs right now on reddit being taken straight from Douyin because that's where cool/fun stuff is being created.
To compare with Vine - by not having time limit, I was able to see the 30sec video of how too cook one of the Chinese dishes, or 1 minute video of a metal welder creating one of his metal sculptures.
It's extremly addictive I think, because content might be realy short or quite-but-not-too long.
I'm trying to say in a roundabout way that Douyin content is miles ahead of TikTok content. I haven't seen too much of the TikTok's girls seeking attention content issue.
That doesn't necessarily work for everything but for many things cutting out the fat is going to deliver more information in a shorter time.
It's working in some large markets but not others:
"Compared to the exponential growth in India, cracking the U.S. market has been more challenging. While TikTok became one of the most downloaded apps in the U.S., the number of people who actively use the app is far less impressive. TikTok’s 30-day user retention rate in the U.S. has been around 10%, compared to more than 30% in India, people with knowledge of the matter said."
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinas-bytedance-pla...?
I miss vine.
* vine’s founders resisted aggressive monetization * instagram added short videos and did monetize them a lot * marketers quit spending money on sponsored vines and started spending it on sponsored instagrams * twitter just kinda sat on their thumbs with regards to putting any resources into vine, the founders drifted away
Teenage girls seekin attention through showing skin and acting provocative is nothing new, but tiktok is amplifying it to hitherto unseen levels. Some of these girls have multiple millions of followers while their content is mostly repetitive uninspired lipsyncing while gyrating the bottom or flapping the chestbags.
Tiktok has a face-narrowing filter enabled by default; it makes your jaw look much more narrow and gives you a pointy chin, making you look younger and more attractive. It cant be turned off afaik.
The hordes of predominantly male followers donate significant amount of money, of course. Tiktok takes its cut, of course. What % do you think it is? It's not 2-5% like most donating platforms. It's not even the high 30% like in app stores.
It is 50%. Tiktok takes half of every donation. It takes advantage of underage girls, pimps them out and dangles their sexuality in front of the viewers, and skins them for half of everything they get.
https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1552272052005.webm