Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands the threat of TikTok
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Taking his Q&A responses at face value is a mistake. There is a huge element of PR in his response. He is undoubtedly very aware that anything he says has a decent chance of being leaked to the press.
Did you not the convenient word there? That is the key, nothing else is as convenient as facebook, so much as I don't like facebook I remain.
The people that knew Ed well enough to care will find out. And the grandparents would probably prefer an extra visit a month than a never ending photo reel.
It appears convenient but adds nothing of substance to our lives.
So yes, there is certainly value there. And it's made even more attractive by the fact that the actual cost is effectively hidden to users since they aren't actually the customers. The argument here is more about whether the cost incurred is actually worth the minor convenience.
Tangentially, I've often thought that the added convenience necessarily cheapens the interactions. Things like the automatic birthday reminders have basically outmoded the old "it's the thought that counts" adage.
They are both depriving the user of freedom to choose to compromise their privacy for convenience and asserting that the user is inherently flawed because they even thought they had such a choice. They aren't just arguing that the individual should reconsider their decision to use Facebook, they're arguing that they need to reevaluate their life.
Note, I left Facebook some year ago, and my mental health is better for it.
[0]: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-pok...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-d...
Yet each one got their lunch ate in the next trend.
MSFT missed the boat on mobile and have given up from a HW standpoint. Apple missed the boat on the cloud (tbd if they can catch up). Google missed the boat on social.
Microsoft never was a hardware company but their software powered many pre-iPhone smartphones. If you are into Android hacking, you probably know about xda-developers. It got its name from the O2 XDA brand, a brand of Windows Mobile early smartphones. They were on the boat, they just couldn't keep up. When tablets became a thing, they had a second chance, they tried to take it, but failed.
Google had Orkut before Facebook even existed, and every few years, they try a new social thing, and they invariably fail.
As for Apple, they didn't really miss out on the cloud. Apple has cloud services... for Apple device users. It is an exclusive service they offer to people who buy their overpriced devices, and it seems to work well for them.
The failures, I think, are just a matter of corporate culture. What helps them one way handicaps them in another. Microsoft focus on business hinders their ability to consider consumer-focused mobile devices. Google machine-centric doesn't help with the human element of social interactions. And Apple focus on hardware limits the availability of their software.
They lost out on mobile, but you can’t catch every boat.
I don't believe that Facebook is at that point yet. If they were they would have missed the switch to mobile, struggled against Google+, lost to Snap, etc.
lol, we must live in a different world.
(i) TikTok's content is more engaging (ii) Instagram's content could be easily recreated on TikTok (iii) TikTok's explore feed is addictive
(i) TikTok videos are high-definition, fluid videos with catchy music. TikTok's compression algorithm almost seems lossless since videos are much more crisp than on Instagram/Facebook. I even believe they are upsampling videos from 30fps to 60fps (although this is just a personal observation and may be wrong). The catchy music is probably self-explanatory.
(ii) Think of typical Instagram content: an influencer posing or a travel snapshot. Now imagine the same content as short, crisp, and fluid videos with engaging music. Instagram content creators could easily recreate their content on TikTok in a more engaging way.
(iii) Upon opening the app you are shown the explore feed. You are shown a single TikTok video in fullscreen and you can swipe up to load the next video. The TikTok app seems to preload the next 5 videos which in practice means that content is always instantly available. The algorithm is quite quick in learning what content you like to see.
I think this quote sums up my thoughts quite nicely: "When I was a product manager at Facebook and Instagram, building a true content-first social network was the holy grail. We never figured it out. Yet somehow TikTok has cracked the nut and leapfrogged everyone else." — Eric Bahn, General Partner at Hustle Fund & Ex Instagram Product Manager
This is something I didn't think about: do they play video by itself and sync the audio to the video? They could then cache the audio once, and replay for all similar videos.
In Turkey TikTok people and Instagram/Twitter people cater to completely separate demographics[from all ages]. People in Instagram/Twitter world would be exposed to funny TikTok videos quite often through Instagram/Twitter celebrities but TikTok is viewed as the place where "rednecks do cringy things that are sometimes funny but I don't want to be associated with".
BBC Turkish did a short documentary[0] on Turkish TikTok celebrities, they were talking about their desire(but a failure) to migrate their fanbase to YouTube since the monetisation was not good enough on TikTok. They portrayed TikTok as a place for everyday people, unlike other places like Instagram where apparently everyone lives a glamorous life.
I think Zuck understands the threat better than most. And this is precisely why the government should not allow him to buy anymore of these competitors, no matter how early in their startup life. No monopoly should be allowed to buy any competition at whatever level.
If they want to compete, they should build their own solutions and compete on merit. They should certainly have all the money and clout they need for that (it's just that often they completely misunderstand the "new markets", but that's their own leadership problem and nobody owns them anything so that they remain a monopoly).
I certainly wish Instagram and WhatsApp didn't belong to FB or any of the Big Tech right now.
(In the abstracted, skin-tone neutral sense)
Like clearly Tumblr and Blogger and Twitter, despite being structurally not that different from each other, have different cultures.
What I’ve found interesting about TikTok is that the culture seems so joyful. Lots of really happy people sharing in a way that actually makes you feel some cohesion with other people.
People checking in from the South, or Georgia or Wisconsin, or the city or country, etc. it’s sort of the opposite of the constant divisiveness you feel browsing Twitter or Reddit. Or the opposite the little cultural bubble Facebook puts you in.
I wasn’t aware the internet could still do that. I think that might prove to have interesting implications.
Sometimes rules and other deliberate structures guide the evolution but it's often small things that aren't obvious up front.
And, of course, very different things can evolve within the same social network. Lots of people don't care about monetization on YouTube. For others, it's what YouTube exists for from their personal perspective.
Ten years ago I thought it was impossible. Any social media network that can't achieve that, including Snap, is probably counting its days. Facebook also has an absurd amount of user and interest data.
I always thought those who considered Snap to be a real threat (and now TikTok) to be ignoring the underlying revenue growth vehicles of those companies.
The Gen-Z social networks will be all about creation
Zuckerberg does not have a finger in this pie and that should be an alarming sign for any Facebook share holders.
Why? Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out. Or, in case the target is unwilling to be taken over (like Snapchat was), Facebook simply integrates their model into FB/Instagram, exposes it to billions of people at once and crushes the target.
The time to buy TikTok was three years and 500M users ago.
FB got away with it because Vine and Snap had really awful UX.
I don't remember an app that lasted less time on my phone than Vine, it's almost like it was made exclusively for people glued on their phone all day. Sound on by default? REALLY?
ByteDance is one of the most valuable unicorns in the world, I can't see that ever happening.
Isn't it Chinese government policy not to block such transactions?
Google didn't buy Baidu, and Ebay didn't buy AliExpress, and Paypal didn't buy WeChat Pay.
Gee. I feel old now. Real kick in the face. ;)
- Lost Generation (1883 - 1900 cohort, extinct as of 2018)
- Greatest Generation (1901 - 1927, WWII generation)
- Silent Generation (1928 - 1945, McCarthy, Korean war, civil rights)
- Baby boomers (1946 - 1964, post-war, Vietnam War, hippies)
- Generation X (1965 - 1980)
- Millennials (1981 - 1996, formerly known as Generation Y)
- Generation Z (1997 - early-2000s)
"iGeneration" is a label that gets tossed around occasionally, but it's so meh.
In the meantime, I've been calling them Zoomers or Zoomies :P
There was no Generation W. Only the Baby Boom (starting in 1944 and going on a decade or so) was an actual demographic event, followed by a smaller "baby bust" and an even smaller "baby boom echo" that corresponds vaguely to GenX. Subsequent "generations" are pretty much exclusively in the minds of marketers and social media.
So to the degree that Generation X is a notion worthy of a name, "X" is the name they gave themselves, following Douglas Coupland's book, which didn't coin the term but attracted a lot of attention. The book was mostly about dotcom culture, and "dotcom" would be a better name for it since that was the defining event of that generation (if it had one at all).
"Z" is now entering the same phase: graduating into the world of work, hating entry-level jobs, and not yet having its big cultural moment. If there is one at all.
This does not fit in with FB's goals and strategy. Zuckerberg may not grasp it, but even if he does, it's unclear how this could be implemented inside a framework that is 100% centered on a user's profile and real-life persona.
It's not easy to convince such passionate and fan-driven folk with built audiences to switch, it's almost as if Vimeo started trying to pay YouTubers to switch to Vimeo.
Less restrictive? Just look at what they do to LGBT content: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-l...
Additionally, it's Chinese and thus likely to be in the target list of economic sanctions. For once, something good could result out of the cringefest that is the US-China trade war.
The name alone means nobody will use it. It's not catchey at all. It sounds more of a clothing store or something.
> If Zuckerberg... doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon... we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own.
I'm usually a fan of Josh Constine's analysis of Facebook, but positioning Facebook as a defender of American political values is a bit much. If the growth-at-all-costs company that led us to social media dystopia is our best defense against Chinese political values, we are well and truly fucked.
His other platforms don't seem to have the same level of deep data collection and manipulation capability FB does.
Anyone who can minimize the attention span further, turn blind eye to abuse of children in their platform (at-least initially till uproar) by targeting Asian countries where enforcement of laws are questionable and 60% of world population live; can grow at exponential rate i.e. till another platform which reduces attention span further.
This is a plague, these limited attention gratification is not limited to these platforms themselves and are being exploited successfully for pushing misinformation by various nefarious elements including but not limited to political parties.
As I've said many times: just move all those old cyberpunk novels to the nonfiction section.
Almost none of them cross the divide and become more widely popular.
I think the fast nature of Tiktok is driving it much faster to that same end, I've seen plenty of widespread Tiktok fake videos that were created with the sole purpose of getting the most views, like those fix things with ramen pack and glue.
Contrast to something like a coal company strip mining, and everyone can see the same thing with their own eyes.
What do you mean? The fact that different people may see different things in their feeds doesn't mean you can't point out differences in (for example) social network's policies (sometimes this is more of an unwritten policy) on media that depicts children's bodies.
I personally don't have TikTok but I have never found a single video of half naked children dancing on YouTube, Facebook or IG that wasn't a reposted TikTok video (I have read about videos like that being on YouTube, though). And I don't think it has much to do with the fact that I don't like to see this kind of videos in my feed. It also makes sense given the demographics of TikTok app.
I don't have any serious citations to give, this is of course anectodical as it's my personal experience and I don't even have TikTok, but anyway I don't think one can dismiss worries like this just by blaming the algorithm. Most of the time that content shouldn't be there for the algorithm to recommend it in the first place.