TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram | Hacker News Reader

TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

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298 pointselorant305 comments

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.

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!

TikTok is a soft porn dosage for newer/emerging internet users.

Sounds like youtube. It took years for youtube to get from cat video quality to scientific / conference videos that often are better than books / text by the name people.

I still don’t believe I would switch :)

> 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.

Videos encode way more information than a snippet of text.

If anything, social media is moving the opposite way, where people are requiring more stimulation and information.

I think it’s somewhere in between.

More stimulation but less information.

More information, at least in the information-theory sense, but much less knowledge. I.e. videos are much less efficient than text, or even static pictures. Take a second of the most insightful video you can find, and in the same space, you could easily cram an entire textbook on the same topic, complete with high-resolution images.

Just pulling a transcript of a given video, timing your reading, and comparing it to the length of the video would make this evident. And that's if the information delivery is perfectly optimized, which in most cases it's not. Compare 1hr of CNN to a 1hr college political science lecture, for example.

depends on the image and the text. teens dumping goo on their brother's head and then running away are essentially useless compared to a wiki paragraph on the holocaust.

> people are requiring more stimulation and information

Perhaps I'm old, but TikTok failed to get me back over and over again.

i cant speak for anyone else, but as a heavy vine/snapchat user, it scratches a specific itch for effortless entertainment in the same vein as leaving the tv on in the background. I still consume long form media as much as i used to. but my turn-my-brain-off outlet is different

At the same time we have the rise of long form podcasts. Producing quite the opposite effect.

90% of podcasts these days are just people rambling on without much thought while trying to sell you something. I have a feeling that most people who listen to podcasts do so for background noise, as a way inject some dopamine into their boring commute or routine chores.

I used to listen to podcasts a ton but switched to listening to lectures or conference talks.

I'm not sure why you've picked up downvotes, it's exactly right. Most podcasts, just like youtube videos, have matured to specific lengths optimized for interspersed advertising opportunities.

At the same time, the criticism is useless without knowing the podcasts someone is listening to.

Pretty big difference between listening to Wendy Williams vs, I don't know, philosophical debates and deep dives into history and all sorts of intellectually stimulating things. Most people I know including myself listen to the latter which is nothing short of welcome mind-expansion and I'm a more interesting person as a result of it.

People listening to podcasts or reading books really aren't the people I'm worried about in the modern era.

I mostly listened to software engineering radio, software engineering daily, talking machines, this week in machine learning, village global, freakonomics, econtalk and other similar tech and business shows.

Most of the content in those shows is still fluff and nowhere near as information dense as a lecture from Stanford or MIT. Take talking machines as an example, an interview with a guy like David Blei will be very shallow and watered down for the general audience, I'd much rather listen to him give a lecture at a machine learning summer school.

What? My podcasts are all on subjects that I'm interested in and rarely (other than sponsored 1 or 2 minute ads that I can fast forward through) mention a product. What are you on about?

I mostly listened to tech podcasts like talking machines and econ/business stuff like freakonomics or village global. They all mostly follow an interview format where the guest is only there to promote something that they work on.

They are there because they have insight into a phenomenon they have studied and is being discussed, and they may have a book or something that further explains what they are talking about should the listener be interested. Should they not mention or promote their work?

Almost always the main guest is there to primarily plug something. They almost are never there just to discuss some findings.

There are also more high-quality documentary series than ever before. And more books, and more of everything.

I don't know what GP's expectation was - that the internet would turn everyone into Aristotle?

Now weigh (e.g. multiply) the number of each with the number of people actually consuming it. Just look at Youtube: If a serious video that teaches you something interesting has a thousand views it can be called "very popular". The latest useless joke video easily gets a million views.

Except that the "useless" jokes will always win the view battle since they are very easy (i.e short) to consume. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that people are consuming long form videos and podcasts

The most amazing math textbook in the world may sell maybe 100K copies tops. 50 Shades of Grey sold 125 million. Does this mean books are bad, or does it mean people aren't always exclusively interested in intellectually challenging topics?

The Gutenberg revolution had its critics. I think criticising the Internet as a medium has parallels to that. That's not to say any arguments made are idiotic, just that they may miss the point. I think there are reasons why the view counts are so different that don't imply the Internet is a shitty medium.

Firstly, a 3 hour podcast takes 3 hours to listen to, generating one click per three hours of listenting time for that podcast. TikTok videos take a few seconds to watch, so in 3 hours you're doling out thousands of views.

Secondly, views are distributed differently for those types of content because everyone finds roughly the same things funny, but only few find the same things interesting. If you want to watch something funny, you're probably not gonna spend much time finding suitable content, instead just consuming whatever is popular, so a handful of videos end up with insane amounts of views. But if you want to take up a hobby project you'd pick something that interest you, which is very different from what might interest me, even within the domain of CS and maybe even within subdomains of CS, so views are distributed more evenly for instructional videos.

And now we're here comparing the view counts of popular funny videos to instructional videos. I think it's clear why that might not be a good data point.

Just some counter examples: Joe Rogan, Veritasium (science), vloggers in general, Pritimive technology.

I think things have flipped. TV used to be for serious content, Internet for cat videos. Now it's going the opposite way.

And why is that a problem? So what if I scroll through 200 Twitter memes on my lunch break and then throw on a 2-hour educational YouTube video in the evening? Sure, I've given 200 impressions to the bad kind of content and only one impression to the good kind, but I don't think I've disastrously eroded my ability to focus on things.

I would suspect two very different demographics.

I would not suspect so, and I think this is our time's video game violence. It's such a trope for the newly adult generation and up to start worrying about the latest fads. Sometimes justified, like vaping is legitimately a terrible habit, but ultimately hard to gauge until it's too late, i.e. until the consequences are a fact.

Relevant crosslink in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21575365

Podcasts that many people have playing constantly. In the car or on the train. In the elevator. At work. In the bathroom. At the store. At home. For many people, it's mindless banter they put on in the background while doing other tasks. Youtube, but you can use your eyes.

But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own? Just a moment when someone or something isn't barking at you to listen to this or buy that. I at least can't think clearly about something else if someone is reciting a story to me. Scary when most podcasts also have advertising, so you are getting a subconscious dose of that during all your waking hours.

This reminds me of that "alarming" picture[0] taken on a Philadelphia train used to scaremonger people about how everyone is addicted to the newspapers and how it degrades the fabric of society and thought by making everyone antisocial.[1]

Yes, there are many arguments that can be brought up about differences between newspapers and social media, etc., but I strongly feel like it is essentially the same kind of neo-ludditism that will play out the exact same way. Something new will come up after social media, and then people will jump on that as the next thing that "degrades the society". We can already see a micro-version of that, with people lamenting how "back in the old days, blog posts were long form and meaningful, not like those tweets and instagram posts".

0. https://imgur.com/gallery/WkHHpZ1

1. https://xkcd.com/1227/

Just like all of the people pushing FUD that Tinder/Grindr and one night stand culture would kill true relationships (or worse implications on wider society). Even though everyone I know who used those earlier in their life and are now in serious relationships with people, often one's they met online.

People are always looking for the 'surprising' reasons why society is really in decay and everyone's living their day-to-day lives completely blind to it - except us few who know better.

There's huge demand for this sort of thing to be true, it's been the basis of every cult ever, plenty of extreme political movements, religions, and a million think pieces through history. Yet life and culture always ends up being far more boring and resilient than predicted.

>Just like all of the people pushing FUD that Tinder/Grindr and one night stand culture would kill true relationships (or worse implications on wider society). Even though everyone I know who used those earlier in their life and are now in serious relationships with people, often one's they met online.

Oh wow, I haven't even thought of that one until you mentioned it, but it certainly seems to ring true for the people I know as well.

> But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own?

When you're recording your own podcast.

You're a person. When do you get a free thought in? In the absence of overwhelming evidence you should assume other people are probably more like you than you think, rather than making grand claims about "many" people that aren't you.

> But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own?

You come on a discussion platform like Hackernews to voice your own thoughts and opinions?

So is a discussion platform better for the mind in that sense?

This view seems like the usual textbook moral panic stuff.

The people most "easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns" certainly—at first glance—don't appear to be the same people who are most comfortable using modern media channels.

>Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds.

real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/

>With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease...

>So much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination. It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary.

I know people that cannot go 60 seconds without picking up their phone, with no purpose except to check for notifications that aren't there and then put it back down. Reposting a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality where people are really struggling to focus.

You say that "a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality" and then go on to say that "people are really struggling to focus" which is essentially the same point, or at least closely related, that the quotes from the xkcd are making. Why are you acting like the quotes are unrelated when they support what you're saying?

I think you're misunderstanding why OP posted the quotes. The quotes are mocking people that say that technology is making it harder for people to focus, because a hundred years ago people said the same thing about books and the telegraph etc.

Maybe that’s when the slide started...

Idiocracity is based on the trend that has been a trend for a long time now: as we’re able to scale more in most industries, we need less people relative to the population in the work force, but the minimal intelligence required to fulfill those roles is growing.

This is the reason that Silicon Valley is pushing minimal guaranteed income: rich people need to pay off people who they can’t provide a job for anymore.

Some TikToks are highly creative, joy-inducing and a testament to being one happy human (or dog) anno 2019.

I agree people also need to enjoy a lengthy book once, an inspiring piece of music or whatever floats your boat, but aren't you painting a too gloomy picture?

We are all together solving something about our relationship to symbols. It may be painful to go through, but in the end humanity will be better off for all the hard work we who are here today have done by staring without pause at our phones.

"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."

Sadly, those kinds of people make some of the best consumers, and many online companies (from advertisers, to game developers, to news sites) are optimizing for that kind of addictive, short attention span engagement.

Vine was unnecessarily wrecked by Twitter's poor stewardship, and a fatal dispute with the community of stars who produced its top content: https://www.mic.com/articles/157977/inside-the-secret-meetin...

- 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.

New compilations of old Vines still get posted every day and rack up hundreds of thousands of views. It really was only a matter of time.

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.

Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass -> ergo SnapChat

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

>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

Tik Tok doesn't have formal interest groups the way that reddit has subreddits, but there are definitely niche communities that congregate around hash tags. The big ones include visual and audio artists, and there are big pet communities there too. I haven't seen aquarium enthusiasts (mostly because that's not my niche), but I'm sure they're out there. Tik Tok is in the middle of a huge ferret craze because of this cute video of a dancing ferret [1] for example.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGVytQMUmE

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.

I hate when social media tries to figure out anything about what I like. Its never correct.

"Oh you liked this one cooking show, well here is 237 more cooking shows!"

You don't like hot people?

They tend to burn my tongue. I prefer them served lukewarm.

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'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.

I have children, all the children are using it. The other day two famous TikTokers we're spotted in a Northern VA mall and it was a pretty big deal. It's not fake.

Just because a lot of kids are using it doesn't mean it has 1.2Bn downloads. That's a lot of downloads.

Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has 1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the world.

I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to be in China.

If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company.

If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't ~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are completely unbelievable.

At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed that more than 65% of their users are under 25.

So there's 抖音 and TikTok. They have completely seperate databases and installers (unlike WeChat). On IOS, if you are geolocated (or maybe it's locale restricted?) in the Chinese market then you can only download 抖音。If you are located in the international regions, then you will only find TikTok.

Since there is no Google Play Store in China, you will only find TikTok there [in the Play Store]. To install 抖音 you simply download the apk from their website and side-load it.

Since the article states

> TikTok has hit 1.5 billion total downloads across the App Store and Google Play

I believe that IOS has around 13% market share in China. So this is missing out on A LOT of downloads.

Then again it's hard to believe that there are 1.5 billion downloads for tiktok (ios + android) and 抖音(just ios). Then that must mean that it's not counting 抖音 downloads on Android.

> Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that.

GMail comes preinstalled in a lot of phones, and you can also use the service with different mail client, so you can't really compare two numbers and call that a day.

My gut says it's a real trend, but the numbers are still juiced.

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.

[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...

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.

huge advertising spends

Chinese money wants in instead of the usual way where it’s western money trying to pick China. Not sure about censorship, always a possibility when Chinese money is involved.

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.

> Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.

That's what's got me skeptical. There's a lot of people saying TikTok proves Twitter killing Vine was a bad move, but Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are wildly different "social networks". IMO the equivalent of putting Amazon, Youtube and Wikipedia on the same "website" category.

WhatsApp is incredibly useful. It's perhaps the "lamest" of all social networks— it doesn't have "creators", it's not known for its cool filters, it has no "likes", but it works and where it's used, it's as ubiquitous and used as phone numbers once were.

Facebook is very utilitarian too. IMO they haven't become "uncool" because they dropped the ball— they went for the general population. It's like they purposefully toned down their "cool" brand to widen the age of users that could associate with it. Now you can not only find pretty much anyone on Facebook, but also buy and sell on Marketplace, find a Job, find events, restaurants, find groups for parents, study groups, groups for people with rare diseases, the list goes on.

TikTok is very popular, but what's the demographic and what's the value proposition here? Teenage entertainment? If so, they're competing with Instagram, but also YouTube and Netflix. It's also perfectly plausible its users will outgrow it by the time they go to college or enter the workforce, or once the ads pick up to keep with the operational expenses.

The real challenge for the company will come in the form or retention and the broadening of their product + user base to compete on the next level, as something useful and not just entertaining, IMO.

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.

Facebook’s privacy faux pas will be nothing compared to a company who’s government can request any of users data (Chinese or not) with zero oversight.

We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful global companies.

Except who will know?

"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.

Didn't they acquire Messenger as well? I think it was called Beluga

I’m not sure about the mobile app itself. I do know they rebranded messages in Facebook to become Messenger. Basically you had to access private messages inside Messenger.

No, it was split out from the main app: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-spl...

> The move allows Facebook developers to focus more exclusively on features and improvements for each individual app. Of course, it also requires users to download another Facebook property onto their smartphones, a not-so-subtle way for the company to increase app downloads.

I found this on Beluga, but it smells of an acquihire and rewrite, and predates the split by a few years: https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/

The article you posted is about how Beluga was turned into Messenger...

Beluuga was a pretty basic app. Sure they acquired that. But Messenger is mostly and created by Facebook. Especially because Facebook Chat was already around.

Instagram was small app for hipsters, and everyone thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1B for it.

They weren’t a competition by any means, and would (speculation) most likely die if they didn’t tap into Facebook resources.

WhatsApp was only real big competition Facebook bought so far.

> They weren’t a competition by any means, and would (speculation) most likely die if they didn’t tap into Facebook resources

What's your reasoning for that? I think pre-WhatsApp acquisition most people would argue that Facebook would have died if it did not acquire Instagram...

I'm forced to use messenger for work but have refused to download the mobile app for this reason. Voting with my download count.

Ouch, forced to use Facebook for work... Thats rough... My last company ALMOST used Facebook for enterprise like 3 years ago when they were advertising it... So glad it was a flaming pile of garbage when we tested it out.

> Ouch, forced to use Facebook for work... Thats rough...

Yeah the worst part is that I can't tell my boss to screw off because it's my company :D We do some customer support on Facebook because so many of our users are there, otherwise I wouldn't be touching it with a 12 foot pole either.

> They also lied and said you had a message when you really didn’t. Just to force the messenger download.

I bet the line of reasoning is that the message notification is for the upsell telling you how great Messenger is.

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.

I would hardly consider Amazon as having an OS - but having actual decent mobile website experience and being a service that requires less use than social media probably helps

Amazon sells their own devices with their own version of Android with their own app store. I would consider that their own OS.

Amazon's main apps are probably the store app and the Kindle app. The store app isn't very useful unless you have the ability to pay over the internet and the ability to have packages delivered; you probably shouldn't be in a country subject to US trade sanctions either.

The Kindle app may not require ability to pay via the internet, but it helps. There's also a big step to wanting to read.

Neither of these apps are going to hit the numbers that mostly non paid communications apps will hit, because of the difference in markets.

I would agree with you although I’m not sure what this has to do with my original comment.

On Amazon’s scale, there’s a very common mistake made by people in the 11 countries where Amazon delivers (out of a possible 192): they don’t realise that Amazon is actually hardly available internationally. They can’t have a billion users because they don’t serve countries with more than 800M inhabitants.

AWS is a different story but it’s B2B. And I think that Amazon (Prime) Video is available more widely but Amazon, for all it’s Revenue and Market share isn’t a billion-user company.

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.

G+ was a facebook clone that brought nearly nothing new to the picture and thus no reason to switch so it failed. Pretty simple. TikTok fills the Vine niche and then some.

Competition in this space is clearly possible, or we wouldn't be discussing TikTok.

New to the Internet and young people have less qualms about trying things and are often able to spread things with word of mouth.

Google plus got mired down in the real name policy and the account consolidation and the usually problems associated with Google (which includes an association with Google).

Worth noting that these are apps you have to download to use. You don't need to download the Reddit app for example to use Reddit.

I knew teenagers weren't on Facebook anymore, so I asked my niece what she uses with her friends: WhatsApp groups and Instagram.

Then I realized how good Facebook knows its market.

You can say that about Instagram but not really WhatsApp. When FB acquired WhatsApp it was already the most popular messaging app in many countries. In Israel for example literally every person in the country had WhatsApp on their phone by the time of the acquisition. FB acquiring WhatsApp wasn't that impressive. The impressive part was the amount of money there were willing to pay for it. As far as I know it's still not making any money so it's not even clear yet if it was worth it.

How do they meet other people online now? Those platforms aren't really conductive to creating new friendships. It seems like you'd already need most of that somewhere else. Where are they getting it?

As far as I can tell, Discord.

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.

You can use mbasic.facebook.com to see an low-bandwith version of Facebook. From there you can view and reply to messages without having to install the Messenger app.

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.

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.

Here's my writeup on why TikTok is doing so well: https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-tiktok

I enjoyed this, thanks!

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.

One of TikTok's strength is recommendation, so I don't think spamming will work.

> Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app.

There's also https://www.tiktok.com/trending

My only concern with TikTok is data collection being funneled to the CCP.

Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies.

> Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies.

As a European, I'd rather have my data stored on US servers than Chinese servers.

Hell, Facebook probably has better security than the NHS.

Chinese GDP growth is headed for <5% anyway.

The US isn't using that data to put Muslims into concentration camps and killing them to take their organs, or marching troops into Hong Kong.

You’re right about the concentration camps, but regarding Hong Kong US has done and is doing worse things. Sadly this is how empires work.

As a programmer, I am seriously curious about how these silly videos can help PRC "put Muslims into concentration camps", "take their organs" or "march troops into Hong Kong"

I wouldn’t be so sure,

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

> Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies.

You sound like a good candidate to visit China. Experience the difference between east and west for yourself. Let me assure you, I'm very thankful to live in a Democracy. There isn't parity on this issue.

At least we can bitch about it together...

I don't think they're able to do much bitching over there.

I think there’s a bit of hysteria here. Tiktok have completely separated their Chinese business and international one, with international server hosted outside China. Saying that data collection is funneled to CCP is like accusing any US company of _potential_ acquisition of foreign data by the US government. Or to rephrase, no Chinese business should have the ability to operate elsewhere because they are from China? I think it’s overboard and even somewhat hypocritical.

We know for a fact that US business funnel data to the US government, often unwillingly, thanks to Snowden.

it is actually very doubtful even tiktok has a separate section for internationals. for example, do you trust huawei's international operations?

You can ping the endpoints and see where the servers are, in addition to difference in naming, app, API, domain, etc.

I don't need to trust anyone to verify the things that I can verify myself.

Nowadays it is very easy to have a front server with behind-scene server farms. You as a common end user without special tools just cannot see through, unless you are a genius script kid.

this is a small part, actually. if the younger generation of the us population is brainwashed by the ccp regime's propaganda, what is going to happen when these kids grow up?

They are already being brainwashed by propaganda in the US, both left-wing (the mass media) and right-wing (some online rabbit holes), I don't see this as much worse.

The US left-wing and right-wing media propaganda is just a piece of cake comparing to the CCP's propaganda. Anyone died in Tianman Massacre? Anyone died in Natural Disaster Years of 1960-1963? None. LOL.

Can you find interesting video(non funny) on tik tok ?

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.

Because one app is more used doesn’t mean other apps aren’t useful.

My impression is that it is a quick, simple, but extremely effective medium for artistic expression.

In a sense it is very pure; it is not about anything specific and, more importantly, it is not about showing a fake, happy, successful version of yourself.

While I am too old to participate in it, as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging).

> It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.

The reason to create an account would be not to watch videos but to make videos. In that tiktok feels a bit like a teenager version of a twitter, youtube chimera.

> [..] as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging).

I think that is the core to its success (and was for Vine). Instagram became a platform for people to promote themselves or some product and people are fully aware of that nowadays.

In my own, very subjective, experience. It seems more people are "real" on Tik Tok. I just opened up the app, and the second video I saw, was a young woman talking about her Alopecia (an auto-immune disease that causes hair loss). I've seen similar videos about Scoliosis and Autism and lots of other issues people face. There are also a lot of queer creators on Tik Tok (though the company has had ongoing issues with removing queer content).

Tik Tok isn't free from toxic behavior or those problems with insta-models and travel vloggers by any means, but my impression has been that it's a surprisingly friendly and welcoming community, especially compared to a lot of other social networks

I just took a trip through the "trending" page and all I saw were dog videos, people showing off how awesome, happy or cool they were, and a couple tutorials.

None of that says "real" to me. It was all about showing how happy and successful they were.

In the videos I saw in general (again, not my thing, so a limited experience) there is a difference in production value.

On Instagram there is a tendency to push for that one perfect photo, on tiktok it looks like there is more a push for content. (obviously there is a continuity between them)

Especially with the "reply" functionality (I don't know how it is called, but you can reply to other users's video by making your own video that will appear the the side) the posts are often in the style of commentary.

In terms of online persona, on tiktok it is almost natural to post a video of your pimples/acne as funny video while on IG it would feel strongly out of place.

I've started seeing more cooking clips that are actually pretty well made and work well on the medium. If more content creators of various interests adopt it as a platform, it might be worthwhile.

You can search for things, and you can follow accounts that post things you're interested in. For example, I follow several accounts that show clips of renovating homes, or using power tools in interesting ways, or interesting construction techniques, etc.

Outperforming when Instagram is banned in China.

I remember there was a vaguely similar services from Twitter, and that somehow never caught on.

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.

Doesn't TikTok use a separate brand and app called Douyin in China with its own app download counts?

Yes, it does.

Yes, but it was in the report and I quote

"Much of TikTok's growth has been driven by an explosion of users in India, who accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. "

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?

> When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there?

Is that what TikTok is? I only use 抖音 which is definetely not that (there are a lot of dog videos, Bart Baker singing patriotic songs, Bart Baker staging skits where he makes americans love Chinese snacks, Alan Walker's team posts pretty frequently, and like 2-minute episodes of original dramas). Some video game highlights and like some really shallow plots where A treats a service worker badly, and then they show A's significant other be disgusted by the behavior and give the service worker a giant tip or something.

Funny to read these comments and see how many people are now “old” but haven’t realized it yet.

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?

I tried it a month ago, and while it was fun, I had to uninstall because there's NO WAY to disable push notifications for new posts, profile suggestions, etc...

You can’t just disable notifications for the app from your phone settings?

I uninstalled because I found it running in the background when it shouldn't be, but turning off notifications was easy for me.

My daughter and her friends are using Tiktok and Snapchat. It seems these two are mostly popular for teenagers. That was also the user base of Instagram in the first years. To be honest I'm trying to get her off both of these services and instead rely on texting/hangouts/email/etc to communicate with her friends.

another observation: TikTok and similar apps (and the long Phone designs) have made Portrait/Vertical Video ther norm.

We need another product that's not controlled by CCP though. Privacy & security should be the most important topics nowadays. We should all beware how big tech companies, especially those linked with CCP, would be using the data they collected. And take action (quit/avoid) when / before it hurts.

The biggest headline should be this:

    Essentially, TikTok is the only app in the top five that isn't owned by Facebook.

Do you trust Facebook to influence your children with toxic content and propaganda in the top 5 app downloads all owned by Facebook? I don't.

Do you trust the Chinese government?

However much I may dislike Facebook, I dislike the Chinese government more.

The only country able to stand up to China is the US. Without the US not trying enough we are all doomed...

I dont want my country to become once again a russian satellite. China is too far away but will feed Russia to influence my part of the world.

Seriously muricans get your shit together.

Expect to see more of this. Other nations will innovate and keep talent around while Bay Area engineers are stuck in traffic or moving away because of bad schools and insane housing costs.

Any form of social network platform gets ruined for me once it becomes mainstream. The feeling of belonging to a community is gone. Interacting with renowned people is almost impossible.

I'm not sure what to feel about this. The app seems worth than facebook to me. I've not used it myself, but from the limited information I gathered from friends, some of them would mindlessly watch it for hours and not be able to stop even if they wanted to. Some forced themselves to delete the app.

Genuine question to people who use the app: how does it add value? Or is it a even better attention grabber?

I'm surprised that it is so popular but lacks a web interface. I heard a lot about it so I wanted to try it. But I didn't want to try enough to download an app so I have yet to see what do the hype is about. Maybe if the web interface was good enough I would have downloaded the app

Sad to see this devolve into politics and hardly anything about the underlying technology, strategic execution, monetization prospects and the like.

That's a ton of downloads, and an abundant source of data from international users going directly to the hands of the Chinese government.

any thing big in china has some liaison with ccp regime, otherwise it cannot survive.

this one app just gets hot for less than two years, a lot of promotion and marketing power behind it.

Going exactly to China’s plan

Downloads != usage

Aight, conspiracy theory time.

I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back.

I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about violence, the shills will always use the word "ISIS" somewhere in their message.

It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC astroturfing not a big deal? Maybe my concerns are valid but that doesn't justify further concern about the influx of PRC messaging vectors to the USA, i.e. tiktok?

When I worked in the PRC I got to see first hand the strong-arm of the Party. Every business involved in communication had a government official whose entire job was to ensure the company "protected the social wellbeing of the people of the PRC" or similar. I can only assume tiktok has the same and I can only assume it's a matter of time before the Party starts directing the company to leverage their access to a massive US audience in a way that benefits the "social wellbeing," i.e. by disseminating PRC propaganda.

Exactly the way I feel about American influence in Europe. It's not too bad, you'll get used to it.

What are the issues that America is trying to push in Europe?

As a Canadian, random examples: Indifference to violence, hypocrisy on nudity, monetizing privacy (no respect for privacy), monetizing medical care.

(I don't mean to start a flame war, but they are topics where EU and Canada tend to disagree with major US trends)

Major US trends, but are people shilling on Reddit to support them? That's an honest question, I don't really read Reddit. I know there are a lot of people in the US who honestly believe in, say, private healthcare, so a lot of the comments in support of it could be explained as coming from Americans expressing their opinions, as opposed to government or corporate agents pushing an agenda.

I guess there can be a lot of influence in a discussion based on how comments are upvoted, how algorithms will favour one type of content over another? (especially when advertising is guiding it all, and lobbies are big advertisers)

I enjoyed this article: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a9335/upvote...

I also rarely visit Reddit, but for Facebook and Twitter, I guess there has been plenty of research on how people can manipulate public opinion by sharing/voting, and also the impact of their respective algorithms for promoting content?

Of course, Tik Tok is no different, and we should be worried. They do the same thing, only it's not 'our' lobbies and we have little control on them.

As a fellow Canadian can you expand on this?

Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime (born in 1993). Don't know what you mean on hypocrisy on nudity, but I only became comfortable with it when I visited Scandinavia when I was 22; seems like Canada has a similar issue.

I'll maybe give you medical care, but this is an incredibly complex topic. To think that public health care isn't monetized is a naïve point of view.

Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US. That's my honest opinion.

> Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime

Since the US is Canada's largest trading partner, this will always be the case, but there are huge and important differences in the level of involvement. Famously the level of involvement in the Iraq war was almost non-existent. Canada's involvement consisted of patrolling surrounding waters, and approximately 100 Canadian soldiers who were embedded in American forces as a sort of culteral military exchange[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_the_Iraq_War

Link from my sibling comment:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/war-crimes-in-the-da...

Violence: We have very different gun control laws, and general perception towards guns and violence. In my kid's primary school, they weren't even allowed to pretend-shoot at each other. Whereas I have to remind my US friends to leave their gun at home if driving to Canada (and yes, one of them had their gun confiscated at the border).

Medical care monetisation: sure there is a big private industry, but it's scales different than in the US. And it did not say that it does not exist, only that we tend to disagree on the trend (ex: pharma insurance, now deployed in some provinces, and likely to become federal).

Nudity: granted, I'm from Quebec, it might be different, but things like nipples, breastfeeding, nudity in art, being naked in locker rooms, seeing friends naked (non-sexually), etc. people tend to be much more indifferent about nudity and more comfortable with their body. Obviously, that's a huge generalization and perhaps anecdotal, but I heard this often.

Ah, and I guess with regards to violence, is our difference in free speech: hate speech is not permitted (with exclusions for religious groups, because of LGBT issues, iirc).

Again, these are what I think are non-aligned trends, and topics that have an impact on moderation/algorithms online, not a hard truth. Obviously not everyone agrees on these topics, some regions are more divided than others, and these views tend to evolve in time.

> Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime (born in 1993).

Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

> Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US.

Canada did not suffer a financial crisis to the extent that the US did in 2008 because banks here are regulated very differently than in the US. Also, the likelihood of medical bills causing financial ruin is much lower here.

> Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That's what is reported. I highly suspect JTF2 was involved since the beginning. This directly proving my point of the government misleading the people.

[0] - https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/war-crimes-in-the-da...

While i agree with you on the first two as US movies and culture to propagate those values, third you could argue that europe and canada are pushing more privacy onto america due to GDPR and PIPEDA and companies having to follow them, but the last one i entirely have to disagree with you on the last one.

I don't see the US trying to export or push that idea/policy and i can't see it ever gaining traction in canada or the EU.

As an eastern european i feel the same just from the opposite perspective. Western European push for values that fundamentally cannot work in my country.

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. This is insanely off topic and can't end well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sorry :)

The occasional war comes to mind.

I don't think someone should even consider to get used to commie influence

Or in 5-10 years that someone will be in situation worse than HK now

You mean to, in supposed good faith, suggest that USA influence in Europe is similar and/or equivalent to Chinese influence and interference in the USA?

Yes. Are you familiar with the NATO?

Quite. I think I'll stop responding to this thread because we're not going to see eye-to-eye here. Despite the current US President's love for despots and totalitarianism, that doesn't describe the USA.

Did you mean that old organisation which defend world from soviet invasion?

I hope this is sarcasm?

The things the USA did supposedly in the name of stopping "red danger" were utterly dispicable, and still have an impact today.

Wait

So you think that "red danger" was fake?

Or "red danger" did (and do) less despicable things?

> So you think that "red danger" was fake

I didn't say that - I think the US reaction to the threat was horrendous.

> Or "red danger" did (and do) less despicable things?

That's whataboutism - you would hope that a country that bills itself as "land of the free" would aim for a little better than that.

This whole thread is based on whataboutism! It’s supposed to be about Chinese influence, and then someone derailed it into talking about American influence, and now the whole thread is 90% comments about America and 10% comments about China.

Note: this also happens in pretty much every other thread about a country that isn’t America. God forbid anyone ever discuss anything else, Americans want to relitigate the same old tired “why my country sucks” debates!

And for what? Is any useful information being conveyed? No, it’s mostly just some kind of social status signalling — Americans of certain insecure social class feel the need to complain about America at every opportunity to distinguish themselves from people of a lower social class because patriotism is coded as a low-class activity.

Yes you’re all very sophisticated and I’m sure you like high speed trains and such. Can we please stop talking about the same thing all the time?

Love,

A non American

Nationalistic and ideological flamewar are not welcome here. No more of this, please, on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"red danger"? Like when Cuban intervened in Angola and murdered 10's of thousands or dozens of others horrors around the globe?

Hell, just think of how many excessive deaths have been caused around the globe by the USSR's push of socialism, retarding growth by decades everywhere it won.

You'd have to be a hard core ideologue to not look at the 20th century and think the "red danger" wasn't the most evil thing to ever happen to humanity.

soviets never pushed socialism

Never

That word was a mask for totalitarian ideology

> Hell, just think of how many excessive deaths have been caused around the globe by the USSR's push of socialism, retarding growth by decades everywhere it won.

Hell, just think of the violence, misery and excessive deaths that have occurred across Latin America and the Middle East because of the USA's interventions.

My point is that just because the USSR did worse, doesn't excuse the USA's actions, which still have an impact to this day.

Are you conveniently forgetting the forceful seizure of an entire continent, displacement of native populations, importing millions of human beings to be used as slaves, colonization and plunder of natural resources across the globe, and deliberate destabilization of regions for profit?

You need to check out the rose glasses you're wearing yourself

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic or ideological flamewar. Also, please be careful not to cross into personal attack, which is a force multiplier on all things bad here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic or ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are simply wrong on so many levels. NATO is the reason why the iron curtain stayed where it was and why the Russian federation hasn't steam-rolled Western Europe.

If you believe the US is the only actor that benefitted from this development, you're somehow ignoring about 800 million people and over two dozen countries who remained free and independent thanks to NATO.

> You are simply wrong on so many levels. NATO is the reason why the iron curtain stayed where it was and why the Russian federation hasn't steam-rolled Western Europe.

There are no historical artifacts claiming that USSR ever had a serious plan to "steamroll" Western Europe. If anything, they were deathly terrified of NATO incursion into Russia and almost pathologically attached to creating a buffer zone of Warszaw Pact states.

Please do not mix up US cold war propaganda with historic facts, those are not quite the same.

Please fight the cold war somewhere else. We don't want flamewars here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. This is the last thing we need here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. The results below are hand-wringingly wretched.

I know you're sincere but sincerely burning this place down is still destructive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think that "people" are interested in USA

CCP - yes

It will be interesting to see how all of these silly videos recorded by kids will be used against them in 10-20 years. Everything that they do and say will be indexed and accessible for blackmail.

All one need is a black face/not black face AI. Or whatever will be taboo in 20 years.

Not to mention all the ask-reddits such as "what serious crime did you commit and get away with?" or "what is your definition of torture? [SERIOUS]".

I keep hoping that society will become more actively forgiving of things people actually regret in the future. Blackmail isn't possible if no one cares about your edgy phase that you got over.

Yeah, we seem to be able to rightfully forgive people who commit actual crimes once they atone in prison. But cancel culture seems to give you zero ways back despite the most genuine heart-felt apology you can muster for a faux pas you uttered a decade ago.

I think it will, but not before the current generation's white knights get hoisted on their own petards. The stuff they say and do today is going to come back and bite them, and then they'll realize the value of forgiveness and start preaching it.

The next generation will see it as they grow up, so it'll be smoother for them.

Exactly what I thought when I first saw Facebook and Instagram. And it turns out that I am the idiot.

The way I see it, the Chinese government doesn't care what you do as long as you don't challenge it. The US on the other hand seems intent on enforcing its whims everywhere on the globe it can. War on terror, war on drugs, war on encryption, war on financial privacy, war on intellectual property infringement. To quote CS Lewis: "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

You are wrong: I am familiar with the CS Lewis quote

1) In this case the nation working behind the scenes is China. American imperialism I concede is bad. However, the Chinese have quietly been breaking over 50 international regulations and laws from the WTO and universal declaration of human rights.

2) The Chinese do care what you do. Just last week the Swedish government was going to give an award to an activist in Sweden, and the CCP threatened the entire country - pathetic. The Australians said they do not agree with Chinese human rights violations, so they were denied entry (clearly they care). I also question how one can determine what is "challenging" the CCP when it is a mercantilist nation with hands in every basket.

3) Enforcing the war on drugs all over the world? Like asking China not to ship fentanyl? Sure.

4) America is pushing the war on financial privacy? Hello, have you seen Alipay and Wechat before? Do you realize cash is still a major way that some people get paid in America? Perhaps in swift you could argue undue transparency, but wire transfers are a different subject.

5) American intellectual property infringement? ...do you mean like the Chinese forced intellectual property transfer?

Lastly, on the CS Lewis quote. America is constantly at odds with its conscience. Half the country is constantly calling out the other half. In China if you don't tow the imperial / mercantilist line your social credit goes down and your freedoms are limited.

It's been like a week since the last US-backed Latin American coup.

Yeah, but US-backed != US-hatched. The proximal cause is that Bolivia had fallen into a state of utter chaos (therefore a power vacuum); the proximal cause of that is that the president tried to pull off a Xi Jingping but this didn't play even with much of the population that initially backed him.

It's the difference between setting a house on fire to acquire the land, and buying a land lot where a house used to be.

That's certainly the official US line on the matter.

How has the official US line held up, historically, when it comes to coups vs socialists in Latin America? Why should it be different this time?

I don't think the above commenter was defending China, so much as pointing out that the US does much worse.

Each one of your bullets is true, and more extremely applicable to the US.

Chinese organ harvesting is surely beyond what the US is doing.

I think drone stickes where civilian deaths are acceptable is comparable.

They were absolutely defending china and mischaracterizing the US at the same time, as are you

"...as long as you don't challenge it."

Challenge it on what? Currency manipulation? Unfair trade practices? Influencing elections? Going against every international body and established rule, and building island military bases to seize new ocean territory from its neighbors? Building concentration camps to imprison millions of minorities who have committed no crime? Propping up N. Korea to use its instability to further Chinese international negotiations?

So if China isn't challenged on any anything of importance, it doesn't care what you do? All countries do bad things and they should all be challenged on it. Why would China be different?

Would you rather live under a robber baron than in the US? What does this look like to you? Who is the robber baron? How does he treat you?

I think we can criticize both the Chinese Govt as well as our own government. For instance, China sees no holdback from imprisoning and killing anyone on the thinnest of pretenses, it's basically wielding ultimate authoritarian power to ruin or end lives. On the other hand, the US actually wields a similar authoritarian imprisonment power much more frequently than China, actually more than almost any nation in the world - 10x more than other enlightened western nations, and the same or more than many repressive nations going by percentages of population in prison. The US justifications for that many in prison are just as weak a pretense as the Chinese justifications we just accept them more readily.

Wether it's an oligarchy of party elite, or oligarchy of robber barons pulling the strings makes little difference to the lives ruined.

> I think we can criticize both the Chinese Govt as well as our own government.

In the west we can criticize our governments and are arguably more free. in china you can't and are arguably less free. I know where i would prefer to live.

I think you need to read my last line a little more carefully. I did not say the US is less free - I said that ruined lives are still ruined.

That one would personally prefer to have the freedoms of the privileged class of the US is not in question. But the US ruins lives at a 3x higher rate in prisons than China does. And it's not organ harvesting, but is cruelty that is personal, financial, and petty. Medical care is routinely denied, long term imprisonment in solitary conditions is considered torture in other nations, and is common in the US. And undeniably, prison is applied more frequently and for longer terms to a minority set of races in the US akin to how China persecutes minorities. (again I agree the degree is different but point out the rate is higher in the US, and ruined lives are still ruined). Those affected in that system really don't have the freedom to opt out of it.

Edit: The robber barons cruelly end lives too...

https://twitter.com/AllOnMedicare/status/1184644551987777537

What!? A few thousand migrant families arrested at us border is bad. Agreed. But million minorities in re-education camps with organ harvesting is really bad. Not even close on the scale of shittyness.

I think OP is referring to the Middle East.

Well some of those migrants families have babies who are not learning to speak or read at critical times due to intentional neglect. That's pretty horrific.

But I was referring to our in-nation prisons to clairify.

So much for the success of Chinese propaganda abroad. No democratic western state comes close to the totalitarian regime that is China. They attacked students with tanks a few decades ago and still have the same people in power. People should be informed about Chinese politics more, and that it does not happen via mainstream media is a telling sign of their financial leverage nowadays.

Reddit is overrun with pro-PRC shills and trolls, it's pretty eye-opening on any thread about Uyghur genocide, Hong Kong protests, or throwbacks to Tiananmen Square.

edit: And HN too, apparently. Like clockwork, downvotes galore. I'm willing to hear someone on the other side out on the Uyghur genocide if they'd like to offer their perspective on it.

I honestly wonder how people get this perception when both reddit and HN are so overwhelmingly pro-HK and anti-China. The only way you would ever see a pro-China comment on reddit is by explicitly searching for it, either by sorting by controversial on China-related topics, or by searching for pro-China subs (which are super small compared to reddit, or even just r/HongKong).

I believe it's because painful experiences are more memorable than pleasurable ones and make deeper impressions. Running into hostile comments and opposing views is painful: they are like verbal smacks in the face. We remember these more, and they quickly accrete into our overall impression of a site.

It doesn't matter how infrequent the comments we dislike are relative to the whole. What matters is the absolute number of them that an individual reader encounters. If it's more than some threshold value N, they will conclude that the entire place is hostile, even if the hostile comments are a tiny minority. At a psychological and even a biological level, that makes sense: once a place has generated N painful experiences, it's dangerous. Percentage of the total is irrelevant. Indeed, it makes a place even more dangerous if most experiences there are pleasurable, since one will be inclined to stay—exposing oneself to future smacks—and to let one's guard down, making the next smack even more painful. We all have a version of this, and though N may vary per person, I bet it's lower than most of us would predict.

This phenomenon has some interesting consequences. One is that it enables you to guess with high confidence what someone's views on a topic are, based on how strongly they believe HN (or whatever forum) is biased against them. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the feeling that it is shows what they find painful and therefore what they disagree with. Also, the intensity of the belief in bias grows with the intensity of their view on the topic. That is, the more passionately you believe X, the more pain an anti-X comment causes, the more strongly you will believe that the forum is anti-X.

Another consequence is that the closer a forum gets to being unbiased, the more all sides will believe that it's actually hostile to their views. That seems weird in the wild, but it's simple: the more diverse the comment stream is, the more likely all sides are to notice disagreeable comments and thus receive painful impressions.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I think you nailed it; painful experiences are more memorable. I had the same sentiments but felt what I wrote wasn't eloquent enough to share :).

It's always a joy reading your thoughts on moderation and communities in general--keep up the awesome work!

You are being downvoted because you are talking nonsense.

> Reddit is overrun with pro-PRC shills and trolls

I challenge you to link one example in any popular post. My experience is that if you dare to say anything remotely pro-China, you will get downvoted to oblivion.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes this place even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This comment breaks at least three of the site guidelines. Would you please read and follow them when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why is the PRC evil?

Comparisons dont matter. It's easier to fight a one front war against your own countries evil then to also have to deal with another empire waiting to swoop in and make things worse.

Because it refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of Taiwan, it sent troops to enforce violence against what was originally peaceful protestors in Hong Kong, it is forcefully imprisoning Uighur Muslims in concentration camps, it is forcing citizens to install spyware on their phones, it doesn't have rule of law, it arbitrarily locks up human rights activists and lawyers, it will target people for their religion, etc.

Note that these complaints of mine are against the Party, not the people of China as a whole. Xi Jinping and his cronies are a fresh brand of evil.

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. Nothing good can come of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have the same concerns and it's very important to be skeptical. Social media is now the perfect way for governments to control how people perceive something and brings us much closer to an Orwellian world. I think that every government (including the US) is engaging in this disinformation campaigning & psychological warfare, and it's ruining the vision I think most of us had of what the internet would become back in the 90s.

Amusingly, when you look at the comments to yours here in this thread, they try to shift the conversation to "Look at what US does in <region>" without actually talking about what you specifically are bringing up. I see this pattern a lot now, whenever you bring up any thoughts such as yours in this realm involving China, a lot of whataboutism in reply happens. Sad to see this happening on HN.

You’re right

I had been worried about the Chinese influence in America for a while in the past, but recently came to the conclusion that the American value system is not at risk of being taken over by the Chinese value system. The American system pushes forward individual freedom, humanism, liberalism, capitalism -- things that transcend the boundaries of race, borders, etc. I would argue these values were quickly adopted by many cultures because they provide a lot of value in today's market driven world.

In comparison, what the PRC offers is very specific to China. The government wants to see China grow strong and lead the world. They may or may not get there, but these values offer little value to the rest of the world, especially those that have already adopted the liberal values.

>The American system pushes forward individual freedom, humanism, liberalism, capitalism

I agree with you, but a lot of people seem to think these values are automatically parts of America - a "system" as you described it - instead of things we all have to actively achieve every single day. It's a "use it or lose it" kind of thing in my opinion. We have some of the worst voting rates in the developed world. We have illiberal values and behavior creeping into both sides of the political spectrum. On the left we have the language police, cancel culture, and a general attitude that no part of American life can take place outside of the government's sphere of influence. On the right we have blatant xenophobia, voter suppression, and a refusal to deal honestly with our country's legacy of racial oppression.

Those values you listed are not magic totems that we can summon to fend off the specter of Chinese totalitarianism without any real work on our part. If we don't actively pursue them, defend them, and set examples for our children, they will die off.

I totally agree with you that we need to cherish these values because they really are precious. And I also very much agree that we have these issues creeping up, not just in America, but in many places around the world. On the other hand, I still think that there are progresses that cannot be easily undone because they simply change the way we live entirely. The Scientific Revolution is an example that comes to my mind.

Regarding all the problems you listed: I think the reason we see these issues come up nowadays is in large due to the fact that the "modern" way of life that currently dominates the world -- the system that encourages individualism, consumerism, and duality, has simply met its end of life. We cannot solve the problems you listed from a dualistic viewpoint. Heck, we can't even get people to help save the environment. In that sense, I do see that we will see a huge shift toward the more Eastern values (especially the notion of interdependence) in the near future, but certainly not the ones pushed by the PRC.

> PRC offers is very specific to China

This is the entire reason behind "with Chinese characteristics". There is no universal Chinese model to export, the Chinese system is a product of constant experimentation that is highly situational and enabled by advantages of Chinese scale. Most countries are constrained in demographics, geography etc to replicate what China has done. The closest applicable model behind Chines development is Manchukuo, strategic protectionist policies that establish domestic industries which has fueled other Asian tigers like Japan, Korea and Taiwan. What's unique to China is sheer scale enables her reach great power parity in many fields and the ability to absorb failures without losing too much momentum. At the end of the day, the only oppression that China will export is surveillance state technology like Huawei Smart City but that's an commercial commodity like weapons, not ideology.

IMO people are worried about Chinese influence because US influence is declining - that shining house on hill has become dilapidated in the last 20 years. Blaming the nouveau riche neighbor won't solve America's problems, nor will trying to stop them from getting that new pool nor coercing others in the neighborhood to avoid the new neighbors house party.

You know, you do not need "export" anything if you occupy territory

And if you have plans for 20-50 years you don't even need military or police force

Just buy any politician and push your ideology and rewrite history books. And in 50 years people can't think that was something else

And 50 years it is a lot. In rusian federation that was done by less that 5 years

1984

My concern is not that the PRC will try to put PRC values on the USA, it's that they'll foment negative cultural mores here in the USA - i.e., tap into latent Islamophobia to defend their persecution of Uighur Muslims, and in doing so increase Islamophobia in the USA.

I think the _real_ problem is that our current social, political, and economic systems are ill-equipped to deal with the advances of technology. It's not just the increase in propaganda (which I argue is enabled by technology) that creates instability. It's the fact that our environment is collapsing, the capacity to modify human embryos is within our reach, longevity researches are showing promising results, millions of jobs will be replaced by automation. It is my belief that the real task is not to combat the PRC, but to figure out what systems will provide the most value in the future, and work toward those goals.

My favorite brand of recent propaganda has been the cooking videos from the idyllic Chinese countryside.

> I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC astroturfing not a big deal?

Wait what? Chinese social media is astroturfing at its best (worst?) and it’s not even close, it’s not even possible to say something without a Wumao[1] matching you post to post with total BS. It’s much more blatant than English forums IMO (but maybe that’s just me being a native Chinese speaker in a reverse situation)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

Apologies, I meant that I don't see anti PRC shilling on Baidu etc.

Ah that makes sense. Well in that case it’s likely because of censorship, you don’t see those comments since they are either blocked or deleted.

I think the fundamental misunderstanding that westerns have is that propaganda is separate from personal opinion, that posts supporting the CCP or astroturfing for China is part of a larger structure, there is a centralized intelligence and that people somehow contain hidden sympathy for western ideas but are afraid to voice them or mask it under the party line.

That may be so in some cases, but my experience is that the propaganda is a reflection of the zeitgeist of Chinese people. Propaganda works because it taps into fundamental beliefs and grievances of the masses. It may distort or channel it into certain directions but it is actually quite aligned with prevailing schools of thought in China and Chinese historiography.

Some of these include:

- The west is hypocritical, the goal of western human rights and democratization is to weaken or subvert China's rise with the goal of ultimately replacing a strong centralized Chinese state that encompasses its present borders for several independent states along ethnic lines and geographic lines that would be easier to manage from a western perspective.

- The fundamental strength of the west up to now is due to superiority capacity for warfare, subjugation of foreign lands through brutal colonialism and exploitation of their natural resources. Now the west in criticizing China in Africa and one belt and road initiatives is simply a cynical maneuver to kick down the ladder after one has already climbed up it.

I could go on, but from these two points stem all subsequent arguments and I think they provide the fundamental rationale for argument over all points of conflict between China and the west.

> It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all.

Well one benefit of a censorship state, is that it's easy to censor all the astroturfers.

I'm more concerned about AIPAC, which has much more influence than PRC.

The PRC surprisingly thin-skinned when it comes to any criticism. Harassing foreign nationals in foreign lands is a new diplomacy fail though, which I think will end up biting them in the a.

Think of it this way, go to any movie theater in China and almost half the movies are Hollywood movies.

Or if you go to any high end department store, more than half the models in ads are not Chinese. The models present a luxurious, enviable lifestyle.

Any random Chinese person can name at least 10 Hollywood celebrities and hum 10 American songs.

This type of “influence” is much more powerful than what China is currently capable of. And until Americans are like that, I’m not worried at all about “Chinese influence.”

Now if you are strictly talking about government sponsored astroturfing, then look up Operation Earnest Voice and Project Mockingbird.

I also recommend Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

Throwaway account since I don’t dare discuss some topics with my real account

> Hollywood movies

There is plenty of evidence showing China's propogandistic influence on Hollywood movies. References to Tibet, Taiwan, etc. are often removed.

How do you suggest doing this? Fighting censorship with censorship? Banning pro China voices because they must be shills and have to be working for CCP in someway or the other? Establish an Committee of Un-American activity in Congress?

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar, especially not off-topic rants about astroturfing for which there is no externally verifiable evidence.

I've spent countless hours looking at this problem in HN data, which admittedly may not be representative of the internet at large, but is the most relevant here. By far the overwhelming finding is that users are massively prone to leap to "astroturfing" (or "shill", "troll", "bot", or "spy") based solely on hearing something they dislike on a charged topic. This is plainly a psychological bias—probably one we all share—and it dominates all discussion on the topic by at least 99% if not 99.9. The phenomenon is so universal, and conforms so closely to what I see on other platforms even though I can't study their data, that I have to believe it's the same everywhere.

The parsimonious explanation for comments expressing strongly opposing points of view is that humans are the same on both sides of any divisive topic: emotionally charged and primed for reflexive, predictable responses. That's why these arguments are all the same (in the case of China v. US: "but imperialism", "but totalitarianism", etc.) and also why they are off topic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

This was the top subthread before I marked it off topic. That's mostly because of upvoters, but the reason we ask people not to post this sort of flamebait is that upvoters simply can't resist it. When it comes to indignation, upvotes are a statistical cloud of fruit flies showing up near a decaying banana.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

99% of the time I'm with you 100%. This is the 1% so perhaps I can steal a bit more of your time to understand how to better have the conversation I wanted to have around the subject (and if the answer is "somewhere other than HN" that is fair and fine).

I definitely wasn't trying to start a flamewar, let alone a nationalistic one - I do see an aggressive amount of pro-PRC posts (on other platforms), I have no proof that they're PRC agents other than the fact that they're posting things that one would consider "pro-PRC." I have no proof that similar isn't happening against the PRC on baidu, other than that I don't see it. So is the issue that my post was on too tenuous a thread, based on your data on HN? I certainly didn't mean to imply the presence of shills on HN - I almost never see pro-PRC posts. I specifically called out facebook, twitter, and reddit to avoid that implication.

Perhaps it would have been better to construct my post without mentioning shills at all? I am concerned about the PRC gov's role in communication applications and technology, and I am curious what others (HN crowd particularly because they're almost universally more knowledgeable than me) have to say on the subject.

If the answer to all my ramblings is "don't pin random conspiracy theory shit on the PRC here" that's totally acceptable as well.

I think all I can do is repeat myself: (1) don't comment about shilling (astroturfing/bots/trolls/spies) unless you have specific evidence, keeping in mind that the presence of opposing views is not evidence; (2) don't post flamebait, including nationalistic flamebait. If I apply those principles to your GP comment, most of it would disappear. Perhaps there's a version of it that could be rewritten not to violate them, but I'm not so sure.

I believe you about intent, but the sad fact is that intent doesn't matter in cases like this, because the dangers are mechanical and predictable. Arson is worse than negligence, but from a fire-prevention point of view there's little difference; and since many more fires are started by negligence than arson, it's the bigger problem.

pfft. its carefully targeted to children and the young. it's even more ephemeral than twitter. there is no "community" behind it.. its purely entertainment.

It'll die off. it has nothing to build on.

Wow that is really a great competition but I guess TikTok really doing great because there are lot of funny and good content or videos uploaded.

And I find some of the ads on TikTok are relevant and interesting to me. Additionally, I don't have to wait 7 seconds to skip an ad I don't want to see, nor do I have to watch several ads in a row to continue to the next video (think Youtube).

What's the operating margin? Of course a new company will have like 0 ads as it tries to capture market share and be cool. Once VC moneys runs out and they need to make money, believe me, you'll see ads.

On average, I see an ad about every 7 videos on TikTok. Given a video is no longer than a minute, that puts the ad dispersement about on par with Youtube.

The parent company is profitable now (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-bytedances-firs...).

Note that their revenue generator is Toutiao, not TikTok.

In other words, you like it more because it isn't trying to actually be profitable yet. If it needed to make money right now, you would see the same level of annoying advertising as on other platforms.

I would consider the number of ads that TikTok runs to be on par with Youtube. However, they do it without the annoyance that Youtube forces on viewers.

I removed the Youtube app from my phone and bookmark from my toolbar. That's how annoying I felt their ad scheme was.

Which is exactly GPs point. The advertisements are forced, not skippable because that is how the platform makes money.

No, the post your respond to is making the point that forced not skippable advertisements are, at least with him, causing youtube to lose money.

I suspect they are with many people, they are a very strong motivator to only use the platform when you have some form of adblock enabled that prevents you from seeing the ads at all. They probably also reduce the total number of views = total number of ad impressions for people not using adblock.

After I've seen an ad once, I get to make the decision whether it's relevant to me on TikTok. On Youtube, they would like you to review the ad all over again, just to see if possibly you changed your mind. In fact, I've had the same ad replayed back at me so many times that my enjoyment of the videos was ruined.

Why do I have to suffer the repeat annoyance? And even when I've skipped the same ad twelve times, why do I then have to watch the ad full length before I can continue to the video? At what point does Google treat me like an adult that can decide the relevance of content?

This is the very reason I cut the cord on Cable TV.

instagram ads are skippable too?

I wouldn't know. I don't use Instagram or Facebook.

You don't have to wait to skip.

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