‘Content network effect’ makes TikTok tough to copy | Hacker News Reader

‘Content network effect’ makes TikTok tough to copy

techcrunch.com

54 pointsrbanffy60 comments

Someone like Cory Doctorow would argue that this barrier to unseating established, content-heavy networks would go away if competitors were able to freely and legally build their own interops with TikTok's services.

If a 3rd-party app allowed users to cross-post to TikTok, or even to import their feed from TikTok and respond to posts without leaving the app -- the network effect would look a lot less intimidating.

This article focuses purely on the question of, "how could established networks with lots of content leverage that content to try and catch up?" But TikTok's network only matters because that network is surrounded by a legal wall.

Allow competitors to bypass that wall, and then TikTok will be forced to compete with its UX, privacy policies, client features, and advertising -- not by holding your friends hostage from you.

Uhh yeah but why would tiktok pay all the hosting and bandwidth fees so some competitor could have a cut of their revenue stream (by inserting ads or whatever the competitor plans to do to turn a profit)?

Why would tiktok spend the immense time and engineering effort required to create and never break a public API?

>Someone like Cory Doctorow would argue that this barrier to unseating established, content-heavy networks would go away if competitors were able to freely and legally build their own interops with TikTok's services.

Do you have a link to a specific article where he said that? I'm struggling to understand how that is true.

1. For content networks (YouTube, Netflix, TikTok), video bandwidth is the highest cost and it isn't cheap. Why would anyone effectively pay their competitors for the privilege of hosting their content? That is the number one reason why we don't see competitors to YouTube.

2. >UX, privacy policies, client features, and advertising -- not by holding your friends hostage from you

TikTok does compete - they pay for content. They learned the lesson Twitter refused to acknowledge with Vine, the facebook has been dragging its feet trying to adopt, that was invented by YouTube and abused by Netflix. You need to pay for content to bring video creators to your platform. Now, again, if I'm TikTok, why would I pay for creators for content to be shown on a competitors platform. Worse still why would I pay for content that I can no longer accurately measure the reach of, and deal with a 10x worse fraud problem?

Simply put, I see no reason why TikTok should be forced to socialize their platform so that third parties can leech of their content and video infrastructure for free. If competitors want to compete they should compete on talent and pay creators, everything else is secondary.

> Do you have a link to a specific article where he said that? I'm struggling to understand how that is true.

Sure, here’s one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversaria...

>Today's tech giants—and both their apologists and their critics—insist that their dominance is the inevitable consequence of "network effects," and so nothing we do will recapture the diversity that once defined the Internet. But adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.

Isn't that currently legal and permissible? The precedents keep getting set in our favor (even just this week!) that ignoring terms of service on a service are not sufficient to be "hacking" or "trespassing". Practically speaking, we do see tons of people making alternative Snapchat clients or extensions, and they haven't been able to do anything to them legally... but, technologically, they keep changing their protocol slightly (which breaks older clients, but they have no issue with that; I am not sure to the extent to which they reorganize the data or merely require new and different challenges) to use shifting DRM (which makes it economically discouraged to maintain an alternative client) and then they punish users they detect using slightly non-conforming clients (putting a chilling effect on the market), and since they are also freely able to do that, there's no real hope for any of this thought process to matter. (This is similar, btw, to the issue of DRM actual being effective in the medium term and being likely to win in the long term, which is an argument I have actually had multiple times in person with Cory, as I feel he often discounts the core problem: "asymmetric encryption with cooperation from hardware vendors actually works; and, unless you make it illegal to build closed, unextensible, unrepairable systems, we are going to end up in a crypto-anarcho-capitalist dystopia".)

Can't believe Twitter killed Vine rather than negotiate with the content creators.

It's truly comical how bad Twitter is at managing it's acquisitions. Time and time again, they get the initial idea right, then squander it.

I thought their problem was advertising in general, not keeping the content creators on their platform. Vine would be what Instagram is now where no (or very few) creators get paid by Facebook to post since they know their audience is on that app.

Here’s a decent comparison between Triller and TikTok-

https://medium.com/the-dopamine-effect/triller-vs-tiktok-dif...

Triller has 27 million users in the US but never heard anyone talk about it.

How subjective is "27 million users"? TikTok and it's ilk are such viral-driven products I imagine metrics like DAU are gamed to Narnia and back. They NEED those metrics to sing to get funding and advertisers.

Never heard of Triller. TikTok can't be competed with because it's already too big. Try competing with Facebook by creating an app that does basically the same thing, you will almost certainly fail to become bigger than Facebook (obviously).

Byte tried it, and hasn't seen good growth at all. TikTok has too much money to spend on advertising, and too many users that they've already won. Competing with a similar app is just dumb at this point, move on to something else.

This article has a font change after the (likely copy pasted) description of network effect. All the more reason to love plain text...

I have used TikTok extensively and I have not seen many of the remixes. That’s why the whole story sounds a bit made up to me. If you’re saying TikTok is great because it has lots of people on board that create fun videos daily. Fine. But why give that phenomenon a new name? It’s similar to YouTube’s success. Why should I ever use any other app/site if I get what I want on TikTok/YT?

TikTok managed to build something that requires less attention and focus than YouTube (I can't believe that's real now that I'm saying it.) If you're wondering how it would improve your life then the answer is: it wont and it's probably not meant for you.

You are probably consuming remixes and don’t even know it. I’d guess that a lot more than half of the content on TikTok is a remix of something else.

The privacy implications of TikTok are like Facebook but even worse in every way. If you hate Facebook and refuse to use it but use TikTok you're simply being a hypocrite.

Or naïve

Teenagers don't prefer TikTok to Facebook for privacy reasons...

Does TikTok track you on non-TikTok properties all across the internet?

Facebook didn't start tracking everyone all across the internet either.

Nothing is worse than Facebook selling all your personal info, likes and dislikes, political leaning to advertisers.

TikTok is distributing some incredibly dangerous material during this pandemic - people claiming in tiktok videos their religious faith makes them immune to the virus and showing a Corona infected person hugging others with messages like - "No virus is going to prevent me from loving my fellow human being". This isnt a oneoff video, there are a whole bunch of them and they are going viral. Completely at a loss at how to contain the spread of this dangerous information during a pandemic.

PS: I am consciously choosing to not post a link to any of those videos here to prevent them from going even more viral.

Is there "dangerous information" or only stupid people? Sometimes I worry focusing on the former is actually dangerous, because it ignores why people aren't capable of critical thinking in the first place.

In the midst of a pandemic where teenagers are liking and sharing these videos I do think that public interest concerns apply.

No there is absolutely dangerous information.

There are people today, even President Trump, touting unproven drugs as a cure for COVID-19. People based on this information then do stupid things like (a) die from ingesting pool chemicals with a similar name or (b) hoarding large quantities for profit. Or look at the irrationality around toilet paper.

Most people in this situation aren't stupid. They are ignorant. And as such they rely on authorities and experts to provide accurate and safe information.

> look at the irrationality around toilet paper

I think it is perfectly rational to buy a bit more than you need if you think “irrational” people are buying more than they need. Low cost, low risk, so why wouldn’t you? Expecting everybody to act rationally is highly irrational IMHO.

It’s probably a both defect in game theory?

It is rational to act irrationally if others are acting irrationally.

> And as such they rely on authorities and experts to provide accurate and safe information.

Sorry but I don't agree here. The authorities also got it wrong. Just look at the initial public responses in the US, UK, Italy, Germany, etc.. They stuck their heads in the sand while 'Coronavirus alarmism' was written off as misinformation.

> Completely at a loss at how to contain the spread of this dangerous information during a pandemic.

This is the reality of free information and free expression, it's a problem that has to be addressed at a cultural level, trusted community and family leaders need to guide the ignorant, you can't prevent exposure to bad ideas.

Of course you can prevent exposure. People don't get their information out of thin air.

It mostly comes from one of the few dozen top news and social media sites. And you can absolutely hold them to account for allowing such content to persist on their platform.

Which is what they are doing e.g. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube all banning content referring to unproven COVID-19 cures.

> Of course you can prevent exposure

No, you really can't. It's true that platforms can play moderator whack-a-mole to beat back the tide of garbage on the internet, but you ultimately can't rely on remote technocratic arbiters to stop people from being exposed to bad ideas, it's not a strategy that scales, at least not until the day when everything you post on the internet is automatically moderated by a machine learning filter.

No. I reject this stance. It's not the place of tech companies to decide what is true and what is false and on that basis control what the public sees. Your attitude, if followed to its logical conclusion, would have tech companies ban people saying that masks work because big official institutions have been lying and saying that masks don't work. Stop it with this attitude that you know what the unwashed public should be allowed to hear.

Do you really need to be so combative in your response? It detracts from your overall argument, which is good and reasonable.

Actually tech companies have freedom of speech so they are free to host whatever content they want on their platform.

Also as a general statement masks don't work. (a) Because people aren't using N95 masks and (b) they don't understand that COVID-19 can live on fabric for at minimum 24 hours. Which means that if you're not washing your mask every single day or using a disposable one then it is worse than having nothing at all.

Yeah because if some people don’t use something correctly that means “as a general statement” it doesn’t work.

If the brakes on a car are not properly maintained and replaced, the car won’t stop and will be dangerous therefore “cars don’t work”.

That doesn’t make sense. How about we tell people the truth and allow them to use it to make better decisions. A lot of people want to do the right thing but are disempowered when truth is withheld or replaced with falsehoods.

> How about we tell people the truth

That's exactly what is happening.

People just don't want to listen to medical experts and instead trust random people on social media.

Perhaps the experts should stop lying to the public.

I'm pretty sure it's viral due to people sharing other people doing stupid things, not because people agree with it.

Every video that mentions Covid, corona, virus, etc. seems to automatically get tagged by TikTok and a "get facts on covid-19" button appears on the bottom of those tiktoks. I would also assume they take down covid misinformation if/when it's reported enough but I can't attest to that.

Thank god this is limited to TikTok. Certanly nothing like this on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram et. al.

Recently finished “Civilization: The West and the Rest” by Niall Ferguson. Ferguson argues that competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and western-Protestant work ethic allowed the West to make “advancements” while others “stagnated”. (1)

In the section on consumerism he talks about how the USSR in many ways was equal or stronger than US or other western countries but couldn’t seem to make a single decent pair of blue jeans.

The Chinese government has made some incredible strides and has taken note of the many things that the west did right and the west did wrong. I believe TikTok is one of the best ways China has been able to study western culture. It won’t be long before it will be the East and the rest. And the west gave most of it away for free.

(1) https://archive.org/details/civilizationwest00ferg

Any book purporting to explain why the west was so successful without including the practices of colonialism is just utterly without merit, sorry. Enormous transfer of wealth and resources from the rest of the world are very handy.

Somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem. If the West was successful due to colonization, how is it that the West became the colonizers in the first place, and not the colonized?

>how is it that the West became the colonizers in the first place

The Industrial Revolution? Colonization has existed hand-in-hand with empires, the West has been colonized by Rome, Britain, France, in a massive tug-o-war. The Industrial Revolution took that fight global. There's a clear "egg" here.

easy. Imagine twin brothers each with identical wealth and then one of them steals the other one's money. Now one has twice the wealth of the other.

If my brother stole from me, I'd steal it back. If that failed, I could always kill him. Why couldn't the colonized do the same?

The Europeans succeeded in their colonization efforts because they were more technologically advanced than anyone they were colonizing. It is not a case of twin brothers. It is the case of an older brother stealing from his baby brother.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" has a go at explaining this.

The role of germs should not be underestimated; the pandemics the colonizers brought and spread (in some cases deliberately) killed far more than the guns. Thus offering the illusion that there was empty space for the taking.

But the reason that Europe had germs is because Europe had dense cities for far longer than the places they were colonizing.

Similar arguments made by Paul Kennedy in his seminal work Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...

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