ByteDance is going from strength to strength | Hacker News Reader

ByteDance is going from strength to strength

economist.com

48 pointsjkuria19 comments

I think one part of its success is that TikTok really hit a nerve w/ its core social appeal: miming to pop culture artifacts. For those of you who remember Youtube back when it was just a sketchy looking website in a sea of seedy websites, the 2nd (?) video that ever went viral was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LZVmn3p3o. In essence the same concept as TikTok. Just to take the message home, singing along is one aspect of social miming, from it there's endless variations, so endless potential to create content. And once you generalize from miming top10 songs to miming challenges created by other people, you arrive at the heart of TikTok's social mechanics: it's not just creating videos or remixing songs, it's creating culture, conforming to it, and bending it towards yourself.

They've nailed the formula for addictive social media apps. I discourage people from using TikTok, but I've played with it and it hits all the notes and delivers small hits of dopamine effectively.

What they're doing with social apps reminds me of what happened to pop music:

https://nypost.com/2015/10/04/your-favorite-song-on-the-radi...

Once you nail the addictive formula and get it to drive network effects, the rest is pretty easy. Warehousing vast amounts of data at scale and doing analytics on it is no longer hard, unlike back in the early oughts when Facebook started. The addictive formula and network effect is the only thing you have to master. The rest can be rented from cloud companies.

China should allow non-Chinese social media companies from operating in mainland China or else international governments should ban Chinese social media companies from operating in their borders.

This is absurd. China is surveilling the world with their apps now.

I'm starting to think that this kind of idea is dangerous.

Chinese apps are left unchecked as long as they are loyal to the regime, but international companies would be held accountable back home for their actions in China, in an inevitable race to the bottom, this is competitive disadvantage and outsiders are doomed to fail.

You got yourself confused because of the US centric view. The real problem here is US literally took the entire market for global scale online services. Companies like Google don't even pay much corporate tax in countries like Australia. Why should other countries further damage their economies to anger their No.1 trading partner China to defend such US monopoly?

All non-Chinese social media companies have to do is comply with Chinese censorship laws. Nothing ever stopped these companies from operating there except the filtering requirements was onerous (read: expensive). China brought in mass human moderation way before it was deemed necessary on non-Chinese social media. The primary reason FB, twitter was banned is they refused to filter calls for ethnic violence post 2009 terrorist attacks in China. Western platforms finally recognized that was necessary in the last few years.

The real problem is the disparity in allowable speech on between ecosystems means China can conduct official diplomatic influence campaigns on western social media platforms. Where as embassies in China frequently get censored trying to conduct influence operations. Really that's China exploiting an asymmetric western vulnerability, not much to do but fight fire with fire at the cost of western values.

As long as these social media companies follow Chinese law, they will be allowed.

https://archive.md/jjjRS

Can anyone explain to me why this has gone to the moon and Vine died? To an uneducated observer such as myself, TikTok and Vine are basically the same. What separates TikTok?

Vine was killed, it didn't die.

Also, Vines felt really standalone. TikTok manages to feel both like a community and like cable TV: you can choose to interact with replies and remixes, or you can just passively sit back and let it serve you an endless array of amusing 15-second clips, with a stream that quickly learns what you like and shows you more of it.

In my opinion, it actually comes down to two main things.

The first is the algorithm that TikTok uses to generate your "for you" page (on TikTok this is the home page, the first screen you see when opening the app). Vine had a small number of creators that essentially ran the entire app because they had the most followers and views. You only saw videos from people you followed on Vine, or when exploring the popular category sections. For the most part though, the large creators gained too much power after essentially unionizing and demanding salaries from Vine/Twitter. After they left the platform Vine quickly died faster than it already was. On TikTok, there is a massive talent pool and each individual video is tested by the algorithm by sending it out into a test pool of users, and if it does well it continues to get sent to more and more users. This makes it easier to go viral on TikTok than on Vine (on Vine you would have needed followers already for anyone to see the video), which means more people are willing to upload content in an attempt to go viral and this gives TikTok more high-quality videos to serve. It also means that even if the top creators left it wouldn't matter much to the average user; they would mostly see the same feed that they are seeing now.

The second is that TikTok provides a lot of editing capabilities in the app itself. Vine never had that. In order to upload edited videos to Vine, there were extra steps involved. TikTok provides these capabilities out of the box with filters, various editing features, green screen effects, etc. It's actually very impressive.

One last point is video length. Vine was always limited to 6 seconds (except for at the very end of life when they did a weird feature that allowed a 6-second video to be a preview for a longer video). Vine came out at a time when both Instagram and Snapchat ONLY supported photos, so it naturally rose as the only mobile video platform. During Vine's decline Instagram and Snapchat both introduced video support, allowing for longer length videos (Snapchat at 10 seconds, and Instagram at 1 minute) which only accelerated Vine's decline. People lost interest with Vine, the big creators shifted to Instagram and for sending videos to friends Snapchat became popular.

That's been my assessment having lived through the rise of these apps (I was in high school when Vine was at its peak).

If anyone notices an error in this, or has other thoughts, let's discuss!

Their algorithm is based on revealed preferences (what you actually watch multiple times), not stated preferences. If you like or follow someone, their stuff goes into your Follow page, but the main page is algorithmic and likes have very little impact (to discourage click farms).

Tiktok's are not limited to 6 seconds. The limit is around 1.5 minutes I think.

Finally - it's a very creative app. It encourages remixing of both audio and video, so you could sometimes be watching something with an audio that is 2-3 meme levels deep. You can edit video (not just a simple editor) in-app as well.

Edit: I should also mention that you could use the app and consume content on the app without creating an account or logging in. If you do want to create an account, you could use "Sign in with Apple" and select Apple's anonymous email relay feature, and also select to not give TikTok your real name.

TikTok, as others have mentioned, is much lower friction, and is more algorithmically driven. Unfortunately, this means the quality is much lower.

Every time I see a good TikTok, it makes me miss Vine. Vine was a huge outlet for young black people to express themselves, so much that "Black People Vines" constitute their own genre [0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9qXmk8jhaE

> it is now the world’s biggest unlisted technology “unicorn”, recently valued at between $90bn and $100bn

You know, maybe there's actually nothing incorrect about these astronomical unicorn valuations. Maybe the Reverse Flynn Effect is causing our society to place economic value in different areas than it did in the past.

Just like Netflix bring more valuable than Disney. Absurd on every measure.

TikTok is pretty much a carbon copy of Vine. If Twitter wasn't able to make money from Vine, ultimately choosing to shut it down, is this a sign that apps like TikTok are fundamentally unprofitable or that Twitter is just a poorly run company unable to monetize their products?

Profit is the least of their concern. Tik Tok is backed by the Chinese govt. The more downloads the more spying.

Has anyone here tried using their Lark suite (looks to be a G Suite competitor)? I'd love to hear more details about it, because they've done a great job on TikTok/Douyin regardless of the issues with CCP.

Expect Mr. Zuckerberg to lobby even more for regulatory capture and seed FUD (some of which is justified) in (vain) hope he'll win this battle.

Though to be fair, most of the growth now is coming from his secondary brands, WhatsApp and Instagram, which seem they're being better run.

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