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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Tiktok isn't imploding, its broadly a bunch of old men (senators, CEOs) afraid of china. The userbase of tiktok is tweens and teens.

The best thing those old men could do is legislate system level privacy protections onto IOS and Android so an app can never get the level of info they're worried about.

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Just a few days ago, TikTok was banned in India (a huge emerging market). I’d say it’s imploding.

India might be an emerging market and you get tons of users from there, but it is not profitable at all. Any mobile app dev can tell you that.

It's simple Math, Great number of Indian users, even if ad dollars per person is not as much as in US, overall it is bound to exceed in the long run.

The US has approx 9x overall GDP as India, despite approx .25 the population, for 36x the spending power on a dollar basis. On a PPP basis per capita, its still 9x. In the very long run I'd certainly not bet against that GDP difference getting down to near 4x, but thats certainly multiple lifetimes away in terms of Social Networks

You don't seem to understand what exponential growth rate is like, just look at last 20 years of growth and the difference that was overcome by both China and India against US.

They made some really funny TikToks, though

Fueled by a recent Indian-China border conflicts, a political decision.

Ninja, the biggest (English-language) video game streamer in the world, just posted yesterday that he's deleting TikTok for these concerns.

I'm not going to get into whether or not this actually makes sense, but he is a massive celebrity among young millennials/gen-z.

After going to mixer I'm not sure we ought to take Ninja as the authoritative voice on social media platforms

He definitely made a ton of money, probably most of the money Mixer was investing in their entire launch, and now he's completely free to triumphantly return to Twitch (or take another deal).

I'm not sure how going to Mixer is a knock on him.

idk about that, his tweet only got 10K re-tweets...

its broadly a bunch of old men (senators, CEOs) afraid of china

If your entire worldview is ageist, works strictly on stereotypes, and encompasses only the United States, that might be true. But there are companies, organizations, and governments around the world locking out TikTok.

Yes there are companies organizations and governments locking out tiktok - and thus far there's not much evidence that tiktok does anything more than linkedin, facebook, or any number of other social networks, because of the permissiveness and leakiness of the platforms that everyone's mobile devices run on.

Tiktok is not some extra special danger, except to those who have extra fear of a Chinese owned company. India has banned Tiktok, around the same time they've had border skirmishes with China and are running a big nationalist government.

China has shown has had a track record of mining data and corporate espionage, so it's not just a "bunch of old men". It's a serious concern. There is no reason for them to be prying into citizens' information like they've been doing.

What does the age or gender of the people have to do with this?

It's the same argument against allowing Congress or the Supreme Court from legislating/ruling on new tech when they don't know how it's used because they don't use it themselves. Age cohorts do actually matter in apps that live or die based on network effects.

I'm not so sure. Reddit skews young, yet the narrative there is that TikTok and the Chinese gov are just shy of evil. The iOS clipboard bug in particular has startled reddit into a wave of self-reinforcing "TikTok is spyware" stories and comments. A story like this one just reinforces that narrative, and I'm not sure there's any way TikTok is coming back from it.

I'd guesstimate the average redditor is somewhere in their late 20s to mid 30s. Compared to Congress, that's certainly young. But that's about twice the age of what I imagine the average tiktok user to be (teens.)

You may be right about reddit. The only decent source I can find is https://civicscience.com/nearly-4-in-10-americans-under-35-s... , but it agrees with your estimate.

Anecdote: every adult I knew that used Reddit, save two, has moved on. Most children under 12 I'm familiar with use Reddit.

The local TV news uses TikTok and mentions it regularly. Not exactly a teen-age audience.

> TikTok has a reputation for being popular with teens. And it is: 27% of its users are between 13-17 years old. But internal data from March 2019 shows that its largest age demographic (42%) is the young adult crowd.

https://blog.hootsuite.com/tiktok-stats/#:~:text=TikTok%20ha....

It looks like the median user is 18-24... but that's still quite young compared to "tv news" watcher where the median age is around 60.

https://capitolcommunicator.com/nielsen-provides-data-on-med...

I am a brown guy in my 30s and I also would like to have tiktok be banned from my home country.

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