Facebook readies global launch of its TikTok competitor | Hacker News Reader

Facebook readies global launch of its TikTok competitor

nbcnews.com

32 pointsuptown70 comments

Facebook seems to prefer to let others do the first-mover work to carve out a social market, and then come in a bit later and use their existing scale (with FB, IG, Whatsapp) to copy the same features into their apps.

It’s basically what they did with Instagram Stories after Snapchat existed.

There’s the whole China aspect with TikTok, but regardless this is just how Facebook competes with whatever is popular.

Except facebook's base is aging and many of the youth are not interested in jumping on the next facebook offering. They had to purchase instagram to get a younger audience but their insta story pivot was successful. Gotta be honest, the last thing tiktok needs is a bunch of 40+ yr olds opening up accounts and creating content, as they are much more inflammatory than the fun content creators filling up my For You Page on tiktok. Tiktok is still very different than most other social media because its not really about following people you know as discovering interesting content nooks thru the For Your Page.

I share your enthusiasm for TikTok. It's the first social media app that felt like fun instead of an obligation. I have no doubt something will come along and ruin it (olds, monetization, acquisition). For now, it's really magical. It genuinely gives me hope for the next generation. They are impressively clever short-form story-tellers and continuously innovating techniques.

IG and WhatsApp where "first movers" that FB acquired.

(Also, none of these are "first movers". They are just variations on the same idea. Vine is ancient.)

I personally would much rather Facebook succeed in this space. I’m extremely apprehensive about TikTok and how China is using the data.

I’m fully aware that Facebook will collect data (possible the same data), but I believe the motives and outcomes are more in my favor when it’s my country doing it.

I'm pretty much in the opposite boat, I would never use the facebook replacement and really have no issue with Tiktok. My tiktok does not have access to my camera, mic or location services (i'm a consumer, not a creator) and I clear my clipboard prior to opening it.

The solution I want is for Apple to provide more access toggles and transparency about what apps are doing

I'd rather the whole idea fucked off out of existence.

That would be ideal but it’s not going to happen.

What is wrong with the idea? I don't use it because i don't enjoy the content but I don't find anything wrong with the idea. Genuine question.

52 minutes a day is average engagement. 800M users. 32,000 man years or 400 human lifetimes of attention wasted every day (if I got my mathematics right).

We could be colonising mars or something instead of watching short videos of something totally ephemeral. And I’m sure in time it will be used much like Facebook to polarise people.

Then again I’m shitposting on HN so perhaps I’m just a hypocrite :)

Edit: the colonising mars thing was facetious and I probably should outline that. The issue is that our attention and mental health is more valuable than wasting on these shitty platforms.

Must produce. Must create value. Life worthless if no create value.

Seriously, let people have their free time why don't you. A lot of the western world is already half stuck in deadass jobs they hate, getting barely enough money to get through life so they can have the privilege of working more. It's quite something to read, on HN, in a place that has a majority of people lucky enough to not be stuck in that kind of life, judgement on how other people spend their free time instead of "colonizing Mars".

In my opinion humanity has put in the effort to get first world countries running water, sewer systems, electricity, access to the internet - all luxuries that a lot of the world can not afford. Because we don't have to worry about these things, I believe we are obliged to spend time to problem solve and tackle the biggest challenges the world has today - and not waste it watching 200 8 second videos before -- drooling off to sleep -- (not the best way to put that)

Do you even sort of hear yourself?

You know the two aren't mutually exclusive?

And what do you, dear commenter, exactly do before drooling off to sleep that is so much more productive? Seriously hope it's not watching Netflix, wasting your time reading fiction, or God forbid, spend time on social media such as HN.

Wake up, tackle the biggest challenges the world has today, go to work, go home to do some more tackling in your free time up until you fall asleep.

If I sound annoyed, I am. This is what privilege looks like: people who have it easy in life, judging the fuck out of people who don't and aren't "doing their part".

I don't use tiktok for what it's worth and I don't care if it disappears, but jeez, attitude.

You are right. "Drooling off to sleep" is a condescending way to put it. I don't want to be condescending - my goal is not to judge people who don't have it easy in life. However, I think it is important that the people who do have it easy in life to realize that, realize the luxuries that they have and not take them for granted. I want people to utilize the resources they have to do good in the world.

But thank you. I should be more empathetic

Yeah you're right but staring at 30 second clips of better lives than your selected by algorithm to bias your mind in some way to perpetuate either the existence of the platform or the product being sold is part of the downward spiral. At some point it becomes compulsion rather than choice. That's mental slavery by shitting in your head and I will judge that with extreme prejudice.

> Yeah you're right but staring at 30 second clips of better lives

That's instagram. TikTok is about average people having normal lives doing funny skits, often making fun of their own hardship rather than bragging about how they're living the high life as in other social medias.

That's your bubble. I've seen other people's and it's not. Instagram is worse I agree.

There are people flexing indeed and it shows up in my bubble too but I would say average people doing funny skits is what defines TikTok and what made it so appealing to many and still makes up the biggest part of TikTok content.

So for what it's worth I deeply agree with your edit of your above post. I just dislike putting the onus on the users themselves rather than the platform.

> A lot of the western world is already half stuck in deadass jobs they hate, getting barely enough money to get through life so they can have the privilege of working more.

Two wrongs does not make a right.

Exactly. Humans are incredibly capable of solving major problems if we have a desire and urge to solve them. This whole instant entertainment phenomenon is sucking the human desire to change out the window. "Is your life hard?" your phone asks. "Well just reach into your pocket and forget all of your problems! Be entertained instantly! Don't worry about fixing your problems, just forget them!"

Eh, you can argue the same about people taking a bit of time off to relax, watch TV, play videogames, and yes, shitpost on HN, what's the difference? Let's take TV more specifically. I'd say that it may be better than watching TV, at the very least.

If you used it you would know. It’s fucking terrifying. I used to use it and hours would just disappear without even noticing. It also destroys your attention span. It turns out than if you spend two hours watching some novel thing every 15 seconds, it becomes much harder to focus on a task or watch a movie, where you need to follow a cohesive plan for two hours.

Facebook is not your country. You have zero say in who is in charge at Facebook or what Facebook does with your data. Even if they aren't compelled to share your data with any government, history has shown that they will sell it, not just to the highest bidder, but likely many times over. History has also shown that they will spend little effort to go after developers who misuse this data according to their TOS.

I'm not saying this is worse than TikTok, but it is certainly not better.

We've actually seen Facebook use their data for Political purposes and profiting.

They are about as Anti US as any country.

One company wants to keep advertisers happy. The other wants to keep the CCP happy.

With those incentive structures how can you even posit that the two are comparable?

> I believe the motives and outcomes are more in my favor when it’s my country doing it.

This makes zero sense to me, particularly when the argument is applied to the US. If anything, European companies seem to be taking privacy and consent much more seriously out of necessity than American companies do.

The idea that an American company is more aligned with my interests because I'm an American is completely laughable.

Except we’re talking about a geopolitical rival that now has a lever to influence the minds and opinions via an opaque algorithm and moderation policies.

One wants to provide better targeted ads, the other wants to subvert a rival nation state to achieve geopolitical aims.

You can see how they aren’t really equivalent.

How would they do that? Push to my stream more content made by the small userbase of young Trump supporters? Have you been on tiktok? Cause that doesn't not end up well for most of them as tiktok is INCREDIBLY woke. This isn't facebook with a bunch of older users reposting lies. If tiktok alienates their young userbase, they have nothing. Not to say that things cant change, but not by november 2020.

If it's anything like what Russia was doing on reddit in 2016, most of the activity is actually anti-Trump. They don't really care who wins, they just want the country to be divided and weak.

Yes, but it's video content, not text. So they would need to hire young pretty americans to produce and distribute political content. That is a much higher bar than a fake bot account reposting a link.

If they control the recommendation algorithm, they don't need to make their own posts, they can just recommend existing content that fits the message they want to promote.

Simple, promote divisive content that sows discord with your rival society.

We saw Russia taking advantage of this with Facebook groups. The threat model exists. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/if-r...

Pushing divisive content is what social media does, regardless of owner. But I gotta be honest, the reason I use tiktok is that is does not do this. When I see content I dont like, I skip past it or even mark it as not interested. The algorithm adjusts. If it didnt, tiktok would not be as popular. It is a very happy place to be compared to any other social media app out there.

> Except we’re talking about a geopolitical rival that now has a lever to influence the minds and opinions via an opaque algorithm and moderation policies.

There are American companies that seem fine with influencing the minds and opinions of users via opaque algorithms and moderation policies (looking at you, Facebook). How does the fact that I'm an American and it's an American company (with a global reach, I might add) benefit me or us as a society?

If you have a problem with companies influencing minds and opinions, the nationality of the company is a really strange demarcation line, no?

I didn’t make any value statements of benefit.

I merely stated that the two aren’t comparable.

One can be used as a tool for subversion of a geopolitical rival, the other sells you things.

The thing is you can’t decouple large companies from their governments, especially not in China. It presents a very easy avenue for spreading propaganda and suppressing dissent

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

> The thing is you can’t decouple large companies from their governments, especially not in China.

Funny, I'd say the US is just as bad as china with respect to government having their grimy little laws in large company data. Let's not forget how FISA can sign a warrant for vague national security reasons, and immediately have full access to internal company data, and they can also prevent the company from disclosing anything about it.

But let's not stop there. The Cambridge Analytics problem, and Facebook's ridiculously hesitant response to it, shows that Facebook's data isn't just distributed to governments or even the highest bidder, but literally anybody who waves money in their face.

> One can be used as a tool for subversion of a geopolitical rival, the other sells you things.

Facebook doesn’t just “sell you things”, that’s a gross oversimplification of their objective as a social platform. They’ve refused over and over again to police political speech on their platform coming from incumbents. What about that isn’t spreading propaganda?

You’re arguing that FB is just this place to see ads of things to buy when they’re constantly in the news for allowing race-baiting hateful political speech to spread. That’s absolutely comparable to some of what China does.

I would question the implied premise that Facebook does not want to subvert rival nation states (or subvert the United States government itself) to achieve geopolitical aims.

I didn’t read it as implied that Facebook isn’t used to subvert rival nations, I would fully expect it. Subverting rival governments is a part of life. Though I would imagine if Facebook wants to subvert the United States government they would be severely hamstrung.

>I’m extremely apprehensive about TikTok and how China is using the data.

There isn't any evidence that China is using any TikTok data, so why is this presented as fact here about five dozen times per day?

TikTok has got a distinct privacy policy for people outside of China, stores American data in the US and Singapore IIRC, and there hasn't been any evidence presented yet that this is not true.

'China' is literally just used as a derogatory term on this website, which is embarassing for a tech community.

China should be substituted with CCP.

The CCP have done an incredible job of linking their government with the Chinese nation. Which to me is an absolute tragedy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

China has never been a democracy though. It's always been a one party system for thousands of years, CCP is just the current name but it is not that different than what was there before. When you take this into account, it makes sense to consider CCP and China the same thing (ie the one party system in place for thousands of years).

In fact it is quite an improvement at least since Tchang Kaï-Chek (the Mao era was for the most part horrific and worse than what preceded it).

I'm sure people living in Honk Kong and Xinjiang would disagree with your assessment.

Xinjiang surely wants to be left alone but I doubt they're looking for a progressive liberal western style democracy. Hong Kong has been under heavy influence of the British so they have indeed developed an attachment to Western style democracy but to what extend I don't know.

Not an american but I would certainly prefer that some country that I don't and never will live in spies on me than my own government who could use that data against me.

The problem I have with FB and to a lesser extent, IG is that you can't get away from politics. The issue with that is that in addition to data scraping, it opens users up to political manipulation (i.e., vote hacking).

How is it on TikTok? I'm not an avid user and never got hooked. My impression is that it's just dumb dance videos.

> My impression is that it's just dumb dance videos

you'd be wrong. it's a very important platform. besides dance videos there are also hilarious and cute dog videos.

I've mostly gotten out of Politics on Instagram. You see them?

Tik Tok is INSANELY good at figuring out what you want to watch. At first it shows you a random selection of videos, but it pays very good attention to what you're lingering at, and starts showing you more and more of those types of videos.

My wife and I downloaded Tik Tok at the same time, were shown the same videos in the beginning. Now, I basically see only Call of Duty: Warzone clips along with a few prank videos. My wife (far more political than I) sees a lot of videos of the protests, BLM activists, and other stuff.

Tik Tok does not try to force you to watch videos that you're not going to watch. It's crazy good (and scary).

It is, I'm pretty sure the "lingering" part is exactly true, in that you don't have to like a video or even finish watching it for it to influence your feed to show more of similiar stuff. Just keep looking at it a bit longer than other videos.

Any idea for their algorithm is built?

I think it's actually quite simple - unlike instagram, it's showing you videos. Videos can range from 1 to 60 seconds. Videos you like, you'll watch longer (and maybe some bonus for watching to the end). Videos you don't like, you end up skipping really quickly (and since skipping becomes second nature, perhaps you can measure the length and speed of the swipe).

Therefore, just sprinkle across various videos at first (perhaps most popular videos on the site). Show more of the videos that are watched longer, show less of videos that are watched for a shorter duration. Sprinkle in other analytics you collect (iphone user? says something about wealth and status - what videos do they like? android user? skews younger, poorer, what videos do they like? location data: show protest videos of big cities around you), and you end up with the "beautiful" soup that is Tik Tok.

Of course that optimizes toward a particular bubble, so you end up not seeing content you may have also enjoyed, because the app has pigeon holed you into a particular type of content.

After a certain amount of time I find most algorithm driven feeds stop being able to deliver an interesting experience, and I stop using them.

I wonder how your feed will evolve once Warzone isn't the top dog anymore, maybe it considers cohorts and enough people in your cohort will actively search for the next popular game that it will spill into your feed?

it will be interesting, for sure. In your example though, I personally feel like this is a case of "ignorance is bliss" - I have many ways of finding interesting content - I treat Tik Tok as a guilty pleasure, much like my relationship with ice cream. In a world overwhelmed with choice, and just sort of mental exhaustion from politics, world events, current affairs, and overall negativity, I'm very happy to just sit and consume ice cream for 15-20 minutes a day!

Sadly there is a completely lack of appreciation of TikTok here on HN.

TikTok is really the next generation of social media. The way the algorithm adapts to the user is unlike anything out there plus the integrated videographic tools are incredible. Plus it is cheerful and playful, and not full of conflict or self promotion.

However the only thing we can focus on is that it is Chinese.

Agreed. It's hard for me not to suspect that there's some strong motivation by interested parties to make TikTok a boogeyman. I'm much more concerned about unintentional harm caused by incompetence (Facebook) or deliberate messaging for a purpose (Fox News, or pick whoever your personal least favorite media source is).

What are the odds of it launching just after TikTok gets banned? I wonder if Facebook has turned into the social media version of the US dollar to the US government, it is just too valuable, all this information. They have a defacto monopoly on social media around the world and they're not going to let it go, even if force needs to be used (in this case banning the competition).

There was no new original product from FB in the last 15 years.

Lol. The only thing I want less than China spying on the cat videos I watch is Zuck spying on them, and reselling it to a 3rd party to hack my voting decisions....

Sure, but in the case of TikTok, there's one less intermediary in the chain trying to hack your voting decisions.

Are people using the same TikTok that I am? There is currently a single skippable ad when I open the app (that appears maybe 75% of the time). Other than that, its a bunch of people under the age of 35 doing skits.. What am I supposed to be worried about when it comes to election engineering here?

I suspect if I were TikTok, I could keep track of the skits you watch and start directing similar skits with subtle political messages towards you in their place. If I were really nefarious, I might be able to professionally produce skits that look amature that are essentially well designed propoganda.

I've never used the app but I'm sure they also request location information and a lot of people agree, so I can make a reasonable guess for most people where their home location and corresponding voting districts are.

Also, over time, the type of media delivered may subtly shift anyways. When I started using Facebook, it required a .edu domain to register and focused on listing your courses, finding peers in your courses, campus events, and so forth. Now, it looks absolutely nothing like that, yet I still have a Facebook account (which I rarely check but thats another story, many of my peers appear to still actively use it). For now it's a bunch of silly videos, maybe it won't always be that way.

You may be lured into a platform, grow accustomed to it and the convenience of a user base, then slowly go along for the ride as the platform shifts direction. Perhaps you may be vigilant of this (the reason I stopped using Facebook many years ago), however, a large portion of people may not.

Now, whoever manages TikTok has a direct route of information to a wide group of people providing they don't upset them or a competitor doesn't lure them away.

What young pretty American is making that subtle political content that china will start to slowly move me towards? I gotta be honest, the potential for abuse so much less than facebook as it is a video medium. Their best attack vector is to use that information outside of tiktok by trying to target ads on other American owned platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Google.

Pantomime to Trump speeches is thing on TikTok. This one went viral outside the app:

https://www.tiktok.com/@whatchugotforme/video/68190614138777...

Other than that apparently TikTok'ers were behind the small show up at the last Trump rally - though I don't quite understand that one.

Anyway. Compared to Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, the levels of politics on TikTok is tiny and done in a much less agressive way.

The data about you it mines from your phone. I think this is the most recent security hole detected: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/06/26/warning-a...

Well, that's a load off my mind

Sure, but good luck if you are in Hong Kong given that your innocent 'cat videos' are being surveilled for any criticism's to the CCP, which will get you arrested or thrown in jail.

Why do you think TikTok was withdrawing from Hong Kong after the security law was passed? In the UK or in the US, I can criticise the government on Facebook without them throwing me in jail. If I were in Hong Kong and did the same thing to the CCP on the other hand...

TikTok is run by a Chinese company in Shanghai. They weren't in HK for safety.

What would keep FB from buying your cat videos from TikTok?

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