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Comment by dannyr | Hacker News Reader

So how will this work?

Will there be 2 apps? Tiktok US and Tiktok for the rest of the world?

The split would likely be Douyin (TikTok China) vs. TikTok for the rest of the world. The business is already structured that way- ByteDance operates Douyin directly but TikTok operates through a subsidiary.

They are divesting the US operations though. So basically different owners for US, China and the rest of the world.

What does that look like?

For example, different engineering departments

They could set up an IP cross licensing agreement for software.

US operations alone cant be valued at 50 billions.

The subsidiary is for legal purposes only, all of the tech is built and operated from China and is subject to Chinese laws.

In fact, even after divestiture this will be the case for some time. The Chinese entity holds the IP to the algorithms and other underlying technology that make Tik Tok as viral as it is.

Leave it to America to have an app that works just great (Vine), destroy it, let China copy it, and buy it back.

stonks all the way my brother

From what I know: Jack Dorsey closed down Vine. It wasn't destroyed by any country. Bytedance bought Musical.ly(Chinese App) and merged it with Tiktok. I have never used either but I from what I can see is Tiktok is an evolution of Vine but not a copy. Vine was probably just too early.

I’m not an expert in TikTok by any means but the videos I’ve seen are quite different to the ones I used to see on Vine.

America destroyed Vine? That’s quite the zoomed out view

I wonder how this looks like in a planetary context

I thought it was the Tiktok for the rest of the world other than Douyin (Tiktok China), but I'm not sure.

If it is true that there would be a US-only version, then it sounds little bit ironic - if this kind of thing keeps happening the US would be somehow walled itself just like China...

Or even a TikTok China and TikTok for the rest of the world? (Considering the ban of TikTok in India and the perceived threat of TikTok amongst several other countries as well.)

> Or even a TikTok China and TikTok for the rest of the world?

TikTok is banned in China, Douyin (also owned by ByteDance) is effectively “TikTok China”.

Interesting. Thank you for clearing that up.

"TikTok China" exists already, it's Douyin. It was there first (2016). Bytedance created TikTok as "international" Douyin in 2017, then merged it with musical.ly.

Hidden forces behind Toutiao: China’s content king - https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3x-hidden-forces-behind-... is an interesting read.

Too much hype.

2 reasons for the meteoric rise:

Super duper aggressive marketing spend, akin Apple's iphone rollout.

A long going murmur about them using funny accounting to drive their valuation into stratosphere, and use it to raise money.

"Machine learning" and everything else all fluff.

I can pretty much imagine something akin to page rank for videos being used, with some perceptrons sprinkled on top.

>Super duper aggressive marketing spend, akin Apple's iphone rollout.

That's the real reason. Bytedance spent millions, possibly hundreds of millions, to buy those users. You couldn't escape from those ads in 2019.

I wonder how much the American TikTok app is based on Musical.ly? 50%? More or less?

At current point, around 0%. TikTok simply absorbed the idea and the users.

By the way, according to your post history, I believe the following fact would be interesting for you: Musical.ly is a 100% Chinese app [1] with their HQ in Shanghai.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly

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