Hacker News Reader

Comment by Firebrand | Hacker News Reader

>At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainment staple.

TikTok devs mentioned PewDiePie reacting to these cringey videos as a large impact for the company. His massive gamer audience downloaded the app to make fun of the early TikTok users too and got sucked in. They started making memes instead of lip-sync videos and it took off from there.

View on HN

From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a different American tech giant.

Is there a way a social app targeted at young people in the US doesn't end up looking as if their success comes from sexualizing girls? I don't use any social media, but Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat also seemed to me like that in their early stages. Maybe Whatsapp is an exception, and that might be why they largely failed here but took off elsewhere.

I think the difference maker is that new social media apps like TikTok are artificially promoting this content from day zero via algorithms as opposed to Facebook and instagram which started by showing that content only from within your own network or through your own intentional curation. Now the second they identify a male you get a discover page full of bikini pictures and women bending over in yoga pants whether you want it or not. And of course this brings all the teenagers to the yard, and older predatory males with deeper pockets... “we’d love to have you model for us!” comments all over the place the second a pretty girl puts her profile to public.

You make a fair point. I think, anyway.

Don't forget, sex is the driving force in so many human actions. I'd hardly blame it on platforms.

Interestingly, the subreddit r/TiktokCringe is the same - was made to make fun of TikTok, but now highlights Redditors favorite videos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com