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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

Ever heard of redesign? Vine needed it. TikTok didn't win against Vine because of it was new. It had better UI, UX, better features better strategy overall.

Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.

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Tiktok didn’t really exists at the same timeline as Vine so I wouldn’t say Tiktok won against it.

Vine had over 200 million active users and Twitter didn't see any potential?! TikTok has over 800 monthly active users in 3 years. I don't know what Twitter was thinking but Vine had a lot of potential. TikTok wouldn't be so big if Vine was kept alive and managed well.

Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.”

TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.

Is the CCP funding ByteDance? Anyway a quick google suggests they made a tidy 3 billion profit (ByteDance as a whole) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html

Key point is ByteDance as a whole (I haven’t been able to find anything to indicate that TikTok itself is profitable), which happens to be a privately held company. ByteDance’s CEO have also gone on record saying they had a “weak” implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would “further deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.

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