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Comment by asutekku | Hacker News Reader

People will flock in where other people are. Unless Instagram gets a decent competitor, people will just get used to it.

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This is the issue that made Facebook to big to fail now.

They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.

I don't know. In Facebooks case it might as well be hurting them with younger demographics. When everyones mom is there the younger people just might want to go someplace else.

You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.

Young people just make secret accounts and don't tell their parents. My younger brother is 15 and reports him and his peers are on both Snapchat and Instagram in addition to the usual suspects like Twitch, Tiktok, and Discord. The main reason I've heard for not using Facebook is largely that it's redundant when Instagram provides most of the same features in a slicker package. A lot of fb features like the event planning and facebook market aren't relevant to them yet.

Well there already is a competitor - TikTok.

As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat.

I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.

If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any potentially malicious components?

> If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any malicious components?

Rename it "Skype for Teens". Make no changes to the codebase.

That's more like it, but seriously there aren't a lot of articles written about app acquisition and the process of going through and debugging a massive codebase. If they buy it, no one from Microsoft will ever write a blog talking about how the code was a mess and how their team improved it.

They will grep for and comment out the code that goes like “maliciouslyUploadSecretInfo.*()“

Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.

Acquiring an app from a Chinese company and slapping the Microsoft branding on it without doing some sort of vetting would be absurd.

What’s absurd is thinking Microsoft doesn’t have anyone who can read source code.

How is it different from acquiring a US app?

According with the new cold war narrative, in this case we have an very evil code that spy people all the time. Forgetting that last time I checked, companies proven by leaked documents to really spy and pass information to the government was Microsoft, Instagram, Facebook and Google.

They're not. "Malicious" in this case means gathering user data and MS wants that data. They're just going to point the information flow to their servers.

My take on this is that a Chinese company can't take a National Security Letter, and Microsoft already has a Room 641A.

TikTok is "malicious" only because a Chinese company partially owns it. That's literally it and it's just like any other social media company otherwise.

What malicious components?

And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.

Malicious as in doing things outside the scope of what Microsoft wants done.

Anyone else think Facebook launching this might stop Microsoft from buying TikTok now? Depending upon how much money they need, I think Microsoft not having any past social media presence might scare them taking on Facebook as a competitor.

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