Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination
wsj.com
wsj.com
The decision to force transfer of business undermines our country's brand and our reputation. It's sad that Twitter is participating in this shake down.
I posted this in another thread and colorfully illustrates that Twitter is no better than what they accuse TikTok of being.
China's different from those two in that they've been exceptionally careful not to spark a shooting war and to keep enough profits flowing to US companies for the past few decades to keep them placated. But now China's shaking off the leash by building up an indigenous high tech ecosystem that can challenge the US and trying to be the dominant military power in East Asia. Any country that challenges the US can expect its wealth confiscated.
Don't expect the current situation to defuse anytime soon. China's goal to be technologically independent eats into the profit margins and future R&D expenditures of US high tech industries, and China's goal to be the military leader of East Asia threatens America's post WW2 influence over Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Both countries want what they believe to be their fair share of the world, but the sum adds up to more than 100%. Both countries also believe they'll be the winner in the end. What better powderkeg could you ask for? Someone will have to give ground at the negotiating table eventually, but that'll only happen when both sides agree on what the actual balance of power between them is and it might take a war to find out.
At that rate, China seems like a pretty poor place to put your money. Doesn't matter if their domestic technological pace is impressive.
Can anyone honestly think that in 10 years, they would trust the CCP enough to buy property or invest there?
Frankly, if you have to pick between being aligned with the US or China the US gives more goodies away than China does. Full access to US markets, military umbrella, and no obnoxious sense of inherent superiority over smaller countries that's displayed overtly. The only benefit to allying with China is that China doesn't demand political reform. Everything else is very meh, especially if you're already using America's preferred political system.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-tik...
Who would they sacrifice then? Obviously, it will be the Big Techs.
Project Dragonfly was Google’s attempt to re-enter, but bad publicity forced them to stop.
Think of Europe. The EU has just realized that by letting US runs internet for itself is costing it money and its technological future.
As what the current administration is doing, the tie is getting weakened and I don't see the trust re-established to its previous level again.
Too bad Europe is having fucking hard time to kickstart startups ecosystem.
US Executives paid off politicians who then allowed trade deficit to pile up, we saw one of the biggest wealth transfers in the history of mankind - Some 30 trillion dollars of growth in China. Whatever was returned then went into American executives' who made sure that the median wages were as low as possible (paid off politicians again) which lead to massive wealth inequality here domestically.
I think the people to blame are not executives. These are the wolves. The real assholes of America are the politicians, both left and right, who put their own interest before public's. Infrastructure, education, building the nation to be capable to compete was put aside, instead they promoted consumerism, big-fat American dream and laughed off to their multimillion dollar estates.
You make a good point about rule of law - yes, it is in favor of big corp. Not for medium and small businesses. Italy has some ridiculous % of GDP coming from companies less than 50 employees. I forgot what that % is, but it is like 50% or more.
This is what America could have been. A powerhouse of innovation, extremely motivated workforce, excellent education system and health system, virtually no poverty and infrastructure could be unlike any other nation.
Living here in Silicon Valley, it feels like a crumbling place ridden with crime, feces and homeless people everywhere. Depressing.
Economic growth is not the same as a wealth transfer. It's not a zero sum game.
If I am making Jeans in 1995 in America, but in 2000 I lay off workers, shut down cotton fields, dying processes, etc. and off shore it, while hiring 2 people instead of 50 - to manage suppliers, that indeed, unquestionably has resulted in loss of wealth.
Can you explain how this would be a zero sum game? I know @naval keeps tooting that and it makes sense to me in macroeconomically, but I can't convince myself - I think of a closed thermodynamic system with system energy = work done + heat transfer out. That's how I think of the economic systems too when it comes to microeconomics.
By offshoring the manufacturing of jeans, American jobs were lost, correct. But presumably the cost of manufacturing was lowered which opened up new markets (can charge less and still make a profit) and those profits flowed back into the US. And at the same time, American consumers benefited by lower cost jeans (whether price decrease or a slowing of price increases).
The Chinese benefited because they were get a piece of that overall value chain - the manufacturing part.
We are on the same page then - those profits do flow back to the US, but as huge pays for CEOs, executives and the upper echelons of the company. This was the original premise of my argument, and you're right - it is not a zero sum game strictly speaking.
We haven't done enough to make sure the middleclass wages rise with the increased economic output. American wages have been stagnant [1] even though those companies have brought back wealth.
If there were laws that oversee buy-backs, disproportional executive pays, corporate taxes, and other systems that ensure that profits do actually benefit the nation - we would have been in a better position.
I am not a proponent of some kind of socialistic marxist society; Capitalism with strict laws and checks/balances is great.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
But you're right, jobs are not zero sum either. They create new jobs, which in turn create other new jobs, and so forth. If they didn't, we'd all pretty much be unemployed except for farmers.
Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for short looping videos before it shutdown. Previously users have suggested Vine used a follow/subscribe-model and was not algorithmic like TikTok, but adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have been that hard.
It's been reported Microsoft is looking at buying TikTok with some investors valuing the company at $30-$70 billion. [3] That number is high in the context of this latest WSJ article, which says Twitter has $7.8 billion in cash and a market cap of $29 billion.
However, TikTok reportedly earned $5.6 billion in revenue in Q1 2020 [4], and reportedly made a $3 billion net profit in 2019 [5]. It those numbers are correct then TikTok (which often called a Vine clone, and Vine 2.0) has grown bigger than Twitter itself.
This leapfrog happened in an era of cash-rich Silicon Valley software companies, where investment funding is easily obtainable.
It's worth reflecting deeply on this turn of events, and why Vine was allowed to wither and die, only for a better executed clone immediately take over and dominate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/revive-vine
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-for-a-deal-to-bu...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-results-idUSKBN...
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html
Twitter had to choose one video strategy and went with live because of Periscope and it ended up being the wrong decision.
The question is why a cash rich Silicon Valley company didn't buy Vine for pennies on the dollar. It could have been Google. It could have been Apple. It could have been Microsoft. It could have been Facebook.
Personally, I think it could even have been revived by private equity (who would immediately do deep cost cutting to bring the burn rate down).
I'm not convinced this is true. TikTok's algorithmic "For You Page" is astonishingly good. Somehow TikTok manages to zero in on stuff relevant to users extremely quickly, and without relying on spamming a lot of general interest popular content. I created a TikTok account recently and literally within minutes I was getting an extremely personalized FYP (For You Page) without even following anyone. If my wife and I compare our FYPs we'll find virtually no overlap (possibly a few cat videos but that's it). I've never seen anyone else do an algorithmic feed even half as good as this. Everyone else seems to rely on just spamming you with general-interest popular videos and hope you'll find enough people to follow to fill out the feed yourself. TikTok's FYP isn't even driven by follows, that's a separate feed.
The algorithms behind recommendation engines are well understood. Companies can and do invest huge amounts into making their algorithms better and it yes, it definitely takes a lot of effort to tweak and refine the algorithm to make the overall experience addictive and relevant.
But the seemingly widely held idea that TikTok builds better recommendation algorithms than other companies (including Facebook's News Feed) doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny.
Did you completely change your IP address?
Did you spoof/hide any other aspects of your browser configuration?
Private browsing or not, you would probably easily be recognisable based on IP + browser fingerprint alone so youtube could just continue to serve you the same videos.
It has completely updated based on what YouTube has learned about your interests based on your search and view history.
It works even without searching (eg, click through on a link on the default homepage).
Also just letting YouTube keep automatically moving on to another video, it pretty quickly gets off into weird territory. It's like YouTube thinks that for any video you watch, you want to hyperfixate on that particular topic and are perfectly happy to end up in some weird video with hand-drawn badly-voiced Sonic and Mario characters having a tea party.
Or perhaps my favorite genre of "where did this come from?" is a series of stop-motion videos with figurines of Ash, Misty, Brock, and for some reason Link (from Zelda), sitting in a classroom, with Nurse Joy as the teacher, who puts up a silhouette of a pokémon on the blackboard and asks what it is, and the characters try to guess. It always ends up with something weird like a silhouette that looks exactly like Voltorb, and once everyone gives up, Nurse Joy reveals it as a top-down view of Jigglypuff. This one is weirdly entertaining. But also just plain weird.
Not quite as good but even weirder is the 3D animated but badly-rendered and badly-animated scenes of lego pokémon with wizard hats and wands that conjure up lego buildings and collaboratively build a farm.
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I suspect the real difference here is TikTok wants to drive user engagement. It wants me to actively enjoy the videos I'm watching, put likes on them, maybe comment on them, share them with people, make my own videos inspired by them, etc. It wants me to be an active participant in consuming and creating content, and it wants me to always be confident of finding new content I enjoy by going through the feed. And me swiping past a video that I don't care for is perfectly fine as long as I don't have to do that very often.
YouTube on the other hand wants a passive viewer. It wants me to just sit there on the couch slowly going numb as I let it show me videos. If I never touch the remote control, that's a win for YouTube. Every time I hit the menu button to go back to the content list, that means YouTube failed. Picking new unique content is therefore a big risk for YouTube, its best bet is to just stay closely related to whatever it is I just watched, and to slowly migrate towards anything that keeps me fascinated. This means it tends to get weird.
The secret sauce of TikTok isn't the availability of short video. Its short video with the world's library of music. TikTok is about music videos.
More importantly, Twitter would have messed it up. If Vine would have lasted until 2020 it would be filled with riots, violence and left wing politics - a reflection of Jack Dorsey (and staff's) attitude. Just like twitter.
What does that mean?
I don’t remember the exact breakdown, but I believe one covers some of the Asian countries (where Google Play is available)
If the acquirer, can make it work, it will be the greatest tech M&A deal since Facebook acquired Instagram in terms of long-term return.
Twiktwok.github.io
I would argue that the algorithmic feed curation spreads content that has the capacity to be viral much faster.
Yes so far.. but it's still relatively new. I think competing against TikTok is a challenge, but it doesn't take much for a platform like that to explode in growth... just needs catalyst and continual refinement of the product.
After all, they had Vine back then
MSFT is a much better business, and have the cash to back a long strategy imho.