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Comment by gman83 | Hacker News Reader

Dom Hofmann, one of the cofounders of Vine launched Byte which is basically a new Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_(app). I don't know if it's catching on though. I guess if TikTok does get banned we'll see a mass migration somewhere.

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There's also Google launching YouTube Shorts, but who knows when they'll send it to Google Graveyard.

Google Graveyard is in maintainance mode, and is not accepting new burials I'm afraid.

They could not have picked a worse name. No kid is gonna say 'find me on shorts.'

Maybe some kid with 10 years of C++, kubernetes and tensorflow experience will

> I guess if TikTok does get banned we'll see a mass migration somewhere.

Mass migration to Canada Tiktok.

I don't keep up with the new social media - but I am wondering why TikTok succeeded where Vine failed?

Better recommendation engine

Or actual people doing the recommendation?

You are right to a degree. Vine at its peak had less than 30 engineers total and at most 1 person working on the "engine".

Think also about how much data plans and smartphones cost in 2012, particularly ones centred around video streaming

I also think 30 seconds is just long enough to tell a meaningful story rather than Vine's 6 seconds which was only useful for short-form comedy.

And note it's 60 seconds, so even more so

Vine launched in 2012. There probably wasn't a critical mass of mobile phone owners, specifically teens, at that time. The iPhone hit the market only five years earlier.

I haven't tried it but everybody says TikTok's magic ingredient is the AI behind recommendations.

The music licenses are a big deal - you can put actual popular music in your tiktoks and not have to worry about it being taken down.

Is the 30 Second rule applicable World Wide? Just wondering.

It's difficult to understand why Microsoft wouldn't buy this. With some clever marketing I'm sure they could grow the username rapidly and it would cost less than 1% of whatever TikTok would cost.

They tried, but apparently the sale was blocked due to AI export control laws in China.

i think he means why didn't they buy the rights to the name "vine"

Why? The hard part isn't building a Vine or TikTok clone. It's getting 800M people to come and use it.

Really depends. They made and then shut down Mixer, their Twitch competitor, because no one was using it.

Bytedance paid $1 billion in advertisements in 2018. Anyone remember how annoying and ubiquitous their ads were?

That was on top of purchasing Musically for $800m, partially for their existing U.S. user base.

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