TikTok's co-founder to step down as chief executive | Hacker News Reader

TikTok's co-founder to step down as chief executive

bbc.com

210 pointsthrowawaysea88 comments

> "The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I'm more interested in analysing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people," Mr Zhang wrote in a message on the company's website. "Similarly, I'm not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible," he added.

This fits the description of a Fierce Nerd as defined by Paul Graham. Little wonder he navigated the company to such great success.

[0]http://paulgraham.com/fn.html

>Little wonder he navigated the company to such great success.

After Twitter destroyed Vine it was clear something was needed to replace it and TikTok filled that void.

Not really. Snapchat and Instagram both introduced video features around the time Vine started declining. Instagram's video support is what killed the Vine userbase as the big creators moved off of Vine.

TikTok didn't fill a void, it's a fantastic video app that did a lot of things right. There was a lot of new video apps after Vine died, none of them were successful.

TikTok most definitely filled the void left by Vine. Vine was short video, usually chopped up, lots of one person skits. That type of content was not popping up on Instagram or Snapchat. Snapchat video would disappear, Instagram video felt more like a typical Instagram post but with video, or just throw away stories.

TikTok came in with short videos, collaboration tools, audio sharing, and has a realness that Instagram does not.

Also funny enough many Viners lived together in the same building so they could collaborate. We saw the same thing happen with TikTok.

Vine had almost as many active users as Twitter, yet there are users actually claiming no one used it. smh

The service failed because it was in high competition and they lost momentum. While Tiktok succeeded simply because it was fresh, appeared at a time when demand for personal and videos was growing, and offered the right combination of UX that satisfied its target audience.

> Also funny enough many Viners lived together in the same building so they could collaborate.

Yep, 1600 Vine St. It’s a nice apartment building with lots of YouTube (and now TikTok) stars.

vine was used by almost no one. tiktok didn’t fill a void, it created a new space. all the reasons tik tok is successful didn’t exist on vine. the only thing they share is video

Yea nobody liked Vine. That's why Vine compilations still garner 20M+ views on YouTube 5 years after it was shut down. /s

It’s like those restaurants. Nobody goes there because it’s always far too busy.

>Instagram's video support is what killed the Vine userbase as the big creators moved off of Vine.

I don't really think that's the case. I'd still argue lack of investment from Twitter is what killed Vine.

>TikTok didn't fill a void, it's a fantastic video app that did a lot of things right.

Agree it's fair to say TikTok carved their own path to where they are today, but a lot of the same Vine-energy lives on in TikTok.

TikTok is the evolution of Vine just like Facebook was the evolution of MySpace.

>I don't really think that's the case. I'd still argue lack of investment from Twitter is what killed Vine.

Conclude whatever you like, my understanding is that Instagram video directly killed Vine after the big creators had meetings with Vine executives about getting paid to stay on Vine. I guess that could be considered a lack of investment, but it can't be ignored that Instagram captured the creator base.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-t...

"Former executives say that a major competitive challenged emerged in the form of Instagram, which introduced 15-second video clips in June 2013. “Instagram video was the beginning of the end,” one former executive told me. “[Vine] didn’t move fast enough to differentiate.” Instagram courted celebrities with longer videos, eventually bumping the limit to a more flexible 60 seconds. (Vines didn’t break the 6-second barrier until earlier this year, and its extended videos never caught on.) Instagram also began promoting celebrity accounts in its popular “explore” tab, bringing them attention that Vine found difficult to match. Marketers began shifting their money away from Vine, and stars followed."

Vine had the talent and the creative editing down. Many of the biggest YouTube stars started with Vine. World Star Hip Hop vine compilations were incredibly culturally relevant. They fumbled the bag, so of course those in charge would look to blame it on IG. Did IG have an impact? Sure, but this type of content never took off there. If IG really killed Vine for those reasons you listed TikTok would have never happened.

We don’t have hard numbers obviously but a lot of people did miss Vine. Snapchat and Instagram didn’t come close to replacing it’s coolness and connected factor. Not to mention Vine was amazing for black culture. If you think the others replaced Vine then you probably aren’t a heavy social media user. Everyone knows Snapchat is for “rogue” content. Like your random sketchy night out in college that you only send temporarily (the close friend feature on Instagram and DMs never replaced this fully).

Instagram is much more for funny content that is longer form or static (this goes serious static content and memes), some short form content (since it has grown with reels), and for clout. The gram has always been for clout first and foremost. I’m not posting my pictures of my new whip on Snapchat or Facebook.

Vine was the platform for the great short form collaboration that is equally silly, informative and cool. TikTok is having the exact same effect, but has a feed, comment section, and related video functionality that makes it even better.

I might be too naïve but being a new platform, evolved from Musical.ly, closer to the Gen-Z by just being something that their parents/teachers/"older" people won't use was the most determining factor in its explosion. So, Vine being bought and deeply connected by Twitter was definitely an issue for Vine.

Is it? I took a look at it after someone mentioned some days ago that it's available on the web, no account required. Searching for videos is pretty terrible, so I did want to create an account for more possibilities but that wasn't possible on the desktop. Then I installed Bluestacks, installed Tiktok, created a dummy account and took a proper look that time. The "For You" stuff was rather useless, so I searched for some good music (from a specific genre) and liked some videos which resulted in me being recommended more music of that genre. OK. Now, obviously, I wanted to see something more than just footage from groups performing, so I looked for some easy-to-find things and liked those. Made no difference for the "For You" recommendations though. Eventually, 2-3 other topics trickled in and completely replaced the music footage (despite me often watching to the end). Then I found out that you can mark videos as "not interested" by holding down the mouse button...which basically completely killed two topics because I'm not intersted in stupid captions or annoying effects. And apparently you can't block effects....or captions...or hashtags. Heck, I selected that video language filter option from the very beginning but it doesn't apply to the "Discover" part of the app at all and doesn't even work with the "For You" stuff properly. Why can't I directly filter out certain things? I can do so with creators and music apparently, but not with hashtags, videos from specific countries, videos in a specific language etc. Then there is also the issue with "not interested" not working most of the time. Only after doing that to Vietnamese military parade videos four times has it appeared to work. When it comes to meme videos, Corona and politics, it doesn't work at all, no matter how often I select it. I'm also stuck watching the same kind of videos over and over and over again. One would think the app would recommend something else entirely after someone sweeps at least 90% of the time immediately. Ah, also, the categories-that-you-like selection is utterly pointless too apparently. The only one I selected from the very beginning was "gaming" and out of hundreds of videos, there was only one which was gaming-related. Since the search function is terrible, I can't search for multiple hashtags or very specific things like "bla-bla". And single-hashtag is pointless since at least 95% of the videos I'm not interested in + there is the overlap of words of course. If I'm looking for the MSX computer, then I'm getting different results of course because "MSX" is a more popular thing for X and Y. Something else that I've noticed is that, possibly because of demographics, most of the videos feature girls/women, even something typically male-dominated like farming/agriculture is like 50/50 while everything else seems to be 90+%.

Anyway, just some ranting because I don't think I can understand why this is so popular, despite being so unusable. Granted, at best I would use it as an appetizer for proper content (like after listening to a good tune, looking for the full song or hearing/seeing some interesting tidbit and looking for more information). If people that talk aren't involved, it also rather reminds me of flash loops from days (more or less) gone by, just with terrible captions as an addition.

I like it because it just has stupid memes and jokes, and some cool recipes and stuff - it's easy to browse for 10 minutes on a break and it feels organic.

Instagram and YouTube etc. have all become incredibly corporate with professional production studios etc. dominating the platforms - I imagine the same might happen to TikTok eventually, but at the moment you can just see a funny video someone made of their cat, and the cat isn't sponsored by SquareSpace.

TikTok is popular for the same reason why Facebook was super popular back in the day; constantly checking for new short videos is akin to constantly checking for new status updates, new photo uploads and new DMs but now all that Facebook activity dissolved into various platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. On top of that it is easier for content creators to create short videos than for example 20 min long YouTube videos meaning barrier to entry is much lower.

Also teens and young people in general say that their parents and grandparents moved to Facebook because of which they do not feel comfortable doing all the shenanigans on the Facebook anymore.

Zuckerberg was genius and cursed at the same time because he created social network for everything or in another words for general content(text, photos, videos etc.) but he didn't specialize in any until recently when he and his team started paying attention to each and every of this content category.

I would recommend using it a bit more. The algorithm is generally pretty good, it just takes some time to learn your interests.

The reason they don't have all those filtering options is probably because most people don't want to use them and it's fun to see video content from all around the world and even in different languages. Serendipity on TikTok is part of the appeal.

Although it wasn't the case for you, I'd say TikTok probably has the best cold-start experience of any consumer content app. For comparison, try creating a new account on YouTube or IG.

Still get that TikTok may not be for everyone, but imo it feels like the end game design of short video content consumption. The content can be really fun, silly, pointless, mundane, or educational. You don't need to follow people. Celebs are not as relevant. Don't like something? Just swipe up. It's a pretty refreshing take.

It can't learn my interests if I don't see any new videos though. As I wrote, it's just the same over and over and over again. Usually one would mix in something completely different...which it doesn't do. That applies to the content and the music. And it's not like I'm not interested in things. On the contrary, my interests touch a large variety of topics but I never get a book recommendation, classical music played on different instruments, sports etc etc.

Actually, it starts you off with your native language only at first IIRC. I increased it to seven different ones which didn't matter at all and then decreased it to three. And again, no difference.

I don't use any social media and all the "celebrity" stuff is generally not for me at all. So I can't really compare the experience to anything.

Though, I guess I can attribute the success to what the others said, despite its demerits:

- really low barrier of entry (mrkramer)

- organic feeling, as opposed to corporate-controlled/generated (alexgmcm)

The addictive nature of seeing what comes next likely also plays a role.

As a typical "old guy" I just went over there to browse, as an experiment, and while I did find a neat (but too short) woodworking video that was kind of interesting, I generally agree: I don't know what I would get out of TikTok--it's mostly young people doing things that they understand and interest them. It's clearly not targeted at my demographic, and that's OK.

My only mild annoyance has been that sometimes my FYP gets stuck on a topic like golf that I really don’t like and it can take a while to get off of it. Otherwise the alg tends to send me a lot of small videos of stuff that’s extremely specific to very specific interests which is so much nicer. Searching for things and liking videos in those things tends to make those things show up on my FYP.

Tiktok has a different user base; they don't use email, phone, or SMS anymore, instead relying on Snapchat and WhatsApp, etc.

Wow, his comments were super honest as to his reasons for stepping down. It's refreshing in such a transition that it's not smothered in corporate speak written by lawyers or HR, or the common go-to of 'spending more time with family'.

After reading and re-reading his comments, I'm still not 100% sure whether these were his honest feelings or just a different form of "corporate speak." Also interesting he is stepping down during a wave of crackdown on Internet giants in China by the CCP. It could be genuine, but I find it hard to judge.

Whether or not it’s all true is separate from the fact that this is very much not “corporate speak.” The tone, language, self reflection, and self criticality is so foreign to what you normally see in press releases. There are a few passages in there that feel less sincere, but some of them feel totally new to tech PR at a company of that scale.

Sure, you can pose the hypothetical: but what if he’s lying? That’s a less interesting observation IMO.

I used to work at Tiktok. His speech feels consistent to me. Unlike some ceo's like Mark (fb)/Evan (snap) he rarely spoke to general employees. There was no weekly/biweekly q&a to hear from the ceo. You could easily go months with him not doing any company wide talks/emails which did make top level transparency feel bad. Maybe china had more ceo communication, but lacking on US side. The rare times he did speak/email his wording tended to be much more direct and honest than I'd expect from an executive.

> leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people

somehow I think this is what a CEO should be doing, and then letting managers do the people management.

CEO should be strategy, not keeping Karen in accounting dept. happy.

Too many companies just continue doing whatever they have been doing for a long time, without any ability at reconsidering if this still fits the market.

Strategy involves keeping the team happy. Modern CEOs may have technical backgrounds, but once they become CEO, they are generalists, whether they like it or not. The problems that they personally have to solve are people-related, be it employees, customers, shareholders or regulators.

Every job in management is managing people, IMHO. That CEO is watching after VPs who are themselves people with typical people issues. It's people all the way up. :)

I guess if he does not want to be honest, he does not need to write it this way, it is easier just to have someone draft some words for you.

Of course, one of the factor could be what has happened: forced to sell TikTok by US; couldn't sell TikTok because rejected by China; although the massive traffic amounted by apps from his company, they are seen the same way as Facebook as not healthy for society (once you are on tiktok, time really flies by :)); Maybe all of these, we don't know. This is not his first startup, and I hope this is not his last. He definitely don't have a single vision as Zerkerburg does. Let's just take his words for it since he has put efforts into it.

The court rejected Trump’s executive orders so they didn’t have to sell TikTok. I don’t think any of Trump’s executive orders concerning commerce in China were not rejected by the court.

It is impossible to tell if someone is being sincere, or just very good at appearing to be sincere.

I doubt the CCP was involved either way. A CEO stepping down with a humble excuse wouldn’t do them much good.

> A CEO stepping down with a humble excuse wouldn’t do them much good.

Of course it would, it makes it look like everything is calm, orderly, and that their economic system isn't under siege by the state. The CCP - as with all authoritarian systems and to the degree of the authoritarianism - is at all times obsessed with faking appearances. (insert inevitable diversionary replies: "but America")

Colin Huang desperately fled control of Pinduoduo, terrified of Xi's targeting of the next Jack Ma types. He started giving away his shares specifically to avoid getting that bullseye painted on him, to avoid potentially becoming the richest person in China.

It makes perfect sense that Zhang Yiming would be in the same boat as every other prominent figure that is scared they're next. ByteDance is even more influential and important than Pinduoduo though, which makes it clear there was no other scenario to be had with ByteDance other than to 'step down.' This process will not just continue, it's going to have to accelerate; authoritarian systems - a dictatorship in this case - either must liberalize, collapse or persistently tighten the screws on any perceived risks and opposition to maintain control. It's obvious which scenario is occurring.

> Also interesting he is stepping down during a wave of crackdown on Internet giants in China by the CCP.

Yes, "the best lies are the ones shrouded in truth". The reasons he listed might indeed be reasons why someone else would be a better fit for his positions, but I wouldn't be surprised if the actual trigger for stepping down now is the CCP.

I think it might be Chinese corporate talk. the politicians also talk like this sometimes. might be related to communism -- attempting to not be condescending to regular people. or maybe it's just Chinese culture that doesn't value empty talk and so he is forced to write something concrete but it doesn't mean this is the truth.

Corporate talk means to use pretentious and socially acceptable excuses to conceal the uncomfortable truth. There is no such thing as concrete corporate talk.

I'm guessing in America the word "Chinese" will become a swear word soon.

what I said is not exactly critical. so I think you already associated Chinese with bad, that's your problem

Chinese politician talk is as empty as you may see elsewhere, just in a different way (wording being more "communism" and harder to decipher)

And perhaps just harder to decipher for us because it's a different flavor of bull then we are used to, and has been passed through a translation layer

Whether or not they were scripted/forced, the comments show a refreshing amount of humility, honest, and lack of narcissism. Thumbs up!

Fiduciary duty to shareholders perhaps. Non generic and too-honest messages might rattle share prices.

Nothing is honest here.. it’s just becoming a state owned company...

You gotta hand it to him. He navigated TikTok successfully through an absolutely crazy period.

Pay respect where due

For those unfamiliar with ByteDance, they’re actually much bigger than you might think, and have become serious competitors to China’s leading tech companies (BATX + H) [1]:

- Baidu

- Alibaba

- Tencent

- Xiaomi

- Huawei

You can see how their offering compare in this Big Tech Spreadsheet [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BATX

[2] https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/big-tech

TikTok will surpass Facebook as the most engaging social media app in the US with fewer DAUs than Facebook. It's already at par [1] according to some data.

ByteDance might become the most valuable company in the world, not just in China.

[1] https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak/status/1394704798591590401?s...

That's a prediction and a half. It would only become the most valuable company if the stock market goes crazy about it, as it stands, one does not become that with just a mobile app / social network.

Still, it will be an incredibly valuable company, especially as the Chinese middle class comes into wealth.

China seems to be aging faster than the middle class can get wealthy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/01/chinas-aging-population-is-b...

I've come to realize that the inherent advantage to the China system is that it can dispose of people at will, it doesn't need to care about your feel and whether you want to be in the loser pack, all in the grand name of the greater good.

That makes it nimble, and powerful, that means the system itself almost always wins, as for the people, well, good luck.

The CCP runs an arbitrage. It is willing to destroy any citizen’s life — to deprive, to immiserate, to extract - in exchange for marginally better systemic performance for the party state. Most other modern governments just aren’t willing and able to use and abuse their citizens to quite the same degree that the CCP is. And with a lot of expendable people + total control, you can drive some fast results. But this is also why the world needs to firmly reject such unethical governance plays, by banding together to shun and decouple from any ruling elite that tries to run them.

> Most other modern governments just aren’t willing and able to use and abuse their citizens to quite the same degree that the CCP is.

Oh, really? Let's look at one metric: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_....

overall incarceration rate in the US is 639 per 100,000

The incarceration rate of the People's Republic of China varies depending on sources and measures. According to the World Prison Brief, the rate for only sentenced prisoners is 118 per 100,000 (as of 2015)

WTH is going on here?

In what sense does a high rate of incarceration help the United States “system” though? This feels like a tenuous connection.

I am not an expert, I dont know how a government benefits from abusing their people. I dont see CCP doing that systematically. But apparently many think CCP just like to abuse Chinese people, even if there is no data to support it. Maybe US government is with hidden agendas that requires abusing people inside prisons?

Isn’t it generally agreed that China is actively committing genocide against its own people? If that’s not systematic abuse, I’m not sure what is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

You can search Youtube and see youtubers' visiting to Xinjiang, and even the sites of the so-called genocide events. Draw your own conclusion. I haven't been in Xinjiang in my lifetime, I have no idea what really happened. I watched CNN, ABC, and many western news reports, and CGTN's reports, and a lot of Youtuber, like and dislike China all alike. I had my own opinions. But I see no reason to present them without myself setting foot on the region.

Yes, of course. No sense in presenting opinions without setting foot in Xinjiang with the blessings of a carefully monitoring government. Sure many celebrities and professors have disappeared for the last 2-3 years and China is trying to compel expat Uighurs to return to China. But I don't want to present opinions without setting foot in china. There are too many reports of Chinese soldiers entering homes whisking husbands away into educational camps and sleeping with the wives.

But irrespective of all these stories, I am firmly in your camp about my opinion. I see no reason to present my opinion without myself setting foot on the region.

Well, let's not be cynical.

Speaking truly and frankly. You are expressing a lot of opinions.

I indeed reserve my judgement on CCP, as I know that I know very little about the entity.

You may or may not interpret that as complicit to them, or whatever. But please do calm your mind, and see into the facts, and the reasoning behind the emotions.

I am not asking anyone to be correct. I am asking rationale.

Please don't mistake my words for opinions. I am not posting any opinions, just like you.

> it doesn't need to care about your feel and whether you want to be in the loser pack > as for the people, well, good luck.

I am more and more direct nowadays to point out the ridiculousness of comments like this:

This type of comments do not square with the facts in even the slightest sense.

China runs the world's largest and most successful poverty elimination program. How can a government doing this not care about you in the loser pack? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/11/27/asia...

In essence, a lot of such comments treat CCP as some kind of bizarre imaginary entity that automatically possess any negative traits for the topic being discussed.

Of course, the distribution of positive & negative comments are certainly always mixed.

But boy, oh boy, I never seen a single comment actually showing a decent understanding of CCP's functioning nowadays, in my 10+ years on hackernews.

Not a single comment.

Wow

The older folks were not educated (less than 10% with college degree). The young people are much more (close to 30%). Besides, close to 40% pop lives in rural.

I am sorry what else is Facebook???

That's never going to happen. TikTok is already losing engagement in the US. The TikTok problem is that there are only so many cloned dances to do and very short form video is overwhelmingly low value garbage.

Ever look at the TikTok channels for prominent celebrities? The content is horrible. It's embarrassing to look at their channels. It's inherent to the format. The sole thing propping up TikTok in the US - which is already beginning to fade - is the popularity of young people cloning mediocre dance routines. There is only so far for that one trick pony to go, it becomes increasingly boring with time.

Facebook persists as the telephone that every house has, along with its protective moat in Instagram. TikTok has no persistence reason to exist long-term. It's far easier to build the next fad social network than it is to replace something perma entrenched like Facebook. The over 30 crowd is the majority of social media users in the US, they aren't going to abandon Facebook, it's set (exactly the same way Google is in search); young people however will abandon TikTok for the next cool trinket social media app as they get increasingly bored with TikTok and desperate for something new and cool to play with.

> The sole thing propping up TikTok in the US - which is already beginning to fade - is the popularity of young people cloning mediocre dance routines. There is only so far for that one trick pony to go, it becomes increasingly boring with time.

for the first 15 minutes, sure.

once TikTok starts to understand what kind of content you're interested in (and it does this quite quickly), this problem disappears. i can't remember the last time i saw content like that.

it's almost like the difference between YouTube signed out vs signed in.

Nobody use BAT anymore, Baidu has been a 2nd tier company for at least 5 years and nobody refer it in the acronyms. The top 5 are Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Financial, ByteDance, Meituan or PDD

1. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba.

2. Is Meituan that big?

3. I have never heard of PDD.

4. What about Xiaomi and Huawei?

PDD is exclusively caters to mainland group buying. It's valuation is quite big though 160B USD

seen any good analyses of what happened at Baidu? how do you screw up being "The Google of China"?

(I know "X of China" is never actually true but work with me)

Web search is not very profitable ever since the so-called "mobile age". A large percentage of mobile-only users have stopped relying on search, they reach to WeChat or just 100 different specific apps instead. Baidu was in desperate for growing or even keeping its ads revenue then, and they did something really bad which triggered a PR storm [1], making things worse.

Also, around 2016-2017 most of my engineer friends who are great at their job left Baidu for, surprise, ByteDance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi

Google is still relevant because it controls Android and Chrome. Baidu never gets lucky in building that and be a dominant player. This makes it very passive in the mobile internet market competition.

How would you say ByteDance compares to the other four?

I highly recommend http://acquired.fm podcast. They cover these companies and many others.

Being a grey beard, their episode on Tencent and the freemium business model kinda blew my mind.

Thanks, I just subscribed.

It bothers me that the acronym is two non-words.

I propose X-BATH

I'm reading as a Corona reference

BatxH where H = Human, x = multiplier sign

Where did you get this data from?

I filled it myself using Google to find projects I wasn’t aware of.

I'm guessing there's some internal pressure. He's probably going to get a year off and then a cushy role in the party.

Quite a possibility he wants to Pivot to biotech industry. https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1395213832411254793

Interestingly, PDD's founder Colin Huang also recently resign from PDD and want to research life science.

https://www.bytedance.com/en/news/60a526af053cc102d640c061 the letter itself

His full statement is here https://www.bytedance.com/en/news/60a526af053cc102d640c061

I really enjoyed reading it!

funny reading the naive comments here that think his statements reflect the real reason he stepped down and not that the CCP forced him to amid a broader crackdown in china on tech companies

guess that’s what happens when you’re in a tech bubble and totally oblivious to world affairs or news

And that’s exactly why China will take over the US.

In my opinion, TikTok is a network of wilful informants and a dataset that can be used to train AI at recognising foreigners so they can be more easily spied on when in China. It can also be used as a basis for race segregation programs and help run concentration camps in China (e.g. spotting "western" behaviour in the population and automatically issuing a ticket to reeducation camp). I think that service should be banned altogether.

Would gathering an AI dataset for nationality and race really be such a hard problem without it?

What do you think the CIA does with all the data they get/hack from American companies?

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