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Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

There are only five growth strategies that exist, and your product only fits one. Press isn't a growth strategy, and neither is word of mouth

The five growth strategies are high-touch sales, paid advertising, intrinsic virality, intrinsic influencer incentives (Twitch!), and platform hacks.

Emmett forgot to include hot tubs ;)

I think that last one "platform hacks" may be the most crucial now. Even more so than influencer monetization. If you study TikTok user growth it wasn't just mobile video content creation tools and algortihmic ML assisted curation. It represents a foundational change in the way we transmit ideas via memes. A visual language that crosses cultural boundaries easily. There is no analogue to the TikTok video "remix" found on any other platform.

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TikTok growth early on came from massive Chinese backing allowing it to acquire a series of other platforms (most notably Musical.ly) and fold their users into TikTok. The platform content creation and curation tools certainly helped, but don't fool yourself into thinking it was purely organic growth.

Word of mouth is intrinsic virality, which is exactly how the early Twitch platform grew before it pivoted to streaming video.

I really know almost nothing about TikTok. The videos I've seen are all people lip syncing to existing famous songs or movie dialog. If that is TikTok, then (a) their piggy backing off existing popular media and (b) it doesn't require much talent to post a semi-completing video. Not saying there aren't talented TikTok-ers, more saying it's that if TikTok is mostly lip-syncing/acting over existing songs and movie dialog clips then TikTok is similar to coloring books. You start with something that's already a (good?) template.

I dont use TikTok, but its pretty clear to me there are some unique creations coming from it. Its absolutely not only about "lip syncing over existing songs". Here are some great examples of the remix phenomena:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S61ENc51Z1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgsurPg9Ckw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFeLkeSp_Ps

I watched that on YouTube, and it was quite enjoyable! But how does TikTok help?

TikTok lets you easily put your own video alongside an existing video, or reuse the audio from an existing video.

This basically gives you the tools to develop video memes. You'll often see a video or audio clip go viral and then see a bunch of different riffs on it that evolve over time, each a twist on the previous iteration, in exactly the same way you see image/text based memes evolve over time, get mixed together, adapted for a current news story, etc etc.

This sort of thing doesn't work quite as well on platforms like YouTube, the barrier to creation is too high.

Another component of the innovation is to mix lowering that barrier with a strong algorithm to surface the best content, since you now have so much of it.

I tried TikTok, it reminds me of when I used facebook about 8 years ago: full of relaxing/ funny videos, but leaving a feeling of emptiness having not done anything for the past 30 minutes. So I uninstalled it after 30 minutes of viewing. It's the opposite of Twitter, which induces stress and the desire to reply to someones tweet.

Though I wonder if there's any educational/ productive content on TikTok. This was someones argument about the difference between Twitter and TikTok: TikTok doesn't allow conversations/ debate.

Editing videos on mobile is really hard. Sitting on a desktop, transferring the videos, downloading the other videos and sounds you want to remix in, and stitching it all together in a video editing program is actually a really high barrier.

Tiktok is basically set up for remixing. You can splice your reaction, or add your dub, or lip sync, or more, and any of those would take less than 5 clicks to upload.

Most of my Twitter consumption comes through hacker news. Does that mean that Twitter doesn't provide value in this case?

TikTok are the first people to produce video editing software that ordinary people can use. This is so powerful that even on platforms which have copied the feature ("Reels" on instagram) the videos often have the TikTok watermark on.

Why did the internet become so popular? SGML had been around since Goldfarb's work in the 1960's but a dumbed-down version of it turned everyone and their third cousin into an HTML "programmer." Python is a similar phenomenon. People with no formal software training can peck at their keyboard und watchen das blinkenlights.

The main explanatory variable goes back to Olds, J. & P. Milner: Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain . J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 47 (1954) 419-427. Rat's would press their orgasm button 7,000 times an hour.

Humans evolved to sit around campfires and entertain themselves with singing and dancing. Now almost everyone in the world has their own portable 24x7 personal campfire they can use to connect with their tribe.

that's only a part of tiktok.

tiktok is really good for finding interesting things about almost any hobby or activity. home reno, biking, weightlifting are what pop on my feed and most of the content is pretty damn good.

That was how I felt about Instagram... I used to be able to search the hashtags about topics I'm interested in and see tons of legit, awesome real content. It has gradually devolved to basically spam and an "algorithmic" feed that jams ads and unwanted crap at me. I can't tolerate that unfortunately. Haven't used it in a couple years now.

In the same way that YouTube, reddit, digg, before it has done the same, and presumably tiktok will do so in the future

Yeah, I speculate that it is the ~inevitable path for any investor-funded social platform, necessary to drive increased revenue. I actually see no alternative to doing so, other than the services becoming paid subscription services -- a barrier to entry most of them are not going to adopt after years of free access.

It is and it isn't. The algorithm learns what you like pretty quickly, and there are some really unique creators on the platform.

Music they don’t even license.

I thought they did license it

they do now but not initially

That is such a tiny part of TikTok nowadays that it has become a meme itself ("boomers think that TikTok is about lip syncing").

Did they end up banning the bikini clad girls with cameras on their cleavages, or is twitch still in competition with onlyfans?

This is a separate category now: https://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/ttv-boxart/Pools,%20Hot%20Tubs,...

"Separate" as in "just another kind of content on the platform". It's not exactly segregated (like, say, imgur did).

I installed Twitch on a just unboxed NVIDIA Shield TV, not yet logged in, the first recommended stream was a lady in very revealing bikini doing "ear licking ASMR". The second one was another in generous and prominent cleavage, just chatting with her thousand of viewers.

It's not exactly segregated, nor separate, but actively promoted.

Except it IS segregated from an advertiser PoV (aka companies that don't want to attach their ads to that sort of content can opt out of it when setting up their ad campaigns).

Twitch will never ban one of their huge sources of revenue.

Is it a huge source of revenue?

The category never seems like it gets above 20k concurrent and that’s mostly for a couple of streamers. Right now it’s the 55th most popular category with 4.4K concurrent viewers which is two orders of magnitude less than the most popular category.

That is if you equate viewership with revenue, but most Twitch streamers I have heard talking about this is that the income from advertisements (scales with viewership) is lower than income from subscribers/donations (also scales with viewership, but more so with willingness to donate).

Right but we don't have access to conversion rate by category to compare. And it'd have to convert ludicrously well and the other categories ludicrously badly for it to get anywhere near being relevant to Twitch's revenue. Personally I'd suspect the advertising revenue for the Top 10 streaming categories (over a million concurrent viewers right now) to far outstrip the sub revenue from the Hot Tub category (4.5k viewers) all by itself.

DrDisrespect?

Doc had a multi million $ contract with Twitch, while I bet these bathtub streamers don't, so they're cheaper, and get even more money in donation from very lonely viewers.

I dont think they are in competition, clearly Twitch is a Feeder Platform for onlyfans.

Amazon should just buy OF

Ironically I have been seeing a lot of ads for OF where it looks like they are trying to portray them selves SFW platform...

There are a few SFW creators on OF, but they are a clear minority.

SFW and NSFW content is like oil and water, they naturally want to be separate from each other.

When it comes to monetization, I am not aware of any platform, service or business that has been successful at both at the same time under the same brand.

I doubt OF will be the platform to change this (or Twitch for that matter, as they rub the line between SFW and NSFW it is clear the majority of their advertisers are seeking them to be a SFW platform. )

Did he? I don't think he forgot anything: hot tubs are "intrinsic virality". And your comment is a proof.

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