ByteDance in talks with banks to borrow over $3B

If I sell a 10% stake for $100m, my company is valued at $1bn.

If I use that $100m towards growing the business, then both the 10% stake, and the remaining 90% grow in value.

If a new investor wants a 10% stake, it's going to cost more than $100m.

This is a very oversimplified example, so there are probably parts of the process where financial cost is incurred by the company. But I'm not sure where that happens.

they'll 'exit' before that by IPO

It's hard for me to imagine adults spending their time watching these stupid clips constantly but you are right, it's not just limited to children.

I still can not understand how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society

HN is in favor of free speech, except for teenagers dancing to each other.

Defeatism short-circuits one's ability to grow and serves as an excellent excuse to do nothing.

if you dont allow your children tiktok/insta/etc, they get completely excluded from their community.

a possibility is to move into a community that does not use social networks that much, so not using them is normalized, but sadly this is not easy in western europe (at least for me).

I grew up in the same era... and the solution to that was easy: my parents told me to go outside and play.

In 2021, their phone goes with them everywhere, and if it doesn't one of their friend's phones does. There's almost no way, short of helicopter parenting 24/7, that you can insulate your children from Tik Tok, and I'd argue it is far, far, far more harmful than TV. Random kids at school didn't attack me for the TV shows I watched privately in my own home in high school.

This is rather sad; would you rather have been prevented from them? What would you prefer to have been made to do?

I wasted so much time especially in my 20's racking up idiotic "achievements" that exist only in a Factorio savegame and other similarly irrelevant places.

Most people, opponents and supporters of video games alike, tend to discuss if the activity itself is harmful - does it make us desensitised to violence etc, but the real issue is what you are NOT doing when you play those games.

If a child doesn't have easy access to cheap thrills from a video game, she will start using her imagination, draw something, go to a friend, come up with some mischief.

Time is limited, and childhood is the most precious thing in the world, don't waste it.

I think there are also serious qualitative differences between games in the 90s/00s and mobile freemium games of today.

It should be noted that most culture war stuff is itself engineered for an emotional "hit", although usually an angry one.

On the extreme end, you got the Civ series. It's been around for 30 years now. There is literally a joke website called Civ Anonymous. "One More Turn"

FPS games like CS really feed that dopamine hit when you get a kill, especially a head shot. You think the game designers aren't thinking about how to make that kill as satisfying as possible?

Even the games of the 90s were engineered to be addictive. Tetris when you clear the blocks. Mario when you get a power up. Even Solitaire when you win the game and the cards go flying.

Not MTV exclusively, but yes I knew kids (in elementary school!) that watched TV for hours every day (although I didn’t grow up with that habit).

Pretty sure the same hours-a-day thing was true for video games as well, although in my view at least that’s not totally passive and was sometimes social (kids playing against each other in person).