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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction.

I don't know why the author didn't make the obvious connection here. TikTok's emphasis is not on distraction, but on video. TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.

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I think TikTok’s success is based on: (1) far superior UX, (2) showing content from anyone as the default, giving them a large pool to draw from and avoiding the chicken and egg problem, and (3) an excellent (probably quite simple) ML loop that just throws video at you until it finds something you like.

TikTok feels like an intense drug hit compared to Facebook. It’s easy to lose time to it, a LOT of time.

I didn’t think I’d like it until it figured out I enjoyed DIY / makers videos. Then 30 mins went by before I realised and deleted the app.

I think TikTok's creator fund has led to quite a large number of influencers across many interests and categories. Perhaps seeing the success that Vine failed to largely capitalize on.

TikTok is going to eat away at other platforms even more once they increase the fund, and it looks like they have plans to do just that:

https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/introducing-the-200-millio...

Over 1 billion dollars in the US over the next three years.

One common complaint from creators I watch on YouTube seems to be that the fund isn’t high enough for them to do TikTok full-time.

So currently the flow is:

Build an audience on TikTok, have that audience follow you to YouTube where ad revenue reigns supreme.

One day that flow will just be to build an audience on TikTok.

> TikTok is successful because it understands the power of video without the legacy mental model of television: longer videos punctuated by attention-breaking ads. YouTube is still firmly operating in this legacy model.

There's nothing legacy about long videos and it's not television that introduced them.

I think the shortness of videos hijacks the dopamine system hooking users thanks to constant, fast-moving novelty. I doubt they'd have been as successful with long-form, ad-free videos.

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