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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

> If Instagram wants to capture TikTok's magical human touch, it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper.

I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram, they're not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave.

Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don't have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.

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TikTok is just AI/ML engagement algorithms unleashed, they never gave into the backlash that YouTube and Facebook did after the 2016 election and just continued optimizing purely for engagement metrics.

US tech companies dumbed down their own content algorithms and are somehow shocked that they are now getting destroyed. Social media is a drug, TikTok is providing the purest form right now

This; and they have a legion of well educated MLEs in China working for much less in a cut throat competitive environment

This is wrong. When supply of world-class talent is low, the price of said talent goes up, not down. https://web.archive.org/web/20200831135137/https://www.bloom...

I have friends in China. At Douyin (China) there's a general resentment towards Tiktok (overseas, esp US), at the same level the folks at home are paid much less.

Also, the big TC numbers (for most ICs, not sure about high level execs) are mostly inflated illiquid RSUs.

I get the impression that TikTok--due in no small part to its Chinese origin--also has an army of people explicitly moderating the community and re-weighting content, whether for reasons we might consider good or bad. I thereby really don't think it is fair to call it "AI/ML engagement algorithms unleashed", and I don't think it has any chance of falling into the content tarpits of YouTube (as extremist content would be removed or shadowbanned by humans) or Instagram (as low-effort content farms are essentially non-existent due to the moderation)... but, they also had a major scandal a couple years ago when we learned they were actively telling their moderators to filter out people who looked too ugly, poor, or disabled :/.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

> The makers of TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing app with hundreds of millions of users around the world, instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed “national honor” or broadcast streams about “state organs such as police” with bans from the platform.

yes...this is the trending HN narrative. but do you have any evidence to support this take? i read certain takes on HN soo often i start to feel i know them for fact, but do we really? Some of them are probably very wrong. Why couldnt tiktok just be doing the same things as meta, but a whole lot better?

The weird thing is, it wasn't long ago when HN was praising TikTok for feeling refreshing and quirky and reminding them of the creativity they missed on the "old web." How this place can sometimes turn on a dime...

For me, the amount of ads and the forced non-sensical recommendations have totally killed my interest in instagram. Right now it's flooded by AI-generated imagery accounts, that if you click on such an item once, you get a ton of these forced down your feed. It's as bad as Youtube with regards to that. With TikTok I can safely venture outside of my interests without having to redo my 'flavour profile'.

You can mark a post "not interested", which helps a lot.

The building and launching approach makes intuitive sense, but it runs against the feudal nature of large tech companies.

This point is perhaps clearer if we take Google as an example instead. Mid-level engineers attach themselves to a project or initiate it, then guide it past a certain point. Once promotion is secured, the project is dropped by its initiators. Staffed with lower-status engineers who were enrolled without the prospect of promotion, the project begins a gradual rot and the Google graveyard deepens.

The key concept here is that the projects are launched and fueled at the start explicitly for the chance of promotion. In the strategy you describe, with Facebook higher-ups mandating the top-down creation of various projects as part of the global strategy of the company, it would become risky for mid-level engineers to ever get involved. They would not have their names connected with the success of the projects as higher-ups would have imprinted themselves on it beforehand, but would be connected to its failure, whereas in the Google scene the 'moonshot' culture is well-established and limits this sort of blame. Due to massive opportunity costs, Facebook employees would be better off trying to get promoted through the traditional channels, or to quit and pursue the promising ideas themselves and hope to get bought out eventually.

I don't get what's wrong with running a social media company that caters towards older people. Not everything has to be geared for 15-35 year olds. Presumably younger people will age into this product so it's not like the user base will literally die off. For instance, once you have a kid and people start using facebook to coordinate and communicate, you're kind of forced on it. As more people you know are on it, you're more likely to engage. If anything, the younger crowd is more ephemeral and likely to move on.

I get that advertisers pay more to target a younger audience, but that's fine. It's offset by less competition in the space targeting older people

I'm not sure younger people do age into a social media product. To give an example, I'm about the youngest (~35) that my cohort still uses facebook. people slightly younger than myself (~30) tend to use whatsapp and google calendar for the useful functions of Facebook and instagram for doomscrolling. They have no reason to switch, except if someone slightly older is 'pulling' them towards the platform. But the only time I've seen that happen is on facebook marketplace, where they're interacting primarily with strangers.

I don't think social media is like a minivan, where a different lifestyle suddenly makes it make sense to switch. People are on social media for the other people that are there, I don't see the incentive the other people would have to migrate at a certain age, seems more likely they'd change how they use it (as indeed happened with Facebook). Maybe I'm misunderstanding your premise?

I think social media totally could be like a minivan if the companies took it seriously and built tools for folks at different stages in their lives. Instead they seem to be locked into chasing the youngest people and the most mindshare, always.

In my life a lot of the reason folks got off FB was 1. the experience became trash and 2. the brand became toxic. Neither of these things are about folks moving to the better, newer social network just cuz that's where everybody was.

In general I think the social media companies have no actual vision but are spooked about becoming the next Friendster/MySpace so they constantly react, desperately trying to not become irrelevant.

I think also that figuring out something that works in social media is hard and somewhat random; absent a framework to help imagine new futures people will always become reactive and defensive. Of course SM companies have to frame that as innovation and convince their shareholders that "becoming tiktok" is somehow visionary and helpful because "yes we're losing eyeballs but we're going to double-down on what we do really well and learn from it because we think the future has space for many types of social media" doesn't convince shareholders.

Idk, rambling now, but so frustrated at the whole market.

They do its the New Product Experimentation team. They've made a dozen+ apps and none of them have been successful. It's just not in their DNA to come up with interesting products at this point.

> it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper

I thought you were going to call this out. It should read "something more shallow"

you need a creative culture, not let code culture and ultra short term optimization, tiktok spend a lot of time and money making tools for creator, more than any other platform in a long shot.

Facebook just designs too much to data/metrics, doesn't feel like anyone there really has a vision for what they're building. End of the day without that everything they build will ultimately be soulless because building to the vision is what imparts soul into a product.

So many great products have been hamstrung by designing for the nearest-term metrics available. I don't understand why so many highly intelligent people keep making the same obvious (to the consumer) mistake.

Bad company culture. You can’t do anything new without explaining how it will have an immediate payoff.

> Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.

Nah. Buy the good ones early enough.

>because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram Instagram's getting more and more of the creators--financial incentives. Why post on just Tiktok if you can make more money by posting on both?

I see similar arguments to this one a lot and frankly I don't see how anyone with an active social life can believe it to be true. The userbase for these platforms has massive crossover. Maybe it's a generational thing or something but I can gurantee you the socially active Gen Zers are on Insta and TikTok. If anything they'll be on both of those as well as Snapchat and Discord using each for particular types of social interaction. So the issue clearly isn't a locked in userbase.

So it must be the content creators right? But this is rediculous too! Because virtually every content creator worth a damn on TikTok will have a linked Instagram! What's more, many of them will often have a Linktree or similar url either in their profile description or linked on their insta that will include everything from YouTube, to Patreon, to OnlyFans. People who understand how to make money making content on these platforms aren't one trick ponies, they're using sophisticated marketing approaches that leverage the strengths of different online platforms to compensate for the fact they often have handle their own marketing.

So if the content of the knockoffs is bad or the creators arent finding the competition worth considering then the only question remaining I would argue is whether the problem is in the reccomendation system (TikTok was, and still is, famous with users for doing a solid job at this), the moderation system (TikTok, maybe because it's Chinese, is not so fixated on implementing the SJ nonsense that YouTube, FB, etc. pander to at the moderation level), or the compensation system (Again, probably because they care less about demonetizing you for wrongthink against whatever miniority or "important cause" is the pet of the week. Content competes primarily on its merits as likeable content).

In short, TikTok might have had an early mover advantage but the reason no one catches up in the current environment is because they can't get their heads out of the sand enough to realize it's their own fault no one entertaining wants to produce anything but TikTok reposts for them.

Why bother doing that when you likely can just buy or copy it? Why doesn't Hatebook just make a new complete clone of TikTok, FlibFlab, and push that on users instead trying to half incorporate it into Insta that has a user base that wants to use it as it is?

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