TikTok’s stratospheric rise: An oral history
wsj.com
wsj.com
So much information gains or loses value based on who is saying it. It also came out around the same time that every YouTube creator started stretching their content to 10 minutes minimum for ad revenue. I rarely want to spend 10 minutes on a single throw away topic which killed a lot of interest in browsing YouTube casually for me.
I know there are a lot of naysayers for good and bad reasons but if you are on the fence you should give it a try and it will likely become one of your favorite online spaces to spend time.
These days I preference 20+ minute content on YouTube that I mostly watch on my tv. Which makes me sit and carefully select something high quality rather than veging out to short videos.
Also, there are Reddit user analysis tools (such as: https://reddit-user-analyser.netlify.app). If ever I’m speaking to someone and get the sense they might not be arguing in good faith, I just look them up and if they have a history of trolling, I end the conversation.
>I know there are a lot of naysayers for good and bad reasons but if you are on the fence you should give it a try and it will likely become one of your favorite online spaces to spend time.
Really?
Back to the topic: I think Vine already showed us that there was a market for a video-based social media application that was tied to your @-handle. YouTube has over the years become way too proper and high-effort for creatives that want to do it for fun. Instagram was too picture-based. A good video editor and fame (or notoriety) and the unofficial Vine-descendant is born.
I wonder what the people at Vine thought after they saw TikTok do what they did with a few tweaks.
No idea what they wanted, no idea where they wanted to go to, and no idea on how to use what they had.
There is even a 2012 New York Times article: "A Master of Improv, Writing Twitter’s Script" [2]
I always wonder how media portraits an alternate reality where people and organization behaves as if they were living within The Truman Show [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Costolo
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/technology/dick-costolo-o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...
shudders
Improv is a fantastic tool that I recommend to everyone. The basic concept of Yes, and… makes a huge difference from an emotional intelligence perspective.
So Twitter shut down Vine."
(also cites https://www.mic.com/articles/157977/inside-the-secret-meetin... )
Like all union-busting actions, the purpose of this was not simple financial maximisation but showing who was in charge.
[citation needed], this sounds like outrage porn for a certain kind of person.
Those creators could choose to stop creating content and Vine would still have lots of other creators. It's not like the site would've stopped functioning without the few unionists.
Well, the founders made ~$10MM each with 5 months of work. So they were probably happy at the time. But Vine was too early, so I think video storage and movement was still pretty expensive for non-FANG companies. So they limited uploads to 6 seconds. I think that limitation was too low to do what TikTok does.
But the real reason they were too early is recommendation systems like TikTok uses seem to have been based on work done since Vine was shuttered.
At first, it started showing you some unfunny mess of weird gifs, memes and short news briefs. But after an hour or two of scrolling, it learned. It observed your scrolling speed changes, your tap patterns, everything. And the feed magically changed to something more interesting — to you, personally.
Interestingly, later on this app was accused in facilitating pushing the Chinese political agenda, and then withdrawn from app stores in 2020. But TikTok moved on.
Why have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels failed to implement this? It is the main reason the TikTok algorithm learns so fast and is so much better that their algorithms. The other important reason is that the "Not interested" action is seamless and TikTok actually learns from it.
Humans doing curation is not that expensive, that is the main innovation TikTok came with.
That is their "innovation"; and is also something that is hard for YouTube and Instagram to copy as it would mean they would have to spend more and monetize less.
Have you ever used it? Because is doing a "decent" job but not a "great" job. I've been suggested videos that I constantly flag as "not interested" all the time (and since it has no "block" functionality you gotta suck it up if it comes back again)
The algorithm is great but is more about where are you located than anything else. You don't get to see a lot of the content created in the first place just because you're not in the right region (eg. I never saw a Charlie video for example)
Overall I think it might apply a weighted approach on what to show and based on your engagement double down on what you are likely to watch more. Then you've trends, top creators etc that get featured more often.
The only thing I love about TikTok is the non-existing advertising. There's some, but is rather seamless and non blocking that sometimes you are even going to watch it.
Nothing to do with YouTube where you're basically in a worst situation than the classic TV (ads every now and then)
As the obvious example, if you are a male, you might only need to click "not interested" once or twice to stop seeing e.g. skateboarding or woodworking content, but many, many times to stop seeing content from attractive females.
But jokes aside, that totally make sense since was tech content from a tech bro that I personally feel was a bit too cringe.
Is actually laughable, you can earn a living on YouTube only with ads but not in TikTok.
I tried TikTok in my usual manner and attitude towards social media; I would doom scroll as fast as I could, allotting longer time for patterns I don't recognize, shorter for what I already understood, tangential to preference and couple seconds at most. The feed or whatever it's called became monotonous, lacking in diversity, devoid of content, even those that I would be presented with in other platforms as trending on TikTok. And I deleted the app.
YouTube isn't as terrible, though not ideal(perhaps my overuse of ad blocking is playing a role with it).
Youtube however spend a lot of effort to drive that early content away and focus on professional content that they could monetize easier. Finding a random video from somebody who isn't a professional full-time Youtuber is getting pretty rare these days.
Youtube Shorts thus has the problem that all the random slice-of-life content that strives on TikTok, is deliberately suppressed on their own platform. Difficult to see how they can fix that, as it just goes against everything they have been doing for the last decade.
The algorithm is important of course, but it needs content to search through and I just don't really think there is enough left on Youtube to compete with what TikTok is doing. All the videos I saw on Youtube Shorts was just professional Youtube's cutting some bits out of their larger videos into a shorter video, it just felt useless, annoying and uninteresting.
Could you elaborate a bit on that? What did youtube to do drive that early content away? Why is it easier to monetize professional content?
I have an alternative theory: Some people within every social media company try to turn the company into a mass media company—they want to promote content according to their taste, hang out with celebrities ... See "youtube originals". Social media companies win if they can withstand that pressure, if they manage to stay neutral, to show things to people that they're interested in.
For the same reason that Twitter is currently under fire: brand safety.
Brands don't want their ads to appear next to people spreading flat earth conspiracy theories, drunken ramblings, hate speech or dangerous "challenges" - just think back to the Tide Pod "challenge", if you were an advertising buyer for Tide, would you want an ad for Tide as a pre-roll for a video where a bunch of morons eats them like candy? That crap alone led to almost 7700 hospital incidents and at least fourteen deaths [1]. Additionally, you have people without a fucking clue what they are doing who upload videos like high voltage arc burning in wood, showing no concern to safety - and at least 30 people died because they were blindly following these videos [2]. Other stuff I've seen are "DIY" YouTubers doing electrical work and even I as someone who's not formally certified but have way over a decade worth of experience in construction and maintenance immediately see just in which amount of danger these people go.
And hell even actual professional YouTubers like HeavyDSparks routinely show a shocking lack of caring about workplace safety. Not wearing proper PPE (helmets, shoes), standing barely a foot away from a winch cable with thousands of pounds of load on it... it's bad enough that people don't care about OSHA guidelines on their own, but showing that on YouTube... I respect the guy and his team for the good work they do to help out people and nature, but they could definitely do way better in promoting safe workplace standards!
Platforms that allow large scale unmoderated publication of user-generated content will always end up facilitating grave injury and death.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_of_Tide_Pods
[2] https://hackaday.com/2022/05/02/the-most-deadly-project-on-t...
I thought this is the naive view expressed to non-technical people, but it incorporates a lot more user input. It's just, to the user, it feels like that's the only thing it's communicating.
On the "classic" consumption UI's of other social networks you couldn't create that metric with such high accuracy, because you don't know which content is in focus and the content itself might be static.
That's probably also why Instagram's algorithms now put much higher weight on Reels than their classic feed when measuring engagement of a user...
But personally, I haven’t found TikTok’s “not interested” button to be useful at all. It’s like it puts content/creators in some limited time out and then brings them back with a vengeance.
On TikTok I’ve found the best thing to do is block creators who I’m not interested in. It’s the only surefire way to keep them out of my feed and is very effective.
https://mobiledevmemo.com/tiktoks-billion-dollar-secret-that...
Stratospheric rise, yes. But I question how market driven this actual rise was, who exactly provided the funds to spend $2bn over a few years to make TikTok a large brand.
Is it a "cultural phenomenon" and "geopolitical flashpoint" when an app with that much firepower takes off?
I think people failed to understand TikTok. People keep talking about social network. TikTok is not a social network, it does not use your friends and your connections to predict what you will enjoy, and that's the beauty of it. For me TikTok is a TV. It is MTV, constantly showing you exciting videos, regardless where it come from. YouTube is like Cable TV. The closest to it is Instagram, but Instagram pays too much attention to who you follow. TikTok does not replace Facebook, but it will eat your TV time, it competes with Netflix.
DouYin, which is TikTok China, has totally transformed the Chinese e-commerce market. You know what it does, something very much similar to QVC, with Internet's low cost, it is eating up Alibaba's market share. Last year NEW ORIENTAL ED & TECHNOLOGY went bust after Chinese government forbids after-school education, the company set up accounts on DouYin, English teachers start to sell products on DouYin while they casually teaching online, it became a hit, they sold hundreds of millions GMV every month, you would be surprised to know hundreds of thousands people would log on DouYin every day to listen to what these guys talk about, and buy everything at the same time. It saved the whole company.
enough to spend $1bn in ads in 2018? That just seems unlikely to me, but I could be wrong.
Spending $1b on ad is not exactly what they did, they invest $1b for contents (influencers), not pure ad.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html
https://startuptalky.com/bytedance-success-story/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-26/bytedance...
One thing that TikTok did for me that was awesome: I searched for restaurants in the small tourist town I live in, and the search results were very good. I had read that young people (I am 71) use TikTok as a search engine so I tried it.
I tend to have TikTok installed about 25% of the time, and uninstall it when I am wasting too much time. Someone here suggested blocking content creators I don’t like; next time I have it installed I will try that.
To my surprise, there's at least some form of praise for TikTok here in hackernews. It is surprising because as far as I'm aware, there's a negative sentiment here in general for social media (facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.), for the mental health risks it poses.
I have nothing against it either, I guess I'm just getting old and have less inclination to try new things.
Plus the security issues. TikTok has been proven to be full of backdoors.
The linked article says TikTok has been downloaded over 200 million times in the US. So assuming you’re in the US there are something like ~130 million other people in your shoes.
Not nothing useful, but actual nothing, as the algorithm gatekeep us from seeing what’s on it.
Privacy concerns aside, it really is a wonderful nexus of humans.
Never heard anyone say that about TikTok, ever. Even if true, the amound of bullshit and disgust you have to endure to find one good video isn't worth it.
I can now get pretty much 80% videos from creators I enjoy and the variety of that content is amazing. Funny rap, followed by serious rap, followed by a professional chef critiquing the creation of a dish, followed by a SNL skit, followed by a Ryan Reynolds skit and on and on.
What irks me with these sort of uncritical apologists is how they see it as second coming of Jesus, when all I ever seen praised about tiktok keeps me hard in 'meh' category. I am sure its addictive as I see it clearly in other's people kids, but so is heroin and I feel 0 urge to get hooked on it nor make it available for my small children.
Life, and its ultimate quality and beauty is something completely, utterly different thing. It never came, comes or ever will come off the screen.
YouTube's discoverability is abysmal, so it's really not comparable. I use YouTube every day and have not had it recommend to me a new channel I'm interested in... a year? When I refresh my homepage, nearly one half of the videos stay the same. I've already seen 5 of them.
> I am sure its addictive as I see it clearly in other's people kids, but so is heroin
Well, I'm not praising its addictiveness, right? I'm praising the people that post on it.
TikTok is essentially Chinese spyware, and the quality of its algorithm is terrifying. But that's really it – it's just a good content platform, and its scale means its attracted great content. Ascribing all these silly qualities to it, like being in opposition to life, and similar to heroin, is hyperbole to the extreme.
What you see in tiktok feels more "real" (even when contrived) than the overly produced content of youtube.