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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

SV failed to build social media products that appeal to Gen-Z so this is the "plan B". The only reason why TikTok is getting banned is because its popular. And the only reason why its popular is because US-based entrepreneurs seem to struggle building products that connect with users under the age of 30.

The irony is there was a product, Vine, that filled this niche but it was ultimately killed by Facebook (who promoted Tiktok because they didn't want Vine making inroads with their users) and Twitter (by not developing it further).

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> Vine [...] filled this niche but it was ultimately killed by Facebook (who promoted Tiktok because they didn't want Vine making inroads with their users) and Twitter (by not developing it further).

Agreed on the twitter part, but the FB part feels like a pure conspiracy at best, and is just factually provable to be false. For one, Vine was killed off in September 2017, which is the same month that TikTok became available internationally.

TikTok was available internationally for a very long time already, just under a different name. ‘Early’ TikTok was nothing but a rebrand of musical.ly

No, that wasn't the case. Tiktok already existed as Douyin within China. Musical.ly was an entirely separate company and product. Douyin went truly international as TikTok after acquiring musical.ly.

To add, the acquisition happened in november 2017[0], which is after Vine had already been killed off. Vine had 200mil users as of 2015, while it took musical.ly until May 2017 to get there. Which is also, months after Vine had already been dead, and over half a year after Vine had announced the upcoming shutdown (those numbers and dates are all from the wikipedia pages of the companies mentioned).

0. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/09/chinas-toutiao-is-buying-m...

Vine died (or was killed) before TikTok started. It was more outcompeted by Instagram and Snapchat iirc.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok

This is incorrect. TikTok is actually a direct descendant of Musical.ly which Bytedance bought and rebranded, and was in competition with Vine.

Fta:

TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was released in the Chinese market in September 2016.[10] It launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.

From the links above Vine was already dying if not completely dead before TikTok was ascendent.

That's what I'm saying, the article lacks information. Before being Doyin, TikTok was Musical.ly, which came out in 2014. Bytedance acquired Musical.ly, made TikTok from it, but only merged the two later on.

Killing Vine was really weird decision.

How did FB promote TikTok?

Vine was shut down before TikTok even launched.

TikTok was originally Musical.ly which predates the death of and competed with Vine.

No, it’s because it’s from China which bans US tech platforms. If this came from the EU or SK there would be no discussion on this in Congress.

China doesn't ban US tech that obeys the CCP's surveillance laws, like Apple does. This targeting of tiktok is pretty specific by US government, because it singles out a company rather than act as a law.

Therefore the US is free to pass laws that make TikTok illegal by your own reasoning.

Please elaborate on how a law banning a single company is the same as a law that allow companies to comply.

If China is able to ban all western social media because of “law” then per definition any law that stops Chinese social media is also “legit” if we go by the argument that it is okay to ban things if the law says to ban them.

Please elaborate on how a law banning a single company is the same as a law that allow companies to comply.

TikTok can comply by not having CCP leadership in the executive management. See the conflict?

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