Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

That crazy push for 10min and longer videos was a sole reason why tiktok happened.

I still remember that there used to be short and super informative videos before but now everything is so stretched out with low info density

View on HN

God, I wondered why these youtubers can't stop with the super long introductions, walkarounds to tell us something basic that could be explained in 2-3 minutes TOPS.

Yeah, lot of noise added. Reminds of those content mill articles that dance around the subject/question for 80% of the length of the article just to keep you for longer and increase the chance of clicking an ad.

It has to be long for you to get any ad revenue, I thought?

I think twitter killing vine was the real moment that brought us tik tok. It was like the digg exodus to reddit but way bigger. Everyone thought twitter was dumb for cancelling one of the most popular social networks out there for no good reason, and what do you know, the market proved this was dumb when tencent came in with their vine clone and became bigger than twitter ever was.

That was a remarkably bad call and huge fuck up. The weirdest thing is I think all my older gen-X colleagues are the ones that could've told you that. They were the ones who had kids old enough to be on music-Ly or whatever that got bought by TikTok. I as a lowly millennial had no idea what they were talking about at first but whatever it was had all the signs of a viral success with their kids.

Wasnt there like a 10 year gap between the two? It's clear Vine left a gap that TikTok filled but it's wasnt like one shut down and the next started right away... Rgiht?

TikTok launched in 2016, about 4 months before Vine shut down, although it wasn't immediately available worldwide. Musical.ly, the precursor to TikTok which then merged with it, launched in 2014.

I think you are being disingenuous. It wasnt widely available or popular until 2018.

Saying that Musical.ly, a Chinese based lip syncing service, was where everyone went after Vine, a USA based short video service, closed down in 2016 is quite the stretch.

I said 10 years which was an exaggeration but TikTok may be the spiritual successor to Vine but TikTok didnt even exist in the country where the majority of Vines users existed until two years later.

I guess you could say there was a exodus from Vine, users wandered around in a desert for two years, and then finally arrived at the promised land, TikTok...

Was Vine ever that popular outside of US? I've almost never heard of Vine in France.

TikTok is worldwide.

I remember some of the best youtube content I've seen was less than 10 minutes in length, like short animations and other content which took a lot of time to produce in small amounts.

Khan academy videos are one of the best examples for this.

It's still out there, it's just harder to find. YouTube also doesn't want to send it to my subscriptions inbox so I now prefer NewPipe which actually shows me what each channel posts.

This is exactly right. Youtube has been trying so hard to turn itself into a tv network. Tiktok (for now) is a classic disrupter and has had tremendous success by making something great that people liked. Vine is the more embarassing failure, but YouTube is a close second. For those who dismis tiktok without even trying it, it is hard to convey how fun, interesting, and surprising it can be.

Does TikTok make a profit though?

Is it required to? It's effectively Chinese government owned, right?

Exactly. Not all profits are dollars.

i'm not sure if vine was a true failure. the only difference i see between that and tiktok is the focus on music and the less rigid length requirement.

the users loved vine and it's still quoted in tiktoks

i think it's because china is able to dump money it was able to take off more

> i'm not sure if vine was a true failure

it isn’t around anymore.

Google Reader wasn't a failure, but it's also not around any more.

Sometimes companies shutter successful products.

There is quite some value in longer videos.

However there seems to be a thing that you need 10 minutes for monetisation, so people stretch content not needing much time to those 10 minutes ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com