Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S.

nytimes.com

20 pointscoloneltcb9 comments

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Prediction: This sale won't happen, in fact, no sale will happen.

The idea that a TikTok ban was signed into law will be quietly forgotten. IMO, that's been the strategy of ByteDance.

Just ignore the law because US politics is very fickle and moves on quickly to the next news cycle.

If the executive does not enforce it, then the law is just toilet paper.

https://archive.is/Xlfjv

Besides the fact that this would give Amazon access to more data to train multimodal models, an area where they are lacking compared to Google/Meta, I don't see a good synergy here. It seems reminiscent of the Twitch acquisition where it became obvious through the years that they had no real plan for it besides "hey we can synergize because AWS".

> Besides the fact that this would give Amazon access to more data to train multimodal models, an area where they are lacking compared to Google/Meta, I don't see a good synergy here. It seems reminiscent of the Twitch acquisition where it became obvious through the years that they had no real plan for it besides "hey we can synergize because AWS".

I think the strongest synergy is actually with Amazon-the-retailer and TikTok's advertising business and shopping platform, not with AWS.

Does Amazon have any consumer product that people actually like because it’s a good product? Maybe kindle? Which always felt half assed compared to competitors. Obviously people like Amazon, but I think that’s for objective reasons (convenience/price) and not emotional/subjective ones like your need for Tik Tok/Twitch.

Even Amazon studios feels more miss than hit.

TikTok platform is not the same as it was in 2020. The creator ecosystem really dried up when they changed the algorithm and suddenly it was very hard to go viral.

I don't see TikTok being that valuable. There is a Lemon8 app that ByteDance came out with that feels like a fusion of TikTok and a Vlog, but it doesn't get nearly the traffic the 2020 version of TikTok did.

As a counterexample, most people don't care about the creator ecoystem. I see in your profile that you have a tiktok, I'm guessing there is some bias there from the creator side.

What I can tell you - TikTok is one the most popular social platforms still. Specificially with younger folks.

I do have a TikTok, but I have not posted to it in over a year. Every social platform goes through these cycles where earlier on it is easy to go viral.

It is a much different platform for creators today. The owners definitely have a heavy thumb on what is allowed to go viral.

TikTok goes dark on 5 April (again) if there is no solution or reprieve.

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