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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.

Users better be running now before they get hit with those new licensing fees.

Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."

It's like a 100 year old with hardware crypto wallet.

Not sure why I thought of Bill Belichick

I've always been fine with Tiktok dying, surely that will be expedited under their leadership

> Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.

I'm hopeful. With any luck they'll ruin TikTok and it will die, a satisfying result.

First they will start launching TikTok Enterprise.

An all-buzzwords compliant subscription based solution for enterprise and professional content creators.

I immediately had the same thought. One can hope!

The "good" news is that they will only own the US operations, with the ROTW continuing to be operated by ByteDance. So if they diverge too far from the original product we can expect to see a discussion about life behind the Great Firewall of America.

why do people hate TikTok as a product so much?

if TikTok dies then one of the alternatives: instagram reels or youtube shorts would take its place.

the brainrot will be the same. I guess people think tiktok's algorithm is particularly pervasive over Google's or Meta's? But I don't see why.

For me it’s the potential china influence. Reels and Shorts is at least American and I already have established relations with both companies.

Are we for sure the TikTok algorithm doesn’t bump towards or away from certain issues? The data on the cultural zeitgeist? The ability to promote political messaging?

Brainrot the same. Intentions, maybe not.

People keep saying this but shouldn't it be kinda trivially easy to check?

Start new accounts, swipe through the content and establish what kind of algorithm it is. The few attempts I've seen on youtube seem to indicate it's heavily based on your geographical area. They don't really care that much which side the apple falls onto.

I do acknowledge that there's a latent threat that could be activated. And I can see an argument being made on that front, I mean, China doesn't allow access to a lot of American social media for that reason. But I don't really buy the argument right now as I haven't seen a lot of evidence of Tiktok doing things that Meta/Google haven't done.

Like you say, they could target different messages for different geographical areas. Similar to how in the election last year Dearborn, MI (highly middle eastern) got different messaging from both Trump and Kamala wrt Isreal/Palistine compared to the rest of the country on traditional ads.

They can target any age range or demographics, any interests.

We had Uber hiding things from LEO almost a decade ago via geofencing and other tricks, I’m sure it’s a bit more sophisticated now.

You keep bringing Meta/Google into this. I don’t care if they do the same things. I mean, I wouldn’t like it either, but we have solutions available to us. We can pass laws or go to court and handle it internally. A foreign nation is not bound by that.

It's delightfully naive to think that a new account is 'fresh' and can't be associated with previous usage.

Those "alternatives" didn't exist before TikTok, not the same way. Hating the inventor of a drug more than the copycats is reasonable IMO.

Larry will sue those alternatives for 'stealing' tiktok IP.

> why do people hate TikTok as a product so much?

That's like asking why to people hate heroin a product so much. After all, most its users can't get enough! Must be good, eh?

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