46 ms·

TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

298 points by elorant 7y ago

nriconalla 7y ago
Wow that is really a great competition but I guess TikTok really doing great because there are lot of funny and good content or videos uploaded.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  And I find some of the ads on TikTok are relevant and interesting to me. Additionally, I don't have to wait 7 seconds to skip an ad I don't want to see, nor do I have to watch several ads in a row to continue to the next video (think Youtube).
  - sorenn111 7y ago
    What's the operating margin? Of course a new company will have like 0 ads as it tries to capture market share and be cool. Once VC moneys runs out and they need to make money, believe me, you'll see ads.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      On average, I see an ad about every 7 videos on TikTok. Given a video is no longer than a minute, that puts the ad dispersement about on par with Youtube.
    - logicchains 7y ago
      The parent company is profitable now (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-bytedances-first-half-revenue-better-than-expected-at-over-7-billion-sources.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-bytedances-firs...).
      - sanxiyn 7y ago
        Note that their revenue generator is Toutiao, not TikTok.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    In other words, you like it more because it isn't trying to actually be profitable yet. If it needed to make money right now, you would see the same level of annoying advertising as on other platforms.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      I would consider the number of ads that TikTok runs to be on par with Youtube. However, they do it without the annoyance that Youtube forces on viewers. I removed the Youtube app from my phone and bookmark from my toolbar. That's how annoying I felt their ad scheme was.
      - nsporillo 7y ago
        Which is exactly GPs point. The advertisements are forced, not skippable because that is how the platform makes money.
        gpm 7y ago
        No, the post your respond to is making the point that forced not skippable advertisements are, at least with him, causing youtube to lose money. I suspect they are with many people, they are a very strong motivator to only use the platform when you have some form of adblock enabled that prevents you from seeing the ads at all. They probably also reduce the total number of views = total number of ad impressions for people not using adblock.
        Fjolsvith 7y ago
        After I've seen an ad once, I get to make the decision whether it's relevant to me on TikTok. On Youtube, they would like you to review the ad all over again, just to see if possibly you changed your mind. In fact, I've had the same ad replayed back at me so many times that my enjoyment of the videos was ruined. Why do I have to suffer the repeat annoyance? And even when I've skipped the same ad twelve times, why do I then have to watch the ad full length before I can continue to the video? At what point does Google treat me like an adult that can decide the relevance of content? This is the very reason I cut the cord on Cable TV.
  - bil7 7y ago
    instagram ads are skippable too?
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      I wouldn't know. I don't use Instagram or Facebook.
    - grenoire 7y ago
      You don't have to wait to skip.
rvz 7y ago
> TikTok poses a major threat to Facebook and Instagram in particular. Billions of downloads doesn't tell you if 'something is growing' it's the Daily Active Users. Ask them how TikTok plans to make money in order to remain profitable and they will completely fall tone deaf. This article tells you nothing about TikTok outperforming instagram.
- enahs-sf 7y ago
  While I agree that downloads in and of themselves aren’t super telling, if we think about the conversion rate to user this is still an insane amount of people. At 20% conversion, that’s 300M users. Even 1% DAU from that would be 3M people and probably from a segment of people that are the most valued (ages 14-25) to instagram from an audience perspective. Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.
  - aylmao 7y ago
    > Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story. That's what's got me skeptical. There's a lot of people saying TikTok proves Twitter killing Vine was a bad move, but Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are wildly different "social networks". IMO the equivalent of putting Amazon, Youtube and Wikipedia on the same "website" category. WhatsApp is incredibly useful. It's perhaps the "lamest" of all social networks— it doesn't have "creators", it's not known for its cool filters, it has no "likes", but it works and where it's used, it's as ubiquitous and used as phone numbers once were. Facebook is very utilitarian too. IMO they haven't become "uncool" because they dropped the ball— they went for the general population. It's like they purposefully toned down their "cool" brand to widen the age of users that could associate with it. Now you can not only find pretty much anyone on Facebook, but also buy and sell on Marketplace, find a Job, find events, restaurants, find groups for parents, study groups, groups for people with rare diseases, the list goes on. TikTok is very popular, but what's the demographic and what's the value proposition here? Teenage entertainment? If so, they're competing with Instagram, but also YouTube and Netflix. It's also perfectly plausible its users will outgrow it by the time they go to college or enter the workforce, or once the ads pick up to keep with the operational expenses. The real challenge for the company will come in the form or retention and the broadening of their product + user base to compete on the next level, as something useful and not just entertaining, IMO.
BoumTAC 7y ago
Can you find interesting video(non funny) on tik tok ? For example if your interested in bike, can you find cool bike related stuff ? Or is it just some people doing funny thing with some music on it ? I tried it a few months ago and found only funny videos. It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it. I like Instagram or YouTube because I can follow thing I'm interesting in.
- philshem 7y ago
  Because one app is more used doesn’t mean other apps aren’t useful.
- afiori 7y ago
  My impression is that it is a quick, simple, but extremely effective medium for artistic expression. In a sense it is very pure; it is not about anything specific and, more importantly, it is not about showing a fake, happy, successful version of yourself. While I am too old to participate in it, as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging). > It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it. The reason to create an account would be not to watch videos but to make videos. In that tiktok feels a bit like a teenager version of a twitter, youtube chimera.
  - dna_polymerase 7y ago
    > [..] as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging). I think that is the core to its success (and was for Vine). Instagram became a platform for people to promote themselves or some product and people are fully aware of that nowadays.
    - jzymbaluk 7y ago
      In my own, very subjective, experience. It seems more people are "real" on Tik Tok. I just opened up the app, and the second video I saw, was a young woman talking about her Alopecia (an auto-immune disease that causes hair loss). I've seen similar videos about Scoliosis and Autism and lots of other issues people face. There are also a lot of queer creators on Tik Tok (though the company has had ongoing issues with removing queer content). Tik Tok isn't free from toxic behavior or those problems with insta-models and travel vloggers by any means, but my impression has been that it's a surprisingly friendly and welcoming community, especially compared to a lot of other social networks
m12k 7y ago
"It is the third most-downloaded app outside of gaming this year. Numbers one and two are WhatsApp and Messenger, while four and five are the Facebook app and Instagram." Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.
- wil421 7y ago
  There was competition and FB used their war chest to buy them all, sans messenger. They forced people to download messenger to see FB messages on mobile. They also lied and said you had a message when you really didn’t. Just to force the messenger download.
  - mhluongo 7y ago
    Didn't they acquire Messenger as well? I think it was called Beluga
    - wil421 7y ago
      I’m not sure about the mobile app itself. I do know they rebranded messages in Facebook to become Messenger. Basically you had to access private messages inside Messenger.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      No, it was split out from the main app: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-split https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-spl... > The move allows Facebook developers to focus more exclusively on features and improvements for each individual app. Of course, it also requires users to download another Facebook property onto their smartphones, a not-so-subtle way for the company to increase app downloads. I found this on Beluga, but it smells of an acquihire and rewrite, and predates the split by a few years: https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/
      - mhluongo 7y ago
jzelinskie 7y ago
I recently was watching a stream where the topic was playing bootleg versions of games on an Android tablet. Instead of microtransactions, many of the games would forcefully stop the game and prompt the user to install TikTok in a way that looked impossible to avoid. This definitely seems to imply that TikTok is directly paying for installs and gives me doubt about their organic growth.
senectus1 7y ago
pfft. its carefully targeted to children and the young. it's even more ephemeral than twitter. there is no "community" behind it.. its purely entertainment. It'll die off. it has nothing to build on.
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keepper 7y ago
Facebook’s privacy faux pas will be nothing compared to a company who’s government can request any of users data (Chinese or not) with zero oversight. We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful global companies.
- darzu 7y ago
  Except who will know?
Jedi72 7y ago
Im surprised at peoples comments like "its not organic growth" and "they'll never be profitable" - how is TikTok different to snap/insta/fb in the early years? The thing that matters in that biz is hitting critical mass of users. Then they can spend the next 10 yrs bleeding their users in long tail of platform stickyness.
- butler14 7y ago
  huge advertising spends
  - baq 7y ago
    Chinese money wants in instead of the usual way where it’s western money trying to pick China. Not sure about censorship, always a possibility when Chinese money is involved.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
From a fraud perspective, it would be extremely cheap to fake downloads. Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric gives more credibility to their internal numbers. I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just me.
- trophycase 7y ago
  It's probably not fake. My teenage sister has gone from "TikTok is so cringey" a few months ago to "I actually kind of like it". It's now socially acceptable to use so it's in the clear. I saw someone using it on the airplane last week too.
  - chrshawkes 7y ago
    I have children, all the children are using it. The other day two famous TikTokers we're spotted in a Northern VA mall and it was a pretty big deal. It's not fake.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      Just because a lot of kids are using it doesn't mean it has 1.2Bn downloads. That's a lot of downloads. Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has 1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the world. I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to be in China. If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company. If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't ~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are completely unbelievable. At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed that more than 65% of their users are under 25.
ksec 7y ago
Outperforming when Instagram is banned in China. I remember there was a vaguely similar services from Twitter, and that somehow never caught on.
- AMerrit 7y ago
  You're thinking of vine, which felt like it was just hitting critical mass when twitter killed it off. TikTok has grown so big because of the boost it started with from people looking for a vine replacement. At least that's what it feels like, I don't have the numbers to back it up.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Doesn't TikTok use a separate brand and app called Douyin in China with its own app download counts?
  - mciancia 7y ago
    Yes, it does.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Yes, but it was in the report and I quote "Much of TikTok's growth has been driven by an explosion of users in India, who accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. "
- headsupftw 7y ago
  Do you even know TikTok is not available in China? The brand was specifically created for western countries. In China the same company (ByteDance) owns a hugely popular short-video app called Douyin. These two apps do not share content for obvious reasons (yes, communist censorship and all that). I think what boggles HN readers' mind (mine included and I'm Chinese btw), is that in a place that's purportedly Orwellian or at least bearing resemblance to it, creativity is supposed to be severely oppressed and virtually non-existent. Yet the reality is quite the opposite.
durpleDrank 7y ago
Astroturfed or not TikTok has excellent creators (for now anyway I'm sure it will be ruined as it becomes more popular if history teaches us anything about fads). Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app. It's easy to burn 1-2 hours mindlessly watching absurd videos. I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh" people won't use it much longer.
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  One of TikTok's strength is recommendation, so I don't think spamming will work.
- progval 7y ago
  > Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app. There's also https://www.tiktok.com/trending https://www.tiktok.com/trending
bransonf 7y ago
What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed vine. Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move. I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with) First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I’ve been a user for a year now. It used to be that people watched it for the bad content - then intentionally bad content. The biggest TikTok compilations were “TikTok cringe”. But now...the content is actually good!
  - koolhead17 7y ago
    TikTok is a soft porn dosage for newer/emerging internet users.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    Sounds like youtube. It took years for youtube to get from cat video quality to scientific / conference videos that often are better than books / text by the name people. I still don’t believe I would switch :)
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  > First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
partiallypro 7y ago
My only concern with TikTok is data collection being funneled to the CCP.
- progval 7y ago
  Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies.
  - cheonic728 7y ago
    > Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies. As a European, I'd rather have my data stored on US servers than Chinese servers. Hell, Facebook probably has better security than the NHS. Chinese GDP growth is headed for <5% anyway.
  - partiallypro 7y ago
    The US isn't using that data to put Muslims into concentration camps and killing them to take their organs, or marching troops into Hong Kong.
    - xiphias2 7y ago
      You’re right about the concentration camps, but regarding Hong Kong US has done and is doing worse things. Sadly this is how empires work.
    - response777 7y ago
      As a programmer, I am seriously curious about how these silly videos can help PRC "put Muslims into concentration camps", "take their organs" or "march troops into Hong Kong"
    - throw964563 7y ago
      I wouldn’t be so sure, > In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.” > According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.” https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
devsatish 7y ago
another observation: TikTok and similar apps (and the long Phone designs) have made Portrait/Vertical Video ther norm.
komali2 7y ago
Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about violence, the shills will always use the word "ISIS" somewhere in their message. It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC astroturfing not a big deal? Maybe my concerns are valid but that doesn't justify further concern about the influx of PRC messaging vectors to the USA, i.e. tiktok? When I worked in the PRC I got to see first hand the strong-arm of the Party. Every business involved in communication had a government official whose entire job was to ensure the company "protected the social wellbeing of the people of the PRC" or similar. I can only assume tiktok has the same and I can only assume it's a matter of time before the Party starts directing the company to leverage their access to a massive US audience in a way that benefits the "social wellbeing," i.e. by disseminating PRC propaganda.
- pcroh 7y ago
  Exactly the way I feel about American influence in Europe. It's not too bad, you'll get used to it.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    What are the issues that America is trying to push in Europe?
    - mgbmtl 7y ago
      As a Canadian, random examples: Indifference to violence, hypocrisy on nudity, monetizing privacy (no respect for privacy), monetizing medical care. (I don't mean to start a flame war, but they are topics where EU and Canada tend to disagree with major US trends)
bxparks 7y ago
TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and China is a totalitarian state, so it's basically owned by the Chinese government. Is it too paranoid to worry about all the videos and their metadata being controlled by the Chinese government?
xivzgrev 7y ago
One cannot simply compare total number of downloads (Tiktok) to number of monthly active users (Instagram) to make assertion that Tiktok may be as big as Instagram.
quotemstr 7y ago
Tech in the west has been complacent for years, and it's not just leadership either. People whine constantly about "work life balance" and spend all day demanding that employers ban everything that offends them. The Chinese, meanwhile, are killing it. Only in the west do we indulge bizarre and self serving ideas like "you do more when you work less" and "what people contribute is less important than the way they make others feel". Turns out that these beliefs don't actually work. They're self indulgent nonsense. We could afford them for a while, but now that we have actual competition, we can't. We need to go back to old school attitudes, buckle down, get our heads out of our asses, and compete.
- jariel 7y ago
  So that 'one app' that 'some Westerners use' which is 'made in China' is evidence that China is now dominant? "you do more when you work less" 1) This is true in many cases 2) Americans work pretty hard. "What people contribute is less important than the way they make others feel" 1) In many cases 'communication matters' 2) contribution and communicating well are not mutually exclusive but most importantly 3) Nobody says this.
tinyhouse 7y ago
My daughter and her friends are using Tiktok and Snapchat. It seems these two are mostly popular for teenagers. That was also the user base of Instagram in the first years. To be honest I'm trying to get her off both of these services and instead rely on texting/hangouts/email/etc to communicate with her friends.
devy 7y ago
The biggest headline should be this: Essentially, TikTok is the only app in the top five that isn't owned by Facebook. Do you trust Facebook to influence your children with toxic content and propaganda in the top 5 app downloads all owned by Facebook? I don't.
- sjilo 7y ago
  Do you trust the Chinese government?
- thekyle 7y ago
  However much I may dislike Facebook, I dislike the Chinese government more.
kp98 7y ago
It seems crazy to me that we allow Tik Tok to operate in America without restriction and no US entity does anything about it other than the current investigation. The Chinese Communist Party has already designated Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, etc as foreign intelligence threats even though a company like Snapchat has never been proven to work with the US government before, yet ByteDance has CCP party members working for it to ensure the company tows the party line. Given that ByteDance is profitable, it can keep running Tik Tok at a loss to keep acquiring new users even when the retention rate is lower than any American platform by far. With the backing of ByteDance, Tik Tok does not need to be run as a startup, but rather it can be leveraged by the CCP the same way the CCP leverages every other major company: to advance the goals of China via propaganda, selective censorship, and economic mercantilism. The biggest lie told by Tik Tok is that it cannot be influenced by the CCP. ByteDance's HQ is in Beijing and the company has various CCP members working in it. It sounds just like when Facebook said that it couldn't merge the backends of WhatsApp and Facebook. I'm considering making a Youtube channel focused on this because it seems like no one in America realizes the threat that a totalitarian regime can impose once it gains a share of cultural primacy. Already the CCP is threatening the US congress and Swedish government with vague "consequences" for standing up against Chinese mafia tactics.
- melzidek 7y ago
  The CCP subsidizing a social media platform hurts no one. Meanwhile, are you aware how many countries the US military is simultaneously occupying at the moment? We have become a major evil, hated across the world. Not all Americans want this empire to perpetuate
  - hackernewsboy 7y ago
    "The CCP subsidizing a social media platform hurts no one. " only idiots believe this. tiktok can be an extension of the ccp propaganda grand scheme.
  - kp98 7y ago
    The favoured retort of the pro CCP group is American imperialism. No doubt, I agree it is no longer in America's best interest to defend foreign nations and to meddle internationally. However, that does not excuse your ignorance. A totalitarian regime that has caused more death than any other regime in history; one that primarily values wealth over freedom; one that does not believe in the sanctity of human life (ie Uighurs) is not fit to be influencing global culture. Moreover, I agree American foreign imperialism has caused awful things to happen, but one thing no one ever realizes: this is the only time in human history that the world has had a monopole aka one dominant super power by far. Usually the world is bipolar or multipolar. Yet the last 70 years has yielded the fewest deaths from war as a percent of the global population in history. Should America be upset with its past? Sure. However, if China had been the global monopole for the last 70 years I do not believe the total death toll from war would be so low. thanks for ur opinion
dehrmann 7y ago
TikTok's grown so fast I have to wonder if it's a fad. It's built around a pretty specific interaction. When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there? Will they be able to pivot to something more engaging, or will that just look too much like Facebook or Instagram?
- JCharante 7y ago
  > When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there? Is that what TikTok is? I only use 抖音 which is definetely not that (there are a lot of dog videos, Bart Baker singing patriotic songs, Bart Baker staging skits where he makes americans love Chinese snacks, Alan Walker's team posts pretty frequently, and like 2-minute episodes of original dramas). Some video game highlights and like some really shallow plots where A treats a service worker badly, and then they show A's significant other be disgusted by the behavior and give the service worker a giant tip or something.
thiagomgd 7y ago
I tried it a month ago, and while it was fun, I had to uninstall because there's NO WAY to disable push notifications for new posts, profile suggestions, etc...
- snazz 7y ago
  You can’t just disable notifications for the app from your phone settings?
- forgotmypass9 7y ago
  I uninstalled because I found it running in the background when it shouldn't be, but turning off notifications was easy for me.
Nextgrid 7y ago
I'm glad to see Facebook's turf being taken over, however this invader is no better than whoever got dethroned. I'm not even talking about China, but just the fact that their business model is also based on being creepy, stalking their users and then serving them cancer aka ads. I hope one day we'll have a mainstream social media platform that doesn't rely on stalking to fund itself, or at least allows to pay to opt-out.
hackernewsboy 7y ago
any thing big in china has some liaison with ccp regime, otherwise it cannot survive.
themagician 7y ago
Funny to read these comments and see how many people are now “old” but haven’t realized it yet.
parliament32 7y ago
The metrics make sense: as a user of both platforms, I'm spending far more time on TT these days than IG. My biggest gripe is Instagram is absolutely filled with ads: you get ads in between stories, ads in between posts, then a good portion of actual posts are "sponsored" (so ads from the posters themselves)... it's just a really bad mire of advertising and people trying to sell me stuff. Meanwhile TikTok is still fairly ad-free (I get an ad while scrolling maybe once every 10 mins?) and the content is just better. In terms of content: remember when Instagram first became popular, and you started using that more compared to Facebook, because FB just felt "stale" and old while IG was the new and exciting thing, with better and more exciting content? That's basically the different between TT and IG now.
- authoritarian 7y ago
  In the past I used IG to interact with people from niche communities (primarily aquarium related) but I left both because it was acquired by Facebook and I was seeing the huge increase of ads and sponsored posts/accounts as you describe. From what I've seen of tik tok it seems it's mostly young kids and teenagers lip syncing music, dancing, and doing comedy sketches. Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app
  - jzymbaluk 7y ago
    >Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app Tik Tok doesn't have formal interest groups the way that reddit has subreddits, but there are definitely niche communities that congregate around hash tags. The big ones include visual and audio artists, and there are big pet communities there too. I haven't seen aquarium enthusiasts (mostly because that's not my niche), but I'm sure they're out there. Tik Tok is in the middle of a huge ferret craze because of this cute video of a dancing ferret [1] for example. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGVytQMUmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGVytQMUmE
Smithalicious 7y ago
Like clockwork you can't mention anything vaguely related to China without someone accusing everyone else of being a pro-China shill. This is a fucking social network. We don't bring up Guantanamo Bay and the NSA scandals whenever Twitter does anything.
hackernewsboy 7y ago
this one app just gets hot for less than two years, a lot of promotion and marketing power behind it.
Xunxi 7y ago
Sad to see this devolve into politics and hardly anything about the underlying technology, strategic execution, monetization prospects and the like.
ponsin 7y ago
I'm surprised that it is so popular but lacks a web interface. I heard a lot about it so I wanted to try it. But I didn't want to try enough to download an app so I have yet to see what do the hype is about. Maybe if the web interface was good enough I would have downloaded the app
rcpt 7y ago
Expect to see more of this. Other nations will innovate and keep talent around while Bay Area engineers are stuck in traffic or moving away because of bad schools and insane housing costs.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dxl32 7y ago
Here's my writeup on why TikTok is doing so well: https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-tiktok https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-tiktok
- Nagyman 7y ago
  I enjoyed this, thanks! I think they also nailed the music aspect of content creation. Whereas other platforms are actively hostile to users using unlicensed audio, TT licenses popular music which saves a boatload of effort on the content creation side and just makes it all more compelling to watch. Contrast that with takedown notices and little support for including sound at all.
theredbox 7y ago
The only country able to stand up to China is the US. Without the US not trying enough we are all doomed... I dont want my country to become once again a russian satellite. China is too far away but will feed Russia to influence my part of the world. Seriously muricans get your shit together.
Pmop 7y ago
Any form of social network platform gets ruined for me once it becomes mainstream. The feeling of belonging to a community is gone. Interacting with renowned people is almost impossible.
miguelmota 7y ago
That's a ton of downloads, and an abundant source of data from international users going directly to the hands of the Chinese government.
graphememes 7y ago
Downloads != usage
taquitobandito 7y ago
Going exactly to China’s plan
vagab0nd 7y ago
I'm not sure what to feel about this. The app seems worth than facebook to me. I've not used it myself, but from the limited information I gathered from friends, some of them would mindlessly watch it for hours and not be able to stop even if they wanted to. Some forced themselves to delete the app. Genuine question to people who use the app: how does it add value? Or is it a even better attention grabber?
PikachuEXE 7y ago
We need another product that's not controlled by CCP though. Privacy & security should be the most important topics nowadays. We should all beware how big tech companies, especially those linked with CCP, would be using the data they collected. And take action (quit/avoid) when / before it hurts.

298 points by elorant 7y ago

Wow that is really a great competition but I guess TikTok really doing great because there are lot of funny and good content or videos uploaded.

Fjolsvith 7y ago
And I find some of the ads on TikTok are relevant and interesting to me. Additionally, I don't have to wait 7 seconds to skip an ad I don't want to see, nor do I have to watch several ads in a row to continue to the next video (think Youtube).
- sorenn111 7y ago
  What's the operating margin? Of course a new company will have like 0 ads as it tries to capture market share and be cool. Once VC moneys runs out and they need to make money, believe me, you'll see ads.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    On average, I see an ad about every 7 videos on TikTok. Given a video is no longer than a minute, that puts the ad dispersement about on par with Youtube.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    The parent company is profitable now (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-bytedances-first-half-revenue-better-than-expected-at-over-7-billion-sources.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-bytedances-firs...).
    - sanxiyn 7y ago
      Note that their revenue generator is Toutiao, not TikTok.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  In other words, you like it more because it isn't trying to actually be profitable yet. If it needed to make money right now, you would see the same level of annoying advertising as on other platforms.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    I would consider the number of ads that TikTok runs to be on par with Youtube. However, they do it without the annoyance that Youtube forces on viewers. I removed the Youtube app from my phone and bookmark from my toolbar. That's how annoying I felt their ad scheme was.
    - nsporillo 7y ago
      Which is exactly GPs point. The advertisements are forced, not skippable because that is how the platform makes money.
      - gpm 7y ago
        No, the post your respond to is making the point that forced not skippable advertisements are, at least with him, causing youtube to lose money. I suspect they are with many people, they are a very strong motivator to only use the platform when you have some form of adblock enabled that prevents you from seeing the ads at all. They probably also reduce the total number of views = total number of ad impressions for people not using adblock.
      - Fjolsvith 7y ago
        After I've seen an ad once, I get to make the decision whether it's relevant to me on TikTok. On Youtube, they would like you to review the ad all over again, just to see if possibly you changed your mind. In fact, I've had the same ad replayed back at me so many times that my enjoyment of the videos was ruined. Why do I have to suffer the repeat annoyance? And even when I've skipped the same ad twelve times, why do I then have to watch the ad full length before I can continue to the video? At what point does Google treat me like an adult that can decide the relevance of content? This is the very reason I cut the cord on Cable TV.
- bil7 7y ago
  instagram ads are skippable too?
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    I wouldn't know. I don't use Instagram or Facebook.
  - grenoire 7y ago
    You don't have to wait to skip.

rvz 7y ago

> TikTok poses a major threat to Facebook and Instagram in particular. Billions of downloads doesn't tell you if 'something is growing' it's the Daily Active Users. Ask them how TikTok plans to make money in order to remain profitable and they will completely fall tone deaf. This article tells you nothing about TikTok outperforming instagram.

enahs-sf 7y ago
While I agree that downloads in and of themselves aren’t super telling, if we think about the conversion rate to user this is still an insane amount of people. At 20% conversion, that’s 300M users. Even 1% DAU from that would be 3M people and probably from a segment of people that are the most valued (ages 14-25) to instagram from an audience perspective. Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.
- aylmao 7y ago
  > Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story. That's what's got me skeptical. There's a lot of people saying TikTok proves Twitter killing Vine was a bad move, but Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are wildly different "social networks". IMO the equivalent of putting Amazon, Youtube and Wikipedia on the same "website" category. WhatsApp is incredibly useful. It's perhaps the "lamest" of all social networks— it doesn't have "creators", it's not known for its cool filters, it has no "likes", but it works and where it's used, it's as ubiquitous and used as phone numbers once were. Facebook is very utilitarian too. IMO they haven't become "uncool" because they dropped the ball— they went for the general population. It's like they purposefully toned down their "cool" brand to widen the age of users that could associate with it. Now you can not only find pretty much anyone on Facebook, but also buy and sell on Marketplace, find a Job, find events, restaurants, find groups for parents, study groups, groups for people with rare diseases, the list goes on. TikTok is very popular, but what's the demographic and what's the value proposition here? Teenage entertainment? If so, they're competing with Instagram, but also YouTube and Netflix. It's also perfectly plausible its users will outgrow it by the time they go to college or enter the workforce, or once the ads pick up to keep with the operational expenses. The real challenge for the company will come in the form or retention and the broadening of their product + user base to compete on the next level, as something useful and not just entertaining, IMO.

BoumTAC 7y ago

Can you find interesting video(non funny) on tik tok ? For example if your interested in bike, can you find cool bike related stuff ? Or is it just some people doing funny thing with some music on it ? I tried it a few months ago and found only funny videos. It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it. I like Instagram or YouTube because I can follow thing I'm interesting in.

philshem 7y ago
Because one app is more used doesn’t mean other apps aren’t useful.
afiori 7y ago
My impression is that it is a quick, simple, but extremely effective medium for artistic expression. In a sense it is very pure; it is not about anything specific and, more importantly, it is not about showing a fake, happy, successful version of yourself. While I am too old to participate in it, as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging). > It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it. The reason to create an account would be not to watch videos but to make videos. In that tiktok feels a bit like a teenager version of a twitter, youtube chimera.
- dna_polymerase 7y ago
  > [..] as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging). I think that is the core to its success (and was for Vine). Instagram became a platform for people to promote themselves or some product and people are fully aware of that nowadays.
  - jzymbaluk 7y ago
    In my own, very subjective, experience. It seems more people are "real" on Tik Tok. I just opened up the app, and the second video I saw, was a young woman talking about her Alopecia (an auto-immune disease that causes hair loss). I've seen similar videos about Scoliosis and Autism and lots of other issues people face. There are also a lot of queer creators on Tik Tok (though the company has had ongoing issues with removing queer content). Tik Tok isn't free from toxic behavior or those problems with insta-models and travel vloggers by any means, but my impression has been that it's a surprisingly friendly and welcoming community, especially compared to a lot of other social networks

m12k 7y ago

"It is the third most-downloaded app outside of gaming this year. Numbers one and two are WhatsApp and Messenger, while four and five are the Facebook app and Instagram." Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.

wil421 7y ago
There was competition and FB used their war chest to buy them all, sans messenger. They forced people to download messenger to see FB messages on mobile. They also lied and said you had a message when you really didn’t. Just to force the messenger download.
- mhluongo 7y ago
  Didn't they acquire Messenger as well? I think it was called Beluga
  - wil421 7y ago
    I’m not sure about the mobile app itself. I do know they rebranded messages in Facebook to become Messenger. Basically you had to access private messages inside Messenger.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    No, it was split out from the main app: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-split https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-spl... > The move allows Facebook developers to focus more exclusively on features and improvements for each individual app. Of course, it also requires users to download another Facebook property onto their smartphones, a not-so-subtle way for the company to increase app downloads. I found this on Beluga, but it smells of an acquihire and rewrite, and predates the split by a few years: https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-messenger/
    - mhluongo 7y ago

jzelinskie 7y ago

I recently was watching a stream where the topic was playing bootleg versions of games on an Android tablet. Instead of microtransactions, many of the games would forcefully stop the game and prompt the user to install TikTok in a way that looked impossible to avoid. This definitely seems to imply that TikTok is directly paying for installs and gives me doubt about their organic growth.

senectus1 7y ago

pfft. its carefully targeted to children and the young. it's even more ephemeral than twitter. there is no "community" behind it.. its purely entertainment. It'll die off. it has nothing to build on.

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keepper 7y ago

Facebook’s privacy faux pas will be nothing compared to a company who’s government can request any of users data (Chinese or not) with zero oversight. We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful global companies.

darzu 7y ago
Except who will know?

Jedi72 7y ago

Im surprised at peoples comments like "its not organic growth" and "they'll never be profitable" - how is TikTok different to snap/insta/fb in the early years? The thing that matters in that biz is hitting critical mass of users. Then they can spend the next 10 yrs bleeding their users in long tail of platform stickyness.

butler14 7y ago
huge advertising spends
- baq 7y ago
  Chinese money wants in instead of the usual way where it’s western money trying to pick China. Not sure about censorship, always a possibility when Chinese money is involved.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

From a fraud perspective, it would be extremely cheap to fake downloads. Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric gives more credibility to their internal numbers. I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just me.

trophycase 7y ago
It's probably not fake. My teenage sister has gone from "TikTok is so cringey" a few months ago to "I actually kind of like it". It's now socially acceptable to use so it's in the clear. I saw someone using it on the airplane last week too.
- chrshawkes 7y ago
  I have children, all the children are using it. The other day two famous TikTokers we're spotted in a Northern VA mall and it was a pretty big deal. It's not fake.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    Just because a lot of kids are using it doesn't mean it has 1.2Bn downloads. That's a lot of downloads. Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has 1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the world. I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to be in China. If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company. If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't ~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are completely unbelievable. At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed that more than 65% of their users are under 25.

ksec 7y ago

Outperforming when Instagram is banned in China. I remember there was a vaguely similar services from Twitter, and that somehow never caught on.

AMerrit 7y ago
You're thinking of vine, which felt like it was just hitting critical mass when twitter killed it off. TikTok has grown so big because of the boost it started with from people looking for a vine replacement. At least that's what it feels like, I don't have the numbers to back it up.
Nextgrid 7y ago
Doesn't TikTok use a separate brand and app called Douyin in China with its own app download counts?
- mciancia 7y ago
  Yes, it does.
- ksec 7y ago
  Yes, but it was in the report and I quote "Much of TikTok's growth has been driven by an explosion of users in India, who accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. "
headsupftw 7y ago
Do you even know TikTok is not available in China? The brand was specifically created for western countries. In China the same company (ByteDance) owns a hugely popular short-video app called Douyin. These two apps do not share content for obvious reasons (yes, communist censorship and all that). I think what boggles HN readers' mind (mine included and I'm Chinese btw), is that in a place that's purportedly Orwellian or at least bearing resemblance to it, creativity is supposed to be severely oppressed and virtually non-existent. Yet the reality is quite the opposite.

durpleDrank 7y ago

Astroturfed or not TikTok has excellent creators (for now anyway I'm sure it will be ruined as it becomes more popular if history teaches us anything about fads). Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app. It's easy to burn 1-2 hours mindlessly watching absurd videos. I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh" people won't use it much longer.

sanxiyn 7y ago
One of TikTok's strength is recommendation, so I don't think spamming will work.
progval 7y ago
> Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app. There's also https://www.tiktok.com/trending https://www.tiktok.com/trending

bransonf 7y ago

What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed vine. Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move. I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with) First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
I’ve been a user for a year now. It used to be that people watched it for the bad content - then intentionally bad content. The biggest TikTok compilations were “TikTok cringe”. But now...the content is actually good!
- koolhead17 7y ago
  TikTok is a soft porn dosage for newer/emerging internet users.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Sounds like youtube. It took years for youtube to get from cat video quality to scientific / conference videos that often are better than books / text by the name people. I still don’t believe I would switch :)
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.

partiallypro 7y ago

My only concern with TikTok is data collection being funneled to the CCP.

progval 7y ago
Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies.
- cheonic728 7y ago
  > Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies and US agencies. As a European, I'd rather have my data stored on US servers than Chinese servers. Hell, Facebook probably has better security than the NHS. Chinese GDP growth is headed for <5% anyway.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  The US isn't using that data to put Muslims into concentration camps and killing them to take their organs, or marching troops into Hong Kong.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    You’re right about the concentration camps, but regarding Hong Kong US has done and is doing worse things. Sadly this is how empires work.
  - response777 7y ago
    As a programmer, I am seriously curious about how these silly videos can help PRC "put Muslims into concentration camps", "take their organs" or "march troops into Hong Kong"
  - throw964563 7y ago
    I wouldn’t be so sure, > In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.” > According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.” https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

devsatish 7y ago

another observation: TikTok and similar apps (and the long Phone designs) have made Portrait/Vertical Video ther norm.

komali2 7y ago

Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about violence, the shills will always use the word "ISIS" somewhere in their message. It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC astroturfing not a big deal? Maybe my concerns are valid but that doesn't justify further concern about the influx of PRC messaging vectors to the USA, i.e. tiktok? When I worked in the PRC I got to see first hand the strong-arm of the Party. Every business involved in communication had a government official whose entire job was to ensure the company "protected the social wellbeing of the people of the PRC" or similar. I can only assume tiktok has the same and I can only assume it's a matter of time before the Party starts directing the company to leverage their access to a massive US audience in a way that benefits the "social wellbeing," i.e. by disseminating PRC propaganda.

pcroh 7y ago
Exactly the way I feel about American influence in Europe. It's not too bad, you'll get used to it.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  What are the issues that America is trying to push in Europe?
  - mgbmtl 7y ago
    As a Canadian, random examples: Indifference to violence, hypocrisy on nudity, monetizing privacy (no respect for privacy), monetizing medical care. (I don't mean to start a flame war, but they are topics where EU and Canada tend to disagree with major US trends)

bxparks 7y ago

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and China is a totalitarian state, so it's basically owned by the Chinese government. Is it too paranoid to worry about all the videos and their metadata being controlled by the Chinese government?

xivzgrev 7y ago

One cannot simply compare total number of downloads (Tiktok) to number of monthly active users (Instagram) to make assertion that Tiktok may be as big as Instagram.

quotemstr 7y ago

Tech in the west has been complacent for years, and it's not just leadership either. People whine constantly about "work life balance" and spend all day demanding that employers ban everything that offends them. The Chinese, meanwhile, are killing it. Only in the west do we indulge bizarre and self serving ideas like "you do more when you work less" and "what people contribute is less important than the way they make others feel". Turns out that these beliefs don't actually work. They're self indulgent nonsense. We could afford them for a while, but now that we have actual competition, we can't. We need to go back to old school attitudes, buckle down, get our heads out of our asses, and compete.

jariel 7y ago
So that 'one app' that 'some Westerners use' which is 'made in China' is evidence that China is now dominant? "you do more when you work less" 1) This is true in many cases 2) Americans work pretty hard. "What people contribute is less important than the way they make others feel" 1) In many cases 'communication matters' 2) contribution and communicating well are not mutually exclusive but most importantly 3) Nobody says this.

tinyhouse 7y ago

My daughter and her friends are using Tiktok and Snapchat. It seems these two are mostly popular for teenagers. That was also the user base of Instagram in the first years. To be honest I'm trying to get her off both of these services and instead rely on texting/hangouts/email/etc to communicate with her friends.

devy 7y ago

The biggest headline should be this: Essentially, TikTok is the only app in the top five that isn't owned by Facebook. Do you trust Facebook to influence your children with toxic content and propaganda in the top 5 app downloads all owned by Facebook? I don't.

sjilo 7y ago
Do you trust the Chinese government?
thekyle 7y ago
However much I may dislike Facebook, I dislike the Chinese government more.

kp98 7y ago

It seems crazy to me that we allow Tik Tok to operate in America without restriction and no US entity does anything about it other than the current investigation. The Chinese Communist Party has already designated Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, etc as foreign intelligence threats even though a company like Snapchat has never been proven to work with the US government before, yet ByteDance has CCP party members working for it to ensure the company tows the party line. Given that ByteDance is profitable, it can keep running Tik Tok at a loss to keep acquiring new users even when the retention rate is lower than any American platform by far. With the backing of ByteDance, Tik Tok does not need to be run as a startup, but rather it can be leveraged by the CCP the same way the CCP leverages every other major company: to advance the goals of China via propaganda, selective censorship, and economic mercantilism. The biggest lie told by Tik Tok is that it cannot be influenced by the CCP. ByteDance's HQ is in Beijing and the company has various CCP members working in it. It sounds just like when Facebook said that it couldn't merge the backends of WhatsApp and Facebook. I'm considering making a Youtube channel focused on this because it seems like no one in America realizes the threat that a totalitarian regime can impose once it gains a share of cultural primacy. Already the CCP is threatening the US congress and Swedish government with vague "consequences" for standing up against Chinese mafia tactics.

melzidek 7y ago
The CCP subsidizing a social media platform hurts no one. Meanwhile, are you aware how many countries the US military is simultaneously occupying at the moment? We have become a major evil, hated across the world. Not all Americans want this empire to perpetuate
- hackernewsboy 7y ago
  "The CCP subsidizing a social media platform hurts no one. " only idiots believe this. tiktok can be an extension of the ccp propaganda grand scheme.
- kp98 7y ago
  The favoured retort of the pro CCP group is American imperialism. No doubt, I agree it is no longer in America's best interest to defend foreign nations and to meddle internationally. However, that does not excuse your ignorance. A totalitarian regime that has caused more death than any other regime in history; one that primarily values wealth over freedom; one that does not believe in the sanctity of human life (ie Uighurs) is not fit to be influencing global culture. Moreover, I agree American foreign imperialism has caused awful things to happen, but one thing no one ever realizes: this is the only time in human history that the world has had a monopole aka one dominant super power by far. Usually the world is bipolar or multipolar. Yet the last 70 years has yielded the fewest deaths from war as a percent of the global population in history. Should America be upset with its past? Sure. However, if China had been the global monopole for the last 70 years I do not believe the total death toll from war would be so low. thanks for ur opinion

dehrmann 7y ago

TikTok's grown so fast I have to wonder if it's a fad. It's built around a pretty specific interaction. When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there? Will they be able to pivot to something more engaging, or will that just look too much like Facebook or Instagram?

JCharante 7y ago
> When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep them there? Is that what TikTok is? I only use 抖音 which is definetely not that (there are a lot of dog videos, Bart Baker singing patriotic songs, Bart Baker staging skits where he makes americans love Chinese snacks, Alan Walker's team posts pretty frequently, and like 2-minute episodes of original dramas). Some video game highlights and like some really shallow plots where A treats a service worker badly, and then they show A's significant other be disgusted by the behavior and give the service worker a giant tip or something.

thiagomgd 7y ago

I tried it a month ago, and while it was fun, I had to uninstall because there's NO WAY to disable push notifications for new posts, profile suggestions, etc...

snazz 7y ago
You can’t just disable notifications for the app from your phone settings?
forgotmypass9 7y ago
I uninstalled because I found it running in the background when it shouldn't be, but turning off notifications was easy for me.

Nextgrid 7y ago

I'm glad to see Facebook's turf being taken over, however this invader is no better than whoever got dethroned. I'm not even talking about China, but just the fact that their business model is also based on being creepy, stalking their users and then serving them cancer aka ads. I hope one day we'll have a mainstream social media platform that doesn't rely on stalking to fund itself, or at least allows to pay to opt-out.

hackernewsboy 7y ago

any thing big in china has some liaison with ccp regime, otherwise it cannot survive.

themagician 7y ago

Funny to read these comments and see how many people are now “old” but haven’t realized it yet.

parliament32 7y ago

The metrics make sense: as a user of both platforms, I'm spending far more time on TT these days than IG. My biggest gripe is Instagram is absolutely filled with ads: you get ads in between stories, ads in between posts, then a good portion of actual posts are "sponsored" (so ads from the posters themselves)... it's just a really bad mire of advertising and people trying to sell me stuff. Meanwhile TikTok is still fairly ad-free (I get an ad while scrolling maybe once every 10 mins?) and the content is just better. In terms of content: remember when Instagram first became popular, and you started using that more compared to Facebook, because FB just felt "stale" and old while IG was the new and exciting thing, with better and more exciting content? That's basically the different between TT and IG now.

authoritarian 7y ago
In the past I used IG to interact with people from niche communities (primarily aquarium related) but I left both because it was acquired by Facebook and I was seeing the huge increase of ads and sponsored posts/accounts as you describe. From what I've seen of tik tok it seems it's mostly young kids and teenagers lip syncing music, dancing, and doing comedy sketches. Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app
- jzymbaluk 7y ago
  >Are there communities in tik tok where people from niche hobbies can share information and communicate? If I could join and find other serious aquarium hobbyists, for example, I may actually consider giving tik tok a try but I was under the impression that doesn't really exist or fit the use case for the app Tik Tok doesn't have formal interest groups the way that reddit has subreddits, but there are definitely niche communities that congregate around hash tags. The big ones include visual and audio artists, and there are big pet communities there too. I haven't seen aquarium enthusiasts (mostly because that's not my niche), but I'm sure they're out there. Tik Tok is in the middle of a huge ferret craze because of this cute video of a dancing ferret [1] for example. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGVytQMUmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGVytQMUmE

Smithalicious 7y ago

Like clockwork you can't mention anything vaguely related to China without someone accusing everyone else of being a pro-China shill. This is a fucking social network. We don't bring up Guantanamo Bay and the NSA scandals whenever Twitter does anything.

hackernewsboy 7y ago

this one app just gets hot for less than two years, a lot of promotion and marketing power behind it.

Xunxi 7y ago

Sad to see this devolve into politics and hardly anything about the underlying technology, strategic execution, monetization prospects and the like.

ponsin 7y ago

I'm surprised that it is so popular but lacks a web interface. I heard a lot about it so I wanted to try it. But I didn't want to try enough to download an app so I have yet to see what do the hype is about. Maybe if the web interface was good enough I would have downloaded the app

rcpt 7y ago

Expect to see more of this. Other nations will innovate and keep talent around while Bay Area engineers are stuck in traffic or moving away because of bad schools and insane housing costs.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dxl32 7y ago

Here's my writeup on why TikTok is doing so well: https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-tiktok https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-tiktok

Nagyman 7y ago
I enjoyed this, thanks! I think they also nailed the music aspect of content creation. Whereas other platforms are actively hostile to users using unlicensed audio, TT licenses popular music which saves a boatload of effort on the content creation side and just makes it all more compelling to watch. Contrast that with takedown notices and little support for including sound at all.

theredbox 7y ago

The only country able to stand up to China is the US. Without the US not trying enough we are all doomed... I dont want my country to become once again a russian satellite. China is too far away but will feed Russia to influence my part of the world. Seriously muricans get your shit together.

Pmop 7y ago

Any form of social network platform gets ruined for me once it becomes mainstream. The feeling of belonging to a community is gone. Interacting with renowned people is almost impossible.

miguelmota 7y ago

That's a ton of downloads, and an abundant source of data from international users going directly to the hands of the Chinese government.

graphememes 7y ago

Downloads != usage

taquitobandito 7y ago

Going exactly to China’s plan

vagab0nd 7y ago

I'm not sure what to feel about this. The app seems worth than facebook to me. I've not used it myself, but from the limited information I gathered from friends, some of them would mindlessly watch it for hours and not be able to stop even if they wanted to. Some forced themselves to delete the app. Genuine question to people who use the app: how does it add value? Or is it a even better attention grabber?

PikachuEXE 7y ago

We need another product that's not controlled by CCP though. Privacy & security should be the most important topics nowadays. We should all beware how big tech companies, especially those linked with CCP, would be using the data they collected. And take action (quit/avoid) when / before it hurts.