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Someone like Cory Doctorow would argue that this barrier to unseating established, content-heavy networks would go away if competitors were able to freely and l

Someone like Cory Doctorow would argue that this barrier to unseating established, content-heavy networks would go away if competitors were able to freely and legally build their own interops with TikTok's services. If a 3rd-party app allowed users to cross-post to TikTok, or even to import their feed from TikTok and respond to posts without leaving the app -- the network effect would look a lot less intimidating. This article focuses purely on the question of, "how could established networks with lots of content leverage that content to try and catch up?" But TikTok's network only matters because that network is surrounded by a legal wall. Allow competitors to bypass that wall, and then TikTok will be forced to compete with its UX, privacy policies, client features, and advertising -- not by holding your friends hostage from you.

bagacrap 7y ago
Uhh yeah but why would tiktok pay all the hosting and bandwidth fees so some competitor could have a cut of their revenue stream (by inserting ads or whatever the competitor plans to do to turn a profit)? Why would tiktok spend the immense time and engineering effort required to create and never break a public API?
nemothekid 7y ago
>Someone like Cory Doctorow would argue that this barrier to unseating established, content-heavy networks would go away if competitors were able to freely and legally build their own interops with TikTok's services. Do you have a link to a specific article where he said that? I'm struggling to understand how that is true. 1. For content networks (YouTube, Netflix, TikTok), video bandwidth is the highest cost and it isn't cheap. Why would anyone effectively pay their competitors for the privilege of hosting their content? That is the number one reason why we don't see competitors to YouTube. 2. >UX, privacy policies, client features, and advertising -- not by holding your friends hostage from you TikTok does compete - they pay for content. They learned the lesson Twitter refused to acknowledge with Vine, the facebook has been dragging its feet trying to adopt, that was invented by YouTube and abused by Netflix. You need to pay for content to bring video creators to your platform. Now, again, if I'm TikTok, why would I pay for creators for content to be shown on a competitors platform. Worse still why would I pay for content that I can no longer accurately measure the reach of, and deal with a 10x worse fraud problem? Simply put, I see no reason why TikTok should be forced to socialize their platform so that third parties can leech of their content and video infrastructure for free. If competitors want to compete they should compete on talent and pay creators, everything else is secondary.
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  > Do you have a link to a specific article where he said that? I'm struggling to understand how that is true. Sure, here’s one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversaria... >Today's tech giants—and both their apologists and their critics—insist that their dominance is the inevitable consequence of "network effects," and so nothing we do will recapture the diversity that once defined the Internet. But adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.
saurik 7y ago
Isn't that currently legal and permissible? The precedents keep getting set in our favor (even just this week!) that ignoring terms of service on a service are not sufficient to be "hacking" or "trespassing". Practically speaking, we do see tons of people making alternative Snapchat clients or extensions, and they haven't been able to do anything to them legally... but, technologically, they keep changing their protocol slightly (which breaks older clients, but they have no issue with that; I am not sure to the extent to which they reorganize the data or merely require new and different challenges) to use shifting DRM (which makes it economically discouraged to maintain an alternative client) and then they punish users they detect using slightly non-conforming clients (putting a chilling effect on the market), and since they are also freely able to do that, there's no real hope for any of this thought process to matter. (This is similar, btw, to the issue of DRM actual being effective in the medium term and being likely to win in the long term, which is an argument I have actually had multiple times in person with Cory, as I feel he often discounts the core problem: "asymmetric encryption with cooperation from hardware vendors actually works; and, unless you make it illegal to build closed, unextensible, unrepairable systems, we are going to end up in a crypto-anarcho-capitalist dystopia".)

bagacrap 7y ago

Uhh yeah but why would tiktok pay all the hosting and bandwidth fees so some competitor could have a cut of their revenue stream (by inserting ads or whatever the competitor plans to do to turn a profit)? Why would tiktok spend the immense time and engineering effort required to create and never break a public API?

nemothekid 7y ago

>Someone like Cory Doctorow would argue that this barrier to unseating established, content-heavy networks would go away if competitors were able to freely and legally build their own interops with TikTok's services. Do you have a link to a specific article where he said that? I'm struggling to understand how that is true. 1. For content networks (YouTube, Netflix, TikTok), video bandwidth is the highest cost and it isn't cheap. Why would anyone effectively pay their competitors for the privilege of hosting their content? That is the number one reason why we don't see competitors to YouTube. 2. >UX, privacy policies, client features, and advertising -- not by holding your friends hostage from you TikTok does compete - they pay for content. They learned the lesson Twitter refused to acknowledge with Vine, the facebook has been dragging its feet trying to adopt, that was invented by YouTube and abused by Netflix. You need to pay for content to bring video creators to your platform. Now, again, if I'm TikTok, why would I pay for creators for content to be shown on a competitors platform. Worse still why would I pay for content that I can no longer accurately measure the reach of, and deal with a 10x worse fraud problem? Simply put, I see no reason why TikTok should be forced to socialize their platform so that third parties can leech of their content and video infrastructure for free. If competitors want to compete they should compete on talent and pay creators, everything else is secondary.

ryukafalz 7y ago
> Do you have a link to a specific article where he said that? I'm struggling to understand how that is true. Sure, here’s one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversaria... >Today's tech giants—and both their apologists and their critics—insist that their dominance is the inevitable consequence of "network effects," and so nothing we do will recapture the diversity that once defined the Internet. But adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.

saurik 7y ago

Isn't that currently legal and permissible? The precedents keep getting set in our favor (even just this week!) that ignoring terms of service on a service are not sufficient to be "hacking" or "trespassing". Practically speaking, we do see tons of people making alternative Snapchat clients or extensions, and they haven't been able to do anything to them legally... but, technologically, they keep changing their protocol slightly (which breaks older clients, but they have no issue with that; I am not sure to the extent to which they reorganize the data or merely require new and different challenges) to use shifting DRM (which makes it economically discouraged to maintain an alternative client) and then they punish users they detect using slightly non-conforming clients (putting a chilling effect on the market), and since they are also freely able to do that, there's no real hope for any of this thought process to matter. (This is similar, btw, to the issue of DRM actual being effective in the medium term and being likely to win in the long term, which is an argument I have actually had multiple times in person with Cory, as I feel he often discounts the core problem: "asymmetric encryption with cooperation from hardware vendors actually works; and, unless you make it illegal to build closed, unextensible, unrepairable systems, we are going to end up in a crypto-anarcho-capitalist dystopia".)