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Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own
by dvt 6y ago
Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding.
I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own right), but I wonder if there's opportunity here for a potential competitor.
- dragonwriter 6y agoIsn't this a space (short social video sharing) that has been filled by a near infinite succession of short-lived dominant offerings and that's pretty much always ready for a new, slightly different flavor of season?
- rhizome 6y agoThe space TikTok is occupying, for which video sharing is the vehicle: personal information.
- qppo 6y agoI think they all failed for the same reason, video is expensive and the markets can't pick a winner when the game can't be won without money. But if the Chinese government wants to prop up TikTok and pick them as the winner, they can.
- justicezyx 6y agoTikTok parent, ByteDance, already owns DouYin, which is the original APP that TikTok was based on, with significant ingestion from Musically. As a matter of fact, TikTok's previous CEO was Musical.ly's founding CEO. Although it seems the online records are disappearing fast. I could not find a good source of the TikTok history and key figures any more...
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI think it might be a smart move by facebook to buy something similar and put it under their umbrella of companies while TikTok fades. Clearly it can be popular with the crowd that they're losing in droves.
- maerF0x0 6y agoWhat does tiktok have that IG stories or SnapChat does not provide? It appears to me that TikTok is just a perpetuation of exclusivity in Social Networks (the same way kids exited FB when their parents signed up) ...
- ralston3 6y agoThe "For You" page. Sure its just another algorithmic-based feed. But in my experience (and from talking to a few ppl who enjoy TikTok), the For You page is a differentiator. It's like a combination of what's trending, what's recent (time wise), and what you've spent time interacting (watching, liking, commenting) with previously. Again all platforms do some form of this, but just saying TikTok does it in a pretty addicting way. Also combine that with the fact that TikTok videos are so incredibly short that by the time they're over, you haven't even decided whether or not you liked it (no doubt by design), which means you can endlessly consume content. Also, I've heard that TikTok has better (read: better for comedy-style content) tools to edit videos in the app
- kkarakk 6y agoidk whenever and whomsoever's phone i look at it's always just pushing videos of scantily clad underage gals dancing to whatever song is popular att. you have to actively hide that stuff/follow creators and hit "only people i follow" to see any actually creative|interesting stuff. surprised there hasn't been any controversy about that - tiktok is a predator's paradise.
- quuUuw 6y agoI seem to be the only person here who actually uses tiktok. What makes tiktok different is the musical background (somehow people never mention this when comparing it to vine), the fyp algorithm being incredibly good, and the various communities built around certain niches. It's night and day compared to other apps.
- hdjrklt 6y agoThe discovery tab (For You) is awesome. Its the first social app where the discovery tab is better than your feed, so much more that you can actually use it without following anyone. It's quite addictive too, you can easily spend half an hour watching videos. The way the discovery tab works also created a meta game: Alt TikTok, Deep TikTok, Elite TikTok, ... The exclusivity aspect is there too, very few users are over 30, but it's not the driver.
- vorpalhex 6y agoBetween this and streamers such as Ninja talking against the app, I do hope this signals the death knell for tik tok...
- newguy1234 6y agoProbably not. Gen Z is already addicted to it. They like it more than all other social media apps from what I've seen.
- rhizome 6y agoThey'll switch to something else just as soon as they took up TikTok in the first place.
- shripadk 6y agoGen Z was addicted to Vine before it. And it will be addicted to anything else that comes after it. No addiction is greater than national security. And the US Government is not obligated to TikTok in any way, shape or form. It can ban without any consideration to the number of people "addicted" to the platform.
- thephyber 6y ago> No addiction is greater than national security. I'm tired of "national security" being thrown around willy nilly. If the US government has proof that this is a security risk, they need to be public and transparent with their proof. Anything short of that and I'm not on board with "a ban". That said, I agree that young kids and those who compulsively use social networks are fickle and are likely to move onto another network when the current one ceases to keep their attention.
- shripadk 6y ago> If the US government has proof that this is a security risk, they need to be public and transparent with their proof. Anything short of that and I'm not on board with "a ban". You don't need proof when the CCP is itself giving you so much evidence. Infact I should be asking Americans as to what is wrong with you guys that you are supporting a totalitarian government? The CCP passed a new cyber security law in January of this year (called the MLPS 2.0) where it has given itself full power to have unrestricted access to any data transmitted or stored within CCP. “There will be no secrets,” writes Steve Dickinson on the China Law Blog. “No VPNs. No private or encrypted messages. No anonymous online accounts. No confidential data. Any and all data will be available and open to the Chinese government….there will be no place for foreign-owned companies to hide.” [1] What about foreign investors? It gets even worse! "It’s exactly as bad as it sounds, and it gets worse. The MLPS 2.0 is supported by two additional pieces of legislation, both of which strip away any protections, safeguards, and loopholes that might once have been used to maintain the sanctity of corporate data. Both went into effect at the beginning of this month. The first is a new Foreign Investment Law which, as Dickinson notes, treats foreign investors exactly the same as Chinese investors. Although this has been billed as a means of simplifying the investment process, in practice it strips foreign investors of many of the rights they previously enjoyed. Areas of the market previously closed to foreign companies will remain closed. The second, as reported by Engadget, establishes a new set of guidelines surrounding encryption. Again, on the surface, these seem like they were proposed with the common good in mind. It’s only on closer examination that cracks start to appear." [1] And you are telling me here that this isn't a threat to the National Security? TikTok is obligated to share your data without even being asked for because of this Chinese law. And before you say that TikTok operates in US and not in China, its parent company ByteDance is a Chinese company. You cannot form a Chinese company without adhering to these laws! Do you really want the US Government to come out and confirm this when China has itself passed such a law? [1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/chinas-new-cybersecurity-law-bad-news-data-center-security/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/chinas-new-cy...
- newguy1234 6y agoWouldn't be surprised if Google, Facebook, or Microsoft suddenly come out with a competing app. Didn't google have one that they shut down recently?
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoDo those three ever truly come out with something new, or do they just buy up existing tech?
- hdjrklt 6y agoTell me a single good social app from Google. I'll wait. It's not like they didn't try, but all of them seem to suffer from the design by committee syndrome.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWhat was that social network that used to be bigger than Facebook in Brazil? Orkit I think? It was something like that. Edit: Oh, I forgot the one staring me in the face—Youtube! It's no less of a social network than TikTok.
- kshacker 6y agoOrkut
- broknbottle 6y agogoogle settled a lawsuit with affinity engines after the engineer came over to google and misappropriated trade secrets. lol the irony.. Google bought youtube.. Google is completely incapable of coming up with their own successful social network.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoGoogle bought YouTube, but it was hardly a social network when they bought it.
- 6y ago
- maram 6y ago> Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. While they are still in the App Store
- shripadk 6y ago> While they are still in the App Store Not for long! The banhammer is coming for them!
- gsich 6y agoThey fight what they can't understand.
- goalieca 6y agoYou mean like vine? Twitter bought it and killed it. The founder moved on to launch Byte https://www.byte.co/ https://www.byte.co/
- dvt 6y agoVine was definitely the precursor to apps like TikTok, and I tried Byte but I didn't really like it (at least not as much as I do TikTok).
- what_ever 6y agoVine was different. I just posted this on another thread couple of days ago. > Vine was 6 second long video clips. Comparing Vine to TikTok is somewhat like comparing TikTok to YouTube videos. They are different. Lot of TikTok popularity has come from offering songs/lip syncing functionality (done better by their acquisition of musica.ly). That wouldn't have worked on 6 second Vines.
- manojlds 6y agoThat's like saying Twitter is not Twitter because we can type more than 140 characters now.
- Jtsummers 6y agoFor the rest of us that don't follow social media systems closely (just looked up, I'm trusting my search results): TikTok allows 15 second videos (only 2.5x the length of Vine videos) but also has a way to string multiple videos together for 60 seconds of play time (10x longer than Vine had). So this is actually a pretty fair comparison (old Twitter @ 140 vs new Twitter @ 280) if you ignore stringing them together.
- im3w1l-alt 6y agoIt's not only about the mathematical factor. It's about which usecases are possible.
- 6y ago
- c3534l 6y agoMy understanding was that TikTok was basically the Chinese response to periscope and vine, which was popular, but couldn't make money. TikTok's scheme is to be spyware that even puts Facebook to shame, in a way that I'm not convinced isn't just government spyware disguised as social media where the point isn't to make a profit to begin with. If similar attempts have failed because of monetization struggles, I don't see an identical competitor emerging. We alrealy have many close substitutes.
- ubermon 6y agoThey are/were planning to IPO, and their financial will be published so I doubt the conspiracy theory. I've used the original TikTok(Dou Yin), it is super addictive, even my parents fall into that. They do a very good job in terms of engaging both the viewer and content producer(profit cutting etc.) In my opinion, are still "evil" in terms of hijacking our brain, but I am a bit fed up with those prevailing political prejudice nowadays for anything related to China.
- frequentnapper 6y agoYeah but this is in response to people being fed up with what China has been doing. I really hope more countries catch on and put China in its place.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoSome extra info to establish your point which I totally agree with: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news_but_tbh_if_you_have_tiktiok_just_get/fmuko1m/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news... TikTok is really exceptionally bad in this regard.
- mike00632 6y agoThis turned out to be fake. The commentor later said they couldn't provide evidence because the hard drive on their MacBook died and it was too much work to reverse engineer the app again.
- ubermon 6y agoSurprised nobody talked about Fb's Lasso which intends to "copy" TikTok and recently got killed. https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut-down/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA4RhoJ1HnuQgddNHKaJ4hVKcaoLE5y5GMm2KDRlrDBX84MkIP6QWZmcMXmaKRVw6fpVjDNhtWx31dUX2uTskag0HbBuCX5Ql9M862C7zU-V3x1-JzF02LAZs_fHg-eop8QGNDXXBa3kpugve2atcQiLJ9z3K1hqYMMlx0BVYxs9 https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...
- kkarakk 6y agoLasso launched outside of india/china...the two biggest markets for tiktok right now and your app simply doesn't support them? doomed to mediocrity
- taurath 6y agoTiktok isn't imploding, its broadly a bunch of old men (senators, CEOs) afraid of china. The userbase of tiktok is tweens and teens. The best thing those old men could do is legislate system level privacy protections onto IOS and Android so an app can never get the level of info they're worried about.
- dvt 6y agoJust a few days ago, TikTok was banned in India (a huge emerging market). I’d say it’s imploding.
- asutekku 6y agoIndia might be an emerging market and you get tons of users from there, but it is not profitable at all. Any mobile app dev can tell you that.
- alextheparrot 6y agoThey made some really funny TikToks, though
- suyash 6y agoIt's simple Math, Great number of Indian users, even if ad dollars per person is not as much as in US, overall it is bound to exceed in the long run.
- taurath 6y agoThe US has approx 9x overall GDP as India, despite approx .25 the population, for 36x the spending power on a dollar basis. On a PPP basis per capita, its still 9x. In the very long run I'd certainly not bet against that GDP difference getting down to near 4x, but thats certainly multiple lifetimes away in terms of Social Networks
- suyash 6y ago
- carlosdp 6y agoThere is absolutely no evidence of that, its users still love using it.
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agoChina is blocking all the US apps, I don't see why the US (or US companies that get blocked in China) shouldn't do the same to popular Chinese apps.
- thephyber 6y agoTalking about countries versus companies is a different argument depending on whether you are inside or outside Chinese borders. I'm not at all in favor of the US government banning apps unless the US government publicly and transparently shows the proof of security risk first. Anything short of that just appears to be politics and is likely to just be a negotiation tactic. I prefer more privacy controls and transparency (which gives consumers / Attorneys General the ability to sue the app company), but I don't want my government to see the Chinese government's policies as the thing we need to compete with.
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agogood point, if anything we need to inspire other countries about the benefits of democracy. A lot of my coworkers here in the US still think that China is doing good stuff.
- thephyber 6y ago> if anything we need to inspire other countries about the benefits of democracy. I think the US needs to look outward to functional democracies before we try to "inspire" other countries with our broken corruption. What the USA calls lobbying other OECD countries is criminal bribery and all other political dysfunction in the US rolls downhill from there. I'm not blinded to think "China is doing good stuff", but I'm highly suspicious that we should see ourselves as any better than them right now. We are completely unable to address lots of our own {civil, legal, justice, health, economics, ethics, etc} issues.
- Firebrand 6y agoQuibi pivots to user generated content and becomes the comeback kid.
- suyash 6y agoReal implosion will happen if US bans it.
- quuUuw 6y agoEverywhere I go I see this comment. Competitors are literally being made daily. Hell, even instagram has one now. The problem is money and technology can never buy a community and that's really why vine and tiktok were so successful.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago*imploding in the USA. East Asia, India, etc can't get enough of it. No doubt the Indian ban will be temporary while they evaluate it.