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The interesting thing is that these platforms come and go. One year it’s Vine, another year it’s Snap, now it’s TikTok. ByteDance bought musically for $1B in 20
by volgo 6y ago
The interesting thing is that these platforms come and go. One year it’s Vine, another year it’s Snap, now it’s TikTok. ByteDance bought musically for $1B in 2017 and turned it into Tok.
3 years later, it’s grown like crazy because it’s the latest fad and would be smart for them to cash out before the next new thing hits
The whole divestment thing is probably a godsend for ByteDance, “forcing” them to liquidate their stake, but in reality let’s them cash out on an overhyped app that’s easy to copy
Must be laughing all the way to the bank
- patrickaljord 6y agoTikTok is not overhyped, it is here to stay, that's why they want to ban it. It's still growing like crazy and is way way more entertaining than any other social network by a long shot.
- m3kw9 6y agoThe type of entertainment TikTok provides is getting tiring. Is like fb videos on turbo. Sugar high can only last so long
- Kelteseth 6y agoMaybe you are just not the target audience here? YouTube also has videos like TikTok and it still has a bazillion users...
- WilTimSon 6y agoWell, YouTube's core audience isn't going there for TikTok-style content (no judgement on that content either way.) They mostly come for vlogs, let's play's, tutorial videos, video essays, etc. Also worth noting that YouTube is a money sink so it's not like it's the most lucrative business model.
- xzel 6y agoI've heard the argument a few times YouTube actually loses money, besides just being a money sink. Does anyone have anything from Google talking about margins or profit/loss of youtube? I've never been able to find anything concrete on the issue. This is the best I've ever been able to find [1] 1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eugeniub 6y agoYeah the TikTok core audience and the Hacker News crowd have maybe a 1% overlap.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 6y agoThe most successful global consumer-facing company in world history sells sugar water.
- reaperducer 6y agoIf you mean Coca Cola, you're wrong.
- hackstack 6y agoCan you support this with a counter example? This statement by itself is a bit of a tease!
- oblio 6y agoIf he's basing his comment on the source, he probably means that Apple has a higher market cap.
- ascar 6y agoIf anything he would mean Pepsi, which is twice as big as Coca Cola (based on revenue). However, that you immediately think about Coca-Cola speaks for their superior branding.
- learc83 6y agoIs that based on soft drink revenues or because Pepsi owns dozens of other non soft drink companies?
- tmathmeyer 6y agowhy? coke is easily the most recognized brand on the planet.
- akhilcacharya 6y agoI'm 24 and my iPhone tells me I spend 2 hours on TikTok a day. This is up from about a year and a half ago, when i consumed it exclusively in YouTube compilations. Their targeting and algorithmic curation is extremely, scary good.
- hourislate 6y agoIt exposes the level of mental illness in America and around the world. You have teens threatening to kill themselves if it gets banned. What will all these girls do if they can't get some attention and a dopamine hit every few hours. Woman are taking to Tik Tok and posting farewells crying and dancing. Some are even threatening the President. The app is poison but perhaps it's no worse than Insta, Twatter and FB and all social media. How many lives this shit ruins everyday, little by little is unimaginable. People living in the digital world instead of the real one.
- pm90 6y agoPlease don’t bring this kind of holier than thou preaching to this forum. Just because you’re not the target audience doesn’t mean you can call the users as being “mentally ill”. ALL humans crave dopamine hits (what brought you to this forum?). Dance and music is how a certain demographic of humanity lives to express themselves, and there is an app that lets them do so. What the hell is your problem? Who are you to take it away from them?
- hourislate 6y ago>what brought you to this forum? I am only here for information/educational reasons, not entertainment. This is more about educating my mind. >Dance and music is how a certain demographic of humanity lives to express themselves, and there is an app that lets them do so. What the hell is your problem? Who are you to take it away from them? Maybe you haven't seen all the videos of young ladies threatening to kill themselves if the President goes through with it. Or the 1000's of people who have come to name calling and threats against the President. I don't find that normal and I have a problem with it.
- phatfish 6y agoMaybe Hacker News is next on Trumps ban list. Would you be happy about that? Also, I would think carefully how productive your time spend here really is. Is surfing and commenting on HN providing any substantial "education"? Personally i find it an entertaining way to waste some time, that does now and then enlighten me on a topic I didn't know about before, and have cause to want to learn more. But any real knowledge gained is through effort outside of HN.
- untog 6y agoCouldn’t you have said the same about Snapchat a few years ago? Not that it’s about to shut down, but it’s definitely not the white hot app it was hyped to be.
- patrickaljord 6y agoI've tried Snapchat, never felt the same thing I'm getting with TikTok. TikTok is not being hyped to me, I genuinely get a good laugh out of it everytime I open it. Never had that with Snap or really any other social network. This is huge.
- untog 6y agoThat’s your personal experience. But I can guarantee that if you rewind a few years you’d be able to find many people who would say that Snapchat gave them the kind of experience Instagram never did, or whatever. Snapchat was huge. TikTok is huge. But there’s no guarantee of permenance.
- patrickaljord 6y agoSnap never got to the level of TikTok and it was always really niche but mostly, it required IRL friends to send awkward Snaps too. TikTok doesn't have this limitation and is the lowest friction to entertainment social media ever. Of course, nothing is forever, even Facebook, but as far a these things go, TikTok was in for the long shot.
- yushuf 6y agoPeople don't realize how addicted a lot of people are to Tik Tok. It's scary in terms of thinking how much time is 'wasted', but in terms of a product, it can reach the popularity of Youtube.
- jaybeeayyy 6y agoI am very torn on this. On one hand, these types of apps do come and go quickly. On the other, everyone I've met that spends time on TikTok thoroughly enjoys the content far more than they ever have on any other app...it's almost a bit bizarre. My fiancee will be in tears laughing for hours some nights and it's unlike anything I've ever seen. My family never shared vines or youtube videos but now our group chat is completely full of TikTok links. I think people are underestimating how much people seriously love TikTok of all ages, races, classes etc.
- xparco 6y agoOk stop lying
- dkersten 6y ago> it is here to stay That's what I heard about plenty of social platforms like this. Everyone thought Vine was here to stay too. Everyone thought Myspace was here to stay. Snapchat was huge at one point and now I no longer know anybody who still uses it. Maybe it will be like Facebook, but there's a big chance it won't. It's huge now, but its still relatively niche appeal in the grand scheme of tings. These things appear to be fickle. We will see.
- moscovium 6y ago> Everyone thought Vine was here to stay too. Vine was loved and was shut down by a part time CEO. > Snapchat was huge at one point and now I no longer know anybody who still uses it. People under 25 still love and use snapchat. Tiktok has 80 million MAUs, and is becoming the tool of cultural influence in the same way the Instagram did. I wouldn't underestimate the staying power of tiktok.
- rsa25519 6y ago> Vine was loved and was shut down by a part time CEO. Yep. Then the community moved to Musical.ly, then to TikTok. Although the company is gone, Vine is still around in spirit. And I think the same applies to TikTok, too
- trca 6y agoJust because you don't know anyone that uses Snapchat doesn't make that an authoritative source on popularity of a company. Snap's user base has grown consistently and show's no signs of slowing down, even against increase competition in the space (https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/). TikTok is the "Vine replacement" since Vine was bought by Twitter and shutdown. Vine wasn't a "fad" that faded away, it was actively shutdown by its parent company, likely would still exist to this day in a non-insignificant way had that not happen.
- skohan 6y agoWhy did twitter shut it down?
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago> TikTok is not overhyped, it is here to stay The only constant in social apps is that the "apps that are here to stay" do not stay.
- rvz 6y agoThe problem is with this specific demographic is they will grow out of TikTok and eventually stop using it due to fatigue or strange reasons like their parents joining in.* This happened with Snap, Vine, YikYak, etc. They will just move on to the next social network craze that doesn't have their parents, grandparents or their next door neighbours friending you. Rinse and repeat. * The exception to this rule is unless your parents is a Kardashian / West, Musk, or an Obama or some other famous celebrity.
- shigawire 6y agoYikYak killed itself with changes that no on wanted or needed. Vine was killed by Twitter. Otherwise I agree in principle but your examples aren't good.
- ta17711771 6y ago> way way more entertaining than any other social network by a long shot. ahahaha
- seebetter 6y agoThat's not the only reason they want to ban it. I'm amazed how people can just ignore John Locke and the primitives of Western Civilization, and ignore the threat of China, Saudi Arabia or the European Union -- all of whom deny natural rights and are antithetical to the US. Perhaps you're not American but the European Enlightenment is fundamental to modern society. It is the reason we are talking via handheld computers. Let's not ignore its decimation.
- edgarvaldes 6y agoThe EU?
- mmanfrin 6y ago> or the European Union -- all of whom deny natural rights and are antithetical to the US Excuse me, what?
- enricozb 6y ago> it's here to stay Would you be surprised if it just disappears in a year or two, like Vine, Orkut, Myspace, and other "giants" of their day did? I personally wouldn't because these things just come and go. I think it's really hard to make the claim that "it's here to stay".
- seppin 6y agoIt will suck eventually, politics and boomers will arrive and ruin it.
- Sivart13 6y agoI heard people say this about Facebook for years, that it was just the next Myspace and it would be gone in a year. Platforms are temporary until they're not.
- AlexandrB 6y agoSo is Facebook temporary and TikTok is going to take over or is Facebook here to stay and TikTok is temporary? This seems like a zero-sum game for the most part.
- patrickaljord 6y agoIt's not, Facebook is mostly email with pictures and is here to stay. TikTok may be eating Instagram's lunch though.
- oblio 6y agoThe thing is, people really mistake the Wild West days of a market with the mature days. People were saying the same thing about Windows, for example, back in the 1990s. Stuff like: "Back in the day we had Commodore and Amiga and many other platforms that slowly died, Windows will go their way. Unix will outlast it and kill it off." 30 years later and you could base a Fortune 500 company off of Windows, alone. Same story with Facebook. People are comparing things to the pre-Facebook days without realizing that social media is a lot more mature now. They're presenting Snapchat as a failure when it's still growing (in users and revenue), Orkut as an example of a rise and fall when it was only popular in Brazil, while Tik Tok is global. Tik Tok seems to have carved a niche in a pretty mature market. That's hard to do.
- jmcgough 6y agoThis isn't laughing, it's desperation. Either they get bought now or they lose everything. India already banned them and they're terrified of a repeat. I think over time social networks have found more stable userbases. Facebook isn't going anywhere, neither are Instagram or (unless the feds intervene) TikTok. It's not like it was in the early days where everyone abandoned the old platform, because the new one was so much better.
- paganel 6y agoFB has become an “over-40” thing in my country, younger people only use it now for messaging (WhatsApp is still preferred, though).
- paganel 6y agoSnap and Vine have never been a thing like TikTok currently is in my country. The previous social networks that were as hyped and as used as TikTok were FB and IG.
- golergka 6y ago> 3 years later, it’s grown like crazy because it’s the latest fad and would be smart for them to cash out before the next new thing hits That's exactly the thoughts I had in 2010 about Facebook's 10 billion valuation.
- aledalgrande 6y agoThe interesting thing is that US has bigger problems than TikTok right now.
- baby 6y agoOn one hand I want to agree with you, on the other hand I recognize that you are probably the same age or older as me and we are old goofs that probably don't understand what constitute something that is going to work for the generations after ours.
- kerng 6y agoI think you underestimate the popularity and potential of TikTok and ByteDance at large. It's like Facebook, maybe around 2010-2012, with enormous upward potential - they might even dethrone Facebook and their offerings in the coming years. For the core Facebook app, I wouldnt be surprised if they did that already in a couple of countries.
- philsnow 6y agoThe promise of "upward potential" of every one of these social media fads is that it could be the "last" one, the Big One that websites and captures every following generation. Do you think that TikTok is The Big One, that will still be growing at the same rate in ten years' time? I don't. Myspace and Facebook are shrinking. Some of the users leaving are going to TikTok, sure, but I don't think that means that it's better, it's just hotter right now.
- mgraczyk 6y agoFacebook is shrinking in some countries, but globally it is still growing in both usage and activity. Check out their recent quarterly results.
- philsnow 6y agoThanks for pointing this out, my US-centrism blinded me to it.
- jamesjyu 6y agoFB DAU is still growing in the US, albeit slower than before.
- wolco 6y agoWith the stay home orders I would expect numbers to be up.
- csmiller 6y agoThey grew DAUs in every region. DHH said it well on twitter, the constraint to FB's growth is they are running out of people on earth. [https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1288939549884743680 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1288939549884743680]
- one_electron 6y ago"easy to copy" isn't really a factor here tbh, seeing how tiktok (along with vine, snap, facebook, etc) is a classic example of network effects.
- ffggvv 6y agoi don’t think snap is dead. not sure why people keep lumping it in with vine. that’s like saying twitter is dead
- meddlepal 6y ago> an overhyped app that’s easy to copy If only I could have a nickel every time someone on HN says something like this. This site sometimes... smh
- MangoCoffee 6y ago>it’s the latest fad and would be smart for them to cash out before the next new thing hits i used to think FB is just a fad but its been 16 years and it is still going. Not as fancy as it once was but enough to make billions. who to say TikTok won't last? if it last more than 10 years. its already earn back all its cost and some more.
- iliveinchina 6y agoYou are likely underestimating the staying power of ByteDance. They have a portfolio of successful apps within China, such as Toutiao, and have probably overtaken Baidu to be the 3rd most important software company in China (after Alibaba and Tencent). Unlike Vine or Snap, they have a lot of e-commerce revenue and are a major sales platform. Should they be allowed to continue expanding internationally, something like a Facebook or Amazon peer would be the more relevant comparison.