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It’s easy to make money if you can sell addictive drugs before they are categorized as such.

by ericls 5y ago

xvector 5y ago
Are you implying that social media consumption should be regulated simply because people find it so good as to be addictive? Honestly, TikTok is a breath of fresh air compared to every other social media platform I've used. Positive, fun, and tailored content with no doomscrolling or negativity. It's just a fantastic platform.
zffr 5y ago
Easy? I would push back on that. TikTok has built a great app, a community of creators, an audience to consume content, and relationships with advertisers to generate revenue. They have made careful design decisions to engineer how addictive it is. This is hard work, and few companies can pull it off.
- ericls 5y ago
  Do you know how they got started?
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    He has no idea probably. ByteDance's founder is an engineer, who happened to notice the fact that automation should come into content distribution in addition to all other aspects of social and economic activities. So he started JinRiTouTiao, pretty much a DouYin/TikTok applied to text news. The narattive is this to give an analog. The fact is that DouYin/TikTok followed JinRiTouTIao's model. TouTIao's content, like DouYin/TikTok, are manufactured to catch the attention. With attractive/provoking/(or whatever encourages clicking) titles, like the filtered/enhanced cover photo of any DouYin/TikTok video. The content is largely nonsensical, usually a rehash of some well-known old news. Just like DouYin/TikTok, just nonsensical videos to give you some short-term surge of satisfaction. The ads are mixed together with the manufactured content, which also has the same attractive title and content. Just like DouYin/TikTok. The thing is that ByteDance, as a new generation of Internet company, becomes more fragile than any of its predecessors. In the sense that most of key factors of its success are based on machines, which are much easier to copy than things invovled more human activities (for example, it's easy to copy a successful anime, to make it successful, but it's much harder to copy the idea of a motion picture with actors and make it successful). You can imagine someday, another startup, happen to invented a new AI that can generate content, whoola, ByteDance would be crumbling. If the founder would be as convicted as Mark Zuckberg, ByteDance would be killed in a few years...
- zajd 5y ago
  > They have made careful design decisions to engineer how addictive it is. Again, easy because this is all legal. It's like putting nicotine or opiates in McDonalds cheeseburgers and being amazed people keep coming back for them. Of course they will, the shit is ultra addictive and we all know it.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  The people who decided to shut down Vine really screwed the pooch on this one.

It’s easy to make money if you can sell addictive drugs before they are categorized as such.

by ericls 5y ago

It’s easy to make money if you can sell addictive drugs before they are categorized as such.

Are you implying that social media consumption should be regulated simply because people find it so good as to be addictive? Honestly, TikTok is a breath of fresh air compared to every other social media platform I've used. Positive, fun, and tailored content with no doomscrolling or negativity. It's just a fantastic platform.

zffr 5y ago

Easy? I would push back on that. TikTok has built a great app, a community of creators, an audience to consume content, and relationships with advertisers to generate revenue. They have made careful design decisions to engineer how addictive it is. This is hard work, and few companies can pull it off.

ericls 5y ago
Do you know how they got started?
- justicezyx 5y ago
  He has no idea probably. ByteDance's founder is an engineer, who happened to notice the fact that automation should come into content distribution in addition to all other aspects of social and economic activities. So he started JinRiTouTiao, pretty much a DouYin/TikTok applied to text news. The narattive is this to give an analog. The fact is that DouYin/TikTok followed JinRiTouTIao's model. TouTIao's content, like DouYin/TikTok, are manufactured to catch the attention. With attractive/provoking/(or whatever encourages clicking) titles, like the filtered/enhanced cover photo of any DouYin/TikTok video. The content is largely nonsensical, usually a rehash of some well-known old news. Just like DouYin/TikTok, just nonsensical videos to give you some short-term surge of satisfaction. The ads are mixed together with the manufactured content, which also has the same attractive title and content. Just like DouYin/TikTok. The thing is that ByteDance, as a new generation of Internet company, becomes more fragile than any of its predecessors. In the sense that most of key factors of its success are based on machines, which are much easier to copy than things invovled more human activities (for example, it's easy to copy a successful anime, to make it successful, but it's much harder to copy the idea of a motion picture with actors and make it successful). You can imagine someday, another startup, happen to invented a new AI that can generate content, whoola, ByteDance would be crumbling. If the founder would be as convicted as Mark Zuckberg, ByteDance would be killed in a few years...
zajd 5y ago
> They have made careful design decisions to engineer how addictive it is. Again, easy because this is all legal. It's like putting nicotine or opiates in McDonalds cheeseburgers and being amazed people keep coming back for them. Of course they will, the shit is ultra addictive and we all know it.
cwkoss 5y ago
The people who decided to shut down Vine really screwed the pooch on this one.