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If you had an issue with Zuck calling early Facebook users "dumb f**ks," wait until you find out what's going on behind the closed Tik Tok doors. You have to re

If you had an issue with Zuck calling early Facebook users "dumb f**ks," wait until you find out what's going on behind the closed Tik Tok doors. You have to remember - we're still in the honeymoon phase with Tik Tok and haven't learned to hate them yet. Once the media and all your friends start sharing hatred about Tik Tok, leaks are going to start coming out, and there will be all the other fun ways through which we discover the true nature of the beast. My money is on Tik Tok setting new standards for how evil a corporation can be. > The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist. You got used to the idea that the US has the ability to be better at anything we set our mind to. For our sake, I really hope that truism to continue to be true for a long time. But unless you believe in American Exceptionalism, there are no reasons why that should be guaranteed - or even likely. China is more supportive of growth-at-all-costs, their population is willing to work harder, and the idea that Americans are more innovative hasn't been true for quite a while - look at Nio, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, and countless other examples. A lot of cutting edge stuff is coming out of China these days, with the trend only accelerating. We might even start longing for days when we used to have a strong domestic competitor in the social media space. The same thing happened in Germany - back in 2008 when Facebook was tiny on a global scale, there was a German €100m company called StudiVZ that dominated the social networking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with about 10m active users. I don't have to tell you how that story ended - the company is no more and all those users are on FB/IG now. Germany and Austria also happen to now be the ground zero of the global Facebook hatred [1], and I bet you they wish they had shown their domestic company a bit more love back when this would have made a difference. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/86d1ce50-3799-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c544 https://www.ft.com/content/86d1ce50-3799-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c...

ALittleLight 5y ago
The thesis for America exceeding China in the near term future that I have heard is "Our Chinese will beat their Chinese." [1] 1 - https://alphastar.academy/us-team-wins-1st-place-at-international-math-olympiads/ https://alphastar.academy/us-team-wins-1st-place-at-internat...
- nos4A2 5y ago
  I wouldn't take that for granted at all, the last 4 years will definitely have a lasting impact on any brain gain the US might've had.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pedroma 5y ago
    Curious what you're implying happened in the US in the last 4 years. Maybe I'm missing some important event other than Covid but that affects all countries.
    - nos4A2 5y ago
      https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/567493-dysfunctional-doesnt-begin-to-describe-our-immigration-bureaucracy?amp&__twitter_impression=true https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/567493-dysfunctional... https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2021/08/03/fading-beacon-why-america-is-losing-international-students https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2021/08/03/fading-beacon-...
    - nos4A2 5y ago
      https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02172-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02172-8
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    My observation is that it actually accelerated said brain-gain. There was a crackdown on fraudulent H1B applications, with more RFEs being issued. That freed a lot of spots for legitimate applicants that were hogged by questionable bodyshops. It also incentivized attorneys to start looking at O-1 (and they are easier than people think for real engineers to get). Academically, a lot was written (by foreign universities) about how the US was going to lose it's edge have a drop in applicants but the rankings didn't change during the last 4 years. I wouldn't be surprised if more people applied simply because they (erroneously) believed that admission would be a little less competitive with less applicants.
fumar 5y ago
Does a US competitor need to be FB? I would like to see a new more privacy focused social experience prop up. It doesn’t need to be a network per se, but it can be. How do we create a fertile bed for development of new connected experiences? Do we already have it? I am wary of venture capital culture that requires outsized gains. Isn’t there a slow stock market concept now?
- carlhjerpe 5y ago
  Is there honestly a market for it? I bet it's too expensive to run it without ads, and I don't think people would pay for social media. I would love a system as good as FB actually is (except their site is quite heavy on a decent Laptop) which doesn't eat my data.
romwell 5y ago
Yeah, no. TikTok's algorithm has introduced me to my (now) favorite neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ content makers. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers, some a few hundred. I've learned more about these subjects (and myself!) than from most other sources. The value of TikTok for me was that it linked up a bunch of neurodivergent/lgbtq+ people into a vibrant, supportive community. Honestly, if they decide to keep it a clique... I don't mind at all. All the people I interact with there get me. I've never felt this anywhere else. If my content is seen only by a small subset of people who are on the same page with me — awesome! That's who I'm making content in the first place. I don't care about the ominous fear mongering. TikTok has made my life better already. It brings a lot of people together now in ways that other places don't. More importantly, it inspires people not just to make content, but simply being themselves. And it takes away so many barriers for creating, it's insane. Anyway, we are talking about specific things we like about TikTok as a platform that make it unique (so far), and you are talking in abstract. Anything can be potentially bad in the future. But currently, TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet. I can give my long list of reasons why if anyone is interested.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  The social media functionality is the secondary purpose of the app, the first being surveillance and data collection. Of course Google, Facebook, and a million other companies do the same thing, all completely disregarding user privacy in favor of selling your information for a quick buck, thereby making the internet a more hostile environment for taking advantage of the technologically uninitiated than ever before. TikTok is just the latest in a line of the worst thing to happen to the internet.
  - romwell 5y ago
    >The social media functionality is the secondary purpose of the app That's like saying that providing people with groceries is the secondary purpose of grocery stores, the first being collecting money in exchange for them. Duh! How horrible! Everyone would be better off if they just grew their own food on their own farm, like in the good old days Saying TikTok is the "worst" thing is absurd given the article we're discussing. The people clearly see value for them in TikTok that hasn't been provided by other services, and adding that to the Internet is unambiguously great. So the value to the users TikTok brings is unique and novel, whereas any potential harm to the users doesn't really change (as everyone and their grandma are collecting all the data already). Yesterday, an average user had, say, 11 data-collecting apps — and today, it's 12. It's not great, but very little changes for the user. Hardly the worst thing IMO.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
China was supposed to start overtaking the US, but the one child policy knee-capped that route. Now their workforce is getting much smaller and the burden of care for the elderly is growing fast.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Unless you count farmers as part of the workforce, otherwise China will not see a reduction of their workforce for 10-15 years.
  - tbihl 5y ago
    Why not count farmers as part of the workforce?
    - eunos 5y ago
      Farming as percentage of workforce is still huge in China. Higher than countries with similar GDP per capita. Urbanization is also not high enough.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Because the amount of farmers is mostly decoupled from total agricultural output for industrial societies until you hit ~2%. So they're not really productive in the way normal workers are.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Based China’s leadership’s track record, they do not seem like they will hesitate to reduce that burden if necessary.
  - jinguang 5y ago
    是的，中国政府是务实的。
- jinguang 5y ago
  中国已经放开生育政策了，多孩政策很急迫的提上了日程
mrkramer 5y ago
Facebook won because people from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland could not only connect with friends in their domestic and neighboring countries but because they could connect with friends all around the globe. That's what pretty much happened all around the world with FB/IG or in one word standardization.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  You can with Discord? But what is really connecting?
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    >But what is really connecting? Status updates, text, photos, videos etc.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  Huh, TIL Myspace was geoblocked?
- herbst 5y ago
  Not only that. Even thought VZ always showed impressive numbers it always was kinda niche. Definitely not as widespread as some comments make it out to be.
bacondev 5y ago
We already know enough about TikTok to hate it. Unfortunately, the masses don't seem to care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Controversies 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...
- arvinsim 5y ago
  The masses generally don't care. I mean, if you look at the Apple debacle recently, most people will forget about it or won't even be aware about it after a few months.
- bllguo 5y ago
  are you being serious with that second link?
  - bryceacc 5y ago
    kinda funny how people must not realize literally every app is querying all that information all the time...
    - xvector 5y ago
      The sense of blind superiority on HN is getting very frustrating and Reddit-like.
      - rvz 5y ago
        Let me kindly remind you that your comment is breaking this guideline: [0] > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - inanutshellus 5y ago
      Fatalism is how bad things survive. Don't accept bad behavior, and sure as hell don't criticize those that are standing up to it.
mschuster91 5y ago
> and I bet you they wish they had shown their domestic company a bit more love back when this would have made a difference. German here, the problem was different. Facebook was the more attractive portal - they offered stuff like third party apps. Farmville was the death penalty for Lokalisten and xVZ, who were very vocal about not having open APIs for a long time. People naturally flocked to Facebook just to play Farmville.
xvector 5y ago
Please support your argument with facts.
krageon 5y ago
> You got used to the idea that the US has the ability to be better at anything I don't think this has ever been true, but perhaps it's just my social circles.
908B64B197 5y ago
the idea that Americans are more innovative hasn't been true for quite a while - look at Nio, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, and countless other examples. I wonder how many employees at these corporations previously worked at Tesla, Apple, Cisco and Vines... In Huawei's case, the binaries shipped with the products still had the Cisco copyright strings in them! > back in 2008 when Facebook was tiny on a global scale, there was a German €100m company called StudiVZ that dominated the social networking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with about 10m active users. What happened?
- aerosmile 5y ago
  The same that's happening with Facebook and Tik Tok - the new guys built a better product and that was it. In a sense, it's how life works - the winner takes it all. But that's only true in a 100% free-for-all society, whereas most countries have found that some level of regulation is better than none. To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic?
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic? With GDPR Europe is actually moving toward a tax on tech by requiring local data-centers be used. If you can't innovate, time to regulate!

ALittleLight 5y ago

The thesis for America exceeding China in the near term future that I have heard is "Our Chinese will beat their Chinese." [1] 1 - https://alphastar.academy/us-team-wins-1st-place-at-international-math-olympiads/ https://alphastar.academy/us-team-wins-1st-place-at-internat...

nos4A2 5y ago
I wouldn't take that for granted at all, the last 4 years will definitely have a lasting impact on any brain gain the US might've had.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pedroma 5y ago
  Curious what you're implying happened in the US in the last 4 years. Maybe I'm missing some important event other than Covid but that affects all countries.
  - nos4A2 5y ago
    https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/567493-dysfunctional-doesnt-begin-to-describe-our-immigration-bureaucracy?amp&__twitter_impression=true https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/567493-dysfunctional... https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2021/08/03/fading-beacon-why-america-is-losing-international-students https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2021/08/03/fading-beacon-...
  - nos4A2 5y ago
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02172-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02172-8
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  My observation is that it actually accelerated said brain-gain. There was a crackdown on fraudulent H1B applications, with more RFEs being issued. That freed a lot of spots for legitimate applicants that were hogged by questionable bodyshops. It also incentivized attorneys to start looking at O-1 (and they are easier than people think for real engineers to get). Academically, a lot was written (by foreign universities) about how the US was going to lose it's edge have a drop in applicants but the rankings didn't change during the last 4 years. I wouldn't be surprised if more people applied simply because they (erroneously) believed that admission would be a little less competitive with less applicants.

fumar 5y ago

Does a US competitor need to be FB? I would like to see a new more privacy focused social experience prop up. It doesn’t need to be a network per se, but it can be. How do we create a fertile bed for development of new connected experiences? Do we already have it? I am wary of venture capital culture that requires outsized gains. Isn’t there a slow stock market concept now?

carlhjerpe 5y ago
Is there honestly a market for it? I bet it's too expensive to run it without ads, and I don't think people would pay for social media. I would love a system as good as FB actually is (except their site is quite heavy on a decent Laptop) which doesn't eat my data.

romwell 5y ago

Yeah, no. TikTok's algorithm has introduced me to my (now) favorite neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ content makers. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers, some a few hundred. I've learned more about these subjects (and myself!) than from most other sources. The value of TikTok for me was that it linked up a bunch of neurodivergent/lgbtq+ people into a vibrant, supportive community. Honestly, if they decide to keep it a clique... I don't mind at all. All the people I interact with there get me. I've never felt this anywhere else. If my content is seen only by a small subset of people who are on the same page with me — awesome! That's who I'm making content in the first place. I don't care about the ominous fear mongering. TikTok has made my life better already. It brings a lot of people together now in ways that other places don't. More importantly, it inspires people not just to make content, but simply being themselves. And it takes away so many barriers for creating, it's insane. Anyway, we are talking about specific things we like about TikTok as a platform that make it unique (so far), and you are talking in abstract. Anything can be potentially bad in the future. But currently, TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet. I can give my long list of reasons why if anyone is interested.

teawrecks 5y ago
The social media functionality is the secondary purpose of the app, the first being surveillance and data collection. Of course Google, Facebook, and a million other companies do the same thing, all completely disregarding user privacy in favor of selling your information for a quick buck, thereby making the internet a more hostile environment for taking advantage of the technologically uninitiated than ever before. TikTok is just the latest in a line of the worst thing to happen to the internet.
- romwell 5y ago
  >The social media functionality is the secondary purpose of the app That's like saying that providing people with groceries is the secondary purpose of grocery stores, the first being collecting money in exchange for them. Duh! How horrible! Everyone would be better off if they just grew their own food on their own farm, like in the good old days Saying TikTok is the "worst" thing is absurd given the article we're discussing. The people clearly see value for them in TikTok that hasn't been provided by other services, and adding that to the Internet is unambiguously great. So the value to the users TikTok brings is unique and novel, whereas any potential harm to the users doesn't really change (as everyone and their grandma are collecting all the data already). Yesterday, an average user had, say, 11 data-collecting apps — and today, it's 12. It's not great, but very little changes for the user. Hardly the worst thing IMO.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

China was supposed to start overtaking the US, but the one child policy knee-capped that route. Now their workforce is getting much smaller and the burden of care for the elderly is growing fast.

sudosysgen 5y ago
Unless you count farmers as part of the workforce, otherwise China will not see a reduction of their workforce for 10-15 years.
- tbihl 5y ago
  Why not count farmers as part of the workforce?
  - eunos 5y ago
    Farming as percentage of workforce is still huge in China. Higher than countries with similar GDP per capita. Urbanization is also not high enough.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Because the amount of farmers is mostly decoupled from total agricultural output for industrial societies until you hit ~2%. So they're not really productive in the way normal workers are.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
Based China’s leadership’s track record, they do not seem like they will hesitate to reduce that burden if necessary.
- jinguang 5y ago
  是的，中国政府是务实的。
jinguang 5y ago
中国已经放开生育政策了，多孩政策很急迫的提上了日程

mrkramer 5y ago

Facebook won because people from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland could not only connect with friends in their domestic and neighboring countries but because they could connect with friends all around the globe. That's what pretty much happened all around the world with FB/IG or in one word standardization.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
You can with Discord? But what is really connecting?
- mrkramer 5y ago
  >But what is really connecting? Status updates, text, photos, videos etc.
pantalaimon 5y ago
Huh, TIL Myspace was geoblocked?
herbst 5y ago
Not only that. Even thought VZ always showed impressive numbers it always was kinda niche. Definitely not as widespread as some comments make it out to be.

bacondev 5y ago

We already know enough about TikTok to hate it. Unfortunately, the masses don't seem to care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Controversies 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...

arvinsim 5y ago
The masses generally don't care. I mean, if you look at the Apple debacle recently, most people will forget about it or won't even be aware about it after a few months.
bllguo 5y ago
are you being serious with that second link?
- bryceacc 5y ago
  kinda funny how people must not realize literally every app is querying all that information all the time...
  - xvector 5y ago
    The sense of blind superiority on HN is getting very frustrating and Reddit-like.
    - rvz 5y ago
      Let me kindly remind you that your comment is breaking this guideline: [0] > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - inanutshellus 5y ago
    Fatalism is how bad things survive. Don't accept bad behavior, and sure as hell don't criticize those that are standing up to it.

mschuster91 5y ago

> and I bet you they wish they had shown their domestic company a bit more love back when this would have made a difference. German here, the problem was different. Facebook was the more attractive portal - they offered stuff like third party apps. Farmville was the death penalty for Lokalisten and xVZ, who were very vocal about not having open APIs for a long time. People naturally flocked to Facebook just to play Farmville.

xvector 5y ago

Please support your argument with facts.

krageon 5y ago

> You got used to the idea that the US has the ability to be better at anything I don't think this has ever been true, but perhaps it's just my social circles.

908B64B197 5y ago

the idea that Americans are more innovative hasn't been true for quite a while - look at Nio, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, and countless other examples. I wonder how many employees at these corporations previously worked at Tesla, Apple, Cisco and Vines... In Huawei's case, the binaries shipped with the products still had the Cisco copyright strings in them! > back in 2008 when Facebook was tiny on a global scale, there was a German €100m company called StudiVZ that dominated the social networking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with about 10m active users. What happened?

aerosmile 5y ago
The same that's happening with Facebook and Tik Tok - the new guys built a better product and that was it. In a sense, it's how life works - the winner takes it all. But that's only true in a 100% free-for-all society, whereas most countries have found that some level of regulation is better than none. To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic? With GDPR Europe is actually moving toward a tax on tech by requiring local data-centers be used. If you can't innovate, time to regulate!