>But I could be pretty wrong there. The history of TikTok is actually murkier than that. I listened to a podcast about this, I wish I could find it again. The

>But I could be pretty wrong there. The history of TikTok is actually murkier than that. I listened to a podcast about this, I wish I could find it again. The narrative that seems to be popular is that ByteDance launched this app called Douyin in China and it was so successful they decided to launch it globally, and thus TikTok was born and hit the ground running. But the podcast I listened to told the story from the perspective of the founders of Musical.ly - which was an app that was started by two Chinese software engineers that were living and working in silicon valley. Originally it was supposed to be a video app about teaching (?) but pivoted and gained a lot of traction with teenagers in the U.S. This is where the origins of TikTok being thought of as a "teen dancing/lip syncing app" came from. Musical.ly got acquired by ByteDance. - Douyin launched in September 2016 - Musical.ly launched in 2014 and by June 2016 had over 90 million registered users. Around 2016-2017 is when I first remembered seeing videos with the Musically watermark (very similar to the TikTok mark) usually on r/cringe on Reddit. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfT0jRYaovE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfT0jRYaovE - ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for almost 1 billion dollars a year after launching Douyin and merged them to create TikTok. I never used Douyin or Musical.ly, but I think that a lot of Musical.ly's DNA was injected into TikTok and the idea that TikTok was a purely Chinese invention is a little revisionist. The thing that really cements this to me is that Alex Zhu, one of the Musical.ly founders was the first CEO of TikTok. Also, looking at the type of content in those compilation videos definitely gives me the same vibe. So TikTok actually has roots in silicon valley way more than people think it does. I think that noting this history is interesting because TikTok is touted as being so purely Chinese, and it's certainly owned entirely by a Chinese company now so I'm not saying any concerns about the Chinese government having access are unfounded. But I think part of the fear around TikTok comes from "How did they create this app that is beating our apps and seems to have the product/market fit of a glove in our society? Have they been planning this?" But a lot of the iteration and pivoting happened with Musical.ly, in the U.S. and a Chinese company paid through the nose for it.