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A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy
- sexmc22285 2y ago[flagged]
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- Justin_K 2y agoStaying away from the politics, anybody who has a business model completely dependent upon a single service’s algorithm should question what kind of business they have.
- whiletru 2y agoMany successful businesses specialize in a niche. Mastering the algorithms of a single, popular platform can be a strategic advantage. Think of SEO experts or social media marketing firms.
- karaterobot 2y agoThis can be true at the same time the parent comment is. Advantages can be short-lived. I suppose the key is just not to take them for granted, or be surprised when they disappear.
- bsaul 2y agoCorrect in theory, false in practice. Case in point : google adwords / adsense. It’s been close to 20 years and counting, and lots of the online ad economy is still relying almost exclusively on it.
- mtnGoat 2y agoNot sure what your point is. If you rely heavily on Google search traffic or ads, and get banned you are in the same boat. Id say it’s still correct, because the point OP was trying to make is, don’t run a business that can fail entirely because of another entities whims.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoYes, but that is pretty terrible advice. It might make sense if you have tons of profitable business options and you have to choose one, but that is rarely the situation. There are billion dollar companies that run on AdWords, and the owners are far better off than if they refused to run a business with a single point failure, and worked at a coffee shop. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow through AdWords to businesses that would NOT be better off without the revenue.
- godshatter 2y agoAnd if all these Google-dependent companies had diversified a bit, put some money in other ad networks as they grew (even if small amounts), then maybe Google wouldn't dominate all ad revenue. But that would require leaving a small amount of money on the table, so nope, I guess.
- fragmede 2y agoyeah! especially those farmers, taking advantage of the algorithm of plant in the spring, harvest in the fall. what fools!
- zooq_ai 2y agoI'm sure you have the same sympathy for Coal workers, Steel workers, Mom & Pop Retail, right? or is this specially reserved for people who make a living out of content creation, just because you don't like it
- deathmachine 2y agoLol, they realize it's a sell-or-ban bill, right? Kind of a moot point when you realize that TikTok as we know it will continue, just without a connection to the CCP. Even if they do ban TikTok the company, the engineers/ML scientists who developed the recommender system powering TikTok still exist, so worst comes to worst someone makes a new company, hires the engineers, and off to the races
- DaveExeter 2y agoIt has already been cloned! It is called "Redz" [0]. If imitation is the purest form of flattery, Redz is pure flattery. Look at the UI images. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.homyt.thex https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.homyt.thex
- k12sosse 2y agoInteresting name. Might as well have called it COMRADES or MUNISM
- falcolas 2y agoChina has already indicated it won't sell its 20% share, and so TikTok will be removed from the US app stores. And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before. This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.
- petesergeant 2y ago> any replacement would be US only The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.
- seewhydee 2y agoBeijing has a veto on the sale, and are likely to exercise it. From their point of view, allowing the US to force a Chinese company to sell itself off as soon as it achieves success would set a very bad precedent, and encourage a torrent of other blackmail efforts. They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.
- k12sosse 2y agoIf we are not careful, millions of people will have to resort to obtaining employment. Luckily we'll still have Twitch, Kick, playing the meme stock market, and gambling for them to fall back on. Also illegal drug sales may taper off for a while but they'll find snap to be quite cozy again.
- mtnGoat 2y agoSome of them are using TT to sell those illegal drugs though. ;x I’m always amazed at how many accounts openly sell drugs, I report them, meta says they are ok.
- tengbretson 2y agoI still haven't fully recovered from the economic fallout of Vine shutting down.
- caseyy 2y agoNetflix Fast Laughs shutdown has left me economically devastated with no hope of recovery.
- pie420 2y agoA Fentanyl Ban Would Deal a Blow to Consumers, Businesses, Non-Profits and the American Economy
- btown 2y agoNote this is from March 2023. https://archive.is/SoSw9 https://archive.is/SoSw9 Beyond what the article says, something that is very hard to quantify is whether the promise of fame on TikTok causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would, even in excess of the income they actually receive from either TikTok or its effect on the promotion of their ventures. Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
- akira2501 2y ago> causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would The promise of fame is not exceptional. The type of person who on an implicit promise makes decisions that are damaging to their own lives possibly have a larger problem then the exact ownership specifics of one single media company. > Recessions may well have been triggered by less. What percentage of the working age population is actually using social media in this unhealthy way? Is there a better solution that doesn't involve outright taking decisions away from everyone else?
- zeruch 2y ago...or everyone will just move elsewhere. I think the TikTook ban is stupid, but assigning TT this kind of importance in a generally fickle space is dumb.
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- xyst 2y agoThis almost sounds like a paid article by TikTok. TikTok has also “weaponized” their users to spam senators and house reps [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/7/24093308/tiktok-congress-ban-push-notification https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/7/24093308/tiktok-congress-b... TikTok is a scummy business
- falcolas 2y agoYes. How dare a company encourage people to contact their representatives, and ask them to represent them. So utterly discourteous to the congressmen and lobbyists.
- seewhydee 2y agoI am old enough to remember US internet companies spamming users to support net neutrality, even those who aren't American and can't do anything about it. And net neutrality was heck of a lot less of an existential issue for them.
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoWho cares if it is a paid article because it's true.
- snvzz 2y agoIt's a wonder TikTok is still a thing in the US. Something must be really really wrong.
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- rasz 2y ago"An Emancipation Proclamation Would Deal a Blow to Creators, Businesses and the American Economy"
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- paxys 2y agoDo they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.
- jtriangle 2y agoThey certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy. I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like". Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately. And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
- FredPret 2y agoEvery US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work? The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-of-world-dominance-by-2049-sends-chill-through-markets https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...
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- trynumber9 2y agoBut those Americans are still in the economy and will mostly spend their money elsewhere. No net impact as far as I can tell.
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- glimshe 2y agoLet me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.
- Clubber 2y agoAdam Curry theorized on his podcast a few years ago that the TikTok ban chatter was a protectionist move to help Facebook, Twitter and other US social media companies.
- rdlecler1 2y agoRupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen because the US wouldn’t allow a foreigner own a major media company. This is 100,000x worse.
- zooq_ai 2y agoWhy does HN and other Tech elitists treat creator/influencers with disdain that they don't show the same sympathy as they would to other professions?. This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart" "Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code" It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skills required from one platform to another. Remember these are small businesses run by people with little technical skills. Many have toiled to be where they are.
- caseyy 2y agoWell, there are many types of work harmful to society that people partake in. Coal, content makers for abusive social media, there have even been some organizations in history which have committed atrocious war crimes in which people had jobs, and they would have needed to re-specialize had they lost those jobs. It's not that there is a lack of sympathy for anyone who loses their job, but some organizations and efforts are harmful to the broader public. The "HN and other Tech elitists" don't like social media because it's harmful to society. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant already brought forward the notion that it is immoral to use a rational human as means to an end. We have broadly accepted this philosophy in life. So when social media companies exploit human attention and cause significant harm to their mental health as means to achieve advertising income and towards mercenary surveillance (surveilling the public for the highest bidder), that is broadly considered questionable. And not only by HN, but by psychiatrists, psychologists, other health care workers, teachers, social sciences researchers, and so on. There is a national security argument to be made for TikTok as well, which is why governments have taken an interest in it recently. So the ends may be more insidious than advertisement and mercenary surveillance like we see across all social media. We know that the content on TikTok changed a lot the day Russian invaded Ukraine, there has been a flood of misleading information about the war, including a wave of glorifying the "Z" armed forces and the "special operation", not to mention the "denazifying" stuff. People are being used as means to information warfare ends, too. And by both sides of various conflicts. This is also, arguably, immoral. Although I doubt there's much of an argument to be had. The mental health and the national security arguments are separate, but given their context, characterizing this as a hate for mom and pop shop closures in some way or form is inappropriate. I think this comparison is a bit of a low effort troll. It's clear you want to rile people up as I don't think anyone starts a serious discussion by calling the other party an elitist or any -ist. But still, above are the reasons why very many people dislike social media and TikTok.
- faeriechangling 2y agoI have STRONG doubts banning TikTok would hurt the American economy. A blow to creators, sure. A blow to businesses? Maybe but it would probably make their workforce less depressed and slack off less so I don’t think so. The economy? How is pilfering off US dollars to China have TikTok addict them and ad-men brainwash them help the economy? This is before we even get into if the economy would be worth the sacrifice even if it did help the economy. The only plausible negative consequence economically would be from Chinese retaliation and frankly they’ve been playing dirty for ages having long banned US social media and the US has broadly failed to go tit for tat with them due to a “free trade” doctrine that the US should simply not be provoked by or react to non-tariff trade barriers and instead act with the utmost naivety. So I don’t even think the threat of retaliation should scare anybody since it’s still game theoretically correct to retaliate.
- chrismcb 2y agoPersonally I feel like a ban like this is anti free speech. Even if it is run by as foreign institution. I think it is fine for the government or companies to ban it for their employees. Otherwise it is just wrong.
- DueDilligence 2y ago[dead]
- renewiltord 2y agoThis is a great operation, hahaha. US politicians are using their political power to try to buy a tech company. It's like China! Pretty good, pretty good!
- mensetmanusman 2y agoMaybe accelerationists want people glued even more to their devices.
- tharmas 2y agoFollow the money: AIPAC is behind this ban.